Firefighter faces charge over feces

BELTON, Mo. -- The employment status of a firefighter accused of presenting a newspaper filled with feces to an employee of the paper remained unclear Friday.

Belton fire chief Steven Holle met Thursday with Brad Foster, assistant administrator for this town south of Kansas City, but Holle said he could not discuss assistant fire chief Dana Marconett's status with the Belton Fire Department because it was a personnel issue.

Marconett faces a misdemeanor charge of scattering rubbish, which carries a penalty of up to six months in prison and a $500 fine, Belton police Capt. Don Spears said. A municipal court hearing for Marconett is set for April 7.

Marconett's wife, Wendy, was the subject of a recent editorial in a local weekly newspaper, The (Belton) Journal, which described the alderwoman as having "utter contempt for the citizens of Belton."

Spears said a man entered the newspaper office about 5 p.m. March 4 and "put down a newspaper with some kind of fecal matter."

Connie McCann, publisher of The Journal, said that a newspaper employee met the man at the counter. McCann said the man threw a folded paper "full of feces" across a counter, hitting the woman in the stomach and splattering feces on her, the counter and the floor.

The employee wrote down the license plate number of the man's truck and called police.

McCann, who ran unsuccessfully for the Belton Board of Aldermen in April 2003, told The Associated Press on Friday that she was "stunned" by what happened.

"I'm entitled to my editorial opinion," she said. "The fact that he came in to intimidate us is very concerning."

McCann said that in the two years she has owned the newspaper, it has published items about other city aldermen "that weren't exactly what they thought was what they wanted to hear."

But, she added, "I've never had anything like that happen."

Wendy Marconett told The AP on Friday that she and her husband would not comment about the incident or about the editorial McCann wrote.

However, she told KMBC-TV in Kansas City on Thursday that she was tired of The Journal's coverage.

"I'm not defending that my husband did something that was proper because I don't think that he did," Marconett said. "Do I understand why he did it? Yeah, I do. A lot of us here in town, we're all pretty sick of reading the things that she writes."