Every once in awhile we get bad info, and when we do, we go out of our way to correct it.
Which is what this post is about….coupled with a lil Read the Lead for your afternoon.
When we were alerted to the postings of a Marion area bigwig last month, we couldn’t help but do a print version of it. After all, how often does an attorney who believes his crap doesn’t stink and in fact when he takes a dump, probably sees portents of his own success in it (THAT’S appropriate), step in his own pile of crap? Not very. But it happens. Just like bad information being given to US happens.
So let’s clear that up right away: Joe Bleyer isn’t the president of Marion Schools Board of Education. We were told by several people that he WAS, when he posted an inane rant on Monica Zukas’ RealityCheck Facebook page; but he is in fact not, despite the blaring headline on the front page of this current issue that states said fact. The school board president is actually Mike Absher. We haven’t detected that Absher has done anything of note lately….but one of his duly-elected members, Bleyer, certainly has.
Aside from the usual hubris displayed in a way only attorneys can, Bleyer opined on RealityCheck’s page about something he probably didn’t have any business getting in the middle of…that opining being what sent a surge of calls, emails and messages to us in late June and prompted us to produce the article. That so many people advised us he was board president when he is not probably speaks volumes for how much attention those in Marion actually pay toward their government entities, and that’s a sad commentary. But it’s not nearly as sad as the only slightly-coherent soliloquy Bleyer engaged in that prompted this article in the first place. Here now is the ill-headlined Sch. Bd. Pres. finds deaths ‘entertaining’, which we’d like to take the opportunity to clarify: Bleyer isn’t the school board pres. He’s apparently just a flunky board member, who, we were told, has been pouting about being on the front page this month. And if he needs more clarification, we’ll be happy to put him there again. (You know how to reach us, Joe. Give us a holler.)
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MARION—A Marion attorney known for being on the mostly-losing end of representation when it comes to public bodies (municipalities, counties, public officials) who is also president of the local school district’s board of education has opened his mouth, as it were, and has firmly inserted his foot, in a very, very public way.
And while there’s been no official word of foot extrication, the excoriation of attorney Joseph A. Bleyer continued several days past his inane post on the Facebook page of popular Marion WGGH radio show host Monica Zukas’ Reality Check.
The post was made June 24 on the radio show’s page, and exhibited the snarky, arrogant attitude exemplified by many attorneys, but especially inherent to attorneys who are also public officials (in this case, elected) and often consider themselves not only above the law, but their opinions to be priceless gems of wisdom.
In this case, Bleyer was opining on the death of a 19-year-old Southern Illinois University-Carbondale student, Pravin Varughese.
Pravin Varughese
Varughese was found deceased in a wooded area behind Buffalo Wild Wings and Kohl’s department store on Carbondale’s east side February 18, this after having been determined “missing” since he was last seen at a party in town on February 12.
The situation went from a “missing student” to a “death” case…however, local authorities, it was later learned, didn’t believe Varughese came to harm in an incident of foul play; instead, they issued press release after press release that indicated Varughese died of hypothermia in the bitterly cold temperatures of Feb. 12/13, and attributed his death to that with a vague reference that he was yet another college student who had come to be under the influence of some intoxicating substance, and had wandered to the wooded area to his own demise.
A subsequent examination of the young man’s body by family members in the northern part of the state, however—all of them in the medical field—brought that “official” explanation into question. And so the Varughese family hired their own forensic pathologist and other experts to provide a second opinion before they laid the young man to rest.
And what they found was that there were not only NO “intoxicating substances” in his body, but that he had sustained several injuries, consistent with a beating, shortly before his death…
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