Grandson of KCK leader is finally back in jail. Here’s what he says | Opinion
It wasn’t that Robert A. Milan II couldn’t get arrested; he could and did, at least as far back as 1997, and he has been sent to prison in Kansas several times, on sex, gun and drug distribution charges.
In 2016, a judge in Clay County granted an order of protection to a woman who reported that he’d been stalking her, and in 2019, he left the scene of an accident that had caused severe injuries. But in recent years, prosecutors and judges in Wyandotte County have given him one last chance after another.
And as even Milan, now 47, acknowledged in an interview in the Wyandotte County Jail on Saturday night, the failure to hold him accountable didn’t help him at all; on the contrary.
In a column last February, after he had been offered probation in return for pleading guilty to two counts of the aggravated battery of his former partner, I asked whether Milan was getting special treatment because he is the son of Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree’s fellow KCK pastor, Robert L. Milan, and the grandson of the influential former Kansas City Board of Public Utilities president and longtime board member Robert L. Milan, Sr.
A registered sex offender since he was 19, Milan was already on probation when Alisha Murphy reported that he’d broken her arm three times. Prosecutors — yes, the DA’s office, as well as Milan’s defense attorney — said in court that they were recommending probation instead of prison despite Milan’s long criminal history because of inconsistencies in Murphy’s account. I am used to hearing defense attorneys speak about victims of domestic violence that way, but not prosecutors.
When it was her turn to speak, Murphy tried to explain some of these supposed inconsistencies to the judge. For instance, she’d initially told the 911 operator that she’d hurt herself by falling into a wall. “He was standing right over me,” Murphy told me, and “I’m lucky he even allowed me to call an ambulance.” But she had too much to set straight in too little time, and so went back to reading her victim’s impact statement.
‘I never thought I’d make it this far’
Milan’s attorney, Debera Erickson, told the court at that March sentencing hearing, “Mr. Milan does have a drug problem. He is addressing that problem. He has maintained sobriety. … He’s had drug treatment before. He wants the drug treatment.” OK, said Judge Michael Russell, sold. And really, with no lawyer representing the victim’s interest, I’m not sure how he could have decided otherwise.
Milan almost immediately violated the terms of his probation, according to a May court report, by telling a counselor attempting to do a treatment assessment that he hadn’t used since 2013. This despite having tested positive for drug use six times just in March and April.
Now, after violating the terms of his probation many times, according to court records, Milan has finally had his probation revoked, and has spent the last three weeks in the Wyandotte County Jail. He’ll be there for 60 days in all, or until a treatment bed opens up. He had to try hard to get there, testing positive for drug use seven times, according to a report from his probation officer, and not turning up for testing another 11 times.
He also, according to the same report, which was filed with the court in September, “has yet to engage in outpatient treatment as recommended,” has done only eight of the required 40 hours of community service, has not paid anything on the $313 he owes in court costs and has not had a job since August.
The woman he pleaded guilty to battering was sent to jail for 60 days the first time she was found to have violated the terms of her probation with a single dirty drug test in 2023, on a 2022 burglary charge, though she had the same judge and the same probation officer. So how is what Milan got not special treatment? Dupree and his spokesman, Jonathan Carter, did not answer messages asking that question.
When I visited Milan in jail last Saturday night — the only time those housed in his pod can have visits — I asked him if he thought he’d been treated any differently because of his family connections. You are not allowed to take anything into the jail with you, so I could not take notes until immediately afterward, and will mostly be paraphrasing what Milan said in our 50-minute interview.
No, he said at first, he doesn’t think he got any special treatment. Or if he did, he quickly added, it wasn’t because of anything he ever asked for. One judge who said how much his family had done for the community was taken off one of his cases, he said.
Later in our conversation, Milan volunteered that he knows some people get more chances than they know what to do with, while others who deserve a second chance never get it. And that for sure is true.
His dad, he said, has impressed on him that he now has to show the prosecutors and judge that they were right to give him this most recent reprieve — for real the last one, Milan told me. Despite what his attorney said in court, Milan said he’s never had any drug treatment of any kind before. And his father, he said, is even more excited than he is that he’s finally going to get some help. Any parent would be.
“I f***ed up,” he said, and if he f’s up again, he told me multiple times, then he knows that he’s going back to prison. He’s known for the longest time that it had to come to this, too, because otherwise he was going to die on the street.
“I’m too old for this,” he said. “I never thought I’d make it this far.” He also said this: “The drugs aren’t me.” But for a long time, they have been.
As for the underlying battery charges, to which he pleaded guilty, he said, “I’m not 100% innocent, but she’s not 100% honest.” Repeatedly, he said Alisha Murphy “lied on me” and asked, if he had really done all that he was accused of, why she would have kept coming back. He’s never been violent, he insisted, with her or with anyone.
Victim on trial
All of that, as he himself offered, unprompted, is pretty standard stuff from someone in his position. And it is, of course, right down to his insistence that all he ever did was push Murphy, after she started a fight out of jealousy. Her extensive medical records suggest otherwise. She ended up having surgery to repair her arm.
What does stun me, though, in reading the transcript of Milan’s sentencing hearing, is the extent to which it was Murphy who was really on trial. She was accused, among other things, of seeking medical treatment only to get painkillers. As she freely admits, she was an addict, too, until she went to jail for those two months last year, which she says saved her life in two ways: She got clean. And she believes that “he would have killed me otherwise.”
She scoffs at the idea that her true goal in seeking medical treatment was getting her hands on some painkillers: “Those are downers and I did uppers. In hospitals, they don’t even have the kind of drugs I would have abused.”
Milan says he has been struggling with drugs for 15 or 20 years and using longer than that. And any favors he did get only hurt him and those around him, and so did no one any favors.
On Aug. 13, Milan hit someone bigger and stronger, someone who hit him back so hard that he wound up in KU Medical Center with a cracked skull and a brain bleed. I talked to the man involved, Donald Burrow. He said Milan “hit me in my head when I wasn’t looking and we had a fight” at Burrow’s home. “He accused me of losing his job at Hardee’s,” where they were coworkers, but he really lost that job, as Burrow sees it, because “he was bringing a lot of food home.”
“If it wasn’t for cameras outside my house” that captured the whole fight and proved that he’d acted in self-defense, Burrow said, “I’d be in jail right now.” Milan said someone had slipped some fentanyl in something else he’d taken that night, so he doesn’t remember anything that happened.
I told him what I think, which is that if he had been required to get treatment before now, rather than just having it recommended, and had otherwise been held accountable instead of getting let off the hook over and over, then maybe he’d never have picked that fight, and neither he nor Donald Burrow would have been injured.
I see what you’re saying, he told me.
Whether that’s true or not, he says he’s glad to be where he is now, and feels better after these last three weeks off the street, even though jail “sucks.” He’s heard he’ll be getting a treatment bed any day, and is looking forward to that. Would he ever have gotten treatment on his own? He didn’t claim that he would have. This “makes it easier,” he said.
I write a lot about people behind bars who should not be there, either because they are innocent or over-sentenced, especially for something they did when they were very young or when they were victims themselves. Or both.
But that doesn’t mean that public safety concerns aren’t legitimate, because they are. That holds true even when they involve the offspring of friends, who sometimes need protection from themselves.
I used to find the criminal justice system so capricious in offering, as Robert Milan himself observed, so many breaks to some and none to others. But no, it’s instead painfully predictable. I certainly hope Milan makes the most of this supposed last chance. But I also believe he should have gotten it a long time ago.
