Magistrates to review text messages in Tamara Greene case

A federal judge today selected two magistrates to review a slew of text messages in a lawsuit stemming from the 2003 shooting death of stripper Tamara Greene.
U.S. District Court Gerald Rosen also denied a motion from City of Detroit lawyers to quash subpoenas served on SkyTel, the city’s communications provider.
Magistrate Judge R. Steven Whalen and Magistrate Judge Michael J. Hluchaniuk will review the text messages from SkyTel.

Last week, Rosen told attorneys for the city and Greene’s family in an office meeting that he would allow the review and possible release of up to 18 months of messages from the paging devices of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick; his bodyguards; his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty; Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, and more than two dozen others.

In his order Friday, he set a March 28 deadline for Birmingham Attorney Norman Yatooma, who represents Greene’s 14-year-old son, to narrow the list of city officials whose text messages he is seeking. He also ordered Yatooma to narrow the time frame.

Yatooma had requested text messages of 34 officials from various time periods between Aug. 1, 2002 and Oct. 31, 2007.

The magistrates will review the text messages before the lawyers see them and determine whether they are relevant to Yatooma’s case.

The new undertaking would appear to be massive. When the Free Press reviewed four months’ worth of text messages from Beatty’s paging device from 2002 and 2003, about 14,000 messages were involved. It took two reporters days to sift through them.

Greene’s 14-year-old son, Jonathan Bond, has sued Kilpatrick, Bully-Cummings and other top officials claim they sabotaged the investigation into his mother’s April 30, 2003, death, preventing the family from filing a wrongful death suit against her killers.

Greene, also known as Strawberry, has been linked in rumors to a never-proven party at the Manoogian Mansion in the fall of 2002.