Dressed in a light blue gown and wielding her walker forcefully through a pack of police officers huddled in her home, the 98-year-old co-owner of a local Kansas newspaper was unmistakable about her consternation.
“Don’t you touch any of that stuff,” Joan Meyer said, waving her arm in an edited video of the interaction released by the Associated Press.
“This is my house,” she said during the Aug. 11, 2023 search, adding: “Get ‘em outta here.”
The next day, Meyer — who is the mother of the Marion County Record publisher, and shares a home with her son — died of a sudden cardiac arrest, according to the coroner’s report, characterizing the searches as “extremely upsetting” to the nonagenarian.
The coroner’s notes are cited as part of a 124-page report by specially-appointed prosecutors — released this week and obtained by PEOPLE — which calls local law enforcement’s investigation leading to search warrants at the local newspaper and the Meyers’ residence “inadequate.”
Chase Castor for The Washington Post via Getty
The searches – which stemmed from the newspaper’s unpublished investigation into a restaurant owner pursuing a liquor license and put the small town in the international spotlight concerning First Amendment issues – will lead to a criminal charge of obstruction of the judicial process against the former Marion police chief, according to the report.
As of Tuesday, Aug. 6, former Chief Gideon Cody had not yet been charged, but Marc Bennett, one of the independent prosecutors who authored the report, told PEOPLE in an email that the charge would likely be filed later this week. It is unclear if the charge is a felony or misdemeanor.
Sedgwick County District Attorney Bennett and Riley County Attorney Barry Wilkerson, who investigated the case over the last year, both said by email that they could not further comment on the ongoing civil and upcoming criminal proceedings.
In early August of last year, Joan Meyer’s son Eric Meyer, the publisher and co-owner of the Marion County Record, emailed Cody, who was then the police chief, requesting comment after the newspaper had obtained from a “source” a local businesswoman’s driving record, according to the report.
Cody – who did not return PEOPLE’s request for comment in time for publication – “immediately reached the assumption,” according to the prosecutors’ report, that the businesswoman’s record had been stolen in connection with the divorce she was going through.
In reality, the record was publicly available online, due to a glitch in the Kansas Department of Revenue’s online system, and prosecutors absolved the newspaper’s journalists of “any crime,” per the report.
“Small town familiarity explains but does not excuse the inadequate investigation that gave rise to the search warrant applications in this matter,” the prosecutors wrote in the report, adding that “a few minutes on the phone” with the Kansas Department of Revenue “was, functionally, the entirety of this investigation.”
In a statement to PEOPLE, Melissa Underwood of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation – which later handed over the case to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation – said that Cody “did not coordinate the search warrants” with her office “as he claimed,” and that as a result “the KBI did not review or approve the warrants executed at the Marion County Record or at the homes of the accused subjects in Marion.”
Kansas City Star/Getty
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While serving the warrant at the Meyers’ residence, an officer asked the elderly woman how many computers she had in the home.
“I’m not going to tell you,” she said, walking past him: “Get out of my way! I want to see what they’re doing.”
Observing the officers rifling through her belongings, she exclaimed “you people!” before the edited video cut out.
In an interview for the newspaper matriarch’s obituary, Eric Meyer told The New York Times that the coroner had confirmed that the stress of the searches made at their home and the newspaper’s office had contributed to her death. (Ultimately, per the prosecutorial report, the coroner listed her death as “natural.”)
Prosecutors found that while “one could assume that, but for the execution of the warrant and the consequent extreme upset this caused to Mrs. Meyer, that she would not or might not have died on August 12, 2023,” such a presumption was not enough to lead to any sort of conviction connected to her death.
Law enforcement officers who executed the warrants were similarly not culpable of any crime, per prosecutors.
“She said over and over again, ‘Where are all the good people to put a stop to this?’” her son told The Times of his mother, who had worked for nearly six decades as a reporter, columnist, editor and associate publisher at the newspaper and who still wrote the occasional article. “She felt like, how can you go through your entire life and then have something that you spent 50 years of your life doing just kind of trampled on like it’s meaningless?”
