(NationRise.com) – Kansas City Council Member Ruth Herbel recently revealed that the police chief who led a raid on a small newspaper back in August in central Kansas has officially resigned. The resignation occurred a couple of days after Chief Gideon Cody was formally suspended for reasons that weren’t made public and weeks after a prosecutor said there wasn’t enough evidence to justify the raid of the Marion County Record. Herbel said in a statement that city Mayor Quinton Lucas confirmed his resignation during a City Council meeting.
Neither Cody nor Lucas has commented on the resignation, which the Wichita Eagle and the Marion County Record have reported could happen anytime soon. The chief’s departure came after a body camera video from the newspaper’s search revealed that one police officer riffled through the desk drawer of a journalist who was investigating Cody. The footage then shows the police officer beckoning his chief to look at a document he discovered, with Cody then asking him to keep “a personal file on me.”
The police chief obtained warrants for these raids by telling a judge he had plenty of evidence. This allegedly included information on numerous potential crimes related to the circulation of information regarding a local restaurant owner.
However, the newspaper and its lawyers have suggested that Cody was trying to discover what the Marion County Record had learned about his days as a police captain in Kansas City, Missouri. One of the lawyers, Bernie Rhodes, said in a statement that the police chief did all of this to determine “who our sources were.”
Cody is currently facing a federal lawsuit, while many others are also expected to follow. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation recently took charge of the case’s investigation but hasn’t provided any new information. The newspaper’s publisher and editor, Eric Meyer, blamed the stress of these raids for the death of his mother, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who was also the newspaper’s co-owner.
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