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Marcellis Blackwell’s Past Raises More Questions Than Answers | St. Louis Metro News | St. Louis

Published

2 years ago

November 1, 2023

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click to enlarge SCREENSHOT Former North County Police Cooperative Officer Marcellis Blackwell.

This story is part of the RFT’s exploration into how bad cops get hired, and then re-hired. See this week’s cover story, “The Trouble With Bad Cops,” for more.Before he was charged by state and federal authorities for sodomizing men he arrested, Marcellis Blackwell ran a company in the Chicago area called One Stop Transportation. It’s difficult to say what the company did, if it did anything at all.

Two women who worked closely with Blackwell at that time tell the RFT they had grave concerns about the company — to the point that they feared it was a scam.

“One Stop Transportation, that company was fraudulent. That was not a legitimate company,” says Charnice. “It was all fraudulent.”

Charnice and another One Stop employee, Brittany, asked the RFT to refer to them by their middle and first names, respectively. They said that Blackwell hired them to help grow what he said was a trucking company he’d founded that had secured a big contract with Mattress Firm. They had uniforms and Blackwell had an assistant and office space in an upscale area in the Chicago Loop that, in retrospect, the women think Blackwell may have been sleeping in.

“We got there early one day and it was like he was getting up off the floor or something,” says Brittany.

A big part of the women’s jobs was to recruit drivers. On one occasion Blackwell sent them to a VA hospital to do just that, and a social media post from 2015 shows both women and Blackwell at what looks like a career fair. The two women say they collected information from the potential drivers, including copies of their social security cards, under the impression they were onboarding new hires.

But things quickly went awry. At first, their paychecks were slow to materialize. Then, when they did, the checks bounced.

“When it was time for him to pay us, he literally stopped answering [calls],” says Charnice. “After that he just disappeared.”

When the women came to the conclusion that One Stop Transportation wasn’t legitimate, they started destroying information about the so-called “new hires.” They shredded copies of social security cards and did whatever they could to keep people’s private information out of Blackwell’s hands.

In the wake of the operation’s disintegration, the two women tried to figure out what Blackwell’s end game had been. They wondered if he was stealing social security numbers and other information from the people they were tasked with recruiting. That’s just a theory. It would have been a rather baroque plot to conduct identity theft. Why then, for instance, would he have rented a box truck and taken the two women to an empty parking lot and trained them to drive it? They still can’t figure it out.

“I wondered about what it was he was gaining from having us?” says Charnice. “It’s lost on me.”

“It was just very weird,” says Brittany.

The two women’s employment with Blackwell was a strange chapter of their lives, but also short-lived. Things were more serious for Jill Paris.

Also around 2015, Blackwell had reached out to Paris, a Chicago-area insurance agent who worked for her dad’s insurance agency. Blackwell said he was looking to buy an insurance policy for what he described as his transportation business. At the time, Paris says, a lot of the school districts in the Chicagoland suburbs were outsourcing their bussing to independent contractors, and Blackwell’s One Stop Transportation was going to cash in on the trend on the Indiana side of the border.

The two met at Starbucks.

“He definitely did not come across as a savvy businessman,” Paris says. However, she went ahead and secured him a policy. “I was a young and hungry insurance agent,” she says. “This was a good piece of business for us. Marcellis told me he was going to send several other drivers my direction.”

From here, things get a bit into the insurance industry weeds. Essentially, Paris’ company purchased a policy for Blackwell’s company from an insurance wholesaler. When Blackwell’s check bounced and he disappeared into the ether, Paris and her father’s company were left on the hook for the $19,000 premium.

Like Brittany and Charnice before her, Paris says she did what she could to minimize the potential damage. She called the superintendent of the district where Blackwell said he hoped to do business and told him what had happened and that Blackwell’s company was uninsured. The superintendent assured Paris he wouldn’t get any work from the school.

“Having two young children, I panicked that he would be behind the wheel of a bus,” she says.

Paris also filed a lawsuit that led to the garnishment of Blackwell’s wages, but Blackwell did his best to dodge those efforts. She guesses she’s recouped only about $900 from him.

She tells the RFT the incident became a sore spot between her and her father. She ended up leaving his firm and starting her own.

Yet for all the questions about Blackwell’s transportation company, perhaps the biggest question about his past involves his name change. Prosecutors say he legally changed his name to Marcellis Blackwell from Willis Green Overstreet in 2013. It’s unclear what, if anything, he did under that name that would have left any sort of record.

Over the course of several days in October, I called a few dozen numbers belonging to people with the last name Overstreet in Indiana and Illinois who were associated with the same addresses as someone named Willis Green Overstreet, who happened to be the exact same age as Blackwell.

No one answered, but one woman did call me back. She knew who Marcellis Blackwell was and seemed to know he was living in St. Louis. She said some variation of “I don’t want anything to do with it” at least a half-dozen times in a conversation that lasted less than two minutes.

“I’m just trying to understand why he changed his name,” I said.

I don’t want anything to do with it, she replied.

“He’s in some trouble,” I said.

I don’t want anything to do with it.

“If Marcellis Blackwell is someone you care about you should probably Google him,” I said, talking over her.

“OK,” she said, and then she hung up.

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Fenton Man Charged in Sword Attack on Roommate

Published

1 year ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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A warrant is out for a Fenton man’s arrest after he allegedly attacked his roommate with a sword.

