Kansas newspaper co-owner’s son after raid: Mom ‘was a fighter’
- A newspaper in Marion County, Kansas, had its offices raided by police
- Many condemned the move as a blatant violation of the right to a free press
- Newspaper publisher and co-owner says mom died after raid due to stress
maylen
(NewsNation) — The co-owner of a newspaper in central Kansas died after the stress from a raid on her home and the outlet’s office by local police, her son says.
Marion County Record publisher and co-owner Eric Meyer says the coroner who visited his mom Joan’s house after she passed also attributed her death to stress.
“She’s in fairly good health for a 98-year-old, and police knock at her door. And they stand there for a couple hours,” Meyer told NewsNation. “She said, ‘They’re just watching me — Why are they watching me like I’m some common criminal?'”
Officials with the Marion Police Department confiscated computers and cellphones from the publisher and staff of the Marion County Record in the Friday raid. Press freedom watchdogs condemned what police did as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection for a free press.
These searches reportedly happened after a complaint from a local restaurant owner who accused the newspaper of invading her privacy when it obtained copies of her driving record, including a prior conviction for drunk driving. The Marion County Record says it received the information unsolicited and later verified it through public online records. Ultimately, the paper decided not to run the story, as it wasn’t sure the source who supplied it got it legally.
However, Eric Meyer said it was the newspaper’s coverage of local politics, and police Chief Gideon Cody’s record, that sparked the raids.
Cody has defended his department’s actions, claiming they were legal and that the search was tied to a criminal investigation.
Joan Meyer spent the past 50 years of her life working at the newspaper. But after the raid, Eric Meyer said, she felt like “everything was worthless, everything had gone away.”
“She muttered during the night, she wouldn’t eat her dinner,” Eric Meyer said. “She wouldn’t eat breakfast, she wouldn’t sleep.”
Eric Meyer said his mom didn’t have a cardiac history other than high blood pressure.
“She wasn’t somebody who was that fragile,” Eric Meyer said. “She was a fighter.”
However, he added, Joan Meyer would have been pleased about the outpouring of support that’s since come from people “around the world.”
“I just wish she’d had a chance to see that,” Eric Meyer said.
