JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

David Jungerman’s days of reckoning are underway.

On Monday, scores of potential jurors nearly filled a courtroom on the fifth floor of the downtown Jackson County Courthouse. Some of those potential jurors sat in the jury box, while most of the rest sat in the spectator benches behind the courtroom railing.

Facing the men and women in the spectator benches was an old, expressionless, 84-year-old man, who should have been — if he didn’t have the vengeful, delusional personality that he has — one of the potential jurors. But, no, that old man, David Jungerman, is the defendant in a first-degree murder case that shocked Kansas City.

He is alleged — and I have no doubt about it — to have shot a 39-year-old attorney, Thomas Pickert, a father of two children, because Pickert had demolished Jungerman in a civil trial in which Jungerman was accused of recklessly shooting a man who had been on his business property in northeast Kansas City.

The jury awarded the plaintiff $5.75 million, and from that point, Jungerman had it in for Tom Pickert.

Prosecutors allege that on the morning of Oct. 25, 2017, Jungerman sat in his van across the street from Pickert’s Brookside home and shot Pickert with a rifle minutes after Pickert had walked his two young sons to school and while he was standing in his front yard, talking on his cellphone.

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I was a bit surprised at Jungerman’s appearance as he sat in a chair at the defense table. I guess I shouldn’t have been because he was 80 when he was arrested in 2018 and now he’s four years older and has — by his own assertion — had a serious case of Covid-19.

This was the first time in years that I’d seen him out of handcuffs and dressed in anything other than an orange jumpsuit. He was wearing an open-collared, white shirt and dark slacks and had a hearing-assisted device on his right ear.

While his lead attorney, Dan Ross, questioned potential jurors, Jungerman sat impassively, looking either down or sometimes at the particular juror being questioned. At one point, Ross put his left hand on Jungerman’s shoulder while conversing with a potential juror.

The first and only time that I spoke with Jungerman was January 2018, when he was charged with a nonviolent felony in Nevada, MO. (The charge was later dropped.) That day he was animated, talkative and vigorous. Yesterday, he seemed less alert and less engaged. I think incarceration and four years’ time have taken a decided toll on him.

And yet, there we were — about 75 of us — gathered in a courtroom, with everyone focused on this feeble-looking old man who once bragged about owning nearly 200 guns, who shot three other trespassers and who once held several teenagers at gunpoint when he caught them on lake property he owns in Raytown.

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This is a heart-breaking and maddening case. Tom Pickert should still be living in Brookside with his wife and children and should be practicing law and representing people who claim they were wronged by somebody or some entity. And Jungerman, even four years ago, should have been preparing for a happy death, instead of stalking a lawyer in Brookside and shooting him with a rifle from the driver’s seat of his van.

Well…a jury has been selected. The prosecution and defense will make their opening statements Tuesday morning, and testimony will get underway.

There’s only one rightful way for this to end. That’s with the jury foreman standing up in a week or two and declaring, “Guilty,” followed by every other member of the jury uttering the same word.

Note: I will not be able to cover the trial every day, but I will get down to the courthouse as much as possible. I trust The Star, KCUR and other news outlets will cover it daily.

Kansas City owes Thomas Pickert’s family — including his parents, his children and his widow — razor-focused attention on this case.

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The year was 1984, the year before Patty and I married, and I was spending a lot of time at racetracks.

My favorite tracks, owing to my Kentucky heritage, were Churchill Downs in Louisville (of course) and Keeneland in Lexington.

On Oct. 11, 1984, a few friends and I went to Keeneland for the inaugural running of the Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup. For once on a trip to the track, the racing wasn’t the biggest draw for me; it was the presence of Queen Elizabeth, who was making her first trip to an American racetrack. The queen was 58 at the time and an avid horseback rider and Thoroughbred breeder.

Keeneland had created the race in her honor, and that day would mark the inaugural running.

The race, the featured race of the day, was the fourth on the day’s program, which consisted of eight or nine races. It’s unusual for the featured race to be run so early in the day, but I suppose the reason was that the queen had other commitments later in the afternoon.

I remember that before the race, the jockeys lined up in the paddock area, which at Keeneland is a grassy area behind the grandstand, with large trees. The queen walked along the line, greeting each jockey with a smile and a few words. I and hundreds of others stood at the edge of the paddock area, watching the pageantry not more than 50 feet or so from the queen.

After completing the greeting, the queen was escorted under the grandstand and out to a track-side box in the home stretch.

My friends and I made our way up into the grandstand, and we caught glimpses of her in the box well below us.

I don’t remember much about the race — I think I would have remembered if I’d had the winner — so I had to consult Wikipedia. The winning horse was Sintra, owned by Cherry Valley Farm, and the purse was $106,625. (That meant the connections of the winning horse would have received about $60,000 to $70,000, which was very meager compared to the $300,000-plus the winning connections are getting for current renditions of the race.

I found an old United Press story about the occasion, and it described the scene like this…

A crowd of 12,666 gave the queen a standing ovation Thursday at Keeneland track as she presented a trophy to Seth Hancock, co-owner of Sintra, the winning filly in the first running of the Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup.

The queen acknowledged the applause with a smile and a wave, which caused another burst of applause.

She presented Hancock with a 1-foot-high, silver Georgian-style trophy she commissioned and paid for. Its price was not disclosed.

Immediately after the race, the queen left the track, and those of us in attendance turned our attention to betting on the remaining four or five races.

If you’ve ever been to the track, you know that as the day goes on, the atmosphere tends to get less and less ebullient as people — the vast majority, anyway — lose money. The number of furrowed brows and downcast faces increases dramatically, even on Derby Day at Churchill Downs.

As I recall, I was one of those whose brow was furrowed by the sixth or seventh race.

By the last race, many of the 12,666 patrons had left, but we were still there, sitting in the grandstand with a perfect view of the stretch.

With relative quiet in the grandstand, the horses came out onto the track, their numbers on their saddle cloths, and walked past the grandstand before breaking into a slow, galloping warm-up.

Suddenly, the almost-somber atmosphere was broken by a wag standing on the concourse behind us. The guy began shouting, “The queen’s riding the five! The queen’s riding the five!”

Everyone within earshot began laughing. The pall was broken. Money losses were momentarily forgotten. Good humor had returned to the premises. The queen was gone, but we still felt the warmth of her earlier presence.

…Today, the queen is really gone, and tonight I’m still feeling her presence from that crisp, fall day in central Kentucky.

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