“Shapiro would be an excellent vice-presidential candidate,”
said New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul in a pre-anointing of Kamala Harris piece last week. “But given the unfortunate but real antisemitism on the left right now (as well as on the right), this may not be the right time for a Jewish Democratic presidential candidate.”
I can hear my late grandfather now, whispering his favorite word in my ear—a delightful description of the fruit that ripens deep in the south-facing gullies of northbound horses.
While
Muslim anti-Semite Michiganders may block Shapiro’s path to the vice presidency this time around, and to the Oval eventually, his heritage isn’t a problem for non-bigots. But he does have a problem that I hope will keep him from higher office.
The problem with Josh Shapiro for me, and hopefully for you, is that he took part in the cover-up of the murder of a Philadelphia schoolteacher, seemingly at the behest of one of his friends.
In 2011, a 27-year-old woman named
Ellen Greenberg died in the apartment she shared with her fiancé, Sam Goldberg. Ms. Greenberg was found with a
knife in her chest lying on the floor of her kitchen. When her body was taken to the medical examiner’s office, Philadelphia Assistant Medical Examiner Marlon Osbourne found
20 stab and slash wounds. About half of them were in the back of her head and neck.
Osbourne initially
ruled her death a homicide, because, well, duh. But after what was
described in a court filing as a protracted public campaign by the Philadelphia Police Department designed to pressure him into changing his mind, as well as a
“clandestine” private meeting between him, his boss, a representative from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, and at least two representatives from the Philadelphia PD, he
changed her manner of death to suicide. Ellen Greenberg’s parents, Josh and Sandee Greenberg, have been fighting the city of Philadelphia to change the manner of their daughter’s death back to homicide ever since.
They caught a break in 2021 during a
deposition of Dr. Lindsey Emery, a former Philadelphia County Assistant Medical Examiner who, in 2019 at the request of Chief Medical Examiner Sam Gulino, reviewed a city-retained piece of Ellen Greenberg’s spinal column. Dr. Emery testified that, in her opinion, at least two of the stab wounds in Ellen Greenberg’s body had occurred after she died.
“I mean, I think, again, what is significant here is that there is no hemorrhage,” testified Dr. Emery. “I mean, lack of hemorrhage means no pulse.”
When the Greenbergs, through attorneys Joseph Podraza and William Trask,
informed Shapiro of the testimony, the Attorney General’s Office sent them a letter saying they’d reviewed the case and still supported a finding of suicide.
You read that right. Shapiro said he believed Ellen Greenberg committed suicide after finding out that, besides the fact that she was stabbed ten times in the back of her head and neck, two of the wounds she suffered occurred after she died. The evidence the AG’s office cited to support their conclusion was a list of internet searches on one of Ellen Greenberg’s computers, indicating she was looking for a painless way to commit suicide. Stabbing oneself twenty times doesn’t seem all that painless to me.
Emery, probably after consulting with the city’s attorneys, later clarified her testimony and said that her opinion that two of the stab wounds to the back of Ellen Greenberg’s neck occurred post mortem was just one possibility.
I’ve been telling the story of the murder of Ellen Greenberg on my YouTube channel since November 2021. Let me tell you a few more details I’ve learned about this case, then I’ll come back to Mr. Shapiro.
Sam Goldberg
called 911 to report that Ellen was lying on the floor with “blood everywhere” at approximately 6:31PM on January 26, 2011. He said he left their sixth-floor apartment about 45 minutes earlier to work out in the gym on the first floor. When he came back,
he told investigators, the door was locked from the inside with a hotel-style swing bar lock. When he couldn’t reach Ellen by phone, text, email, or by shouting through the cracked door, he said he broke it open and found Ellen unresponsive on the floor of their kitchen.
Goldberg’s call to 911 wasn’t the first call he made, though.
At 6:14, according to a confidential source whose information was
largely confirmed in a letter to me by an attorney representing members of Goldberg’s family, he called his cousin, Kamian Schwartzman. That call lasted about five minutes. Over the next seven minutes, Sam missed several calls from his uncle, James Schwartzman. At 6:26, James Schwartzman tried calling again, and Sam picked up the phone.
Kamian and James Schwartzman were at the apartment building sometime that night. I think I spotted Kamian on security camera footage walking up to the building at about 6:34PM, right before first responders arrived. But,
in the threatening letter his attorney sent to me, he claimed he arrived with his father after 7:00 or “closer to 7:30.” Either way, they were on-scene the night Ellen Greenberg was killed.
James and Kamian Schwartzman are both lawyers. The elder runs in the same political and social circles as Josh Shapiro. All three men hail from Philadelphia’s swanky Mine Line community, what area real estate agents call the city’s “crown jewel.”
According to
his firm’s website, James Schwartzman is the chair of the Ethics and Professional Responsibility Group. He’s a former Assistant US Attorney and was appointed to be a judge on the Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline by Governor Tom Wolf. In 2021,
he was elected as the President Judge of the Court of Judicial Discipline. For at least 19 years,
he sat on the board of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. He is politically connected and powerful according to people who know him who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. He’s somebody who I think should be profoundly acquainted with legal ethics.
The day after Ellen Greenberg was murdered, James Schwartzman and somebody else went back to the apartment under the auspices of retrieving a suit for Goldberg to wear to Ellen Greenberg’s funeral, according to a
statement from the property manager. Inexplicably, they also took her personal laptop, her work laptop, another laptop, and her cell phone from the crime scene. Witnesses have said they think Kamian Schwartzman may have been his companion, but they can’t be sure. Philadelphia Police retrieved the electronics from Judge Schwartzman two days later,
according to a property receipt.
