Yellow Springs

This past October, Yellow Springs Officer Richard Neel was pressured to resign from the Yellow Springs Police Department. It was sketched to look like the YSPD did its job by removing an officer that was found to be unfit for Yellow Spring’s expectations. But Neel should never have been hired in the first place.

In March of 2013, Neel was hired on as a guard at the Montgomery County Prison. According to Neel’s Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) file[1], he was fired in September 2013 for fleeing into the woods from the police after stealing from the Huber Heights Meijer.

Officer Neel resigned the night of Monday October 1st. His resignation was announced moments before a Village Council meeting where multiple instances of excessive force and false charging were going to be discussed by angry Village residents regardless of the desires of the Village government.

Since the Mockingbird's last article about the Yellow Springs School Board granting bullying Principal Tim Krier a golden parachute after repeated sexual assaults by his son on multiple students, the board has announced that an unnamed “outside investigator” has investigated and cleared them collectively and Superintendent Mario Basora individually of any wrongdoing. Sources have come forward with additional information for us via telephone. The sources, and their families whom they have expressed concern for the safety of will not be named.

An anonymous tip came early yesterday morning. They concealed their identity. A special quick school board meeting was to be held at 7pm. I checked. It had been legally announced, barely. The law requires that all public bodies must publish the time, place and agenda of any meeting for it to be a legal meeting. The Yellow Springs School Board does not regularly meet on the first Thursday of a month. If it requires a special meeting, those usually happen on the 4th Thursday.

This article is, in addition to an opinion editorial, an update on other articles.

Watching from the police department from Mills Lawn, the Meister affair feels like a drama playing out on a stage. However, the only actors are Chief Carlson and Sergeant Watson playing the roles of impartial law enforcers with Corporal Meister privy to the reality of the situation and the audience watching in horror.

The Mockingbird has received multiple tips that YSPD Chief Brian Carlson has been out “sick” for nearly for most of the last two weeks. While this is a critical time for the YSPD and leadership absent, it is not Carlson's first big break from the grind of police work during a critical time this year.

At the time that a sexual assault involving “several” Yellow Springs High School students was being reported, Brian Carlson was on vacation. The two week pay period from March 4th to 17th contained 61 out of 80 hours listed as vacation. This can be seen below.

According to sources, one YSPD officer remarked to another “Isn't this the sort of thing we learned not to do in that ethics class?” The short answer is yes in this case. The long answer is that there is an advisory ruling from the Ohio ethics commission clearing this specific instance but the optics are horrible. YSPD Sergeant Joshuah Knapp has a second job. He is interning as a support engineer for a company called Tech Advisers. Techadvisors LLC runs all the servers for the village of Yellow Springs.

Editors Note: The Mockingbird's ongoing investigation into the YSPD uncovered serious problems and possible theft of wages. This was detailed in a previous article. In addition to publishing the article, we sent copies to every member of council, the village manager and every member of the Justice System Task force seeking comment on the record. Only Judith Hempfling chose to respond with a statement about looking into the matter.

The Mockingbird has been following the case of Angela Bussey, a former Yellow Springs school teacher bullied from her position by Principal Tim Krier, father of an accused serial child rapist Noah Krier. In response to her alleged social media post, the school system has invested massive amounts of money in the law firm Bricker and Eckland to bring suit against her for $20,000. She has counter sued.

As part of our ongoing coverage of the Yellow Springs police department, Mockingbird reporter Matt Raska wrote an article detailing a pattern of theft within the YSPD of government funds. Our team went through hundreds of pages of documents, reviewed every pay stub, cross checked every training record and found that exactly two Yellow Springs police officers are not party to this criminal activity.