A community meeting to discuss the shooting death of Pell City resident Barry Bush was fruitful, Mayor Bill Hereford said this week, although two city council members mentioned concerns about not having been invited.

Hereford attended the meeting, organized by Bush’s family and friends, at the Pell City Community Center last weekend, and Councilmen Greg Gossett and James McGowan told the mayor Monday that, had they known about it, they would have been there too.

“I don’t know that I would have made any comment due to the litigation,” Gossett said, “but I definitely would have listened.”

Bush died last November after being shot by Pell City police officer Vincent Warrington, who was executing a search warrant for drugs at Bush’s home.  A grand jury decided not to indict Warrington last month. Bush’s family has since filed a civil suit charging that the officer used unnecessary deadly force and violated the Fourth Amendment by conducting an unnecessary search and seizure.

Alleging that Bush was the victim of a hate crime, some at the meeting criticized members of the city council and the police chief for not attending and offering his relatives and friends no information about what led to the shooting.

Gossett said he was called afterward by the meeting’s organizers who asked why he wasn’t there.  “They didn’t think I had any (concern) for their community.  That’s dead wrong.  I am a city councilman for the entire city, not just one district.”

McGowan said he did not want to be “beaten up in the news media about a meeting I didn’t know anything about.”  He and Gossett told Hereford that they would have attended the meeting, but likely would not have said anything about the case due to the pending lawsuit.

“I didn’t see anything that would be gained by the council being there,” the mayor said, adding that he wasn’t asked to invite council members when he learned about the event and didn’t consider it to be a meeting to which he needed to invite them.

“It wasn’t my meeting to invite you to, and I wasn’t going to lean on the council to come to a meeting when I already knew in advance that we could not discuss any evidence.”

Although the grand jury cleared Warrington—who remains with the Pell City Police Department—of wrongdoing in Bush’s death, its proceedings and testimony are closed to the public.  “I’m sorry that the grand jury didn’t answer (the family’s) questions,” Hereford said, adding that city officials cannot discuss the case while the civil suit pends.