The audio clip that rocked Harford County Public Schools this week spread from the Facebook page of a Towson law firm with no ties to the school system.

Adele Brockmeyer, a partner at Turnbull Brockmeyer Law Group, on Monday posted on Facebook a 911 call purportedly from Harford schools Superintendent Sean Bulson. In it, a caller reports that his New Orleans hotel room was robbed by a woman whose name he didn’t know while he was sleeping. The response from the law firm’s 46,000 followers was swift.

By Tuesday, the county executive was calling for Bulson’s ouster. By Thursday, the superintendent had been put on leave and his board chair had resigned.

The action was gratifying for Brockmeyer, whose firm has become a go-to source of local information, which she peppers with her own questions and commentary.

Like a journalist, Brockmeyer is quick to post information on events unfolding in the area, like the firing of Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, or across the world, like the Swiss New Year’s Eve fires. But she’s a “different animal” from traditional news outlets, she said.

“I’m sharing things that the news maybe isn’t covering,” she said.

At times, she’ll recirculate rumors and theories, though she tries to confirm information before she posts it. That’s what led her to the 911 call.

In December, she came across a video of a masked figure suggesting that Bulson was robbed by a stranger while he was at a conference in New Orleans. The video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence, includes a number of unsubstantiated sordid details. Brockmeyer said she checked with her sources to confirm its validity.

“They put it in writing to me that it was true,” she said. “I posted the video.”

Shortly thereafter, Aaron Poynton, then-president of the Harford County school board, got in touch, warning Brockmeyer that the video was false, misleading and damaging. He demanded she take it down, she said, but wouldn’t answer her questions about what, exactly, was false.

In an interview, Poynton confirmed Brockmeyer’s account and said he couldn’t comment further on the matter because of potential pending litigation.

“We don’t want to look like we are being manipulated by an elected official,” Brockmeyer responded. (Poynton was appointed for a school board seat, but he was elected by board members to be the president.)

Since she felt that a lawsuit could be served, she requested the 911 call allegedly involving Bulson from the New Orleans government. When she received it, she hesitated to post it at first, she said. But she felt the urge to hold a public official accountable.

“People always say to us, ‘Are you Republicans or Democrats?’ And I’m like, I’m actually neither,” she said. “I am part of the ‘do your job.’ That is my complete belief system.”

Her firm, however, contributed to Friends of Alison Healey, the Republican Harford County State’s Attorney, in 2024, according to state campaign finance reports.

Brockmeyer said the recording compromises Bulson. Opponents could “easily” manipulate him with it.

“This is just not right to the people of Harford County,” she said. “You no longer have an independent person because all these people know that are influencing him, and so you can no longer do your job.”

In the audio clip Brockmeyer shared, the caller refers to himself as Sean.

“I let someone in my room who basically just took everything in my room,” the caller says. A document shared by the law group online said the caller’s surname is Bulson.

The Banner has requested the recording and documentation from the city of New Orleans, who said they have received a deluge of requests for it.

Bulson could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Jennifer Sawyer Hathaway, a Darlington Elementary parent who has advocated for better school funding, said she’s grateful for Brockmeyer’s posts. Hathaway said she remembers seeing posts about a New Orleans scandal last school year but didn’t see any evidence to back up the claims. She said she was impressed that Brockmeyer got to the bottom of it.

“I wouldn’t even have known where to obtain a 911 call,” she said.

But Neil Thompson, a member of the social justice advocacy group Together We Will and a grandparent of two Harford County students, questioned Brockmeyer’s motivation.

“It doesn’t seem like a conventional role for a law firm,” he said. “Law firms generally service clients. Where is the client?”

His wife, Tarsie Thompson, questioned Brockmeyer’s interest in Harford since the firm isn’t based there. “This doesn’t feel like it was to help Harford County.” She thinks the release of the audio “could’ve been done in a better way and avoided chaos.”

Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on the journalism industry and media literacy, said he found the situation unusual. While local news social media creators have been around for years, rarely does their reporting lead to the ouster of a public official, he said.

“This is the .00001% best case scenario that can happen from a local creator trying to do investigative work,” Mahadevan said. “Now, 99.99999% of the time, it could go the other way where they trash someone without doing their due diligence.”

Mahadevan said he worries that people without journalism backgrounds doing journalistic work can often post things without providing context or digging deeper, leading to the potential spread of falsehoods.

“It’s alarming to know that this might be sort of the future of investigative journalism in communities without newspapers because a majority of the time, it’s going to go poorly,” he said. “This is a dangerous precedent because it’s only going to encourage people to seek out and find inflammatory public documents and share them without context.”

Brockmeyer said her firm has 250,000 followers between Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, a following she’s been building since 2010.

It took off in 2023 during the three-day manhunt for David Linthicum, who was charged with shooting two police officers. She made 173 posts that day, giving her followers updates from a police scanner and noting what she saw on the scene, as it was near her mother’s house.

“What I learned through that, maybe more than anything, is that people wanted instant information,” she said. “I can literally, anywhere, quickly do a post.”

This article has been updated to include a recent campaign contribution by Turnbull Brockmeyer, as well as comments from Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at The Poynter Institute.

About the Education Hub

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