Police say that on Sunday, Angelus Scott spoke openly about “slicing his roommate’s head” before he grabbed a sword, raised it up and then swung it down at the roommate.

The roommate grabbed Scott’s hand in time to prevent injury. When police arrived at the scene, they found the weapon used in the assault.

The sword in question was a katana, which is a Japanese sword recognizable for its curved blade.

This isn’t the first time a samurai-style sword has been used to violent effect in St. Louis. In 2018, a man hearing voices slaughtered his ex-boyfriend with a samurai sword. His mother said he suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

As for Scott, 35, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office was charged yesterday with two felonies, assault first degree and armed criminal action. The warrant for his arrest says he is to be held on $200,000 bond.

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Caught on Video, Sheriff Says He’s Ready to ‘Turn It All Over’ to Deputy

Published

1 year ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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Video of St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts taken by a former deputy suggests that the sheriff has a successor in mind to hand the reins of the department over to, even as Betts is in an increasingly heated campaign for reelection.

“I ain’t here for all this rigmarole,” Betts says in the video while seated behind his desk at the Carnahan Courthouse. “The Lord sent me here to turn this department around and I’m doing the best I can and I think I’ve done a good job. I’ve got about eight months and I’m going to qualify for my fourth pension.”

He goes on, “Right now I can walk up out of here and live happily ever after and forget about all this…and live like a king.”

The sheriff then says his wife has been in Atlanta looking at houses and that the other deputy in the room, Donald Hawkins, is someone Betts has been training “to turn it all over to him.”

Asked about the video, Betts tells the RFT, “My future plans are to win reelection on August 6th by a wide margin and to continue my mission as the top elected law enforcement official to make St. Louis safer and stronger. Serving the people of St. Louis with integrity, honor and professional law enforcement qualifications is a sacred responsibility, and I intend to complete that mission.”

The video of Betts was taken by Barbara Chavers, who retired from the sheriff’s office in 2016 after 24 years of service. Chavers now works security at Schnucks at Grand and Gravois. Betts’ brother Howard works security there, too.

Chavers tells the RFT that she was summoned to Betts’ office last week after Betts’ brother made the sheriff aware that she was supporting Montgomery. It was no secret: Chavers had filmed a Facebook live video in which she said she was supporting Betts’ opponent Alfred Montgomery in the election this fall. “Make the judges safe,” she says in the video, standing in front of a large Montgomery sign on Gravois Avenue. “They need a sheriff who is going to make their courtrooms safe.”

In his office, even as Chavers made clear she was filming him, Betts told Chavers he was “flabbergasted” and “stunned” she was supporting Montgomery.

“I don’t know what I did that would make you go against the preacher man,” he says, referring to himself. He then refers to Montgomery as “ungodly.”

Betts goes on to say that not long ago, he was walking in his neighborhood on St. Louis Avenue near 20th Street when suddenly Montgomery pulled up in his car and, according to Betts, shouted, “You motherfucker, you this, you that. You’re taking my signs down.”

Montgomery tells the RFT that he’s never interacted with Betts outside of candidate forums and neighborhood meetings.

“I don’t think anyone with good sense would do something like that to a sitting sheriff,” Montgomery says.

Montgomery has had campaign signs missing and on at least two occasions has obtained video of people tearing them down. (Chavers notes that the sign that she filmed her original Facebook video in front of is itself now missing.)

One man who lives near Columbus Square says that he recently put out two Montgomery signs, which later went missing. “If they keep taking them, I’ll keep putting them up,” he said.

Betts says he has nothing to do with the missing signs. In the video Chavers filmed in Betts’ office, Betts says that his campaign isn’t in a spot where it needs to resort to tearing down opponents’ signs.

“If you sit here long enough, a man is getting ready to come across the street from City Hall bringing me $500, today,” Betts says. “I’m getting that kind of support. I don’t need to tear down signs.”

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St. Louis to Develop First Citywide Transportation Plan in Decades

Published

1 year ago

May 21, 2024

Natural Bridge

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The City of St. Louis is working to develop its first citywide mobility plan in decades, Mayor Tishaura Jones’ office announced Tuesday. This plan seeks to make it easier for everyone — drivers, pedestrians, bikers and public transit users — to safely commute within the city.

The plan will bring together other city projects like the Brickline Greenway, Future64, the MetroLink Green Line, and more, “while establishing new priorities for a safer, more efficient and better-maintained transportation network across the City,” according to the release.

The key elements in the plan will be public engagement, the development of a safety action plan, future infrastructure priorities and transportation network mapping, according to Jones’ office.

The overarching goals are to create a vision for citywide mobility, plan a mixture of short and long-term mobility projects and to develop improved communication tools with the public to receive transportation updates. In recent years, both people who use public transit and cyclists have been outspoken about the difficulties — and dangers — of navigating St. Louis streets, citing both cuts to public transit and traffic violence.

To garner public input and participation for the plan, Jones’ office said there will be community meetings, focus groups and a survey for residents to share their concerns. The city will also be establishing a Community Advisory Committee. Those interested in learning more should check out at tmp-stl.com/

“Everyone deserves to feel safe when getting around St. Louis, whether they’re driving, biking, walking or taking public transit,” Jones said in a news release. “Creating a comprehensive transportation and mobility plan allows us to make intentional and strategic investments so that moving around St. Louis for jobs, education, and entertainment becomes easier, safer and more enjoyable.”

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