Aftershocks linger one year after chilling police raid on Kansas newspaper

MARION — Since the raid on the Marion County Record newspaper a year ago, Phyllis Zorn spends more time alone at home, etching glass to calm her nerves.

She suffers life-threatening seizures that were at one point under control but have grown more painful and frequent since. As a local journalist in town covering legal affairs for about a decade, she says the fallout from the raid has thrown “monkey wrenches” into her ability to cover the community. When the sheriff sees her, he turns away.

All these setbacks have only heightened the feeling that she’d “love the satisfaction” of seeing criminal charges filed against the people responsible for villainizing journalists — and vilifying her in particular. But she doesn’t think it’s likely.

“I would really like for them to come right out and say that I am in the clear,” Zorn said in her first interview since the raid. “They have not officially cleared me.”

In the absence of information, she’s left to wonder why special prosecutors have kept an investigative report into the raid a secret. For her, closure remains elusive.

On Aug. 11, 2023, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, with the encouragement of then-Mayor David Mayfield and support from Sheriff Jeff Soyez, trampled constitutionally protected freedoms by ransacking the newspaper office, the publisher’s home, and the home of Mayfield’s political rival. Police seized computers and personal cellphones, and caused fatal stress for the newspaper owner’s 98-year-old mother. And the chilling abuse of power — which upended the lives of Zorn and others, and spawned five federal lawsuits — has cast a shadow over the city that residents fear will linger for years.

Cody, Mayfield, Soyez and other defendants have responded to lawsuits by denying they violated civil rights.

The way Zorn sees it, she was a pawn. Local officials who resented the newspaper’s hard-hitting stories plotted their attack when they learned Zorn had obtained a copy of documentation showing restaurateur Kari Newell’s driver’s license was suspended after a DUI. Zorn’s supposed crime was identity theft, even though she retrieved the record from a public online database. Her reporting threatened Newell’s attempt to get a liquor license — and the credibility of law enforcement who let her drive without a license.

A year after the raid, Newell has left town. Cody resigned in disgrace. Mayfield, who called journalists the “real villains” in America, chose not to seek reelection. Councilwoman Ruth Herbel, a friend of the newspaper whose home also was raided, lost her reelection. Several police officers and sheriff’s deputies quit their jobs.

Eric Meyer, the editor and publisher whose mother, Joan, died a day after police raided their shared home, remains defiant as he sometimes works around the clock to preserve the understaffed newspaper’s reporting prowess in a divided community. Local police still try to intimidate staff, he said, and restrict the newspaper’s access to public records.

“Is it going to prevent us from doing our job? No, because we’re not gonna let it,” Meyer said in a recent interview at the Record office.

He wore a short-sleeved button down monogrammed with his initials, and leaned back in his chair behind a large, mostly spotless dark wood desk, trumpeting his story of triumph. Though it was a year forward from the raids, the wood-paneled space with red vertical blinds suggested a trip back in time. Back when newspapers were king.

Meyer, Zorn, Herbel, former reporter Deb Gruver, and office manager Cheri Bentz have filed federal lawsuits against local leaders and law enforcement that accuse them of breaking federal and state laws that shield journalists from having to reveal sources and other reporting to police, as well as violations of constitutional protections for free speech and against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, whose agents helped investigate Zorn and Meyer before the raid, enlisted the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to review the actions of police and local leaders. Riley County Attorney Barry Wilkerson and Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett, who were appointed special prosecutors, haven’t disclosed the CBI findings.

“There are still people who think we broke the law. A few. I would like to rid people of that impression,” Meyer said.

Marion Presbyterian Church pastor Jeremiah Lange, right, talks with former Councilwoman Ruth Herbel and her husband, Ronald, on July 25, 2024, at a cafe in Marion. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)

Living in the shadow

Jeremiah Lange, pastor of the Marion Presbyterian Church, said he followed a divine calling 19 years ago to move from Los Angeles to Marion, a town of about 2,000 people in east-central Kansas.

Lange said the community makes people feel welcome. And despite the widespread attention from the raid, he said, life goes on.

“It did shine a bad light on Marion,” Lange said recently at a cafe in town. But, as he’s told inquiring outsiders, “people are still mowing their lawns, people are still going to the grocery store, people are still hanging out with friends, people are still going fishing. The daily life is still continuing even after what happened in August.”

But “the shadow,” he said, remains.

The combination of a new police chief, an antagonistic newspaper and small-town politics provided the ingredients for “a bad thing to happen,” Lange said.

“As a community, we had left a pot on the stove, and it was boiling,” he said. “And none of us, including myself, did anything to turn the temperature down.”

