6 people in Golubski victim’s life knew the truth then. Why hasn’t FBI talked to them? | Opinion

Like all of the other women I know who’ve accused former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski of sexually coercing them, Jermeka Hobbs says she met him at what had up until then been the lowest moment of her life.

Meka is 44 now and works as a hotel maid in KCMO. But this was half a lifetime ago, when she was 26, with four young kids and another one on the way. She also had a crack addiction and a boyfriend who, just hours before, on Jan. 5, 2006, had tossed her through the shower door in her grandmother’s house on Yecker Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, causing a serious concussion, cuts and bruises everywhere, and two black eyes.

The morning after KU Med patched her up and sent her home, she says, Golubski showed up, announced that he was on the case and professed outrage that any man would hurt such a pretty lady. “My face was all messed up” from the assault, Meka said, and “there was nothing pretty about that.” Or about what happened then.

As captain of the homicide unit, there would have been no official reason for Roger Golubski to have been investigating an aggravated battery, and he was not one of the five officers listed in court records as witnesses for the prosecution.

But Meka, in the first interview she’d ever given, said that his real purpose at her home that day became clear within minutes.

There was dope in plain sight in her bathroom, which she was surprised that police had left right where they had to have seen it on the night she’d been sent to the hospital. “It was a crime scene, and there’s no way you could have missed it.”

Golubski got right down to business, she said, first staring at her chest and making comments about what he couldn’t wait to do to her sexually, then staring at and gesturing towards the bathroom, where her crack, PCP and weed were still just sitting there.

He made a habit, according to prosecutors, of preying on women who had recently been either victimized or arrested, and who because they were addicted or in other serious trouble weren’t likely to complain. These were women who wouldn’t have been believed if they had.

Roger Golubski and his defenders and enablers have always said he is guilty of nothing other than “liking” Black women, though Meka Hobbs is among those who did not feel especially “liked.”

What sets her apart, though, is the number of people in her life who knew at the time, to varying degrees, what was going on between her and this disgrace of a cop, who worked for the KCKPD for 35 years, from 1975 until 2010, and has only in the last year been charged with crimes that involve rape, kidnapping and sex trafficking.

Golubski, she told me, never threatened to kill her and dump her body in the river, as other women have said he told them. He didn’t say that they’d never find her remains, or that if she told anyone, her loved ones would turn up dead.

But “when he called, I had to show up. It was like I had no choice. … He was blackmailing me.” The unspoken leverage was that he could easily “get criminal charges put on me,” and what would happen to her children then?

‘When I call you, be ready’

When he gave her his business card, at the end of that first visit, he said, “When I call you, be ready.” He would call and they would meet, he said, and that would be how it worked. And for several years, that is how it did work.

He’d either pick her up, or else would summon her to police headquarters. In that case, she’d go up to the desk in the lobby. She’d ask for him, always at lunch time, and he’d come out, always with the same three colleagues: a tall, skinny white guy, a Black guy and a woman.

The other officers might nod and greet her — Hey, how’s it going — but none of them ever intervened, Meka said, even though in her mind they had to have understood her situation. What kind of a detective, she wonders still, could have failed to notice that she was not someone who wanted to be there?

Then she and Golubski would get into his police car in the parking lot around back, in full view of Jesus and whoever else happened to be passing by.

A few times, he took her for barbecue at the old Arthur Bryant’s in the Legends, but he never ate. Nor, in all the time she knew him, she says, did she ever see him laugh or even smile.

Mostly, he drove without speaking, always retracing the same circuit, where there was hardly any traffic in broad daylight. “It spooked me out,” she said. “Our rides would be silent. … He never asked me how my day was.”

The only conversation happened when he showed her the stacks of photos he kept in a plastic Ziploc bag and in a yellow folder. He’d pull them out and ask her, again and again, if she knew any of the women in the photos.

“He would ride through certain parts of the town and pull out pictures of women who were dead. … Some of them were Polaroids, some of them were obituaries. Some of them were just pictures of women in jail, just mug shots.”

Most though not all of these were homicide victims, Black women who Meka says he told her he used to “mess with,” and whose cases he was supposedly working. After a while, she says, “I thought he was the suspect” as well as the investigator. Surely “your cases are not all women,” she remembers thinking.

He showed her a photo of her friend Eric Calvin’s sister, murder victim Rose Calvin — it was her picture he showed her first — and one of Liza Michie, who was someone Meka had known in school. Golubski, she says, always described Liza as his good friend.

