Allen was the focus of a 2011 RFT cover story after he mowed down a Black man in a strip club parking lot
Reggie Allen, the son a Metro East strip club owner who faced charges after fatally wounding a patron in 2009, allegedly killed himself after a standoff with police on Sunday.
Police say Allen, 40, killed another man in his neighborhood in Dupo, Illinois, yesterday afternoon before fleeing the scene in a Bobcat. Confronted by a Dupo police officer, Allen allegedly shot him in the shoulder and neck, and then stole his police vehicle, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He drove the cop car back to his home and barricaded himself inside.
After a standoff, police entered the garage around 10 p.m. and found Allen dead.
Allen was the subject of a 2011 Riverfront Times cover story, which detailed a horrific incident in the parking lot of an East St. Louis bikini bar, the short-lived City Nights, owned by Allen’s mother. (Allen’s mother also owned the well-known club Miss Kitty’s.)
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Two Black brothers celebrating a birthday sought entry to the club around 4 a.m., but the white bouncers turned them away, using racial slurs.
Allen, who was working the door, was then captured on video picking up a brick from the parking lot and winging it through the brothers’ car window. A friend of the brothers pulled out a gun and fired two rounds into the air to scare off the bouncers. Allen then jumped in his Ford F-150 and mowed down the older brother, Anthony Rice. Rice died that night.
At the time, Allen had a ludicrously long record — at 27, he’d already been charged in eight different jurisdictions with 40 non-traffic offenses, including 20 felonies, half of them involving violence. Rice had no record at all.
But it took prosecutors years to charge Allen in the case, and in 2016, they dropped the reckless homicide charge for a plea deal that allowed Allen to do just one year in prison.
Justin Meehan, the St. Louis attorney who represented the Rice family, predicted further violence. “This guy is a menace to society,” Meehan told the RFT at the time. “I was thinking the judge would finally flush it — flush the commode. But if they want him, they can have him, because he’ll be back. He’ll be back.”
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