CLAREMORE, Okla. — June 22, 2026 (The Oklahoma Post)
Melissa Spahr is not the first person to decide that the City of Claremore and its police department needed to answer for something in federal court, and the back catalog is instructive. In 2003 a man named Gene Edward Young, who has cerebral palsy and got around town on a golf cart, began collecting citation after citation from Claremore officers for the crime of driving that golf cart, and eventually sued the city under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Equal Protection Clause and Section 1983. Two decades later the city was back in the Northern District of Oklahoma defending another civil-rights suit, this one brought by Rodney Mullinax and heard before U.S. District Judge John F. Heil III.
The point is not that any one of these plaintiffs was right. The point is that a city of fewer than twenty thousand people keeps ending up on the wrong side of a federal civil-rights caption, and that the institutions Melissa Spahr turned to behaved, by her account, as though the safest response to a citizen with a complaint is to wait her out. What follows is her account, the documents that back the checkable parts of it, and the allegations this newsroom is willing to attach its own name to.
On August 8, 2025, a Claremore mother and nursing student named Shirley Melissa Spahr opened a certified letter from one of Tulsa’s most established law firms. It did not come from the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office of Civil Rights Enforcement, where she had filed a complaint nearly a year earlier. It was from Rosenstein, Fist & Ringold, counsel for the City of Claremore and its police department, and its message was, in effect, stop talking to the city. The letter advised that her attempts to reach city employees and council members about her complaint were inappropriate while the matter was pending, that the firm had advised its client not to respond to her, and that anything further should run through her own attorney. It referenced Office of Civil Rights Enforcement Case No. CR-24-0257-PA. It was signed by attorney Adam T. Heavin, and it was copied to City Manager John Feary.
That letter, and the silence on the other side of it, is the clearest documented artifact in a story that, as alleged by me, the publisher, shows how an ordinary citizen’s complaint can travel from a neighborhood dispute to a federal courtroom while the institutions built to intervene do nothing but close ranks.
How It Started: A Fender-Bender and No-Show
None of this, Spahr alleges, began with politics. It began in May 2023 with a car. By her account, a neighbor struck the Spahrs’ parked vehicle, had no insurance, was captured on the family’s security camera saying she would pay for the damage, then refused. So Spahr took her to small claims court, small claims case SC-2023-524. She alleges the neighbor failed to appear and was later arrested for contempt over the no-show. From there, in Spahr’s account, the dispute curdled into retaliation: trash thrown into her yard, a chunk of concrete left in the driveway, headlights aimed at the house at night. The honest one-line origin is the smallest possible spark. An uninsured neighbor hit a parked car, promised to pay, did not, and got taken to small claims court under case number SC-2023-524, where, court records show, a body attachment issued for the neighbor’s failure to appear.
The first sign that something was wrong inside the police department, Spahr alleges, came the same day she tried to report the vehicle incident, the day after Claremore High School graduation. She alleges she spoke several times with Operations Captain Jamie Starling, who told her it was department policy not to accept a report the day after an incident occurred. Spahr alleges she did not believe that was a real policy. Where Spahr is describing her own experience, the account is attributed to her. Where there is a document, the document speaks.
The turning point came in 2024, when the neighbors filed a protective-order petition against her. The Rogers County Sheriff’s Office served her with that petition on June 5, 2024. Alarmed, she requested body-camera footage from the police records department. What she found, she alleges, reframed everything. In her telling, officers can be seen interacting with the neighbors in a way that suggests the department was, in her words, “actively helping” the other side. “It was the kind of things that officers don’t expect people to get a hold of,” she said. “They just basically exposed themselves.” The Oklahoma Post has reviewed the recordings Spahr provided.
Court records Spahr provided show the District Court of Rogers County granted her stalking protective orders against both neighbors, denied the neighbors’ reciprocal petitions against Spahr and her husband, and later extended Spahr’s orders through November 2028 under case numbers PO-2023-437 and PO-2023-438. In a related ruling the court found the neighbors’ petition frivolous, ordered them to pay Spahr’s attorney’s fees, and ordered the neighbors to relocate. An indirect contempt citation was also entered.
The Two Officers at the Center
Spahr identifies the two officials she alleges were most directly involved as patrol officer Scott Mittelstedt and now-retired Lt. Doug Woodward. In a contemporaneous email she sent in 2024, she alleged Mittelstedt opened an investigation against her with help from a neighbor’s failed protective-order petition, and that a third officer, Bobby Hagen, displayed the contents of that investigative file to the neighbor on his laptop on July 19, 2024. She has since built her open-records demands around that disclosure, arguing the file lost its investigative confidentiality the moment an officer showed it to a private citizen.