Another thing these women all had in common, Meka said, was that most if not all of them were wearing bright red lipstick, just as she herself did back then. And yes, that freaked her out.

‘I told her she better be careful’

All of this seemed to be foreplay for him, she said. “He would make me put my hands between his legs. I would pull it back and he’d put it back” while showing her the pictures and cruising at 5 or 10 mph past the same spots, time after time.

They’d creep past the Quindaro Ruins, through the winding roads inside the Memorial Park Cemetery, pausing always by the section where babies are buried. They’d drive down a block on Brown Avenue that’s grown over and closed to traffic now. That one was especially menacing to Meka: Growing up, “my mama told me never to go on this street” because bad things happened to women there. Even now, “I wouldn’t come back here by myself.”

They also passed the Delavan Apartments, where prosecutors say Golubski worked with convicted drug kingpin Cecil Brooks and two other men as part of a sex trafficking conspiracy.

Early on, Meka said, Golubski asked her if she knew Brooks, and what she knew about Delavan, where her uncle lived and where she’d sometimes gone to babysit.

But Golubski usually just showed her more pictures of women and asked her for the umpteenth time which ones she did and did not recognize.

He showed her some of the same photos at the same spots, too, and she came to believe that he was considering killing her and adding her picture to the collection.

“For so long, I felt like something was going to happen to me. It was abuse.” As a police officer, “you’re supposed to help me because I went through abuse,” instead of piling on with just a different kind of torture.

On these drives, she says, they also almost always went to his house in Edwardsville, which was so clean that she wondered whether anyone really lived there. They’d have oral sex in his bedroom, still without speaking: “That’s what it was, something that I had to do.” And then he’d drop her off and go back to work.

Between these excursions, which made her feel “humiliated” and like there weren’t enough showers in the world to get her clean again, he’d often drive past where she lived, and past where her mother and sister stayed, too.

Sometimes, he’d just sit out there for long stretches, making everyone inside uncomfortable. I’ve heard that from so many women that I wonder how he had time in between stalking stakeouts to get any work done.

But again, the remarkable thing here is the number of people in Meka Hobbs’ life who knew even at the time that she was seeing Roger Golubski, and also that she did not want to be.

‘I remember her talking about having to go to his house’

“He used to come and bother her,” her younger sister, Delresha Robinson, told me. Delresha knew the full story from the beginning, she said, since Meka had told her all along that she wanted nothing to do with Golubski, sexually or otherwise, but felt she had no choice but to do as he said.

“I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ It was kind of scary for her. I didn’t think cops would do that, but he did. He turned the tables.”

Delresha saw Golubski pull into the driveway on more than one occasion, she said. And whenever he showed up, as she remembers it, Meka’s response was one of open dread and revulsion. “Like, ‘Why is he here?’ ”

Meka Hobbs’ godmother, Anita Holsted, also knew plenty, and says that what she knew worried her to no end.

“We lived together” then, says Holsted. “I did know there were other girls he was messing with — I remember stuff about him doing wrong towards women — and I remember her talking about having to go to his house. … Most of the time, he picked her up around the corner, but he was always in the picture. Her kids were young, and she tried to keep people she cared about away from him.”

“Mama Anita,” as Meka calls her, told me that she considered her goddaughter’s whole connection to Roger Golubski, “strange,” “suspicious” and “not good at all.”

“It was in my head that he was a crooked cop, so I told her she better be careful.”

So did her mother, Dedra Everson, who asked Meka to call her every single time she got in Golubski’s car. The relationship, if you can call it that, between the police captain and her daughter “didn’t fit right to me.”

“That was our No. 1 rule,” her mother told me: Meka had to call her mom and report her whereabouts whenever she was with him, so that if anything happened to her, her loved ones would at least know where to start to look.

“Meka don’t follow rules, but she followed that one. … I thought he was trying to use her,” and though her daughter never filled in all of the sexual blanks, she didn’t have to, Everson says. She had no doubt that Meka was scared. On at least one occasion, “she went in the bathroom and whispered” into the phone from Roger Golubski’s house in Edwardsville.

“She had to fear” or else wouldn’t have kept calling her.

As Meka remembers it, “I’d call my mom and tell her I was scared and where I was at when I started feeling like he was going to do something to me.” Which as she recalls it, too, was every single time they met.

