Eric Meyer
Appearances
Criminal
The Raid
Yeah. There was absolutely no way we were not going to publish a newspaper that week. That would have been defeat.
Criminal
The Raid
Down at the office, they took the reporters' cell phones or personal cell phones and all the computers that we used in the news operation, along with our file server, along with our backup drives. They'd been bragging around to other officers that this was going to be the biggest raid in the history of Marion County. They brought every officer they'd had. They even brought extra on.
Criminal
The Raid
It took two all-nighters. We didn't even have our nameplate, you know, the thing on the front of the paper that says Marion County Record. We didn't even have that. We had to recreate everything. We pulled computers out of an old storage closet. That's a fancy name for a junk room. And we had old Windows XP computers that we set up in a temporary network.
Criminal
The Raid
The one thing we still had was that we'd posted a PDF, as we always do on the website of our paper, but it was a low-res PDF. So we pulled it down and tried to grab some material from it and Our normal deadline is midnight on Tuesday night. We were there until 6.30 before we got the paper sent out to our printer at 6.30 a.m., but we made it.
Criminal
The Raid
Oh, no, they laughed at it. And later on in body cams, they're joking about, oh, yeah, sure, he thinks it's going to make national news. Well, it made international news.
Criminal
The Raid
And the judge basically wrote back, said, you didn't listen to my ruling. My ruling said, return it now. Now means now. And so they wouldn't give it to us, but they destroyed it. So we had a ceremony in which the sheriff wanted no part of it. So the undersheriff took a hammer and a chisel and broke the hard drive into little bitty pieces, put them in a plastic bag and gave them to us.
Criminal
The Raid
The report that came out in August basically said, first of all, we'd never committed a crime.
Criminal
The Raid
As often as a case in scandals, it's not the thing that happened that was important. It was the cover-up afterward.
Criminal
The Raid
Well, the reporter who had her cell phone ripped away from her. resigned. She couldn't take working in Marion anymore. She couldn't deal with being around the same people because the magistrate's still there, the county attorney's still there, the sheriff's still there, the sheriff's investigator's still there. There were some nice things that happened. People supported the newspaper.
Criminal
The Raid
I mean, we got tens of thousands of messages of support. We are the 122nd largest town in Kansas, not very big. As of today, we have the eighth largest paid circulation in the state of Kansas because of thousands of people who subscribe to the paper in support of it.
Criminal
The Raid
The issue here is not just the raid. It's the idea that Law enforcement can be weaponized politically, personally, to attack journalists who report things that people don't want to have reported.
Criminal
The Raid
I started doing menial things like stapling. We had a job printing operation and I would staple and trim things. And then I was about sixth or seventh grade, I started developing all the pictures and making all the... In those days, we had to make engravings of pictures. I did that all through high school. I became the vacation relief for my parents.
Criminal
The Raid
And actually, my grandmother, who had retired from the Wichita Eagle, was also working there. So I guess this is a family retirement thing.
Criminal
The Raid
Everything local. If it happens in Marion County, we cover it. So anything that happens from, you know, cars hitting deer – chicken dinner type stuff, the honor roll at the schools, everything that happens in local government.
Criminal
The Raid
We've tried to be aggressive at this. There was a time when this was sort of, oh, boosterism, cheerleading for the community. But we've tried to do a different approach and really bring serious journalism to the newspaper.
Criminal
The Raid
soon as he was appointed was we started hearing from people he had worked with. We had numerous sources, more than a dozen sources, telling us that he was in trouble in Kansas City. He was about to be demoted.
Criminal
The Raid
Oh, yes. He knew and threatened to sue us if we ran it. I regret now that we didn't. We didn't have a document. We didn't have a named source. We had multiple sources, and some people would say that's enough to go on, but we were wanting to get something that was on the record, and he had been threatening us with a defamation suit if we ran it.
Criminal
The Raid
She ordered Gideon Cody to come over and throw us out, saying she didn't want us there. She reserved the right to refuse service to anyone. Why didn't she want you there? She didn't like the media, she said. She later said it was just us, not the media. But at the time, she said no media allowed. We were the only media that were there and had us thrown out.
Criminal
The Raid
We received this tip that said that, you know, that Carrie Newell has been driving illegally for almost 20 years.
Criminal
The Raid
So we got it, and we verified that it was, in fact, a legitimate document. And then we decided whether we were going to use it or not.
Criminal
The Raid
We decided we didn't want to get in the middle of a divorce. But we were a little concerned if the police were aware of this and not enforcing the law. So I wrote a letter to the police chief and to the sheriff saying, we got this document. We verified it's true. We don't plan to use it in any way, shape, or form.
Criminal
The Raid
But you should be aware that there's an allegation that officers are ignoring this and allowing her to drive.
Criminal
The Raid
The city administrator said in response to that, we're not going to investigate this at all. It's up to the state to worry about liquor licenses. The city police department's going to do nothing with this story. That was Friday. Somewhere Monday morning following that, someone changed their mind.
Criminal
The Raid
And I got up afterward and said, no, that is not what happened. I will tell you that it was material that was provided to us and we chose not to disseminate it any further.
Criminal
The Raid
I informed them that I thought this was a set-up deal, that the police chief was aware we had information on him, and he had animus toward us.
Criminal
The Raid
She actually was in her bedroom when they arrived. She came out of her bedroom. She was very upset that they were there and became increasingly upset.
Criminal
The Raid
I was just sitting there at the house, checking email, doing normal stuff, and they came to the door.
Criminal
The Raid
They were just standing there guarding her so that she couldn't touch anything. They were there for two and a half hours.
Criminal
The Raid
She started comparing what they were doing to Nazi tactics. And she's not one who would use the word Nazi casually, but she wanted to know why they were allowed to do this, why there were police in her house. Eventually, by the end of the day, there were seven officers in her house. Two weeks earlier, they had had a case where they were searching for evidence in a rape case, a child rape case.
Criminal
The Raid
They went into a guy's house who was the suspect of this, known to have firearms in his house. They took two people. Why they needed seven to go after a 98-year-old woman to try to get her computer, I do not understand. Other than the fact it was designed to embarrass and harass and put us in our place.
Criminal
The Raid
When they were searching the newsroom, they got to her desk, and an officer was going through her desk, Deb Groover's desk, and found the investigative files we had on Gideon Cody and calls out to Gideon Cody, you should come look at this, and shows Gideon Cody the file we had, the first page of which was the LinkedIn profile of our main source, so he knew who it was.