RIVER CITY'S MINISTRY OF TRUTH

Nearly six decades ago in his novel “1984”, George Orwell told us a story about a man named Winston Smith who was a minor bureaucrat at the Ministry of Truth in Big Brother’s utopia of Oceania.  Whenever the public record needed to reflect Big Brother’s change of mind about the “true” course of events in Oceania, Smith would cut-and-paste until the record accorded with Big Brother’s change of “facts”.  Meanwhile, the actual facts went down the memory hole.

Of course, this chilling tale of totalitarianism is old news, isn’t it?  The Red Menace is history and the internet is an unstoppable torrent of information that no tyrant can control.  Yeah, but old ways die hard in River City.

You will recall the problem that the Sallie and Jennings families are having getting the truth about the cause and the circumstances of the deaths of loved ones at a facility of our local healthcare monopoly, Spectrum Health.  (Here and here, for details.)  In each case Spectrum’s staff pathologists ruled that nothing untoward happened, despite many discrepancies in that finding.  The Kent County medical examiner, Dr. Stephen Cohle, decided against second-guessing the Spectrum pathologists and issued grossly incomplete reports whitewashing the deaths of these people.  (For example, the medical examiner’s autopsy for Edwin Jennings missed the fact that his brain was missing.)

Undisclosed throughout this entire process was another important fact – not just to the Sallie and Jennings families, but to the public at large:  Spectrum’s pathologists were provided by a medical staffing firm called Laboratory Pathologists P.C. and the owner and manager of that firm is none other than Kent County Medical Examiner Stephen Cohle.  No wonder that Cohle’s official report on what happened at Spectrum confirmed the findings of his company’s employees.  It was in his financial interest to do so.

Well, folks, you’d think this would be a matter of some interest to our local elected officials.  Indeed, Kristi Sallie and Phyllis Jennings brought this egregious conflict of interest to the attention of the Grand Rapids City Commission at its weekly public meeting on November 22, 2005.  Some commissioners professed concern and promised assistance to the Sallie and Jennings families.  Yet, you would never know this happened, because the publicly posted minutes of the meeting make no mention of this.  In fact, the mintues do not even acknowledge that Ms. Sallie and Ms. Jennings appeared before the City Commission.  The whole matter went down the memory hole.

As it happens, there is a second, more complete, set of minutes that the City Clerk composes for the City Commission.  When you as a member of the public request a copy of the minutes, you don’t get this record.  You get the “official” one noted above.  To get these “secret” minutes, you have to know they exist and specifically ask for them.  This record is useful because it describes in summary fashion all of the comments made by the commissioners, city officials, and members of the public.  Well, almost.  We did get a copy of the “secret” minutes of November 22, 2005, and they do mention the fact that Ms. Sallie and Ms. Jennings appeared before the City Commission to express their grave concern over the conduct of the medical examiner.  But there is no record whatsoever of the response the commissioners gave to them.  In particular, there is no record of the commitments of any commissioner made to support the Sallie and Jennings families to get to the truth of the deaths at Spectrum Health.  Nothing.

So that’s how official history gets rewritten in River City.  Fortunately, Ms. Sallie and Ms. Jennings were persistent enough to get Mayor Heartwell and Commissioner Tormala to follow through on a commitment to have Grand Rapids Police Chief Harry Dolan look into the matter.  A meeting was eventually arranged for both women to meet with the chief.  Of course, I could have spared Ms. Sallie and Ms. Jennings the trouble by telling them that the chief would say that he had some flunky look into the matter who reported that there was nothing to it.  This is a common tactic of law enforcement agencies when confronted with a problem they do not want to deal with (especially when it involves corruption of other officials they work with – e.g., the medical examiner).  Without any serious investigation, the agency puts its official imprimatur of “case closed” on the matter, and if you complain about the quality of the effort, you get written off as a gadfly or a flake.*

Unfortunately, that was the outcome of the meeting Ms. Sallie and Ms. Jennings had with Chief Dolan.  The GRPD has punted on the issue, and the City Commission record has scrubbed of almost any mention of it.  One wonders how many other such issues have also gone down the memory hole here in River City.  More to come …
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* I've seen this happen firsthand when the MDEQ and other agencies went through contortions to deny the relevance of the hundreds of hours of videotape footage proving that the Boardwalk developers were illegally dumping hazardous waste.  In the case of the Sallie and Jennings families, people died and they still get stonewalled by cheap tactics like the one the GRPD played on them.

Commonsense shows that the GRPD made no serious inquiry into the matter.  The conflict of interest that Medical Examiner Cohle is mired in objectively exists.  Furthermore, the reports his office issued to whitewash the deaths of Kristi Sallie’s mother and Phyllis Jennings’ father at Spectrum Health were severely flawed by any professional standard.  So on the face of it, it appears that Cohle’s financial conflict of interest compromised the work of the medical examiner’s office.  That merited a full investigation, because it not only addresses the tragedy that the Sallie and Jennings families have endured, but also the general public has a fundamental interest in the integrity of its medical examiner.

None of that happened, because the GRPD closed ranks with the rest of local officialdom.