Video of Marion, Kansas, police raid shows chief scurrying away from 98-year-old newswoman | Opinion
When six police officers raided 98-year-old Marion County Record co-owner Joan Meyer’s home, she asked them the question that has been on my mind ever since: Do you all not have moms?
“Does your mother love you?” she demanded of one of the officers, closing in on him on her walker. “Do you love your mother?”
To me, most of the officers appeared embarrassed to be there, as they should have been, though the right answer to a sketchy assignment is always this one: “No.”
As one of them started to answer Mrs. Meyer, Chief Gideon Cody told him, “You’re wasting your breath,” patted him on the shoulder and — my goodness, what a coward — walked away from the woman who was talking to them, and in whose home they were standing.
Yet awful as the whole violation was, there is a small corner of consolation, too, in watching this newswoman’s fierce, oh-no-you-don’t response, complete with peppery language.
“Don’t you touch any of that stuff!” she told them, not at all meekly, even stomping her walker into the ground for effect. “This is my house!”
She repeatedly ordered them outside, refused to tell them just how many computers there were in the house, and barked, “Get out of my way! … What are you doing? Those are personal papers!”
“Those aren’t papers,” one of the misdirected cops replied. “They’re electronic devices, which is what the judge said that we’re supposed to take, OK?”
It was not OK, and Mrs. Meyer had no trouble standing up for herself and for her First Amendment rights by telling them so.
That the officers were sheepish as they searched her home doesn’t change the fact that they were still engaging in what Mrs. Meyer, on the day before she died, rightly called “Hitler tactics.”
The whole incursion appears to have been a bad-faith effort sparked by Kari Newell, a business owner who seems not to know that “identity theft” and looking up a public record are two different things.
The raid was enabled by a judge, Laura Viar, who may have been sympathetic because she, like Newell, has her own history of both DUIs and driving on a suspended license. And it was carried out by a police chief who had already lashed out at the Marion County Record because they were looking into why he’d left the Kansas City Police Department. (Answer: He was under investigation for allegedly creating a hostile work environment, and left rather than be demoted.)
The video firmly contradicts any who told themselves, as some readers told me, that at 98, Joan Meyer must already have been weak and ill. Because as we can see, on the day before the fatal heart attack that may well have been brought on by this whole fiasco flambé, the woman in robe and slippers was still quite a force.
And if her estate does file a wrongful death lawsuit, as the Record’s lawyer has said it might, this video will be Exhibit A.
