Stripper told me she was beaten, says EMS official
New affidavit in lawsuit claims Greene blamed mayor’s wife.
Six years after the long-rumored but never proven Manoogian Mansion party, a Detroit Fire Department EMS supervisor has come forward to say he spoke on an autumn night in 2002 with a swollen faced Tamara Greene, who told him the mayor’s wife has just assaulted her.
Lt. Michael Kearns is the first official to publicly claim he had direct contact with Greene at the time of the supposed assault around October 2002.
Kilpatrick spokeswoman Denise Tolliver denounced the affidavit as hearsay. But in an exclusive interview late Monday, Kearns told the Free Press he is telling the truth.
“I have no ax to grind with the city. I love what I do,” said Kearns, 49. “I don’t have a discipline problem. It’s not like I’m a disgruntled employee. In fact, my record is clean.”
Kearns, a supervisor for the last 16 years, has signed an affidavit with Birmingham attorney Norman Yatooma in which Kearns says he spoke with Greene, a stripper who went by the name of Strawberry, at a Shell gas station on Jefferson and Conner in fall 2002.
“The woman was very upset and had swelling over her left eye,” Kearns says in the affidavit, adding she told him that 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.”
Tolliver said in a statement: “Once again this is a blatant attempt by Mr. Yatooma to bolster his case and solidify a win for his clients. There supposed allegations are strictly hearsay.”
Yatooma filed the affidavit along with another sworn statement from a retired EMS supervisor, Lt. Walter Godzwon, who says he saw Kwame Kilpatrick and his bodyguards about that time at a local hospital where an injured woman was taken.
In 2003, the State Police, who spent many hours investigating the Manoogian rumor and came up with nothing, didn’t mention Kearns or Godzwon in their 500 page report. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox at the time dismissed the party as an urban legend.
Kearns said Monday in the interview he never talked to State Police. In fact, he never talked to any authorities until recently, when he mentioned his account to a Detroit police homicide investigator.
“I just felt it would be like hearsay and who’s going to believe you?” Kearns said. “Did Carlita Kilpatrick hit her? I don’t know, but that’s what she said. … Did she dance at the Manoogian? I don’t know, but that’s what she said.
Kearns said he was working alone that night and responded to the call of a woman reporting an assault before the ambulance crew arrived. He said supervisors often do that so unnecessary runs can be canceled and ambulances can be redirected to where they are needed. He said he may have logged the stop into a book at the end of his shift that night, but he does not have it.
Kearns said in the affidavit that it was either a Friday or Saturday night in fall 2002 when he was dispatched to an assault and met Greene at the gas station.
Kearns said he found a young woman talking to two plainclothes Detroit police officers, whom he did not know.
According to the affidavit, when Kearns asked the woman her name, “she replied, ‘Tammy Greene.’ She said she was a dancer at a place called ‘The Grind.’”
Kearns said an EMS unit subsequently arrived and transported her to a hospital. He said he believes he knows the identity of the workers but has not been able to confirm it.
About a month later, while responding to a fatal motorcycle accident on Belle Isle, Kearns said, he saw police cars with lights flashing at the Manoogian Mansion. He remembered his encounter with Greene after an officer made a joke about another party there.
“Once I made the connection, I still did not come forward out of fear for my career and my safety,” Kearns said in the affidavit.
Wisam Zeineh, an EMS union official who represents workers that Kearns and Godzwon oversaw, praised both men.
“They’re upstanding members of the department,” Zeineh said.
But why are they coming forward now?
“The mayor is simply less intimidating today with a tether around his ankle than he was in 2002 or 2003 when he was firing cops who disagreed with him,” Yatooma said Monday.
Yatooma represents Greene’s son, Jonathan Bond, and his father in a federal lawsuit against the city, Kilpatrick, Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings and other top officials, claiming they thwarted the investigation into Greene’s death.
Greene was killed in a drive-by shooting on April 30, 2008.
Kearns said in his affidavit that he told his story to Lt. John Morrell in the Detroit Police Department homicide section in June of last year. Morrell asked Kearns to submit to an interview with another homicide detective, Mike Carlisle, Kearns said. He said he ran into Carlisle on a police run about two weeks ago, but still has not been interviewed.
Carlisle said Monday, when contacted by the Free Press, that Kearns didn’t have enough specific information when they spoke a few weeks ago.
“At the time I spoke with him, he was unable to provide enough information for me to actually conduct any type of interview,” Carlisle said. “I advised him that if he could give me some solid information on dates or times when this occurred that we would set up a time and date to talk. To this day, I have not heard back from him.”
Rusty Hills, a spokeswoman for Cox, said Kearns and Godzwon weren’t among the 120 people interviewed by his office for the Manoogian party probe.
“But we’d be happy to sit down and take their testimony,” Hills said.
There is no explanation in the documents as to why Greene was at the gas station, which is two miles east of the Manoogian Mansion.
In 2003, State Police investigators attempted to obtain records from Detroit Receiving Hospital, which was rumored as the place where Greene received treatment, but hospital administrators said they would need a subpoena or search warrant, which Cox refused to authorize.
Godzwon, the second EMS supervisor, said in an affidavit filed Monday that he saw Mayor Kilpatrick at Detroit Receiving with his bodyguards one night in the fall of 2002. He did not give a specific date.
He said he learned through conversations that the mayor’s bodyguards brought in an injured woman to the hospital.
Godzwon, 58, said he also saw former Detroit EMT Douglas Bayer at the scene. Bayer recently filed a whistle-blower’s lawsuit against the city, alleging he was retaliated against for providing the State Police with information about the rumored party at the Manoogian Mansion.
Reached Monday, Godzwon told the Free Press he is a Detroit resident, has a pension and “I’m in the middle of this and I’m not a willing participant. This stage of my life I would like to forget about.”
He said Bayer’s lawsuit led lawyers and investigators back to him.
“I made these statements because they’re the truth,” Godzwon said. “Someone put me at the scene and asked me specific questions. I don’t lie.”
The two affidavits conflict on at least one crucial point: Who brought Greene to the hospital? Kearns says EMS transported the injured woman to the hospital. Godzwon says EMS workers told him that the mayor’s bodyguards brought the woman.
Yatooma said any witness who gives an affidavit it subject to perjury.
“These people have signed themselves up for 15-year felonies if they’re untruthful,” he said. “Why would they put themselves in the line of fire in a city all too willing to prosecute them for perjury?”
Joyce Rogers, a retired Detroit Police Department clerk, has already given an affidavit to Yatooma saying she saw a police report in 2002 in which Greene described being attacked by Carlita Kilpatrick. However, that report has never surfaced. Greene’s pastor, the Rev. Ken Hampton, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Detroit, gave a sworn affidavit earlier this year saying Greene told him six months before her death that she feared for her life and people were out to kill her.
