In October 2021, after years and years of very serious complaints and building momentum organized by activists, a federal grand jury began investigating retired Kansas City, Kansas, police officer Roger Golubski. The wide range of accusations against Golubski, who retired as a detective in 2010, was horrific. It included everything from rape to planting evidence and fabricating testimony. And while various complaints and accusations were levied against Golubski long before 2021, the Kansas City Police Department (KCKPD) and the state’s prosecutors had conveniently been unable to do their jobs in investigating these very serious charges, even after state lawmakers began adding political pressure in 2020.
It took the relentless efforts of activists, and the help of hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and his Team ROC (the justice activism wing and philanthropic arm of his entertainment company), who filed the lawsuit against Kansas City, Kansas, and the Police Department in 2021 over civil rights violations and alleged widespread “misconduct” and corruption, for things to move forward. At the time, Lamonte McIntyre and his mother Rose were directly connected to the lawsuit, as they had accused Golubski of targeting Lamonte in a murder case after Rose had reportedly “rebuffed (Golubski’s) sexual advances.” Lamonte McIntyre served 23 years in jail before being exonerated of the crime.
On Sept. 16, the Department of Justice and the FBI arrested Golubski, who was just indicted on six counts by that very same grand jury. The specific charges for which Golubski has been arrested surround his alleged sexual assaults and rapes of two separate women between 1998 and 2002. This is just the tip of the iceberg, according to many.
RELATED STORY: Eleven years after retirement, corrupt Kansas City detective Roger Golubski faces federal scrutiny
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The charges for which Golubski has been arrested are serious enough to potentially carry a life sentence if he is convicted. But these charges do not necessarily help Lamonte McIntyre, who served 23 years for a crime he did not commit. McIntyre was released in 2017, and he and his mother are suing Kansas City, Kansas, for a total of $123 million in damages.
The McIntyre’s are happy Golubski has been arrested, but allege the sheer breadth of this dirtbag’s corruption and abuses cannot simply be laid at his feet alone. To put it into perspective, according to Golubski’s defense attorneys, even if he is found guilty of being an absolute heinous POS, “Roger Golubski will contend that he was a good cop and detective, that he cared about the community he served, particularly the African American community, and that he sought to hold dirty cops accountable.” The McIntyres’ lawyers listed 73 women in their pretrial order for their lawsuit, who they say can testify to Golubski’s sexual assault abuses and his vast network of corruptions.
Golubski’s care for the community that he served has also opened up newspaper investigations into the many unsolved cases of murdered Black women. Cases connected to Golubski. According to the Kansas City Star, FBI investigators believe they can prove Golubski murdered one of the women himself.
The Star also reports that the Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office, in looking through old Golubski-related cases, is now moving forward to exonerate Donnell Dobbs, who has spent more than 13 years in prison on a murder charge the DA’s office now questions the integrity of. Olin “Pete” Coones was also recently exonerated and released from prison after serving 12 years for a crime Wyandotte County prosecutors cannot defend. Coones died of cancer a few months after being exonerated at the age of 64. Connes’ family settled with the state a few months after that.
Since last year, Golubski has invoked his Fifth Amendment Rights hundreds of times, both in court and out of court.
But it isn’t simply Golubski. Other accusations of sexual assault and the grotesque abuses of power by the KCKPD have been around for decades and have not been prosecuted. Many of those accusations are being revisited in print, and hopefully by federal investigators and a Department of Justice that needs to hold law enforcement operations accountable. These allegations include raping young women, planting evidence to convict innocent citizens, and protecting guilty parties willing to pay off law enforcement officers.
The day before Golubski’s arrest last week, the Kansas City Star reported the story of a woman who claimed she was groomed by Golubski as a 12-year-old. She says she would get paid to bring in “other girls her age, who were paid for dancing and for sex at parties for important people, where one prominent KCK official liked to put out his cigar on girls’ skin.” And while this is simply one woman’s story of her experience with the KCKPD, her story has corroboration as more and more people come forward with similar or identical stories about Golubski and the police and prominent officials of Kansas City, Kansas.
It is important that the federal government be closely involved in this process, as the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) has repeatedly shown questionable abilities in being able to thoroughly investigate the KCKPD. In July of 2020, amidst all of these allegations and mounting proof of dirty dealings by Golubski, the KBI told Kansas City news outlet KSHB that, while they had opened an investigation in 2019 into Golubski related to the sexual assault claims that were resurfacing in the media at the time, "That investigation continues, but to date we have found no evidence of any violation of Kansas law that is within the statute of limitations.”
An UPDATE, c/o a reader, who sent me another Kansas City Star report from March of 2021 about prosecutor Terra Morehead. Morehead has been accused of misconduct for threatening a witness. She was the prosecutor that helped get Lamonte McIntyre wrongfully convicted. In 2019, a drug indictment Morehead spearheaded was thrown out by a federal judge, after it became clear that Morehead had used “veil threats” to intimidate witnesses for the defense team. In March of last year, U.S. Attorney Duston Slinkard confirmed that Morehead would no longer be allowed to prosecute criminal cases in the Kansas Attorneys Office.
Niko Quinn, who saw her two cousins killed in the murders McIntyre went away for, says Morehead told her that she’d either say under oath that she’d seen 17-year-old McIntyre shoot them, or “I’ll throw your Black ass in jail and you’ll never see your children again.”
Is there a “statute of limitations” for corruption? Is there such a thing as a single bad apple?