Former KCKPD detective Golubski hospitalized. Victims fear he’ll die before trial | Opinion
On Tuesday evening, a federal court announced that disgraced former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski had been released from house arrest, and from his ankle bracelet, because he’s in the hospital.
I don’t know where he’s being treated, and wouldn’t tell if I did. But let’s hope his room is well-guarded, and I mean that.
I don’t know what shape he’s in, either; the court order said that he’d been released from his ankle bracelet, but not why, since some hospitalized suspects are kept in shackles.
This is crushing but fully expected news for his victims, who have all along feared that the 70-year-old, who was allowed to stay at home for health reasons, would die before the feds would ever get around to trying him.
If that happened, then he’d evade responsibility for his alleged crimes, which involve rape, kidnapping and sex trafficking.
He’s always said he’s guilty of nothing, and though I don’t believe that, every suspect deserves his day in court.
Niko Quinn, who says Golubski stalked her, coerced her sister Stacey right up to the time Stacey was murdered, and then investigated her homicide, has lately been waking up screaming during nightmares about him. What she’s feeling about his hospitalization, though, she told me, isn’t any need for vengeance, “because I’m not a deviant person.” What she does want are some answers. “He stalked me for so long, but why? I want to stand by his bed and ask him, ‘Why did you do the things you did?’ I’m hoping he’s able to be held to account, and there’s things I want to know.”
When I told Ophelia Williams, a woman he’s accused of raping repeatedly, that Golubski was in the hospital, her first question was whether the “bastard” was still breathing. She met him on the morning that her 14-year-old twin sons were arrested for murder.
“Didn’t nobody even call and tell me” that he’d been hospitalized, she said. “Not even the FBI.”
More than a year after FBI agents arrested him, on Sept. 15, 2022, a trial date has still not been set.
And at the last status hearing, the court seemed to be a long way from doing even that, supposedly because the case is so complicated. The defense said it still did not know everything the prosecution has, and the state said yes, they do, but don’t know how much of what the prosecution has they intend to use in court.
Golubski, who gets dialysis several times a week, looked worse than ever at that hearing last month. He’s gotten extremely heavy, and was shuffling along with difficulty.
Some of his victims in the Topeka courtroom that day said they thought he might be faking his infirmity, or at least exaggerating his difficulty moving.
But that may be wishful thinking, as well as well-earned distrust, since no one wants him healthy enough to stand trial more than those who say he hurt them in ways that time will never heal.
He doesn’t need armed guards to protect him from his victims, but from his coconspirators.
Because if anything does happen to him, then KCK officialdom will say, ‘Problem solved,’ and the secrets of those who protected and promoted Golubski will be buried along with him.
Lately, I’ve heard two different people say they’d heard he’d been seen where he wasn’t supposed to be, in one case in a local IHOP. Maybe that’s like Elvis sightings, but it’s a fact that victims are not comfortable with him free on house arrest, and feel they must be vigilant at all times.
Whenever they meet, they shake their heads and say that the feds are just waiting for him to die, or else would not be taking so long.
Justice will only be served if he lives long enough to finally meet her.
This story was originally published October 3, 2023 at 8:26 PM.
