A couple months ago, I wrote about the investigation into the death of Ellen Greenberg. As you may recall, Greenberg's fiancé, Sam Goldberg, called 911 on January 26, 2011, saying that he had discovered her lying on the floor of her Manayunk, PA, apartment.
As Goldberg described it, he left the apartment to go to the gym, and when he returned from his workout the door was locked. After trying to get Greenberg to open the door by knocking and yelling through the door as well as calling her and sending text messages from his cell phone, he eventually broke through the lock and discovered her lying in blood on the kitchen floor. The 911 call can be heard, here.
It turns out that Greenberg had died from 20 stab wounds, some of which were in the back of the head. Initially, the death was ruled a homicide, but the determination was quickly switched to suicide. This classification has been questioned by Greenberg's parents and by many people who have reviewed the facts of the case.
Over the years, Greenberg's parents have sued to have the cause of death switched back to homicide, and the investigation authority shifted from Philadelphia to the State Attorney General's office, and then from there to the Chester County District Attorney's office. The transfers seem to have resulted from conflicts of interest in Philadelphia and also in the State Attorney General's office.
This month, with an appellate court ruling, there was an update in the Greenbergs' lawsuit. In brief,
The Commonwealth Court, in a 2-to-1 ruling, found the Greenbergs lacked standing to bring their claim, meaning simply that they can't raise this challenge.
The Greenbergs say that they will appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court, and their attorney added this thought,
Three judges say there is a completely flawed investigation, and it goes across three parts of our government -- the medical examiner's office, the district attorney's office and the Philadelphia Police Department,
The Prosecutors Podcast covered the standing decision in some more detail, here:
According to these podcasters, the 40 page opinion includes a great amount of detail of the case that should be unnecessary in a standing decision. In other words, the judges may be signaling to investigators that the court doesn't believe the current suicide designation, even though they are powerless to do anything about it in the current case.
The full decision from September 13 is here, and there is a full archive of information related to the case, here. There is also a Justice for Ellen page on Facebook.
Meanwhile, the Chester County District Attorney has been sitting on this investigation with no progress that I can find for over a year.
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