It wasn’t all that long ago, back when Kim Gardner was in charge, that young attorneys starting as St. Louis city prosecutors were thrust into a pressure cooker of high stakes and high consequences with little to no support.
“It’s not just [that] you were thrown to the wolves. It was pure chaos,” says Andrew Russek, a violent crimes prosecutor who started in 2022. “I loved it, but a lot of people it drove nuts and they left.”
In the latter days of Gardner’s never-not chaotic tenure as St. Louis Circuit Attorney, prosecutors talked about developing ulcers, one quit after texts about him expecting Gardner to soon be in jail became public, and another resigned via a scathing public letter blasting Gardner’s “toxic” leadership. At the office’s nadir, staffing went from 53 attorneys to just 24, and only two violent crimes prosecutors remained (there are now five, plus a supervisor)…