Here the documents and her allegation line up. The felony matter, logged as Case No. 24-009638, was classified internally as a citizen assist, coded for assault and intimidation, and closed with no charges ever filed, according to the department records Spahr obtained. A call-detail report and the one-page officer report for that case both list Woodward and Mittelstedt as the responding officers, with Mittelstedt as the responsible officer. In other words, the investigation she alleges was aimed at her is real on paper, and it produced no charge.
Spahr alleges she reached out, in sequence, to the people whose job it is to step in.
The City Manager. Spahr alleges that when she reached City Manager John Feary, he was dismissive, said he doubted her accusations but would investigate, and told her the matter would involve, in her recollection, “me and a bunch of lawyers.” She alleges he never followed up.
The District Attorney’s office. Spahr alleges she was told there was not enough, that her videos did not show enough, and she describes a bar that shifted each time she met it. The district attorney’s office is not a defendant in her federal suit.
The Police Department. Spahr alleges that Deputy Chief Matt Hart, through a secretary, told her he would no longer engage with her, and that her messages to Chief Steve Cox about an internal-affairs complaint went unanswered. This is where her most serious allegation lives, documented above as Case No. 24-009638.
In each case, Spahr alleges, the answer was some version of not our problem, not enough, not now.
The Complaint That Sat Ten Months
If the body camera is the emotional center of the story, the timeline of Spahr’s civil-rights complaint is its documentary spine, because the dates are checkable in the agency’s own letters.
The Office of Civil Rights Enforcement received and accepted her complaint, filed as a public-accommodation and retaliation complaint under the Oklahoma Anti-Discrimination Act, on September 28, 2024. It was not forwarded to the Claremore Police Department until July 31, 2025, roughly ten months later. That July 31 letter, signed by Acting Chief Eric Di Giacomo, named an assigned agent, Travis Russell, and a legal assistant, Spring King, and promised that an agent would contact Spahr “soon” to interview her. Spahr alleges that interview never happened and that her follow-up emails went unanswered.
There is a further wrinkle in what the office actually forwarded. Spahr says she followed up with Di Giacomo’s office on July 22, 2025, after ten months of silence. On July 31 the office emailed to say it had forwarded her complaint to Claremore police, but the version it had prepared was a scrambled one-page document with incorrect dates, details and parties. Spahr corrected it for them, had a twelve-page version notarized, and emailed that to OCRE on August 8, 2025. She says she asked Spring King and Eric Di Giacomo to confirm the corrected, notarized complaint had been sent to the police department. They repeated that they forwarded the complaint on July 31, she says, but never answered whether the corrected version went anywhere at all.
On March 16, 2026, after asking the office to simply close the matter so she could pursue federal court, Spahr received a dismissal, also signed by Di Giacomo. The dismissal form does not reflect a ruling on the merits. The box checked states only that the office “received a request from the Complainant for a Dismissal.”
Stated conservatively: a citizen filed a civil-rights complaint with the state’s top law-enforcement office, waited the better part of a year for it to be forwarded to the very agency she was complaining about, was promised an interview she says never came, and then received a prompt, tidy closure the moment she asked the office to step aside.
Loading Viewer…
Stop Talking to the City or Else
The shutdown letter arrived about a week after OCRE finally forwarded the complaint. There is a wrinkle worth stating plainly, because this newsroom does not hide the parts that complicate its subject’s account. The day before the firm’s letter, on August 7, 2025, Spahr did email two Claremore City Council members about her allegations against the police department. By her account, she was confirming that their addresses were still active after an earlier message went ignored, and re-sending a complaint she says the city had never answered. The firm characterized the same contact as improper communication about a pending complaint. Readers can hold both of those at once.
A pattern of closed doors followed. In April 2026 the city denied her request for the complete 24-009638 investigative file, releasing only a one-page incident sheet, and denied her request for patrol GPS data under a law-enforcement exemption. When she asked again in May 2026 through a second request, the city responded that the records had “previously been provided” and that anything further was “not eligible to release.” She has now been refused the same investigative file twice.
Loading Viewer…
What the Body Camera Caught
The body camera caught a moment the department never expected an outsider to see, and the “she’s fing nuts” remark sits at its center. According to Spahr’s account of the footage, the comment came during an exchange in which Lt. Doug Woodward coordinated the release of Spahr’s own call-history records to the neighbor. Woodward said he wanted the neighbor to reference Spahr’s prior calls for service in the neighbor’s protective-order petition, telling another officer, “I’m not gonna give her details, but I’m gonna tell her that,” at which point Deputy Chief Matt Hart cut in: “she’s fing nuts?” Woodward then tapped the camera, briefly revealing Hart’s face, and Hart laughed and said he had “put my foot in my mouth.” It was a remark made during the release of Spahr’s unredacted records to the very neighbor she held a protective order against. Spahr says she intends to amend the complaint to correct that point. As of publication, the city’s own roster still lists Steve Cox as Chief of Police and Matt Hart as Deputy Chief, with John Case listed as business manager.
