by Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector
July 18, 2024
LAWRENCE — Deb Gruver felt heartbroken and violated when police raided the Marion County Record last year.
As a reporter at the newspaper, Gruver knew that powerful people in town weren’t fans of the accountability journalism she and her colleagues produced. But when police rolled up to the office on Aug. 11, 2023, she didn’t know those officials had plotted a chilling raid that would soon seize national attention.
Gideon Cody, the police chief who led the raid, approached Gruver on the back stoop of the newspaper office and ripped her phone from her hand. Officers rifled through her desk, and searched and seized the journalists’ computers, while she waited outside.
This isn’t supposed to happen, she thought.
“I cried,” Gruver said. “I was pacing around, but I was crying because it was such an affront to what I’ve known, that I’ve wanted to do since third grade. I take this profession incredibly seriously. And I take my role as a public servant, which I think journalists are, incredibly seriously. And I just couldn’t believe that it was happening — but yeah, I could believe it, because of where we were.”
It was her mom’s 86th birthday, and she couldn’t call her.
“So, anyway,” Gruver said. “That was what that day was like. And, it was hot.”
After three weeks filled with nonstop work, sometimes sleeping in the newsroom, she quit and filed a federal lawsuit against Cody for his “malicious and recklessly indifferent violation” of her constitutional rights to a free press and against unlawful search and seizure.
Earlier this month, Gruver and Cody reached a $235,000 settlement in her case, which will proceed against Sheriff Jeff Soyez and prosecutor Joel Ensey, who were added as defendants. The settlement was covered through the city’s insurance.
In an exclusive interview, Gruver said she plans to start a journalism scholarship with some of the money. She also has helped friends and family and paid off some debt. An undisclosed amount went to her attorney, Blake Shuart.
Shuart said he expects people to fixate on the dollar amount, but the real value is accountability.
“I see people make comments for these lawsuits, and they say, ‘This is a cash grab,’ or, ‘This is all about the money.’ That’s missing a point for people that have never had their own rights stepped on before,” Shuart said.
“What you obtain from it and what you accomplish from it are all those other behind-the-scenes changes in conversation, changes in policies,” he added.
Gruver said she is still working out the details of the scholarship, but she wants an annual award of perhaps $5,000 to go to a first-generation college student in Kansas who has “overcome extraordinary challenges in their life.”
“I don’t really care about grades,” Gruver said.
The raid spawned four additional lawsuits, including one from Eric Meyer, editor and publisher of the Marion County Record. The court filings show a wide network of local officials who were involved in the raid, including those who were motivated to punish the newspaper.
The officials targeted journalists under the pretext that they had committed identity theft by looking up public records in a public database. With encouragement from then-Mayor David Mayfield, who viewed journalists as “the real villains in America,” Cody and his officers worked alongside Soyez and his deputies to draft search warrants and carry out the raids. Cody sent the warrants to Ensey, who had an assistant deliver them to Magistrate Laura Viar, who signed off despite obvious legal flaws.
Police raided the newspaper office, Councilwoman Ruth Herbel’s home, and the home where Meyer lived with his 98-year-old mother, Joan. She died a day later, in part from the stress of the raid.
Soyez threw a pizza party for officers after the raid. Cody, who forgot to turn his body camera off for the party, told Soyez that yanking the cellphone from Gruver’s hand “made my day.”
Gruver started at the Marion County Record in 2022, after being away from journalism for seven years. She had previously worked at the Wichita Eagle, and was happy to report from a newsroom where “there wasn’t a giant TV screen mounted to the wall in the newsroom with clicks being updated every couple of seconds.”
Eric Meyer told her, “I just want you to tell stories,” she said.
She said she knew from her first day, when she attended a city council meeting, that local officials wanted to get rid of the newspaper.
“I knew that day,” Gruver said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be fun.’ I mean, seriously, I was excited. It was like, ‘This is gonna be a fun place to cover.’ But also, I mean, exhausting. It was exhausting — because they just didn’t get it.”
Gruver said she met “lovely people” while working in Marion, such as Bob Delk, a 101-year-old man from nearby Hillsboro. Her profile of him won an award.
She talks fondly about hanging out with Delk’s “farmer friends” in early morning gatherings at a restaurant.
“The people who live there are lovely in Marion County,” Gruver said. “The people who are in public office are not lovely.”
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.
