A former Freeman Neosho physician who was recently hit with a felony drug charge has also been targeted in civil court. For the fifth time in the past couple of years, Dr. Jeffrey A. Wool has been sued for malpractice. On Aug. 10, Ronald Taylor filed suit against Wool in Jasper County Circuit Court.
The five lawsuits would appear to have some connection with the criminal charges since a common factor has been the presence of lab technician Neidra DePuy in the suits. Ms. DePuy has also been sued in each of the five cases, four of which are still pending. The fifth case was dropped by the plaintiff. Another common factor has been the listing of John Doe Pharmaceutical Companies as a defendant, as well as Freeman Medical Systems and Freeman Neosho.
It would seem to make sense for The Joplin Globe or The Neosho Daily News to head over to the Jasper County Courthouse and examine those lawsuits. At the least, they should provide interesting reading. Quite possibly, they could provide a wealth of background information on this scandal which has enveloped the Neosho hospital.
Another important aspect to using court documents is that it lessens the reliance the media has on statements from prosecutors and law enforcement officials. Anything that does that has to be a welcome development.
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Officials from Edison Schools have filed a response to the Diamond R-4 School District's lawsuit. In the response, which was filed Aug. 12 in U. S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Edison claims, "Diamond has refused to fully compensate Edison Schools for its programs and service."
Diamond contracted with Edison on Feb. 15, 2002, to provide summer school that year. The two sides dispute how much money Diamond should have paid. The R-4 School District has paid about $212,000. Edison claims the school owes an additional $87,635.51, plus late fees and interest. Diamond filed a lwsuit against Edison in Newton County Circuit Court. Edison filed to have the case moved to federal court.
You can find more background information about this case on the home page and on the Diamond Daily and Archives pages of my Diamond website, www.wildcatcentral.com
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A state appeals court has helped keep the Jasper County area safe, though it has received little, if no, publicity.
In an opinion issued Aug. 10, the Missouri Southern District Court of Appeals affirmed a Jasper County jury's decision to commit Michael Goddard, 32, to a state institution under a law which allows the state to continue to hold dangerous sexual predators.
According to court records, Goddard's attorney tried to have the decision reversed, claiming that testimony given by Dr. Rinta Khan, using statistical models to show that Goddard, who has a long record of pedophilic sexual attraction to boys, would continue to commit sexual crimes if he were allowed to reenter the community.
Goddard's criminal record began at age 15, when he molested a seven-year-old boy, according to court records. Three years later, at age 18, he sodomized an 11-year-old boy, and was sentenced to four years in prison. Other molestations might have been prevented, if he had actually gone to prison. Court records indicate Goddard actually spent 50 days shock time in jail, had his sentence suspended and was placed on probation.
Part of the probation deal was that Goddard was to go through a sexual offender treatment program. He refused to do so. Finally, he was sent to the state hospital at Fulton for in-patient treatment, which also did no good because Goddard contined to refuse to participate. He also "totally lacked remorse, " according to the appellate court opinion.
Apparently, Goddard's probation officer didn't know or wasn't concerned when Goddard began to date a woman with three children under the age of 10. One month after he was released from Fulton, he admitted to
molesting her son several times, according to court records, as well as molesting other boys. In November 1192, he pleaded guilty to sodomizing his girlfriend's son and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, to be served concurrently with his original four-year sentence, since he had obviously violated the terms of his probation.
During his decade in prison, he did not take part in any treatment for his problem, insisting that there was nothing wrong with him. Court records indicate he blamed others for his problem.
Thanks to the appeals court decision this man won't be victimizing any more young people at least for the time being.
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Newton County Sheriff Ron Doerge refuses to go quietly. Doerge's attempts to anoint a successor to his position (he is retiring at the end of the present term) has brought him under the microscope of the media, a place where he should have been for some time.
Doerge's continued success in Newton County has been in large part due to the media. It is hard to investigate a public official who has continued to provide one news story after another to the local media and has gone out of his way to make sure that the area television stations and newspapers have been kept busy with positive news stories about his department. These carefully staged photo ops and well-crafted news releases prevent the media from having to do any work, which is just the way they like it.
Now that he won't be around much longer, the media is finally casting a critical eye on him. It started with Doerge's endorsement of Mike Copeland as the man he wants to succeed him. Despite that endorsement and his apparent conflict of interest in doing so, Doerge agreed to KBTN Radio talk show host John McCormack's request to provide him with a list of questions for a sheriff's candidate forum. Candidate Mike Langland, a sheriff's deputy, but not the anointed one, somehow managed to come up with a copy of the questions, which were being kept on a computer in Doerge's office.
Stories in yesterday's Neosho Daily News and this morning's Joplin Globe gave Doerge's convoluted reasoning for having these questions on his computer, even though it is obvious this was a political function and did not have anything to do with the operation of the Newton County Sheriff's Department. Doerge reasoned that since the forum had to do with who would be running the sheriff's department that made it sheriff's department business.
It is amazing how a man who has been in law enforcement for so long can have so little knowlege of or respect for the law. I am sure the story will continue to develop.
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On a lighter note, an old friend e-mailed me a few days ago to let me know she is getting married. Nothing unusual about that, but she was proposed to in Pittsburg in front of a standing-room-only crowd at an Oak Ridge Boys concert.
Tyleen Winterbower II, a Pittsburg, Kan., social worker who can also be heard occasionally as an announcer on KKOW-AM radio, accepted the proposal. She is scheduled to get married next May. Tyleen is one of this area's true success stories. I first met her when she was a high school student at Golden City. I wrote articles about her for The Carthage Press, both when she was in high school and later. She succeeded despite a childhood that might have broken other people. She was beaten by her stepfather, shunted from home to home, spent time in foster care, but she always kept her eyes pointed toward success. Because of the things that had happened to her Tyleen went into social work to try to help others facing similar situations. Recently, she was featured in a Pittsburg Morning Sun article detailing the success of a program she and another woman started to get poor children involved in music.