‘Chief’s not going to mess with him’

Edna Reed, who at one point lived in the KCK duplex adjacent to Meka’s, remembers seeing Golubski knock on her door at all hours. “I stayed next door, so I did see him pull up, pop up to visit her out of the blue,” whether her neighbor was home or not.

Reed tried her best to have no interaction with Golubski at all, because “I knew he was a cop.”

Meka was not “the only person I knew he would go visit” for sex. But no, she told me, that didn’t worry her, because “I was getting high at that time, and to be honest with you, that’s all I was worried about. He did come by quite often, and I know he did harass her.”

Even Meka’s youngest son, Jeff Martin, who is 21 now, remembers getting in and out of the backseat of Golubski’s detective car: “I remember bits and pieces. As I got older, I started figuring out things,” at which point “my whole body got goosebumps.”

A former KCK police reserve officer who had befriended Jeff, and used to take him fishing, told me on condition of anonymity, because he doesn’t want to be shunned by his cop friends, that he knew from Meka Hobbs that somebody from the KCKPD was bothering her.

“She mentioned an officer, but she didn’t say who. She said he was coming by and harassing her.”

Over the years, this former reserve officer said, he heard from plenty of others in KCK that Golubski was extorting or exploiting someone close to them. “I said, ‘File a complaint,’ and they said he was a big man and the chief’s not going to mess with him.”

The KCKPD no longer has reserve officers; that was a program for retired officers and others who patrolled for up to 16 hours a month on an unpaid, volunteer basis, though they worked right alongside regular officers. This was still considered a good gig, for favorites only, because it led to so much extra off-duty security work.

Even after retirement, KCKPD took care of Golubski

Former KCKPD detective and whistleblower Max Seifert, who went through the police academy with Golubski and worked with him for years, says that Golubski himself became a reserve officer after he retired in good standing in 2010. Yes, though by then, many allegations against him were already well known to KCK officialdom through Lamonte McIntyre’s innocence case.

McIntyre, who served 23 years in prison for a 1994 double murder he did not commit, was finally freed in 2017. It was Golubski who’d led the quickie investigation, such as it was, into those killings, which still remain officially unsolved. Golubski was accused both in the innocence case and in a successful civil suit to have sexually assaulted McIntyre’s mother years earlier, and to have coerced testimony that implicated then-17-year-old McIntyre in the murders.

Yet when Golubski retired, after years of serious accusations, he left with his taxpayer-funded pension, a new full-time job as a detective in Edwardsville, and a commission as a KCKPD reserve officer, which not every retiree who wanted one was granted.

I asked the same former reserve officer who told me that he knew back in 2006 that Meka Hobbs was being harassed by someone on the force how his friends in the department had responded to Roger Golubski’s arrest last year.

“We don’t talk about it,” he said. Because “you don’t know who’s a friend of who.”

Anyone who was a friend of Meka Hobbs, though, has known at least part of her story all these years. “Anybody that knew me,” she says, “knew Golubski came around.”

‘I want it to be out, all of it’

The two federal cases against 70-year-old Golubski are undeniably sprawling and complicated, and I am not one of those from either the left or right who assumes the worst of the FBI or of federal prosecutors. Most of all, I worry that the Department of Justice just hasn’t provided the resources that investigating all of these allegations clearly requires.

And all of this contemporaneous corroboration, from the six people who talked to me about Meka Hobbs and Roger Golubski — a seventh potential witness is someone I could never find, and an eighth died just recently —makes it even more alarming to me that the FBI has interviewed Meka only once, many months ago, and has according to her friends and family never followed up with them at all.

Even beyond those eight, Meka says, were others who “heard me talk about it. They weren’t paying attention. But now, since it came across the news” that he’s been charged with serious crimes, “now they want to listen to me.”

I asked her if she’s sure that FBI agents working this case know what all of these people knew at the time, and she said yes: “They asked me exactly what you asked me, and I told them all of it, too.”

Golubski’s defense attorney, Chris Joseph, did not return my email and phone messages looking for a response to her allegations, which have not been made publicly before.

But since his stock statement is that Golubski looks forward to disproving all of these moldy and uncorroborated allegations against an innocent man, you’d think that prosecutors would be keenly interested in corroboration.

I’ve wanted to talk to Meka Hobbs for several years, but only recently has she felt ready to be public about her experience.

Then, she had to turn around and convince me that she was really OK with having her name and picture in the paper.

