The following article that's posted below was originally written and posted on the FoxC6Watchdogs blog on Saturday March 15, 2014. However, I pulled it down on Monday March 17 at the request of our attorney because he didn't want to
"let the cat out of the bag" just yet. However, as you read about the timing of my article and the timing of former Fox C-6 superintendent Dianne Critchlow's FMLA leave, there's good reason to believe that my article did
"let the cat out of the bag" so to speak back then.
My original article was written the day after I learned that our attorney had been able to obtain the IP addresses from the TOPIX.COM website for many of the defamatory and libelous posts that had been made about me and others. It may be difficult for others to understand the adrenaline rush of knowing that after several years of online bullying that the person or persons responsible for making the defamatory posts would finally be known.
My original article contained a "how to" for using Google to quickly search for posts made on specific TOPIX threads using their unique thread ID and specific keywords. I recommend reading that section because you can apply the same technique for finding things that are much more productive than trying to track down libelous posts.
My original article was written in order to teach others how to quickly and easily do their own digital archaeological digging into the TOPIX.COM website. Knowing how to locate specific posts by keyword and unique thread ID that were written over the last several years can save you a lot of time in reading since there were numerous TOPIX threads related to the Fox C-6 School District on TOPIX. So it's good to know how to narrow your search to a specific thread. It appeared that many of the defamatory posts had been made by only a few individuals based on their language and keywords used.
When I originally wrote the article in March 2014, I didn't have any solid evidence as to where the defamatory comments were coming from but I had a very good idea. It wasn't until May 2014 that it was finally revealed to the public via the news that my suspicions were proven correct. That's also when everyone learned that there were several individuals involved in making defamatory comments.
What A Coincidence!
One of the really interesting things that I thought was such a coincidence back in March 2014 was the fact that Dianne Critchlow took Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave right around the same time that my article was published. In fact, there was a school board meeting on Tuesday March 18, 2014 right after my article was posted and former Fox C-6 superintendent Dianne Critchlow was suspiciously absent from that board meeting because she was on FMLA leave.
Critchlow had posted on her Twitter account that she would be taking FMLA leave. She has since deleted her Twitter account so I can't provide a link to her original post.
It certainly made me think that perhaps my article may have lead to Critchlow needing to take FMLA leave knowing that whoever had been posting on TOPIX as TROOP was going to eventually be discovered.
So, was it just a coincidence that former Fox C-6 superintendent Dianne Critchlow decided to take FMLA leave right around the time that this article was first published?
It definitely makes you wonder, doesn't it?
On March 20, 2014, I wrote an article documenting the fact that Fox C-6 Assistant Superintendent Tim Crutchley filled in for then Superintendent Dianne Critchlow because she was out on FMLA leave. Tim Crutchley thanked outgoing school board members Linda Nash and Dan Smith at that meeting and presented them with small thank you gifts for their service to the Fox C-6 School District.
Since March of 2014 we've learned a lot about who was behind the posts. It's been documented via a subpoena to TOPIX that the IP address for the very first post made by someone calling themselves
TROOP 5 OR 6 was traced back to the home of
Dianne and Jamie Critchlow. It's good to know and be able to document that my suspicions were correct all along.
Our lawsuit against "John Doe" has finally named names and has been served to all of those named in the suit. It has certainly took a lot longer than I ever thought it would to get to this point. It's even more understandable now as to why there was so much effort to silence any critics of our district.
Anyway, this was one of my favorite articles to date that I had written back then because I knew that the information needed to track down the person or persons responsible for making defamatory comments about me and others would finally be known. So I was definitely disappointed in having to remove it from my blog back then.
Hopefully republishing this article will help educate others as to why you should always choose your words carefully and thoughtfully before making disparaging remarks in online forums. You're not as anonymous as you may think you are!
I only made a couple of typographical and grammatical corrections to the article before republishing it. Otherwise, the article is being reposted as it was originally written and posted on the FoxC6Watchdogs blog on March 15, 2014. I also changed the color of the hyperlinks to red to make them stand out more. The title of this article is also the original title of the article with the exception of the "(Reposted)".
Below is the article that I originally posted on Saturday March 15, 2014 on the FoxC6Watchdogs blog.
Tracking Down TROOP From TOPIX.COM!
It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to have a pretty good idea who the person might be that was calling himself TROOP on the TOPIX.COM forum last year. Now, that a subpoena has been filed with TOPIX to obtain IP addresses for TROOP's posts or "TROOP like" posts, it will be interesting to see if my assumptions and the assumptions of many others turns out to be true.
If my assumptions are accurate, it will be interesting to see how things turn out for TROOP and those who have been protecting TROOP.
