News

Kill Thy Neighbor

Donna Ozuna-Trout cried racism after she was accused of attempting murder by poisoned coffeecake. Her many neighbors beg to differ.

By Allie Johnson 

Last July, Edwardsville residents Donna Ozuna-Trout and her husband, Ralph Trout, held a press conference on the steps of the Wyandotte County Courthouse. The couple had just been released from county jail, each on $50,000 bond. Prosecutors had accused them of trying to poison Edwardsville Mayor Stephanie Eickhoff and her family, who happened to be the Trouts' neighbors.

News of the strange arrest -- police said the couple had attempted to murder the Eickhoffs by sending them poisoned baked goods through the mail -- had made the national networks and cast a rare spotlight on the small Wyandotte County town.

The story was even reported in England and Canada, with headlines such as "Terror in Edwardsville" and "Snack Attack."

But Ozuna-Trout told reporters that the accusation was untrue. Mayor Eickhoff, she said, had concocted the story of the poisoning and possibly planted phony evidence in the Trouts' trash to frame them.

Wearing a red suit and glasses, her gray-streaked hair pulled back, Ozuna-Trout read from a handwritten statement and told journalists that the mayor's accusations were the culmination of years of racially motivated mistreatment she had endured as a Mexican-American woman living in a suburban Kansas neighborhood.

"In my opinion, it's because I'm a minority and my husband is a white man," Ozuna-Trout said.

African-American community activist and comic-book artist Alonzo Washington had helped to organize the press conference and was there to support Ozuna-Trout's allegations that her prosecution was racially motivated. And Jesse Milan, a past president of the Kansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also took an interest in the case, later acting as Ozuna-Trout's spokesman in a television interview.

"I would hope that Donna didn't try to poison her. That would be a very foolish thing to do," Washington tells the Pitch. But he expresses little doubt in Ozuna-Trout's allegation that she was the target of harassment. "Since she was Hispanic and married to a white man, some people out there didn't like it, and the mayor didn't like it," Washington says.

"These are false charges," Ozuna-Trout said at the press conference last summer. "We both mind our own business and have never bothered the Eickhoffs or anyone else."

Washington, who grew up a friend of Ozuna-Trout's nephew, concurs. "I've never known her to be a troublesome type of person," he says. "She's a quiet type."

With a trial likely in June, the Pitch went to Edwardsville and another neighborhood where Ozuna-Trout lived previously and looked for evidence that white, suburban Kansans had indeed made life difficult for the Mexican-American woman accused of attempted murder.

In fact, court records and numerous interviews turned up a surprising volume of evidence of harassment, intimidation and threats of violence.

But not against Donna Ozuna-Trout.

The evidence suggests instead that Edwardsville's mayor had found herself living across the street from the ultimate neighbor from hell.

Ozuna-Trout has feuded with her neighbors for years, both in Edwardsville, where she lives now, and in the south Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood that was her home for 15 years.

Her present and former neighbors tell the Pitch --and government documents detail --that Ozuna-Trout harassed them by calling in baseless complaints to police, fire, animal control, and codes-enforcement agencies to trigger frequent visits from officials; that she waved firearms at neighbors who stepped in her yard; that she frightened her neighbors with death threats and menacing phone calls; and that she used the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services as a weapon by filing false complaints of child abuse and neglect against her neighbors, triggering full-scale child-welfare investigations.

"She's nuts. She's crazy," says former neighbor Danny Yeo about Ozuna-Trout.

But Washington still doubts the Edwardsville mayor's version of events. "The thing I always felt that was fake coming from the mayor was that she's so afraid of Donna. She's the mayor. Her husband is in law enforcement," Washington told the Pitch last week.

"How could she be afraid of this regular woman?"

James Eickhoff spotted the package sitting at his door on the morning of April 22 last year.

The family had spent the night before at the Great Wolf Lodge, a hotel and spa with an indoor water park at the Village West development in western Wyandotte County, to celebrate the birthdays of their two younger children, Arthur, 6, and Lillian, 8. (Their oldest child, Ashley, is 14.) It was midweek -- James and Stephanie Eickhoff had pulled the children out of school for the day as a surprise -- and James had returned to the house before the rest of the family to get ready for work. The box was wrapped in brown paper and addressed to "James and Stephanie Eickhoff and Children."

Inside, he found a card wishing Stephanie luck in her term as mayor, which seemed strange, James tells the Pitch, because his wife had been mayor of the small town for more than a year. The package contained glazed doughnuts and a Bavarian-cream coffeecake that looked like they had been smashed a bit in the mail as well as a 2-liter bottle of Vess root beer with a greenish tinge, on which the seal had clearly been broken. "I knew there was something wrong with that," James says.

Worried about being late for work, James called his wife and asked her to call the police to report the suspicious package. "I told her not to go in the house," he recalls.

Stephanie met Edwardsville police at the house, and officers turned the package over to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation for testing.

When the KBI toxicology report came back, Edwardsville police notified the Eickhoffs that the sweets contained lethal doses of poison -- enough lye and antifreeze to kill eight adults.

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