She is, she says, because “I want y’all to know” the whole story, and how much “he needs to get put up. I want it to be out, all of it.”

Despite the potential risk to her safety? “He already knows who is going against him,” she said when I asked yet again if she was sure. He knows what he did, she said, and “has the paperwork that I’m one of the victims. I don’t want him to come after me, that’s the only fear, because he knows a lot of people.”

But then again, “if anything happened to me, everyone around me would know he has something to do with it. I want justice. I told the FBI, put me on a lie detector test. Baby, my story is not going to change.”

‘Because of him, I can’t get close to a man’

And neither, at least until justice is done, is her anger going to ebb.

“I’m going to hell still, because I hate that bastard,” she told me. “Because of him, I can’t get close to a man. My dude, we’ve been together for four years and I’m just starting to open up.”

Golubski finally stopped “harassing” her, she says, not long before his 2010 retirement, and not long after she told him that she had two relatives in the police department.

One was a distant cousin she barely knew and the other someone connected to one of her children; if anyone in her orbit had really been in his, too, she would have mentioned it years earlier. But for whatever reason, she says, Golubski left her alone after that.

She had lost four of her children to the foster care system during the time Golubski was, as she sees it, blackmailing her. And though she’ll never know for sure, she blames him for the fact that even after she did everything the system asked of her, getting clean and getting work and stable housing, she never got them back, either.

Well, other than the time her son Jeff Martin ran away from his umpteenth terrible foster placement and hid out with her for a year. “I’ve been in a few good ones,” Jeff told me, “but in a lot of them, you can do whatever you want — stay out all night or whatever — and they don’t care as long as they get paid. Some families would get mad because I was hungry.”

Whereas “even though we got taken away” from his mom, he said, she “is always going to be there, and that helped me out a lot.”

‘I’m ready for this, all of this’

When Roger Golubski lumbered slowly toward the courtroom for his Sept. 20 hearing in Topeka, he had to walk right past Meka Hobbs. But between his COVID-19 mask and the enormous amount of weight he’s put on, she barely recognized him at first.

During the hearing, which once again ended without any trial date being set, Golubski repeatedly shook his head no while the prosecutor spoke.

Meka, meanwhile, had visible goosebumps, and whispered to me, “Do you know how many showers I took?”

She kept it together until we got in the car and then cried all the way back from Topeka to Kansas City.

Still, she wanted to take me, and did, twice in fact, on the circuit that she says Golubski took her on so many times: “I’m ready for this, all of this.”

She still has nightmare flashbacks on a regular basis, calls herself “paranoid” — I’d say hypervigilant, as anyone in her situation would be — and “if I get in trouble, I can’t call 911, because am I going to have some pervert like him pop up?”

That’s what KCK officials who talk about what ancient history all of this is still seem not to understand — that these events are not in the past for victims.

The women whose pictures Golubski showed Meka Hobbs “didn’t have no justice,” and she wants to help rectify that if she can. Though she used to live in fear of him, she says, not quite convincingly, “I’m not scared of Golubski” now.

When I told her recently that he’d been hospitalized with swelling in his legs, that didn’t worry her too much. “He’s been sick since Day One.” With sociopathy, she means. “He had a high-ranked position to keep people safe” and instead put them in danger.

What all of this has done to her can’t be overstated: She’s “depressed all the time,” can’t be in a crowd and yet also can’t be alone. She often has a flashback of the sign near his house that says, “Welcome to Edwardsville.”

“I literally hear stuff, keep going to the door and ain’t nobody out there. I can’t focus” and she is afraid to drive at night. “I feel like somebody’s always following me,” and “don’t even wear my name tag at work.”

But Meka Hobbs is also a lot more than what’s been done to her. Despite everything, she likes to laugh, and not only when she’s making fun of my terrible driving. She is honest about her mistakes and worries about her children as much as any mother ever has.

She is so glad that her son Jeff has just moved back in with her, and so brave that though she knows she may never see justice, she is willing to put herself in potential danger to try. She thinks not only about herself, but about other victims, too.

I really have no idea whether Golubski will ever be put on trial, or why prosecutors seem to be in no great hurry to give women like Meka Hobbs the chance to face him in court.

But the man is in end-stage renal disease, or kidney failure, for which he is on dialysis. And if he dies before they get that chance, the damage done won’t only be on him, but on them. How long are Meka and the others supposed to wait?