TROOP 18 stated that he was an employee of the Fox C-6 School District
on March 23, 2013 when he wrote:
Dear quintet of opponents... the threat of physical violence isn't tolerated nor even funny.. The fact that you are now all clearly visable and completely exposed does not favor you. The employees of this district have had enough and will faithfully defend their administration and board.(employed and loyal). If you want to go redneck Hoosier on this...all loyal employees will gladly find a place and time. Trust me, there are hundreds of us. Talk is cheap. As is your posts
TROOP attacked just about anyone who criticized Superintendent Critchlow or the school board and even threatened those who dared to speak at school board meetings.
TROOP Was Very Emotionally Connected to Superintendent Critchlow
For those who don't know,
TROOP (5 or 6, 11 or 18) was an anonymous poster on the TOPIX.COM forum who appeared last year after learning that signs had been posted around the Fox C-6 School District about Superintendent Dianne Critchlow. I think that someone would have to be very emotionally attached to Superintendent Critchlow in order to write the things that TROOP wrote on TOPIX over the course of a couple of months last year. He was apparently very attached to Superintendent Critchlow's husband's ex-wife as well based upon his many attacks on her as well.
I never saw any of the signs, but since I've been considered a long time critic of Superintendent Critchlow and some of our school board members who have taken advantage of their position, I was
immediately and
falsely targeted by the person calling himself
TROOP 5 or 6 as the person who had posted the signs.
I was definitely confused when I read
TROOP 5 or 6's first post on January 24, 2013 because I didn't know anything about any signs that had been posted in the district.
I go to school board meetings and email our school board members. I document school district issues on this blog and on Twitter. I don't hang signs!
However, it's good to know that others in our district have strong opinions about the problems caused by Superintendent Critchlow.
I always take the the high road when it comes to accomplishing my goals of cleaning up our school district. I've been providing facts and documentation for years to our school board about problems in the district but they've done nothing.
I've shared my information with others in our school district and for that Superintendent Critchlow sent me a Cease and Desist letter. I guess that's what superintendents do when they don't want the community to know the truth about what's been going on behind the scenes in their school district.
TROOP's assumptions that I was involved in posting signs was incorrect. The person who was posting signs and driving around the school district with them in the back of his truck was eventually discovered and he was sent a Cease and Desist letter as well for his efforts.
TROOP stepped way over the line with his very first post when he falsely accused me of being the person making and hanging the signs in our school district and posted that information online. TROOP also blamed another person that had spoken at a school board meeting and criticized our school district leadership.
The really sad thing is that TROOP made his accusations based upon information that could only have come from a school teacher at Lone Dell Elementary School. The comments that TROOP made in his first post came from a teacher wondering why a student appeared tired that day. The teacher apparently found out about the signs and made a very incorrect assumption that I was behind the signs and then told her principal or Superintendent Critchlow. That teacher's incorrect assumption somehow made it to TROOP.
It's quite easy to see that there are a few people in our school district who don't like me for documenting facts and asking questions about what's been going on in our school district over the last several years. That causes them to make incorrect assumptions about my character and how I work to resolve issues.
It certainly leaves a lot of doubt about some of the people running our school district when they tout everywhere that Fox C-6 is a National District of Character when some of it's school leaders and staff act the way they do because they don't like people pointing out issues and concerns within our district.
I certainly had no idea what TROOP was talking about when I read his first post as
TROOP 5 or 6 while at a basketball practice. But, I knew right away that TROOP had made assumptions that were wrong and he was making libelous comments that stepped way over the line. I had a pretty good guess as to who TROOP might be right away based on his language.
As TROOP continued to post comment after comment, he was making it easier and easier to narrow down the possibilities of who he might be. Very few people had access to the information that TROOP was posting online and knew the people to whom he was directing his comments.
Only a few people in the Fox C-6 Central Office could have known the information that TROOP was posting. So how did TROOP get his information? Did TROOP work in the Central Office or was he the spouse of someone who worked in the Central Office?
It didn't take too long for people who read and posted on TOPIX to start guessing who TROOP might be. Once they started to put two and two together and making suggestions as to who TROOP might be, TROOP went silent.
TROOP didn't post for quite a while as TROOP after he posted on March 23, 2013 when he claimed to be a Fox C-6 employee.
TROOP made
a revealing post on February 7, 2013 when he wrote,
"Now, I will say this. From what I have heard there will be some sparks flying very soon for a few of you. Cue evil monster laugh...".
TROOP's comment was made just a few days before a couple of other citizens in the district were sent Cease and Desist letters from the school district attorney for Superintendent Critchlow. Superintendent Critchlow or someone close to Superintendent Critchlow provided information to TROOP about the Cease and Desist letters. The school board members weren't aware that Cease and Desist letters had been sent out. TROOP must have a very close relationship with Superintendent Critchlow if he knew about the Cease and Desist letters before they were received by the individuals.
