Good Guy with a Gun #14: St. Louis, MO

Original incident: November 3, 2023. When an ex with a gun enters the bedroom where you and your boyfriend are sleeping, he shouldn't expect to live through the encounter.

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This incident took place around one in the morning on November 3, 2023, in St. Louis.

According to the locals, the neighborhood is a decent one: Roosevelt Buck told KSDK 5 that “There’s no random crime around here. Our houses don’t get broken into. We don’t have break-ins... We have elements that come into our neighborhood, and not that often.”

Which means that a home invader is likely to be someone you know.

And so it was that, when a sleeping woman and her boyfriend opened their eyes, they saw John Bernard standing in their bedroom and pointing a gun at them. He was her ex-boyfriend and the father of her child.

That’s an adrenaline rush, for sure. The current boyfriend grabbed a gun and shot Bernard multiple times. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Bernard’s family claimed that Bernard had a key to the house, that the house is where his daughter and her mother lived, and that the house was rented from someone on Bernard’s side of the family. Iris Gerdine, who is Bernard’s cousin, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “There was no burglary involved at all,” apparently trying to claim that Bernard didn’t deserve to get shot.

Those claims seem to pan out, but her argument doesn’t.

For one thing, Gerdine says that Bernard had put his daughter to bed at another home — so if he had business at the mother’s house, it was with the mother and/or her boyfriend. One would think that he should have let them know he was coming... and maybe picked a more convenient time.

For another, he was in their bedroom. That was the claim made by the ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend, and I see nothing in the reporting that suggests otherwise. It’s a detail the police wouldn’t have missed.

Finally, Bernard had a gun. The reporting explicitly says that the police recovered two guns at the scene: One was the current boyfriend’s, and the other was Bernard’s.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that the police called the shooting a justifiable homicide. Though the shooter was arrested initially, he was released shortly afterward, and no charges were sought.

Sources

UPDATE, 11/14/2025: I just found an article on Breitbart by AWR Hawkins regarding this case.

The story by KSDK 5 is very good. Along with the details of the incident, it gives quotes from neighbors and has man-on-the-street video reporting that provides a good sense of context.

Fox 2 News is good, but without video and a little less color. Still, it’s as good as I would normally expect for this type of story.

First Alert 4 / KMOV was less good — there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a bit spare on the detail, and there’s no local context. The video is clearly from a little earlier, before the police determined that the shooting was justified, and notes that the shooter was arrested. In the body text, though, they do mention that it was a justifiable homicide in the text.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I’m sorry to say, did a bad job. They even probably think they did a good job, because they got more of the “human side of the shooting” or something — and I generally favor that — but they did it badly.

• First, I don’t see any article about the shooting itself. It would be best to give facts first, before giving context and conjecture.

• Second, the article I can find gives Bernard’s family’s perspective — and there’s nothing wrong with that — but without asking any hard questions or drawing any conclusions. During the conversation with Bernard’s cousin, did they ask any of these questions?

  • Maybe it wasn’t burglary, but what was he doing at his ex’s house if he had already put his daughter to bed elsewhere?

  • Wasn’t it unreasonable for him to be in the couple’s bedroom, regardless of what he intended to do there?

  • Didn’t the police collect his gun there, which shows that he was armed, in their bedroom, at 1 AM?

  It sure doesn’t look like they did.

• Third, beyond the article itself, they included Bernard in the 2023 Homicide Tracker. This was, of course, a homicide, but they name Bernard as a “victim,” which makes him seem sympathetic, and they lead with his family’s perspective before finally saying “Still, police said Friday afternoon that investigators believe the shooter acted in self-defense and are not seeking charges against him.” “Still?” That sounds something like, “despite all of the evidence we just talked about,” which is absolutely not the case. That’s weak tea at best, guys. This was someone who entered an ex-girlfriend’s house and bedroom unannounced, with a gun. You do society no favors by making him out to be sympathetic.

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