Photos: ALYSSA CWANGER / Staff photographer
Flowers and candles (above) mark a makeshift shrine to Rian Thal at Liberties Walk, near scene of her slaying. Below, her photos at the memorial.
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4 are sought in double slaying
Moments later, the three gunmen calmly left the building. One killer even paused to allow a resident who was carrying furniture to enter the lobby.
"They were extremely brazen, extremely bold," Clark said.
Investigators are trying to determine if the killers had previously cased the apartment building. "That's one avenue we're looking," he added. "It looks like they had been in there before."
Gilmore's murder shocked Detroit Fire Lt. Theresa Halsell, a classmate in his 1996 firefighters graduation.
Halsell said Gilmore's ex-fiancee, who was not identified, worked with her in the department's community-affairs office. Halsell said she would break the news to her.
Seth Doyle, deputy fire commissioner in Detroit, said Gilmore was hired as a firefighter in 1996 and left on disability after being injured on duty in 2007, receiving an estimated $45,000 a year, or 90 percent of his regular salary.
Thal's friends have reacted in disbelief to her drug-related murder.
Ngozi Ibeh, who said she worked in 2004-05 with Thal at Bluzette, a high-end soul-food restaurant on Market Street near 3rd, said that she contacted Thal a few years later to help the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania raise money.
She "was great at organizing events," Ibeh said. "She was a giving person, always willing to help."
"She wasn't a party girl; she was a party promoter," said a friend who wouldn't give her name. "That was her profession; that's was she loved doing.
"Everybody loved her in the city; it's a shame. The newspaper makes it sound like she's a drug kingpin getting high, but she wasn't like that," she added.
Yet, police said they found four kilos of cocaine and more than $100,000 in her apartment.
And Thal's name had surfaced in at least 10 drug investigations by local and federal authorities since 2000, according to criminal-justice sources and court records. Drugs were found in her home, or in a place linked to her, but she was never present when they were found.
"She was no small potatoes. In one case she beat, she was dating the narc," said a source, referring to the drug investigator. She paid bail for another drug dealer, raising as much as $10,000 within minutes.
"She was smart enough not to have anything in her own name," and then have the cases she beat expunged, the source said.
Thal decided not to press charges when she was kidnapped in 2004, and she would not cooperate after witnessing the kidnapping of another reputed drug dealer, a source said.
One of her two drug arrests occurred on June 27, 2000, when Thal tended bar at a Delaware County "go-go bar" raided by state police investigating liquor-control violations, including drug-dealing G-stringed dancers and other pushers.
Thal threw a small bag of cocaine on the floor, and later pleaded guilty and received one year's probation.
In a May 8, 2000, incident, Thal pleaded guilty to drug possession with intent to deliver, in return for dropping two charges, and forfeiting $13,000, on advice of counsel.
But when she realized she'd face six months in county prison, she hired A. Charles Peruto Jr., who persuaded the court to allow her to serve her sentence under house confinement with an ankle bracelet.