For two days before police inspected them, the powerful family of Sam Goldberg—the person who should have been the police’s prime suspect in Ellen Greenberg’s murder—had the victim’s digital devices under their control! This includes the computer that contained the so-called “painless suicide” search evidence.
On June 18, 2022, I received an anonymous tip through my website that said Josh Shapiro went to a small school with Judge Schwartzman’s daughter and that they likely have other connections, as well. I went to work and confirmed that Mr. Shapiro and Kimberly “Kimby” Schwartzman Kimmel did indeed go to school together and that they have other connections through their children’s school activities. Mr. Shapiro called Mrs. Kimmel and her husband “friends” in
a tweet in November 2010. I also found donations from the Kimmels to Mr. Shapiro’s political campaigns.
On July 12, 2022, I posted a video to YouTube titled
Josh Shapiro May Have Broken the Law in which I detailed what I see as Mr. Shapiro’s conflict of interest in the case because of his personal relationship with the Schwartzman family.
At about 3:30PM on Friday, July 15, 2022—just three days later—the Attorney General’s office gave a statement to
6abc reporter Annie McCormack saying that they would refer the case out because of the perception of a conflict of interest. Josh Shapiro did not admit to an actual conflict.
The statement read:
“The Office of Attorney General has referred this case back to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office pursuant to Pennsylvania law. Our office performed an exhaustive review and conducted new forensic analysis, which has been shared to the extent permitted under Pennsylvania law. Unfortunately, after four years of work, new expert testimony and information has been publicly alleged but withheld from our investigators and new accusations of a conflict of interest have been made against our office.
“Building public trust in the criminal justice system is a core priority for the Office of Attorney General. A primary purpose of case conflict referrals is to help law enforcement avoid simply the appearance of a conflict so the public has full faith in the outcome of criminal investigations. While the Office of Attorney General does not have an actual conflict in this matter, circumstances beyond our control have created the appearance of a conflict and our involvement is no longer serving one of the primary purposes of the District Attorney’s original conflict referral.
“As a result, we believe it is in the best interest of the public for this case to be referred to another office. Therefore, we are sending this case back to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office so that it may be referred to another county pursuant to Pennsylvania law.
“We wish Ellen’s family nothing but the best and our office regrets that, despite our extensive work, our additional efforts have not brought more closure to the questions around her death.”
Seeking clarification, I left questions on the voicemail of Molly Steiber, who was Mr. Shapiro’s Press Secretary at the time. They went unanswered. My fundamental question asked, what publicly disclosed expert testimony and information was withheld from the Attorney General’s investigators? I can hear my grandfather whispering in my ear again.
In the days following the statement from the AG’s office, Ellen Greenberg’s case received a lot of attention.
Fox News,
People, and
The Daily Mail wrote stories and follow-ups in order to satiate their readers’ true crime hunger. Each story outlined the gruesome facts of Ellen Greenberg’s death and reported that her case was given new life when it was unexpectedly referred from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office to (ultimately) the Chester County District Attorney. But each story failed to say exactly why the case was kicked after four years of the AG insisting she died by suicide, you know, by stabbing herself in the brain and spinal cord until she was dead, and then finally plunging the knife into her already dead heart.
Crime Online, the Nancy Grace-founded website, attempted to take credit for the referral when
Leigh Egan told her readers that the case was referred following their “gut wrenching” investigation. While it’s certainly true that the case was referred after the Crime Stories team filmed an interview with Josh and Sandee Greenberg, to infer that the referral was made
because of their reporting is irresponsible. The referral happened more than a month before the Fox Nation piece hit the web.
Let’s be clear. Ellen Greenberg’s case was kicked because an anonymous viewer of my YouTube channel informed me that then Attorney General Josh Shapiro is personal friends with a family member of Sam Goldberg, Ellen Greenberg’s fiancé and the person I believe should have been investigators’ prime suspect in a murder investigation. Once the relationship was discovered, Shapiro had no choice but to stop his part in the cover-up and refer the case out. It eventually, and conveniently, landed on the desk of another Democrat raised on the Main Line with high electoral aspirations, Chester County District Attorney Deb Ryan.
In my opinion, Josh Shapiro and his staff stonewalled the Greenbergs’ efforts to have their daughter’s death ruled a homicide for four years. Why? Could it be his personal relationship with Sam Goldberg’s family? Again, in my opinion, the answer is yes.
Now Ellen Greenberg’s case is in the hands of the Chester County District Attorney, where it is again languishing as the Greenbergs continue their fight for justice for their daughter in court. Previous DA Deb Ryan has been elected to the bench in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas, an office she was seeking when the case was referred to her. The new DA, Christopher de Barrena-Sarobe, hasn’t publicly shown any interest in moving his office’s “independent investigation” into the murder of Ellen Greenberg forward. In short, the Greenbergs are being stonewalled again.
Shapiro, having higher political aspirations, moved on to the Governor’s office of the Keystone State where he now eagerly bounces on the springboard that is likely to launch him to a presidential nomination, perhaps with a short stint as the veep. He probably doesn’t even think about Ellen Greenberg. But for four years, because of his relationship with the Schwartzman family, he stymied two grieving parents who simply want the city of Philadelphia to acknowledge their daughter was murdered.
Last Updated: July 28, 2024 7:26 am
