KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Normally, if you ask Lamonte McIntyre how he's doing, he'd say he's at peace after being exonerated for a crime he didn't commit.
But on Monday, that peace may have been rocked when he heard that Roger Golubski, the former Kansas City, Kansas, detective who helped wrongly put him behind bars for 23 years, died in an apparent suicide.
"My peace was disturbed. I expected something. I expected justice as the way we see it — the way when I wanted it. I sat in the cell for 23 years trying to prove my innocence — justice to me looked like him spending time in the prison cell," McIntyre said. "So he could feel what I felt, because he put me in that situation. Everyone was so excited because we had waited for this day for so long. We knew that going into it, he would have to face his accusers, face all the victims he tormented and victimized. We were looking forward to seeing him have his day in court. It didn’t feel like a win today; it's not a win. He robbed. Even in his death, he took from people."
McIntyre says he was robbed of hearing the trial play out.
"People don’t know what happened behind the scenes; they really don’t know how much damage he did. They don't really know how many victims you really have, so the story is still untold," he said.
McIntyre said there are things he’s waited decades to hear.
"Me of all people, my mother, in my situation, why me? He didn’t know me; I didn’t know him," he said. "I wanted to know what happened in leading up to that moment, because I don’t know."
It's information that he and his mother, Rosie McIntyre, tried to find out for years.
KSHB 41 spoke with Rosie in an interview from 2017.
"You just going to take him from me for no reason, and I’m not going to do that I’m going to fight you until I have no breath," Rosie said.
Lamonte McIntyre said that for years, his mother's concerns were ignored.
"She’d been saying for a long time that Roger Golubski did something to her," he said. They ignored her, but she kept pushing."
His mother's hard work helped clear his name.
"We walked down that walkway from that jail holding hands," she said.
McIntyre said Golubski's death brought him mixed emotions.
"People wanted to see this man suffer because he tortured, raped and tormented so many people for so many years, and now, he doesn’t have to feel anything anymore," he said. "I want him to feel how I felt on some level, but aside from that, I know he will never be able to hurt somebody again, so I can look at the bright side."
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KSHB 41 reporter Megan Abundis covers Kansas City, Missouri, including neighborhoods in the southern part of the city. Share your story idea with Megan.