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Friday, April 05, 2024

Raided newspaper in small town takes on mayor, police chief, sheriff in sprawling lawsuit alleging revenge and possible wrongful death

Crying and clutching a walker, Joan Meyer, 98, told the armed police chief standing in her living room last summer that if they kept ransacking the house she shared with her son Eric Meyer, 70 — her co-publisher of the Marion County Record in Kansas, a newspaper serving under 2,000 people — they were going to kill her from the stress.

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen … This is the first time I’ve ever had police in my house threatening me … I’m not dumb. I may be ninety-some years old, but I know what’s going on. And what’s going on is illegal as hell,” Joan Meyer said after she tried to call her son whose phone, “in a cruel twist,” a new lawsuit against the county’s mayor, police chief and sheriff alleges, was already “tucked inside an evidence bag” by police who obtained it with a warrant based on false statements.

Joan Meyer died the next day. She suffered cardiac arrest.