Thread by @michaelharriot

7 years ago, I wrote a small piece about a man who was falsely accused of a crime.

A few days later, I got an anonymous telling me to look up the woman they called “the evilest white woman on earth.”

What happened next is the absolute wildest story you’ll ever hear

A thread

The story begins in 2017, when an editor asked me to fill in for a coworker and do a quick write-up about Lamonte McIntyre, who spent 23 yrs in prison for a double murder he didn’t commit.

I thought it was weird his conviction wasn’t actually overturned

theroot.com/lamonte-mcinty…

I got an anonymous tip telling me that I should look into it more. But I was filling in, remember. At the time, it wasn’t really my beat.

A few months later I just HAPPENED to be covering an unrelated story about cops who sexually assault women

theroot.com/kansas-finally…

I get ANOTHER tip. Same anonymous person. This time they wanted to talk. Now, I would get tips all the time, but something about this person seemed different. I gave them a Google Voice number and they began telling me a wild story

Over the next few months, I would discover why this DA Terra Morehead was so evil.

She had been making up lies to lock Black men up FOR YEARS.

She & a corrupt police detective who ran a human trafficking ring (I’ll come back to that) basically made up the evidence on McIntyre

Then they threatened to take the children away from a 20-year-old Black woman who actually witnessed the double murder unless she fingered McIntyre

I found evidence that the woman told the Prosecutor that they had the wrong man MULTIPLE TIMES.

They made her do it

She was sick about it too. On the day she testified, she went home and tried to kill herself.

Y’all this woman showed me HANDWRITTEN LETTERS to Montell Williams and Oprah trying to get them to help her free this man

I also discovered why Morehead was so successful

Y’all, this woman was SLEEPING WITN THE JUDGE.

Not just a couple of times.

They were in a secret relationship FOR 15 years!

But she was as bad at lawyering as she was good as she was at prosecuting Black men.

But here’s the thing: There’s not a whole lot judges can (or are willing) to do when a lawyer is corrupt.

I found cases where judges essentially said “This bitch be lying” IN THEIR DECISION

Take this dude named Gregory Orozco. Cops arrested in a car with a white couple. It wasn’t his car & he swore the pink bag containing a gun and kilos of meth wasn’t his. Morehead said it was. She even bought the bag to court, & got Orozco’s brother Jose to say the bag was Greg’s

In court, Jose identified the pink bag, the gun etc (except for a SIM card she said was empty) Orozco is convicted of trafficking w/a firearm.

On appeal Jose reveals that he’s actually the drug dealer in the family. Morehead threatened to lock HIM up if he didn’t testify

But that’s not what freed Greg. He also discovered a bunch of pics in Morehead’s case file. Remember that SIM card? It had 100 of pics of the white couple who was arrested with orozco

Even though Morehead told the judge & jury there was “nothing on the SIM card”

When she said that, she had already printed out about 40 of the pics..

Just the ones showing the white couple who carrying a pink bag

In freeing Orozco, the appeals court said Morehead violated Jose’s 6th Amendment rights, hid exculpatory evidence & intimidated witnesses.

To be fair, there was nothing the judges could do about the corrupt prosecutor. See Morehead left her job as district attorney

To become a US attorney.

She literally worked for the department of justice.

That’s where she worked when she seized the family home of two twins convicted of drug dealing. The twins’ parents actually left them the home in their will but Morehead claimed they willingly agreed to forfeited the home…

She just couldn’t find the paperwork

There was the man incarcerated at Leavenworth, where Morehead would occasionally call and instruct guards that she had judges’ orders to put him in solitary confinement

No such orders existed

Then there was times when she just wanted REALLY harsh sentences. She asked a judge to give Mardell Trotter for a small amount of crack. One time She charged 42 people with selling the same weed. Thankfully a judge vacated that sentence

Only after the plaintiffs agreed not to file prosecutorial misconduct charges

Then there’s the case of the interracial couple who beefed with Morehouse for years. They had a blog calling her corrupt…

Until federal agents raided their home & charged them with wire fraud.

For illegally selling stuff on EBay.

And when they kept writing about her, Morehead asked a judge to revoke their bond NINE TIMES.

Anyway, this thread is getting long. You can read the story here

theroot.com/evilest-white-…

Then, read my yearlong investigation into the group of Black women who brought down the drug-dealing, human trafficking, serial rapist cop who protected Morehead

theroot.com/a-criminal-inj…

My point is that this is wh Black journalists are important.. I don’t know if I could have roamed & made ppl feel comfortable enough to talk to me if I was white.

But I didn’t do this, a bunch of brave Black women did this.

National media wasn’t even on this story. But I just looked where they told me to look.

The only reason I thought about this was that when I woke up this morning, one of them had texted me this:

“Look what we did…

No one else.

Just us.”

kansaspublicradio.org/2024-04-16/not…