SkyTel will match city employees with pagers in stripper lawsuit
DETROIT — The city’s former pager service provider by Monday will provide a federal judge with information it has linking SkyTel pagers with specific city and Detroit police employees, a lawyer for the company said Wednesday.
Thomas Plunkett, a Birmingham attorney representing SkyTel, said the company is ready to comply with an order from U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen to turn over what records it has showing pager personal identification numbers (PINs) and the city or police official who was assigned to that PIN.
But the company has concerns about turning over actual text messages, Plunkett said in a court filing on Tuesday.
The records are sought in connection with a federal lawsuit brought against the city and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick by relatives of Tamara “Strawberry” Greene — an exotic dancer linked to a rumored stripper party at the mayor’s Manoogian Mansion who was killed in a drive-by shooting in Detroit on April 30, 2003.
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of Greene’s 15-year-old son Jonathan Bond, alleges the police failed to properly investigate Greene’s killing and concealed evidence for political reasons.
The mayor and city officials deny the allegations.
Norman Yatooma, the Birmingham attorney representing Greene’s family, has subpoenaed text messages sent and received on the SkyTel pagers of Kilpatrick and 33 other current or former city officials for selected periods between Sept. 1, 2002 and Oct. 31, 2007.
SkyTel initially indicated it was prepared to comply with the subpoena, but company officials said they needed PINs, not employee names, to locate the relevant records.
The court then sought from the city a list linking PINs and employee names, but city officials said they no longer contract with SkyTel and they shredded the list of PINs.
SkyTel has said it has limited information linking certain PINs with city employees, but not complete information. Rosen has ordered that information turned over by Monday. Plunkett said after a Wednesday status conference with U.S. Magistrate Judge R. Steven Whalen that SkyTel will comply with the order.
Lawyers for the city, the mayor and former mayoral chief of staff Christine Beatty have sought to quash subpoenas for the actual text messages, arguing the federal Stored Communications Act prohibits the messages from being subpoenaed in a civil case.
Yatooma has argued the records should be turned over. One reason is that the city of Detroit was the subscriber and the Detroit City Council has agreed to their release, he argued in a court filing.
On Tuesday, SkyTel also filed a motion to quash subpoenas for the text messages, saying the company has been told it could face civil lawsuits for turning them over.
