ST. LOUIS — On a July morning, Kathryn Beene said she noticed a homeless man outside the front door of her office in Laclede's Landing.
She slipped inside past him, but the man "rushed the door" when she tried to enter, Beene, director of customer marketing for Abstrakt Marketing Group, wrote in a retelling of the incident.
"We had to tell all of our team not to use our front door and had to physically rush people inside doors and push this drug addict out of the door multiple times," Beene wrote. "THIS IS INSANE. THIS IS SCARY."
The message is one of at least two dozen emails sent to City Hall this summer by employees of Abstrakt, which specializes in business-to-business lead generation, and other neighborhood stakeholders as they pleaded for help with what they called "chaos" stemming from nearby encampments of homeless people.