TROOP's comments focused on only a few people that he felt was criticizing Superintendent Dianne Critchlow and the school board. He focused on me and 2 others who had spoken at school board meetings; the person that was posting signs in the district; and Superintendent Critchlow's husband's ex-wife.
Who in the general public would care about Superintendent Critchlow's husband's ex-wife and make derogatory comments about her while making derogatory comments about people who spoke at board meetings?
Eventually, TROOP knew that I wasn't involved with the making of the signs after the person that was making them was sent a Cease and Desist letter. But, he was mad enough about the signs to blame them on me because he knew who I was.
TROOP went way too far with many of his comments and people called him out for doing so. Three of us that were bullied online and maliciously attacked by TROOP for bringing problems in the district to the attention of the school board filed a "John Doe" lawsuit last year against the person calling himself TROOP. The lawsuit has been filed and subpoenas were recently sent to TOPIX to obtain the IP addresses.
Everyone should know by now that they aren't truly anonymous when they post online. I posted 18 comments on the TOPIX website between October 2010 and January 2011. I posted facts about issues going on in the Fox C-6 School District after finding the Fox High School Superintendent thread on TOPIX while doing a search for information about our district.
I was falsely blamed many times for posting comments on TOPIX over the last 3 years under different names. Superintendent Critchlow would like to think that I stooped to TROOP's level. I post facts and documents. TROOP attacked people for what they looked like and made defamatory and derogatory comments about people that warrants an immediate dismissal as an educator and a revoking of their teaching certificate.
If Superintendent Critchlow has been protecting TROOP as some have posted online, then the school board should have good cause for termination. Once all of this comes to light, our school board will have even more Public Relations problems to deal with.
The last post I made on TOPIX was a link to Mr. Critchlow's resume that he had posted on his LinkedIn account while looking for a coaching job in Texas. Mr. Critchlow removed his LinkedIn account shortly after I posted the link to his resume. My post asked why his resume didn't show any previous teaching experience. My post on TOPIX to his LinkedIn resume was deleted sometime after his LinkedIn account was deleted.
Supporters of Superintendent Critchlow and the board have been attacking me online for more than 3 years because I've been vocal about the problems in our school district.
Since people know who I am, they have a name to attack or bully me online because they can. I guess they think that they can say whatever they want anonymously and not get caught. But, it's just a matter of time.
One thing you'll notice is the language that TROOP uses over and over. He's so consistent that it also makes it very likely that TROOP was the same person that posted on TOPIX in December 2010 just one week after I first spoke at a school board meeting. TROOP may have also been the same person who was criticizing parents of Seckman High School students and defending the football coach at Seckman High School on another thread. You should search for and read some of the posts.
It's easy to find TROOP's posts because of the language he uses. He uses the word "inbred" quite often in his posts along with other words that I won't mention here. The word "inbred" was also used in the December 20, 2010 post that appeared after I spoke at the December 2010 board meeting.
At the 2010 board meeting, I asked our school board questions about their hiring practices. I asked them how they could have hired and promoted a person to a Director position who had only worked for the district for a couple of months and had been fired from a previous job for a DWI. I received no response from the school board in December 2010 but my questions provoked a response on TOPIX.
In December 2010 I found it strange that someone would post libelous comments on TOPIX.COM about me and my parents by naming me by my first name and inferring my last name by using TV character names for my parents first names. I guess that made the person making the comments feel pretty smart about themselves and think that their comments wouldn't be libelous if they didn't name me directly.
The post made on TOPIX on December 20, 2010 was made just two days before an article was published in the Arnold-Imperial Leader newspaper by Kim Robertson who had interviewed Mr. Jamie Critchlow. Jamie Critchlow is Fox C-6 Superintendent Dianne Critchlow's husband. The article discussed Mr. Critchlow's DWI arrest in Tyler, Texas and his being fired from Tyler Community College where he was the head football coach. The article also mentioned that I was at the school board meeting asking the school board questions about a person who had been hired by the district and promoted to a job paying $98,859 after only a couple of months working for the district.
Board member Cheryl Herman told me at the meeting to call the Central Office so I could be put in touch with someone who would be able to answer my questions. She obviously didn't understand that my question was meant for the school board. They were the ones who had approved the hiring of the individual. My questions were not intended for our school district administrators. The school board approved the hiring. That's why I was asking the board.
I asked the board at the time how they could promote someone to a position if they didn't have the certifications required for the position. I wanted to know how the school board could justify paying someone a salary of $98,859 to someone who had only worked for the district for 2 months after being hired as a Behavior Intervention Support Teacher and an assistant football coach.
I never received a response from our school board to my Public Comment questions after the December 2010 school board meeting. My comments were documented in the December 2010 board meeting minutes as
"Concerns with the district". I don't believe Superintendent Critchlow wanted the public to know what my
"concerns" were in the board meeting minutes. That's how Superintendent Critchlow can keep the public in the dark.
