KIRKWOOD — It looked like a normal Saturday here. Sort of.

People strolled the sidewalks, past the ice cream store and the coffee shop, pushing strollers and walking their bulldogs and basset hounds.

At the train station in the center of town, passengers stepped off arriving trains, carrying suitcases and glancing around for their rides. Kids played in a small park named for a fallen police officer near the police station.

But on this sunny day in suburbia, things were a little different. Not even 48 hours ago, an enraged city resident had walked into a City Council meeting and gunned down five people before being killed by police. By Friday afternoon, the story had slipped from the national news. Already.

But in Kirkwood a pile of cellophane-wrapped flowers mounted on the steps of City Hall amid tiny American flags and messages of sympathy. Flags flew at half-staff. A church bell rang slowly. Groups of mourners gathered on the sidewalks.

And just down the street from City Hall, in the heart of this all-American town, people from around the world tried to make sense of an all-American tragedy.

Saturday is a big day at Global Foods. The aisles of the supermarket — not labeled "soda" or "cereal," as in a typical supermarket, but "India" or "Germany" or "Japan" — buzz with immigrants and expatriates who come from around the region to buy a little bit of their culinary roots, from adobo to Zwieback, from calaloo to lotus root.

In the aisle marked "Brazil," Eduardo Bzerra and his wife, Andrea, shopped for a few little things that remind them of home.

"You try to connect to your country with food," he said, standing under the Brazilian flag hanging above the aisle. "It could be a cake, or it could be a drink." Like guarana, he said, pointing to cans of the juice in his cart.

The couple and their children just moved to Chesterfield this week, where they learned immediately of a slaying there. Now this.

"I can tell you that some cities, like Rio de Janeiro, are much more violent than St. Louis," he said in Brazilian-accented English. "But there are more robberies. Not this kind of thing where people go crazy and shoot. These are really scary."

Standing in the Thailand aisle next to the coconut milk, Merlyn Cooper and his Thai wife, Jeanie, shook their heads.

"It seems like it happens every week in this country. It's tied to accessibility. People can get guns," he said. "She doesn't understand it. In Thailand, you can't get guns."

Thousands of miles away from Southeast Asia, in war-torn Lebanon, Tony Ziade was struck by a sniper as he walked the streets of Beirut.

"Here it's guns," he said as he shopped Saturday. "There it's automatic rifles, bombs. There it's religion, here it's race."

Ziade and his wife, Layla, stood under the Lebanese flag, next to bags of bulghur and couscous. "This is our aisle," he said, proudly, as Layla put fava beans and a can of tahini in their cart. "This is our flag."

The couple emigrated to the St. Louis area about four years ago, to get away from war.

"That's why we came here. I don't want my kids to see that," Layla said. The other day, when she heard the news of the Kirkwood shootings, she turned to her husband. "Now we live scared, too," she said to him. "It follows us."

In the India aisle, Raghu and Lavanya Vangala, of Hyderabad, in south-central India, shopped with their 3˝-year old, Rewa.

"In India there are knife stabbings, but no guns," Raghu said, pushing the cart down the aisle as a pregnant Lavanya walked beside him.

A few aisles away, Theresa Montgomery, a Pole who married an American, shopped with her son, Luke. "This society's very cruel," she said, in a thick Polish accent. "What I see here is aggression. We don't have shootings [in Poland]. We don't carry guns. Just police." She pushed her cart toward the aisle marked Poland. "I miss it when I see all this stuff," she sighed.

Dielita Joseph and Chillot Dalencour, of Haiti, walked into the store Saturday to get some rice. "He's not speaking English," Joseph said, pointing to her husband. "I explain it to him — what I saw on TV. All the time you hear about this. It's crazy."

Outside Global Foods, people from around the region made their pilgrimage to Kirkwood, a city now transformed and bearing the familiar signs of collective grief.

On the steps of City Hall, a father nudged his young son forward, urging the boy to leave behind a bouquet of flowers. A few steps away, a banana nut bread-scented candle burned next to a teddy bear dressed in firefighter's gear. Around the corner, at the police station, the city's young people wrote notes of strength and love in loopy handwriting, drawing little hearts in red ink on placards. One message quoted Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who brought food to impoverished children on streets of Calcutta.

"Love is a fruit in season," the message said. "Within reach of every hand."

Nearby, a few Kirkwood residents took photos of it all.

ggustin@post-dispatch.com | 618-624-2438