To get sons back from the state of Kansas, ‘quit talking about’ husband’s innocence | Opinion
All Tammarisk Lyman had to do to get her kids back from the state of Kansas, her lawyer repeatedly told her in emails, was stop saying that her husband Chris was innocent of murdering their 8-month-old nephew.
Only she wouldn’t, because he was innocent.
And even after the whole sad and overwhelming situation caused their divorce, Tammarisk refused to say what she knew wasn’t true about little Johnathan Swan’s 2013 death, which we now know was from natural causes — the respiratory problems that had him in and out of hospitals all of his short life.
This story is about the lawsuit that Tammarisk Thompson, who has remarried, just filed with her former husband, Chris Lyman, against the Junction City, Kansas, police detective, the Children’s Mercy hospital child abuse specialist and the controversial coroner who put them in that situation. It’s about those who, according to the suit, charged her with murder, too, merely as leverage.
There never was a probable cause hearing laying out any evidence against Tammarisk during the whole two years she was charged, even though that sounds like something that could only happen in the Gulag. The case against her was dropped after Chris was convicted. In their view, the state held their young sons hostage for two years because she wouldn’t lie.
But this is also an account of a woman who did what few of us could, telling the truth even when being apart from her children as a result of her refusal to comply hurt all of them in profound ways. Her older son, who was just 15 months old when he was taken from her, became non-verbal for a time in foster care.
She had just recently learned that she was pregnant with their younger son when Chris found Johnathan limp and unresponsive in his crib on the morning of Sept. 15, 2013, and that younger son was taken away from Tammarisk, too, only 24 hours after he was born. Neither boy has ever fully recovered, their parents say, from the two years the state of Kansas kept them from her.
“I really wish you would listen to me,” Tammarisk’s attorney, John Thurston, wrote in one of a series of emails sent on May 14, 2015. “I told you to quit talking about his innocence. You didn’t so they took the visitation away. … I’m telling you that (the assistant DA) does not think you hurt anyone. She plans on you getting the boys back. She would not lie to me. You must QUIT talking about Christopher’s criminal case.”
“No one cares right from wrong anymore,” she answered. “It’s a win and a vendetta. I stood for what I believed in. At least my children will know I am not a quitter or a pushover. … I stood for what I seen and experienced.”
‘I thought she’d abandoned me’
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how rare that kind of unshakable honesty is, even with a man’s liberty at stake. If you were asked to falsely implicate the father of your children or else watch those children suffer, as you yourself certainly were, what would you do?
I’ve written before about Chris Lyman, the Army sergeant and Bronze Star recipient stationed at Ft. Riley who spent nearly 10 years behind bars for killing his nephew, Johnathan Swan, who actually died of pneumonia. But until now, I did not know what had happened to the family he’d lost. Until pretty recently, he didn’t, either.
After Johnathan’s death, he and Tammarisk never saw each other again, other than in court, because she was not allowed to visit him in jail. Then came the homicide charges, and all of this while he was still newly back from Afghanistan, she was still recovering from an ectopic pregnancy, and had just found she was pregnant again. She filed for divorce two years later.
All this time, “I thought she’d abandoned me,” he said, choking up, when in fact, “the state of Kansas was blackmailing her, and for her to stand up to them? That truly takes some guts when they’ve got your kids.”
“We’re good friends now,” he said, and working together for the good of their sons. So is Tammarisk’s current husband, and the former foster parents that she has kept in her boys’ lives, and made their godparents. If all adults were this adult, there would be no actual child abuse.
Chris, whose shaky “shaken baby” conviction I wrote about in 2022, was released from prison in February of 2023 while awaiting a possible retrial because his attorney was found to have been suffering from dementia during his 2015 trial. In July of 2023, Geary County said it was dropping all charges after its own expert not only found that Johnathan had died of natural causes, but said that a review showed a “gross mischaracterization” of the evidence by the state’s child abuse expert.
His wrongful conviction “completely destroyed my relationship with my boys,” he said, and “we’ve been trying to pick up the pieces for the last 18 months” back in Ohio, where he and his former wife are from. His older son “just started calling me ‘Dad.’ My youngest still calls me Chris because he’s not accepted me as his real father, and that’s OK. We’re going through counseling, and it’s a very, very long road.”
Anxiety ‘from being held hostage’
His younger child, who is 10, has autism. “He was born into state custody, and if Kansas isn’t brought up delicately, he gets meltdowns,” while his older boy’s severe anxiety “comes from being held hostage” away from his mother. He’s 12 now, and “a year ago, his big concern was would I disappear from the picture again.”
When the younger child asks, “Why would they do this to you, how do you tell a 10-year-old that a bunch of dirty cops framed their dad after their cousin died? I don’t think Dick Wolf could write a script like this.”
