SIKESTON, Mo. — Not everyone at Lloyd Gilmore’s funeral knew him well. One woman, who had ironed her clothes two days in advance, said she just wanted to be there for his family. School-age children, guided by their parents, approached his open casket in the sanctuary of Cornerstone Baptist Church and peeked inside. Other people looked away.
On that rainy Friday afternoon, hundreds of such mourners gathered to honor the man who went to the police department for help and didn’t come back.
“Stay woke. Stay guarded,” his daughter Lania Gilmore told the church full of mourners in this city of fewer than 16,000 with a long, troubled history of racial violence. “Be there for your family and love on one another.”
Her father, a 44-year-old Sikeston resident, died in police custody on June 10. During a quick, physical altercation involving seven Sikeston police officers, he was shocked with a Taser and put into hobble restraints, which allow officers to hogtie a person’s feet and hands, according to a police report obtained by KFF Health News through a public records request. Two autopsies were performed, but they — and Gilmore’s cause of death — had not been released as of mid-July while the result of a toxicology report remained pending.
