‘Rampant misconduct’: Ethically challenged Kansas prosecutor will finally be disbarred | Opinion

Now that she’s retired, and so can no longer frame any more innocent men or threaten to take any other woman’s kids away, the ethically challenged former federal and Wyandotte County prosecutor Terra Morehead has finally been asked to hand in her law license.

When I first heard last August that she would be asked to do that, in some kind of deal with the Kansas Office of the Disciplinary Administrator, which sanctions lawyers, Morehead’s own attorney, John J. Ambrosio, told me that was absolutely not happening.

Now, though, it is. And Morehead will soon be formally disbarred.

When consequences show up 30 years late, do you say thanks for coming all this way, or what in the name of all that’s holy took you so long?

Both, I guess.

Former federal prosecutor Mike Warner, who worked with Morehead in WyCo and in the District of Kansas U.S. attorney’s office said that in the latter, “I saw rampant misconduct with Terra Morehead at the center of it. I’m happy this happened, but I hope she’s thoroughly debriefed when she turns in her license.”

Don’t you wonder how it is that Morehead and former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski are only being held to account now that their careers are over?

Together, they framed 17-year-old Lamonte McIntyre for a 1994 double murder he did not commit and coerced a cousin of both victims, Niko Quinn, into giving false testimony against McIntyre.

Neither Morehead nor the judge on the McIntyre case, Dexter Burdette, who retired in 2018, ever disclosed that they’d at one point been romantically involved, either.

McIntryre served 23 years in prison before being exonerated, and Quinn felt so torn up about lying on the stand that she went home from court and tried to end her life.

In 2022, Golubski was charged with violating the civil rights of Black women through rape, kidnapping, threats and holding his badge over them, along with a gun. He’s separately been charged with conspiring with three drug dealers in a sex trafficking operation involving girls as young as 13. No trial date has yet been set in either case.

So is Morehead sharing everything she knows about Golubski with her former colleagues in the U.S. attorney’s office? If not, why not? Are federal investigators looking at her, too, since she and Golubski so often worked together? Why was that, I wonder?

And has the Wyandotte County district attorney’s office ever gotten around to looking at the cases they worked together? I asked DA Mark Dupree’s spokesman, Jonathan Carter, but no doubt because they are so busy righting wrongs over there, I got no response.

In Morehead’s 2021 deposition under oath in Lamonte McIntyre’s civil case, which I read again on Tuesday, Morehead said she’d never been aware of any police misconduct, or she would have reported it. But she also said many times that she did not remember various aspects of the case. And now, without the protection that her office always gave her, her recall may have improved.

It was 30 years ago this week, on April 15, that Niko Quinn’s cousins, Doniel Sublett Quinn and Donald Ewing, were shot to death in front of a bunch of people in the middle of the day. McIntryre was arrested right away, but the real shooter has never been charged, and Doniel’s mother, Saundra Newsom, has never even gotten her son’s personal effects back. No one from KCK officialdom ever even came to tell her he was gone.

This is not a “cold case” that should be too hard to solve.

The teenager who witnesses have always said was the real perp, Neil Edgar Jr., known as “Monster,” was found guilty of another murder six years later, when he shot a Missouri man he shot in the head three times “without any provocation,” according to witnesses. Then, yelling that if his dying victim didn’t stop quivering, he’d shoot him some more, he stuffed the man into the trunk of a car, doused him with gasoline and set him on fire.

Niko Quinn told me three years ago that the week before her cousins died, “my cousin Doniel was jumped by these series of guys claiming that he had stole some money or drugs or what have you.” The guys she was talking about were Neil Edgar, Marlon Williams and their drug boss Aaron Robinson, who had been trained in the business by his cousin and close friend Cecil Brooks, Golubski’s co-defendant in the sex trafficking conspiracy case.

In an affidavit in McIntyre’s civil suit, even Brooks said it was Edgar who had killed Quinn and Ewing, because “trouble came when dope was missing. … Monster got paid to do the murder. He didn’t get the whole ticket. He got $500, and the rest was due him but was never paid.”

The news that Morehead had finally been sanctioned after all these years made Tuesday “a good day” for Doniel Quinn’s mother, right on the heels of a “horrible” anniversary, she told me.

Time has not eased Saundra Newsom’s grief. And until both Golubski and her son’s real killer are held accountable, how will she know what justice looks like?