Attorney to seek release of Tamara Greene’s medical files
With new information surfacing about slain stripper Tamara Greene and a rumored Manoogian Mansion party, a lawyer for Greene’s family said Tuesday he plans to subpoena medical records to determine whether she received treatment at Detroit Receiving Hospital in 2002 for a beating.
“I’m as close as I’ve ever been to a date, time and place,” attorney Norman Yatooma said of his lawsuit on behalf of the Greene family. “Enough so that I can focus a subpoena without sending them to every medical provider in Wayne County.”
On Monday, Yatooma filed an affidavit from a Detroit Fire EMS supervisor, Lt. Michael Kearns, who says he was dispatched to a gas station on Jefferson on an autumn night in 2002 and met Greene, who told him that the mayor’s wife, Carlita Kilpatrick, assaulted her.
Kearns said Greene was being interviewed by police officers and was transported to a hospital by EMS workers. Kearns is the first official to publicly claim hearing firsthand from Greene that she was assaulted at the Manoogian.
In a second affidavit, EMS supervisor, retired Lt. Walter Godzwon, said around the same time, he saw Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and a group of his bodyguards at Detroit Receiving Hospital and that he heard that a woman was brought in for treatment.
“You put those things together and you have the mayor at the hospital and Tammy Greene going to a hospital,” Yatooma said Tuesday.
Rusty Hills, a spokesman for Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, said prosecutors will try to interview Kearns and Godzwon, just as they recently interviewed a police clerk who claimed to have seen a report on the alleged assault.
He said any investigation into Greene’s unsolved 2003 shooting death, however, is being handled by Detroit Police and Wayne County prosecutors.
The representatives of Greene’s estate have signed off on the disclosure of her medical records, Yatooma said.
They are: Ernest Flagg, who had a son with Greene; Taris Jackson, who had a daughter with Greene, and Greene’s brother, Brian Greene, a surgeon in western Michigan.
Tamara Greene’s 15-year-old son, Jonathan Bond, and his father, Flagg, are plaintiffs in the suit brought by Yatooma.
The suit accuses Detroit police executives and city officials of thwarting an investigation into the April 30, 2003, shooting death of Greene — roughly six months after Greene purportedly danced at a long-rumored Manoogian party. Rumors that she was assaulted by the mayor’s wife at the party have never been proven despite investigation by Cox’s office and Michigan State Police.
Medical records were an issue as far back as 2003, when State Police asked Detroit Receiving Hospital for a variety of documents regarding possible victims from a party at the Manoogian Mansion.
In September 2003, an attorney for the hospital informed State Police investigators they would need a subpoena or search warrant for the information, but Cox refused to give them authorization.
Hills said Tuesday that the attorney general refused the state police record as “unlawfully broad” because they wanted all medical records of African-American females who had been treated at Detroit Receiving in October 2002.
Hills said state police could have gone to any judge for approval of other warrant requests. It was unclear Tuesday whether state police ever asked for a specific warrant to get Greene’s records.
Kearns told the Free Press on Monday that he doesn’t have any proof of the party. But in his affidavit, he said Greene told him she and a friend “were dancing at a party at the Manoogian Mansion and that the mayor’s wife, Carlita Kilpatrick, threw a fit, hit her and the other dancer, then kicked them out of the house.”
Despite the information provided by Kearns and Godzwon, Hills said the attorney general’s office still does not plan to contact Carlita Kilpatrick.
“Since … both our report and the Michigan State Police report concluded that no crimes had been committed, and since no police report was ever filed, there was, and is, no reason to interview Carlita Kilpatrick,” Hills said.
