https://www.michigan.gov/mspnewsroom/news-releases/2024/01/03/state-police-seeks-participants
Here’s a poster for their parents:
Michigan State Police Seeks Participants for National Missing Children’s Day Poster Contest
Late 2023/Early 2024–a mix
Two Oakland County men end the year by finally getting busted for crimes against children:
1) Southfield music teacher who worked at Cranbrook and Detroit Public Schools was charged with CSC. Took about 9 months for these charges to be reported. Sorry neighbors, it’s not shocking.
2) A Pontiac man (and a Chris Busch lookalike) facing felony charges after detectives said he was in possession of a “large quantity” of child sexually abusive material.
Today, an article about further police investigation into additional murders that may have been committed by a convicted murderer who died last week in the prison hospital at Jackson. This POS was sentenced to life in prison in October for the 1996 rape and murder of a 29-year-old Kent County, MI woman. He was arrested in 2022 after being identified through DNA analyzed by a genetic genealogist. He apparently gave investigators information about other crimes on his deathbed. If the information ends up being accurate or helpful, he is a rare POS.
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This recent article in the Traverse City Record-Eagle gave me pause, but did not surprise me. Check out the quotes from the MSP spokesman. This must be why they don’t let any of these people speak to the press.
State police go dark on disclosure of fatalities
- By Ted Wendling twendling@record-eagle.com
- Dec 23, 2023
TRAVERSE CITY — In a policy change quietly rolled out with no formal announcement, Michigan State Police have determined they will no longer identify fatal crime and crash victims, a decision that will shroud in secrecy the deaths of hundreds of Michiganders every year.
Asked for a written copy of the state agency’s new policy, Lt. Derrick Carroll, a Michigan State Police spokesman, said there isn’t one.
In an email, he said the policy change “was made in the best interest of treating everyone with dignity and respect.”
“This is not an effort to restrict public information or inhibit transparency,” Carroll wrote, “but, instead, a shift we are making as we continually review how to best serve all our customers as a modern police agency.”
But the MSP has been so secretive about the new non-disclosure policy that a Michigan Press Association spokeswoman said the MPA wasn’t aware of the policy change until the Record-Eagle recently brought it to the association’s attention.
Records produced by the MSP via a Freedom of Information Act request show that Gary Miles, editor and publisher of the Detroit News, began inquiring about the policy change last May after one of his reporters brought it to his attention.
In an email sent to MSP Communications Director Shanon Banner after the state police refused to release the names of four men who were killed in an auto accident on Interstate 96 on May 14, Miles wrote: “While we don’t understand the secrecy the MSP is employing in this specific case . . . we do want to express our concern. We want the State Police to fully consider its decision about withholding this information from the public. The implications are significant, for us in the media and for the MSP. For example, while we cover most tragedies involving multiple losses of life quite extensively, the public is rightly curious about why the media has had so little coverage of this one. ‘Are some lives less important to the Detroit media than others?’ is a question we frequently hear and try to address forthrightly.”
While Banner’s initial instructions to their public information officers were that MSP “may” release the names of fatal crime and crash victims after next-of-kin have been notified, Carroll, in an interview, made it clear that the MSP will not release those names.
“We’re not releasing names,” he said. “We ‘may’ if we want to, but we will not. It’s optional – but my higher-ups are saying we’re not going to.”
Lisa McGraw, the Michigan Press Association’s public affairs manager, said the change is bad public policy.
“Why, all of a sudden, without any input from the public, did they decide that this would be the new policy?” McGraw asked. “While we respect the families of victims, we are also always concerned, when records aren’t released, that there is a chance for a cover-up.”
When the Record-Eagle pointed out to Carroll that, under common law, the right to privacy pertains to the living and that the deceased do not have a protectable privacy interest, he cited a Michigan Court of Appeals case from 2001, Larry Baker v. City of Westland.
That case, Carroll said, found that an individual’s privacy rights, under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, survive death.
A reading of the Baker case, however, provides an important distinction pertaining to the public interest: Baker operated a legal services firm that was seeking information about injured and deceased accident victims in order to solicit them for legal services.
The appeals court specifically denied the records in the Baker case because the firm was requesting “information about private citizens that is unrelated to any inquiry regarding the workings of the government. … Fulfilling plaintiff’s request would not further the knowledge of the public concerning how their government operates, but would instead reveal information concerning private individuals.”
“There is no public interest in disclosure,’ the court found, “and the interest the Legislature desired to protect with the privacy exemption prevails.”
