State fails victims

A prosecutor in the Ohio Attorney General's Office assigned to serve as special prosecutor overseeing the Amanda Dean homicide investigation referred questions about his appointment to a spokesman "per office policy." Attorney General Dave Yost AP file photo/Jay LaPrete The problem is spokesman Steven Irwin doesn't know anything about the Dean case or the appointment, and he has nothing to say about it. Dan Kasaris, a former Erie County assistant prosecutor, knows that. Kasaris was secretly appointed months ago as special prosecutor. The appointment was done in secret because that's how attorney general prosecutors operate. It's that secrecy, the total lack of transparency, that rightfully creates mistrust. Dean went missing more than six years ago. Huron County Sheriff Todd Corbin never searched for her, claiming she was alive and well. She was previously the victim of domestic abuse numerous times, but the sheriff never arrested anyone for causing her bruises and making her bloody. The secrecy Kasaris and the attorney general cherish help keep the wraps on why a woman can be beaten and bloodied, and nobody is held accountable. It helps keep secret the real reasons there was never any search for Dean for all those years and why she went from being "alive and well," as the sheriff claimed, to being the suspected victim of a homicide more than six years later. It's not as if Corbin didn't know the man suspected of beating Dean. He knew of him from prior domestic violence calls. In one of those prior incidents, he told a woman who was in the emergency room being treated for injuries that she should come around on Monday and talk with the city law director about her attacker, the same man suspected of beating Dean. He never interviewed the suspect then, and charges were never filed. The same thing happened when the same man allegedly assaulted Dean. No interview, no charges. And when Dean disappeared, Corbin canceled the search for her the next day when he first reported she was alive and well. No interview, no charges. This shows incredible incompetence or intentional decisions to protect the guilty and sacrifice victims. Either way, or any way in between, it's obvious there's a problem. Kasaris' "office policy" excuse for avoiding questions is designed so those questions cannot be asked and won't ever be answered. Having an office policy that only spokespeople can address questions is a total copout, an abdication. The same thing happens every time the Ohio attorney general's office "helps" with difficult cases. Every time. We suggest that Kasaris put on his big-boy pants and start acting like someone who wants to see justice served. We hope Ohio's next attorney general can do that, too, because the one we've got now doesn't seem interested in justice, at all.