The Oklahoma Post did not come to Spahr’s story by accident, and readers deserve to know why.
Here is what is documented. Rosenstein, Fist & Ringold, the firm that sent Spahr the shutdown letter, is the same firm whose attorneys appear opposite this publisher in my own federal civil-rights litigation, Moyer v. Murray. Two of its lawyers, Samanthia S. Marshall and Rhiannon K. Thoreson, are listed on the firm’s own letterhead, and I allege both also appear in my allegation of corruption federal case. The firm carries a deep municipal and public-school defense practice across Oklahoma.
Who Melissa Spahr Is, What She Wants
It matters who is making these claims, because the institutions she is up against will work to define her. Shirley Melissa Spahr goes by Melissa. She alleges she is a nursing student and a mostly stay-at-home mother whose husband works, with three children, including a 21-year-old serving in the Marine Corps and two younger children at home. Her nursing studies are referenced in the federal complaint. In other words, the person Claremore police investigated for a felony, an investigation that produced no charge, is by her account a nursing student and military mother whom a judge found needed a protective order from her neighbors badly enough to extend it to 2028.
Asked what she is after, Spahr gave two answers. The first is simple: she wants the facts out. The second is harder. “I find it extremely scary that the police tried to charge me with a felony for things I absolutely did not do,” she said, an allegation that, in the records obtained so far, takes the form of a felony investigation that ended without charges. The neighbors who started it, she alleges, are gone now. The police presence, she alleges, is not, and she describes officers still driving past her home at night.
This is a base report, published as the documentary record fills in. The case is Spahr v. City of Claremore et al, Case No. 4:26-cv-00305-JDR-SH, filed May 21, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma. It names ten defendants: the City of Claremore, City Manager John Feary and CPD officials Steve Cox, Matt Hart, Doug Woodward, Anzel Chau, Bobby Hagen, Logan McQuaig, Scott Mittelstedt and Chad Rohr.
Writing By: Robbie Robertson | Editing by Robbie Robertson
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is based on court documents, audio recordings, and investigative reporting.
Sources
Spahr v. City of Claremore et al, Case No. 4:26-cv-00305-JDR-SH, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, filed May 21, 2026: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/oklahoma/okndce/4:2026cv00305/77050
Oklahoma Attorney General, Office of Civil Rights Enforcement: https://oklahoma.gov/oag/about/divisions/civil-rights-enforcement.html
Claremore Police Department, current command roster: https://claremore.com/claremore-police/personnel-and-divisions/
Rosenstein, Fist & Ringold: https://www.rfrlaw.com
Young v. City of Claremore, 411 F. Supp. 2d 1295: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2510547/young-v-city-of-claremore-okla/
Mullinax v. City of Claremore, N.D. Okla. No. 4:20-cv-00089: https://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/4-20-cv-00089-jfh-jfj/OK/157044/
On file with The Oklahoma Post: Rosenstein, Fist & Ringold letter dated Aug. 8, 2025 (cc City Manager John Feary); OCRE forwarding letter dated July 31, 2025 and dismissal dated March 16, 2026, both signed by Acting Chief Eric Di Giacomo; OCRE Case No. CR-24-0257-PA complaint; CPD Case No. 24-009638 officer report and call-detail report; CPD open-records responses dated April 20, 2026 and May 27, 2026 (ORR-26-111); and body-camera footage reviewed by The Oklahoma Post.
Support Independent Journalism
At The Oklahoma Post, we report on stories that others overlook; from local courtrooms to statewide accountability. We rely on reader support to stay independent. Your contribution helps keep the public informed. If you’d like to help us keep publishing local voices and independent reporting, consider making a one-time donation today. Every contribution makes a difference.
Got evidence, events, birthdays, obits or inside info?
Email The Oklahoma Post confidentially: editor@theokpost.com
And for the record: unlike the courthouse clique, The Oklahoma Post runs on facts, not dark money.
© 2026 The Oklahoma Post |
By The People’s Popular Paper | Oklahoma Special Report
2026 — The Oklahoma Post — TheOKPost.com is dedicated to delivering relevant news and information to Oklahomans and to sharing their stories, pictures, and experiences. Content on this website includes fact-checked, verified-source reporting created by The Oklahoma Post, as well as contributions from various individuals and links to external public and privately owned sources. The views and opinions expressed in user-generated content are solely those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Oklahoma Post. The Oklahoma Post does not independently verify the accuracy of third-party contributions and relies upon contributors to fact-check their work. By sharing links and allowing open contributions, TheOKPost.com exercises its right to free speech and provides a platform for diverse perspectives.
