Bridgeton, Missouri: Former Imo's Employee Dies After Holding Workers at Gunpoint and Exchanging Fire With Police

A man who once worked at an Imo's Pizza in Bridgeton is dead after police say he held the restaurant's workers at gunpoint on Thursday night and exchanged gunfire with the officers who answered the call.

The incident happened shortly after 9 p.m. on Thursday, October 29, at the Imo's Pizza in the 11900 block of St. Charles Rock Road in Bridgeton, a St. Louis County suburb northwest of St. Louis. Police said the man entered the restaurant with a gun and held the employees inside at gunpoint, according to the police account reported by First Alert 4, the news service of KMOV in St. Louis.

Customers outside called police

Customers who were outside the restaurant saw the armed man inside and alerted police, KMOV reported. Bridgeton officers responded to the store, and the man exchanged gunfire with them. News reports from the scene said no one else was injured in the gunfire.

The man was later found dead inside the restaurant. The first reports from police did not say whether he died from police gunfire or from a self-inflicted wound, and his name had not been released in those reports. No photo of the man is published here, because officials had not released his identity in the reports available Friday.

A former employee, and no clear motive

Police spokesperson Vera Clay told KMOV that officers were told the man had worked at the restaurant several years ago. Police said his motive was unclear.

On Friday, investigators were still piecing together why the former employee barricaded himself inside the store before he died, according to local television reporting from Bridgeton. The work of establishing the full sequence of events inside the restaurant was still under way, and police had not said when the man's name would be released.

Imo's is a long-running St. Louis area pizza chain, and its Bridgeton store sits on one of the suburb's main commercial roads, a stretch of restaurants and shops that stays busy late into the evening. On Thursday night that road filled instead with police cars, and the store at the center of the call stayed closed while officers worked the scene.

The facts police have put out so far are narrow: a former worker, a gun, workers held at gunpoint, a call from customers outside, an exchange of gunfire, and one man dead with nobody else reported hurt. Everything past that, including why he came back to a workplace he had left years earlier, is what investigators in Bridgeton still have to answer.