Murder victim ‘didn’t deserve what he got,’ says Thornfield friend

Murder victim Lawrence Brostedt was a “very private person who didn’t talk publicly about his family,” one of his friends, Juanita Heriford, recalled Monday.
Heriford, who owns and operates the Heriford Store at Thornfield, not far from the house Brostedt had built on Up Hill Lane Drive, met him when he came into the store shortly after he bought the Ozark County property about nine years ago.
“I think he might have originally been from California, but he moved here from Colorado,” she said. “He wasn’t really a people person, but if you got to know him, he was a nice guy. He was staying in Theodosia at first, and he stopped in the store one morning. He introduced himself and told me about the property he had bought. After that, he would stop in and visit from time to time and give me progress reports on how the house was coming along.”
Heriford said her son, Dustin, sometimes worked for Brostedt and had permission to hunt on his land.
Brostedt, 73, “just lived up there on the hill and stayed to himself most of the time,” Heriford said. “Sometimes he would go into town or go to Springfield, but mostly, I think he just stayed home.”
Ozark County Sheriff’s deputies went to Brostedt’s home Friday in response to a request from the Mountain Grove Police Department after MGPD officers failed to reach him by phone when they found some of his checks on a subject arrested there on other issues.
Deputies found Brostedt’s body, with what appeared to a gunshot wound to the head, wrapped in a tarp in the garage of his home.
“Some people have come in and said he was grouchy, but I think a lot of people just didn’t know how to take him. The first time you met him, ...  you might think he sounded grouchy, but if you got to visiting with him, he was a nice guy,” Heriford said, adding, “he sure didn’t deserve what he got.”
(See related story, page 1.)