The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has handed over to federal authorities information from the agency’s own probe into sexual assault allegations against former Kansas City, Kansas, Police Detective Roger Golubski.
The KBI’s investigation was centered on the case of Lamonte McIntyre, who was exonerated in 2017 after witnesses recanted testimony that had helped convict him of two murders. Golubski is accused of framing McIntyre because McIntyre’s mother, Rosie, spurned his sexual advances.
Although KBI hasn’t yet found any violation of Kansas law that falls within the statute of limitations, it has turned over information to federal authorities "for their consideration and possible action," said KBI spokeswoman Melissa Underwood.
FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said she could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.
The revelation comes on a day that a group of state lawmakers and social justice leaders called on KBI for an expanded investigation into allegations of sexual violence by Golubski. In a letter signed by 27 state legislators and 16 social justice and faith organizations, the group pleaded for holding Golubski and the police department accountable.
“These allegations have shown a pattern of abuse toward poor, minority (people of color) residents — specifically the people Golubski and his force were employed by taxpayers to protect,” the letter said.
Golubski, whose alleged activities were an open secret in Wyandotte County for decades, has been accused in lawsuits and in a federal judge’s ruling of the sexual assault of Black women. State Sen. David Haley, a Democrat, wondered why the Unified Government allowed the police for years to create “this seamy underbelly of abuse of people of color.”
After McIntyre was exonerated of a 1994 double murder and released from prison in 2017, Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree requested the KBI investigation and handed over the case file. KBI initiated a review of over 6,000 documents and in March 2019, began the criminal investigation against Golubski, Underwood said.
“This criminal investigation focused on sexual assault allegations, and whether Golubski committed crimes related to the 1994 homicides of Doniel Quinn and Donald Ewing, in which Lamonte McIntyre was convicted,” Underwood wrote in an email.
Quinn and Ewing were shot while sitting in a car in Kansas City, Kansas, in what some suspect involved a drug deal. Golubski, who was on the force from 1975 to 2010, when he retired, could not be reached for comment.
The lawmakers, 25 Democrats and two Republicans, along with the social justice leaders, want KBI to look beyond the McIntyre case and expand the probe into all the allegations of how Golubski mistreated women and their families, said state Rep. Cindy Holscher, an Overland Park Democrat who organized Thursday’s event.
Chester Owens, the first African American city councilman in Kansas City, Kansas, when he was elected in 1983, said he’s been fighting police brutality since then. Now 87-years-old, Owens said he’s not afraid to call out the county’s elected officials and ask where they’ve been all these years.
“Sometimes people say silence is golden,” Owens said. “But I say, sometimes speech is golden and silence is criminal.”
Khadijah Hardaway of Grant Chapel AME Church, said the community wants the Unified Government to fund Dupree’s Community Integrity Unit, which was formed out of the McIntyre case. Dupree has said he needs $260,000 to hire three investigators.
Hardaway also said the community needs a bilingual hotline to report police abuse and to have input into the hiring of the next police chief.
“We are sick and tired of waiting,” she said. “We have been grieving our loved ones who have been lost at the hands of the police department.”