McGraw noted that news stories about fatalities investigated by the state police certainly pertain to the workings of the government — whether those cases were properly investigated, whether charges were filed, and how those charges were prosecuted in the courts.
Noting that the names of people who die in highway fatalities would invariably be shared on social media, whether the state police releases them or not, McGraw pointed out, “You’re going to have all this speculation out there without anybody being able to verify it.”
“That’s not a good way for the public to be informed,” she said. “I don’t want to find out that my cousin died in a car accident on Facebook.”
Three cheers for the Traverse City Record-Eagle’s policy of allowing a $1.99 day pass to view articles.
I am reminded of the MSP’s “handling” of the FOIA requests filed by the Metro Times and the Invisible Institute concerning “wandering cops” who move from one agency to another after alleged misconduct.
And who could forget the little kerfuffle in 2021 with the discovery that encryption messaging apps were being used by top MSP officials:
Michigan legislators were moved to draft legislation to ban these taxpayer employees from use of this technology:
Perhaps you are sensing a theme with this agency that I have long been familiar with.
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It appears that one of the parents of convicted mass shooter Ethan Crumbly will go to trial in Oakland County on January 23. The parents succeeded in getting separate trials.
This heinous case raises so many issues–the tragic and senseless gunning down of four students in a place they have to attend and should have been safe; America’s love affair with guns; cowardly and criminally negligent parents who not only abandoned their child at the expense of other lives–they bought him a fucking gun; the sheer evil of a human being who is probably irredeemable at such a young age; the permanent damage to the school, the community; the unbelievable expenditure of resources in the wake of this crime; the shrugging of shoulders by school officials.
I can’t help but think that in the face of the facts leading to that young man’s trip to the principal’s office and the behavior of the two parents during that meeting, if the person in charge just said “Son, we’re going to need to take a look in your backpack before you leave this office,” none of this would have occurred. He or his worthless parents don’t agree to the search? Have your school cop escort him to one of the parent’s cars and expel his ass. Yet the principal is probably immune from any kind of liability or censure. Kids literally have to be trained in anticipation of a school shooter. Principals–aside from locking things down after the shooting starts, apparently not so much. So fucked up.
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Thank you to readers for these links. I read all of my emails and the comments to this blog. I can’t respond to all of them, nor do I post every comment. I spent some time going through the backlog of “pending” comments, most of them headed with “Do not post.” I have read them all, but responded to very few. I managed to whittle the pending in-box down from 240 to 170 messages before I had to take a break. I feel badly that I have not responded to the majority of these posts, but do know that I read and considered every single one.
To the couple that wrote about pedophile priest Gary Berthiaume, I have finally been able to confirm that his DNA is in fact on file in the OCCK case. At this point the DNA taken from well over 17 suspects in this case is basically worthless because there is really nothing to compare it to aside from degraded mtDNA from a few hairs and a partial Y-str DNA sample. The evidence in this case was so mishandled (and probably purposefully destroyed and tampered with) and the MSP and the state lab have not been willing to submit all of the evidence to be tested/retested by a third-party lab.
2024 is year 48 since the first known abduction in the OCCK case–that of Mark Stebbins. Don’t even try to tell me this is an active investigation. Actively avoiding it, maybe.
- Digitize the case files in the OCCK case as has been done in other Michigan cold cases. Use the college students you are already subsidizing through the programs at MSU and WMU. They will do a better job of the project and you can’t bitch about cost.
- Submit all of the evidence in the OCCK case to a third-party lab. Let them decide what might yield previously undiscovered DNA evidence that may be suitable for a forensic genetic genealogy search.
- Either way, report to the public about why you will not take these steps or what has been discovered or remains elusive. Your 48-year news black out is indefensible.
No previous experience in the OCCK case required. Certainly absent a digitized case file, you can never get up-to-speed. So take these logical steps that are taken in every serious cold case investigation. You don’t even have to investigate the corruption in this case if you take this obvious route. But so far the continued failures, as well as your silence, in the face of other cold case solves around the world are pretty damning.
You owe this to the victims of the OCCKillers and every single kid that was raped or assaulted in and around Oakland County because of your predecessors’ machinations in this case.
Nearly 200 names linked to Jeffrey Epstein expected to be made public | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian
List could be released as soon as Tuesday after deadline for objections to unsealing of names passes midnight Monday
— Read on www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/jeffrey-epstein-ghislaine-maxwell-associates-list