When Kansas cops arrived at newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer’s home to execute a search warrant in an identity theft investigation, the 98-year-old was not having it.
“Don’t you touch any of that stuff,” the career Marion County Record journalist warns from a far corner of her living room during the Aug. 11 raid. “This is my house. You asshole!”
An in-home surveillance video—released by the Record on Monday—shows how Joan continued her defiant outrage over the raid at the home she shared with her son and newspaper co-owner Eric Meyer. At one point, Joan is even seen wheeling her walker right up to an officer and getting in his face before demanding that he wait outside while the search is being executed.
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“Did your mother ever love you,” Joan asks at one point in the video. “Get out of my house. You’re trespassing.”
Two officers are then seen trying to talk her down, while at least four other law enforcers are in the background conducting a search of her living room. Noticing that the search is ongoing, an irate Joan makes her way around the couch, telling one officer to “get out of my way” to view another search for what she called her “personal papers.”
“I want to see what they’re doing,” Joan told the officers.
Less than 24 hours after her standoff with authorities, Joan collapsed at her home mid-sentence and died. A coroner’s report obtained by The Daily Beast states that Joan died from “sudden cardiac arrest” after refusing to eat and sleep amid her shock over the raid.
“This was extremely upsetting to Joan and caused her to remain angry and upset throughout the day and night,” the report states, adding that she “fell back on the bed unresponsive” after 1 p.m. on Aug. 12.
The footage is the latest video to be released in connection with the controversial police raids on the Record that have sparked a national outcry and spurred questions about whether the local newspaper’s First Amendment rights were violated.
The raid at Meyer and his mother’s home was one of three conducted that day, along with a raid at the Record’s officers and the home of Vice Mayor Ruth Herbel. As previously reported by The Daily Beast, footage of the raid at the newspaper’s offices showed law enforcers cracking jokes while they removed computer towers and took photos of private passwords.
On Wednesday, amid national backlash, Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey withdrew the search warrant that led to the raid after concluding that “insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between the alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized.” The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has since taken over the case, which will continue without any review of the once-seized evidence that has since been returned.
Court documents show that at least five computer towers, two cell phones, and an external hard drive were taken in the raids. Affidavits obtained by The Daily Beast on Sunday confirmed that the raids were in connection with an investigation over alleged identity theft after a confidential source leaked sensitive documents to one of the Record reporters about local restaurateur Kari Newell.
Meyer previously told The Daily Beast that while the newspaper did receive information about Newell’s DUI arrest, the outlet did not publish a story about the information. Instead, he said, he alerted local police about the information.
“Downloading the document involved either impersonating the victim or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought,” Police Chief Gideon Cody claimed in an affidavit to obtain the search warrant.
Bernie Rhodes, a lawyer representing the Record, disputed the affidavit’s claims, noting that the reporter simply verified the tip using public information websites and that the court documents “confirm that the only ‘crime’ being investigated was the crime of reporting,”
“The affidavits show that Chief Cody knew that a source provided Kari Newell’s driver’s record to both the paper and the vice-mayor—so neither the reporter nor the vice-mayor illegally obtained anything, yet they were the subject of the search. All the paper did was attempt to verify the authenticity of the record, using a public website operated by the Kansas Department of Revenue,” Rhodes told The Daily Beast on Sunday. “No laws were broken.”
The Marion County City Council is set to host their first town meeting since the raids, but they have stressed they will not be commenting on the ongoing investigation.
