San Francisco police officers searched the home of freelance reporter Bryan Carmody on Friday with their guns drawn. “They treated me like I was some kind of drug dealer,” he told the Washington Post. Two weeks before, police investigators showed up at his home to ask him to identify the source who provided him with a confidential police report about the February death of the city’s public defender, Jeff Adachi. Carmody declined. He wasn’t about to give up his source on Friday either, not to the police or two FBI agents who questioned him about the case. He stayed handcuffed for more than five hours as investigators searched his home, then his office, where they found the report in a safe. “There’s only two people on this planet who know who leaked this report — me and the guy who leaked it,” Carmody said.
The raid added a twist to the intrigue surrounding the death of Adachi, who had built up a high profile during his 16 years as public defender. The only elected public defender in California, Adachi was known as an watchdog on police misconduct. His death at 59 was attributed to a heart attack. On Feb. 24, ABC 7 published a story from a police report that he had been with a woman named Caterina — not his wife — and that he was found unresponsive in an apartment with “an unmade bed, empty bottles of alcohol, cannabis gummies, and two syringes that may have been left by paramedics.” Carmody works from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., when he chases news and sells his services and materials he gathers to local stations for their morning broadcasts. A medical examiner’s report in March ruled Adachi’s death an accident due to the effects of cocaine and alcohol combined with a preexisting heart condition.