The 98-year-old co-owner of a newspaper raided by police died from the stress of the incident, according to son, the paper’s publisher. Press freedom advocates condemned the raid as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
A small central Kansas police department is facing a torrent of criticism for raiding a local newspaper’s office and the home of its owner and publisher, seizing computers and cellphones, and, in the publisher’s view, stressing his 98-year-old mother enough to cause her weekend death.
Several press freedom watchdogs condemned the Marion Police Department’s actions as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection for a free press. The Marion County Record’s editor and publisher, Eric Meyer, worked with his staff Sunday to reconstruct stories, ads and other materials for its next edition Wednesday, even as he took time in the afternoon to provide a local funeral home with information about his mother, Joan, the paper’s co-owner.
A search warrant tied Friday morning raids, led by Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, to a dispute between the newspaper and a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. She is accusing the newspaper of invading her privacy and illegally accessing information about her and her driving record and suggested that the newspaper targeted her after she threw Meyer and a reporter out of restaurant during a political event.
Meyer saw Newell’s complaints — which he said were untrue — as prompting the raids, but he also believes the newspaper’s aggressive coverage of local politics and issues played a role. He said the newspaper was examining Cody’s past work with the Kansas City, Missouri, police as well.
“This is the type of stuff that, you know, that Vladimir Putin does, that Third World dictators do,” Meyer said during an interview in his office. “This is Gestapo tactics from World War II.”
Cody said Sunday that the raid was legal and tied to an investigation.
The raids occurred in a town of about 1,900 people, nestled among rolling prairie hills, about 150 miles southwest of Kansas City, making the small weekly newspaper the latest to find itself in the headlines and possibly targeted for its reporting.
Last year in New Hampshire, the publisher of a weekly newspaper accused the state attorney general’s office of government overreach after she was arrested for allegedly publishing advertisements for local races without properly marking them as political advertising.