When Tammarisk thinks back to the awful morning that she rushed her nephew to the ER, because the hospital was so close that they thought that would be faster than calling 911, she remembers holding him the whole way there. “I’d pat him and he’d throw up, inhale and throw up, and I’m pleading with him the whole time” to live.
Later, she said, her children’s guardian ad litem — appointed by the court to represent her sons’ legal interests — “crucified me for not taking three minutes to put him in a car seat” before leaving for the hospital. “The guardian ad litem never once met my children, and said at every hearing I should lose my rights and they should be put up for adoption.”
As for the child abuse specialist and pathologist, “they said blunt force trauma” killed Johnathan, “and I said what was the object? Where did he hit him? This is a 6-foot-7, 260-pound man and there’s no fracture or brain injury,” old or new. “One of his autopsies says ‘shaken baby,’ but just because you’re a doctor does not mean you know everything. I want facts, I want proof.”
Authorities also barred Tammarisk’s very willing mother from taking the children, she said, “because they said then my sister would murder my son in retribution” for Johnathan’s death, even though “my sister and I have always been on each other’s side” and her sister had no history of abuse, either.
The suit argues that this whole painful ordeal could have been prevented if police or the specialist at Children’s Mercy, where Johnathan was life-flighted, had only paused long enough to listen to that sister, Johnathan’s then-21-year-old single mother, Meggan Swan, who had left her baby with Tammarisk and Chris while trying to get her life together after a second DUI. Meggan never believed that Chris was guilty, and testified at his trial that Chris was the only person her child would ever cuddle with. “He called him ‘Dad,’ she said on the stand, sobbing. “That’s the only word he ever knew.”
‘I don’t care about his medical issues.’
The suit also says that neither the Children’s Mercy child abuse specialist, Terra Frazier, nor the coroner, Erik K. Mitchell, ever saw Johnathan’s medical records before making decisions that put Chris Lyman away for years. It says Mitchell did change his findings, though, to conform with Frazier’s view of what happened. Initially, he found no anal tear. Later, he did. The jury rejected that aspect of the state’s case.
A transcript of the police detective’s initial interview shows that Chris kept trying to tell him about the child’s many serious medical problems, and the detective, Cory O’Dell, kept saying, “I don’t care about his medical issues.” Clearly, no one did. He had to have abused the child, the detective said in the interview, because doctors at Children’s Mercy “specialize in child abuse cases. The doctors, who are specifically trained and do this for a living, tell me this is child abuse. Somebody hurt this kid on purpose. That is the medical truth.”
When Tammarisk’s sister put her on the phone with Frazier, the doctor who’d told O’Dell this was abuse, “I explained about all of his history and how my sister and I had been in and out of the hospital with him his whole life. I told her, O’Dell. I told everyone, he has died before..” Then “they said I was so adamant he was innocent, they were afraid I would murder my children.” Wait, how’s that? “Out of anger, I guess.”
Police immediately charged her with child abuse and aiding and abetting her husband’s escape, even though he was arrested right in their own home. A year later, they upped that to a murder charge, “because they said I know Chris murdered Johnathan and I’m not telling them.”
Neither now-Assistant Police Chief O’Dell, nor Frazier, nor Children’s Mercy responded to messages I left them about the suit. The pathologist, Mitchell, is being represented by Chris Joseph, whose name you might recognize because he was the defense attorney for the disgraced and now deceased former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski. And Joseph did answer me:
“Dr. Mitchell did not change his opinion or invent evidence to please a detective,” he said in an emailed statement. “He had no personal interest in the outcome of Mr. Lyman’s case and did not control decisions made by the prosecutors. The allegation that he conspired to frame someone is absurd.”
What about the foster parents?
Whatever the court decides to do in response to this case, a family in Ohio will be picking up the pieces from this man-made disaster for the rest of their lives.
When Tammarisk Thompson finally did get her children back, the court in Geary County told her to just go pick them up from day care. “I said, ‘Is anyone going to call [the foster parents]? ‘ “ She’s the one who did call them, “and said let’s do a slow reintegration together.”
Honestly, Kansas, you’d almost think it was you who should have kids in your care taken away.
She just in the last year stopped having nightmares, and “worrying that every scrape and bump would cause someone to come in and take them.” When I asked if she ever considered giving in and saying what police wanted her to say, she said no, because “my children matter more. If I lie, they’ll find out” and that would do the most damage of all.
Chris Lyman is not working right now, while trying to get to the bottom of the migraines and other symptoms of the post-traumatic stress disorder that “blew up” while he was in prison.
The boys still hear things from other kids that cause problems in school sometimes, and there’s no sense in which what was done to them is all in the past. Yet when they grow up and can hear and read everything about what happened for themselves, I hope they realize how astonishing their mother is, and how hard all of the parents in their lives worked to make things right for them, in ways they never should have had to.
This story was originally published February 6, 2025 at 5:06 AM.
