Judge in stripper lawsuit: ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this’
DETROIT — A federal judge expressed annoyance Monday when a city attorney said Detroit government no longer has records showing which employees were using which city pagers at the time an exotic dancer was shot to death in 2003.
As part of a federal lawsuit, lawyers for the son of Tamara “Strawberry” Greene are seeking text messages that employees sent and received on city-issued SkyTel pagers.
But Krystal Crittendon, a lawyer for the city, said records showing which employees carried which pagers were shredded after the city stopped using the devices in 2004.
SkyTel has said it’s willing to provide the court with the text message records, but needs records linking the names of city employees to the personal identification numbers associated with the various pagers.
“I find it frustrating and surprising that a municipal government would not keep these kinds of records for some period of time,” U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen said. “There are all sorts of reasons why these records should have been kept.”
Greene, who was shot to death in Detroit on April 30, 2003, was linked to a long rumored but never substantiated party at the mayor’s Manoogian Mansion in the fall of 2002.
Ernest Flagg, the father of Greene’s 15-year-old son, Jonathan Bond, alleges the Detroit police failed to properly investigate Greene’s unsolved killing for political reasons. Defendants include the city, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, former mayoral Chief of Staff Christine Beatty and Detroit Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings.
On Monday, Rosen denied the city’s request for a halt to proceedings in the civil lawsuit. He also denied the city’s request for a gag order in the case, though he cautioned lawyers that he does not want the case to be tried in the news media.
Rosen also ordered the city to turn over Greene’s homicide file to him for private review by Friday.
And he told the city that if he doesn’t receive information about which employees carried which pagers, he will have no choice but to tell SkyTel to turn over all the text messages for all city employees. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
Norman Yatooma, Flagg’s lawyer, asked Rosen Thursday to order the city to show why it should not be sanctioned or found in contempt of court. The city has failed to turn over Greene’s homicide file and records that will help locate text messages from city-issued SkyTel pagers that might be relevant to the case, Yatooma argued in a court filing.
But Crittendon said in a response filed Monday that it’s Yatooma, not the city lawyers, who should be sanctioned.
Rosen said today it was premature to sanction any lawyers or find anyone in contempt.
The city has not turned over the homicide file because Yatooma has not negotiated an agreement with the city to keep the contents of the homicide file from being made public, Crittendon said in a court filing. The city has argued that releasing the file could interfere with its ongoing investigation of Greene’s killing.
As for the pager records, Crittendon denied Yatooma was ever told the city had a list of the personal identification numbers assigned to each employee who carried a SkyTel pager. Rosen had ordered the city to turn that list over to Yatooma, but Crittendon said in the Monday filing she had not been able to determine that such a list exists.
Yatooma has subpoenaed pager text messages for about three dozen city employees, but the identification numbers are needed to retrieve the subpoenaed records from SkyTel, court has been told.
Mayer Morganroth, the Southfield attorney representing Beatty, has said the text messages can not be subpoenaed in a civil lawsuit.
