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Maywood Owes Danka Beasley An Apology And The Public An Explanation 


Sunday, May 16, 2021 || By Michael Romain || EDITORIAL OPINION || @maywoodnews 

I remember the moment I learned from a Maywood Police press release that Quinton “Danka” Beasley, a celebrated and beloved community member well-known for his popular basketball league, had been arrested and charged with allegedly defrauding the village of Maywood.

The news was hard to swallow and immediately put me in a quandary. Beasley’s arrest happened in June 2019. Earlier that year, in March, Village Free Press honored Beasley with an award for his service in the community. 

I was skeptical of the information in the release, but also knew that I nonetheless had to report this out in a timely manner. If I didn’t report and the word of his arrest nonetheless got out, I’d appear to be hiding something and perhaps showing some favoritism to someone on whom we’d just publicly showered praises.

If I did publish, possible harm might come to Beasley’s reputation and I’d be lambasted for merely reporting such bombshell charges about a popular and well-respected community member.

I was stuck between a rock and a hard place and not acting wasn’t an option. I chose to publish, just as I would have done had the subject of the charges not been someone I knew and respected. 

I believe I did as much due diligence as I perhaps could have in the moment, calling the Maywood detective who emailed the news release, the mayor and the village manager. I also attempted to call Beasley, but his phone was apparently off at the time. I worked with the information I had, which was only coming from the police. 

Whether the allegations were true or false, the situation demanded that village officials — from the mayor and board to the manager and finance director — do their own due diligence and look into how this alleged fraud could have happened. Months went by and village officials apparently did nothing. No updates. No reports. No accountability. 

We now learn that the village didn’t even bother to show up in court. Maywood officials, politicians and employees who smiled in Beasley’s face and praised him in public, had left him out to dry. They knew he was innocent and failed to inform the public.

What this incident has forced me to realize, perhaps more clearly than ever before, is that this newspaper needs more money, resources and manpower to more adequately evaluate  when public officials are not forthcoming and force them to act with accountability when necessary. 

Still, as the owner of the publication that perpetuated the village’s false claims and helped harm Beasley’s reputation, I’m embarrassed and for our part in this sordid tale, I offer Beasely a robust apology.

In hindsight, I could have been more vigilant in demanding more information from the village and more aggressive in my followup reporting, but I’m also one man reporting on about a dozen different communities — that’s not an excuse, it’s pointing out a structural limitation and a hard reality that I know I have to improve. We need more funding, we need more reporters and we need more aggressive local reporting. We’re working on making that a reality.

We’ve also tried repairing some of the harm we caused by including a prominent update on the original article about Beasley’s arrest (it can be found at the very top in red font). This way, if the article comes up during Google searches, at least people will see that the case has been resolved and Beasley has been cleared of wrongdoing. We did not remove the article, because the article’s headline will still appear in searches. Once people click the link, they would only be taken to an inactive page with no explanation or update, leaving them to form opinions of their own.

Beasley and his team may consider possible solutions that they’ll have to initiate on their own, such as looking into de-indexing, which removes pages from search results altogether. 

In the meantime, for every single village official who knew that Beasley was innocent months ago, but who failed to volunteer this information in public, which would have helped clear his name much earlier, I only offer you my strongest condemnation. 

If you don’t feel some responsibility, shame, regret and embarrassment for what happened to Beasley, you should not be in public service. Your inaction is why Maywood government is the poster child of incompetence and corruption. 

Maywood’s government not only owes Beasley a formal apology and material restitution, it owes the public an explanation.

What the hell happened? How did it happen? Who is responsible? How are those responsible parties being held accountable? And what is the village doing to ensure that this does not happen again? 

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