Police served a search warrant to the Marion County Record’s Joan Meyer, 98, after the paper’s investigation into local restaurateur
The co-owner of a small Kansas newspaper whose offices and staff were raided by local police officers conducting a leak investigation has died after the situation left her “stressed beyond her limits”, according to the publication.
Joan Meyer, 98, collapsed on Saturday afternoon and died at her home a day after she tearfully watched officers who showed up at her home with a search warrant cart away her computer as well as an internet router, reported the Marion County Record, which she co-owned. After officers also photographed the bank statements of her son, Record publisher Eric Meyer, and left her house in mess, Meyer had been unable to eat or sleep, her newspaper said.
Meyer was “in good health for her age”, the weekly newspaper asserted. And the headline of its report on her death said the police’s decision to raid the Marion Record’s offices along with the homes of its reporters and publishers was not only illegal – but had also contributed to bringing on the end of Meyer’s life.
Attempts to contact both Marion’s police chief – Gideon Cody – and the judge who authorized his agency to conduct the raids aimed at the Record, Laura Viar, for comment on Meyer’s sudden death were not immediately successful.
As the Record has told it, the weekly’s ordeal began when a confidential source leaked evidence that a local restaurant proprietor, Kari Newell, had been convicted of drunk-driving but continued using her car without a license.
The newspaper never published anything related to the information because its staff reportedly suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband during their divorce. Nonetheless, after police notified Newell that the information was going around, she alleged at a local city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents.
According to reporting from the Kansas Reflector, Newell had admitted to the drunk-driving arrest as well as driving with a suspended license. Yet she insinuated that the leak was meant to jeopardize her license to serve alcohol and harm her business.
But, as the Reflector reported, Newell’s comments during the council meeting were untrue, and she had police remove reporters for the Record from an open forum held by US congressman Jake LaTurner at a coffee shop which she operates. (LaTurner’s staff had invited the news media and apologized.)
So the Meyer family’s newspaper responded Thursday by publishing a story to set the record straight, the Reflector said.
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