St. Louis TV Reporter Injured by Politician 'Fleeing' Interview in Vehicle

Hillsdale Chairwoman Dorothy Moore made her "getaway" — and allegedly left Fox-2's Wade Smith with a broken leg

Aug 18, 2023 at 11:24 am

Hillsdale City Hall were photojournalist Wade Smith was allegedly run over while doing his job.

Last week, the top official of a north St. Louis County municipality was allegedly in a vehicle that ran over a photojournalist hoping to interview her, leaving him with a broken leg that required emergency surgery.

The incident, first reported by the Post-Dispatch yesterday, occurred last Friday outside city hall for the Village of Hillsdale, where Mitch McCoy, a reporter with Fox 2 (KTVI) showed up with cameraman Wade Smith to speak with Hillsdale Chairwoman Dorothy Moore.

McCoy has been reporting extensively in north county in recent weeks. His "Towed Away" series investigated municipal governments towing people's cars from their own driveways due to expired tags.

Smith's attorney Chet Pleban says that Smith and McCoy got to city hall seeking to talk to Moore but were told she wasn't there. However, the two recognized Moore's vehicle parked outside and suspected they were being lied to.

At some point Moore went out the back door and got into a vehicle that had a trailer hitched to its back. Pleban says another municipal employee was behind the wheel, with Moore in the passenger seat.

"My understanding is somebody that works for their public works department hopped in the truck to assist her in the getaway," Pleban says. "As crazy as that sounds."

Smith was struck by the trailer as the two fled. Pleban says that the cameraman was laid out on the ground, unable to get up. "Bone was sticking out," Pleban says. "It's gonna take a while to heal. No question about that."

Pleban says that Moore and the driver drove off, not stopping to see if Smith was all right or to assist him in any way.

McCoy and Smith called 911, and it took about 15 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

Pleban says that as far as he knows, a camera was rolling at the time of the incident, but that footage is now in the custody of Fox 2.

KTVI has yet to broadcast a story about the incident, or the underlying story McCoy and Smith were working on. The station also has yet to release a comment and did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Post-Dispatch yesterday, nor to one this morning from the RFT.

The Hillsdale Police Department says that police in nearby Velda City are handling the investigation into the incident.

"I don't know anything about the Velda City Police Department, but that's Hillsdale's neighbor," Pleban says. "It would seem to me that a better approach would probably be to have the St. Louis County Police Department or the highway patrol do the investigation, particularly because the injuries were so severe."

Chairwoman Moore was the subject of a 2018 profile written by the Post-Dispatch's Jesse Bogan, who described Moore as one of "the longest-serving elected officials in the region." The piece includes anecdotes about Moore's adversarial relationship with the media, her chastising a police officer on overnight shift for briefly leaving Hillsdale village limits to get a pizza, and her winning a $3.5 million lottery jackpot.

The story explained that, in the wake of Moore's lottery win, it wasn’t immediately clear if the Dorothy Moore who won the jackpot was Dorothy Moore, the leader of Hillsdale. The tight-tipped Moore wouldn't say either way. Hillsdale's police chief told Bogan that if Moore won the lottery, “Hillsdale would not want for anything ever again."

Bogan later did confirm that the Hillsdale leader had won the jackpot. However, in the five years since, Hillsdale has continued to lose population and around a quarter of its population lives below the poverty line.

The news has lately been rife with stories of public officials reacting poorly to journalists attempting to cover them. Earlier this month in Marion, Kansas, the offices of the Marion County Record were raided in response to reporters there investigating the police chief and other high profile individuals. Last October, a reporter for the McCurtain Gazette in Oklahoma secretly recorded a closed-door meeting of the McCurtain County Board of Commissioners, revealing that officials there were plotting to kill him.