A tense public meet-and-greet at Newell’s cafe with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner 10 days before the raid was a precursor, where Newell asked Cody to evict Zorn and Meyer from the space. The episode didn’t sit well with Pam Maag, a Marion resident with a background in law enforcement. Maag knew that Newell’s drunk driving record should disqualify her from holding a liquor license, which she had asked the city to approve. So Maag sent a copy of Newell’s driving record to Zorn and Herbel.

Herbel notified the city manager, who forwarded the information to the mayor and other council members. Zorn, meanwhile, verified the record by looking it up on a Kansas Department of Revenue website. Meyer notified the police chief that the newspaper was investigating the situation, and the police chief launched a criminal investigation — with input from the sheriff’s office and the KBI — that resulted in the raid.

Herbel had made political enemies among fellow city leaders by speaking her mind: Mayfield had previously tried and failed to remove her from office through a petition. But, he realized, a felony conviction for the supposed crime of having a copy of Newell’s driving record would disqualify her from serving. Herbel has not been charged with any crime.

Herbel said she ran for city council in the town where she has lived for 62 years because she thought she could make a difference.

“Stupid me,” she said.

In the past year, her social circle has gotten smaller. People are afraid to speak to her. She is sorry the town she loves is in the spotlight “for all the wrong reasons.” And she doesn’t understand why police raided her house for having received an email.

“It’s just a bad situation, and I hope eventually when it’s over with, and those that are responsible are held accountable, that Marion can move forward,” Herbel said.

At first, Maag had no regrets. Then she found out Meyer’s mother, who endured a profanity-laced confrontation with the police officers who invaded her home, had died from cardiac arrest.

“I felt very guilty that because of my actions, that was a reaction,” Maag said. “I’ve had numerous people tell me what happened to her was not my fault. It boils back to law enforcement.”

But despite the guilt of Joan Meyer’s death, Maag insists she did the right thing: “Would I do it again? Absolutely.”

Marion County Record editor and publisher Eric Meyer takes a smoke break on July 25, 2024, at the back door to his newspaper office — where police entered during the raid. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)

A sense of duty

In a workshop in the back of the Marion County Record, Meyer stands over a stonetop table where he recalls branding newsprint with letters cast in hot metal 50 years ago. These days, the room full of relics is used for mailing the weekly paper on Wednesdays after it is printed on somebody else’s press and trucked to Marion.

The door in the back corner is where police entered the building during the raid. On a recent balmy July day, Meyer smoked a cigarette in the doorway, gazing upon the parking lot where the swarm began.

His schedule for the past year has involved working every Saturday and Sunday, and until midnight on Monday and Tuesday. He said he slacks off on Wednesday before turning his attention to “business stuff” on Thursday and Friday.

Nobody, he said, has had a day off in the past year. He knows the workload is unsustainable.

“I do it for a sense of duty, I guess,” Meyer said. “And that’s fun. I mean, I’m one of these people, if I sat around and did nothing, I’d go crazy. And a lot of journalists are like that. It’s not that unusual. The idea of going out and sitting on my boat and fishing would be my idea of hell. I just want to do something that’s significant and feel like I’ve done something that mattered for the day.”

Meyer said he was trying to hire an additional reporter at the time of the raid to join him, Zorn and Gruver in gathering news. With Gruver quitting shortly after the raid, Meyer found himself even more understaffed. Only recently did he find a potential replacement.

Gruver settled her lawsuit with Cody, who ripped her cellphone out of her hand at the start of the raid, in July for $235,000. Her lawsuit against Ensey and Soyez is ongoing. She said it was difficult to leave the newspaper “because I knew the position I was leaving them in.”

“To this day, I have — it’s not guilt, because I don’t feel guilty about it,” Gruver said. “I spent most of my life putting other people first. And this was something that I was like, I can’t be here anymore. So it’s not guilt. But I guess maybe it’s regret for the whole situation.”

As the newspaper’s only remaining full-time reporter, Zorn struggles to manage her exhaustion and stress. She suffers from tonic-clonic seizures with convulsions that inflict a “shocking” amount of pain throughout her body, the worst of which took hold two days after the raid. She looks forward to the day she packs things up and leaves Marion.

“At my age, what comes next? Eventually retirement,” Zorn said. But much like Meyer, and despite the harrowing raid, she couldn’t really imagine ever permanently packing away her journalist cap. “I don’t see myself retiring. Because interviewing people, writing stories, ferreting out facts — that’s so much a part of my essential nature, what the hell would I do with myself if I walked away from it?”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.