I received an email response in May 2011 from
Superintendent Brown (now Critchlow) informing me that Mr. Critchlow was certified by MO DESE. She said that he didn't make the $98,859 that I claimed that he made, even though MO DESE records from data supplied by Fox C-6 documented his salary as $98,859 in their Core data. It also seemed as if
Superintendent Brown took offense to my questions about Mr. Critchlow at the time. I don't know if her being offended had anything to do with the fact that she's now married to Jamie Critchlow or not.
It just seemed odd that someone out of the blue would post derogatory and libelous comments about me on TOPIX just prior to an article being written in the Leader newspaper about Jamie Critchlow. It was also odd that since there were only 8 people in attendance at the December 2010 school board meeting besides the Board of Education and Central Office administrators that anyone in the general public would even known that I had spoken at the board meeting besides those in attendance. People certainly didn't find out what I talked about from board meeting minutes. Back then, board meeting minutes weren't posted until after the next board meeting plus they only documented that I had
"Concerns with the district".
So who could have been that upset to post the comments like those posted TOPIX on December 20, 2010?
It's definitely going to be interesting to see what turns up for the IP Addresses from the subpoena to TOPIX.COM. The findings may wake up the Fox C-6 community a bit more as to what's been going on in our school district for at least the last 5 or 6 years.
So how can you find some of the things that were posted on TOPIX.COM?
The easiest and quickest way is to use some of TROOP 5 or 6 or TROOP 11 or one of his other aliases favorite words in a Google search string like I've shown below. Using the Google search keyword site: allows you to restrict the domain name to TOPIX.COM (ie. site:TOPIX.COM).
Next you can add in the unique TOPIX thread identifier like the ones shown below to restrict the searches to a specific thread such as the Nepotism on Fox School Board thread or the Fox High School Superintendent thread or the Why Can't Fox and Seckman High Schools Win Football Games? thread as shown below:
TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 - Nepotism on Fox School Board
TUT6OGLPV1RMEEEO2 - Fox High School Superintendent
TG61O48KVPSPHOPUG - Why Can't Fox and Seckman High Schools Win Football Games?
Next add in one of TROOP's favorite words that he used quite often such as "inbred", "dumba$$", "fat", "$hit", "nimrod", "a$$es", "disgruntled", "hags", "rejects", "tards", "demented", etc. to find some of the posts made by TROOP or those that used similar language.
TROOP also liked to make direct attacks towards me quite often so you can always use Simpson as another search word to see what a Fox C-6 employee who has adopted the Character Education Program thinks about people who bring concerns to our school board.
Here are some example google searches that you can use to find specific posts on TOPIX.COM:
Nepotism on Fox School Board
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 inbred
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 dumba$$
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 fat
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 disgruntled
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 hags
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 nimrod
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 rejects
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 tards
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 demented
site:TOPIX.COM TP57P8GF2PEQBL909 $hit
Fox High School Superintendent
site:TOPIX.COM TUT6OGLPV1RMEEEO2 redneckery
site:TOPIX.COM TUT6OGLPV1RMEEEO2 inbred
site:TOPIX.COM TUT6OGLPV1RMEEEO2 dumba$$
site:TOPIX.COM TUT6OGLPV1RMEEEO2 fat
site:TOPIX.COM TUT6OGLPV1RMEEEO2 a$$es
Why Can't Fox and Seckman High Schools Win Football Games?
site:TOPIX.COM TG61O48KVPSPHOPUG inbred
Take note of the Locations listed on a lot of the posts that were made by TROOP and others using similar language. They typically came from Columbia, MO, Arnold, MO and United States (school possibly based on other posts). It's interesting to analyze the data when your tracking down those people who are anonymously attacking you and making false statements about you and others.
The post made by "redneckery" on December 20, 2010 a week after I spoke at the December 2010 school board meeting uses two of TROOP's favorite words,
"inbred" and
"dumba$$".
I wonder if it was just a coincidence or were they posted by the same person?
The original post from "redneckery" in December 2010 was deleted after I requested the IP information from TOPIX for the post. I specifically asked TOPIX
NOT to delete the post. Luckily,
someone quoted the post on December 21, 2010 prior to the original post being deleted so it can still be found online.
TROOP and whoever else uses the same words as TROOP left a very nice trail of evidence for the Fox C-6 community to get a good idea of who TROOP might be.
Just recently, TROOP or someone using the same language as TROOP posted anonymously using the pseudonym of
Nope and
Milk sprayed from nose on January 28, 2014 on the
Nepotism on Fox School Board thread using one of TROOP's favorite words,
"inbred".
The comments made by TROOP and other pseudonyms over the last several years certainly demonstrate to the Fox C-6 community the incredible lack of commitment that some of our district employees have made to the Character Education Program as a National District of Character that's documented in our school district's Policies and Regulations.
