A summary of the The Washington Post series Abused by the Badge (December 19, 2024):
The New York Times listens to four survivors of sexual abuse at schools run by religious orders in Ireland (December 23, 2024):
At the end of the day
Both Oakland County and the Michigan Attorney General’s Office failed this child. A child custody proceeding is set in Florida for early January. The child’s voice will not be heard. She’s now nearing the age where her voice should be the only one that’s heard.
The family court judge has previously ruled that the child’s hearsay statements are not reliable. He granted the father’s motion to exclude DNA evidence from the Michigan investigation. The judge has reacted very negatively to considering proceedings that took place in Michigan, stating that “unless Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel testifies in his courtroom how and why the case against MacMaster had any merit prior to dismissal,” it’s off the table.
I think it’s a pretty safe bet that the Michigan AG is not going to show up in family court in Alachua County.
Leaving aside all the incredibly awful background of this tragic case, I don’t know how anyone in good conscience can ignore this assessment dated March 18, 2020 (or the other voluminous evidence from experts). I don’t know how they would refute it, except to fall back on the age-old, despicable proposition that all of this is a fairy tale. Sounds like MacMaster has lucked out in the judge assignment as well.
Unbelievable. But also systemic.
There were 703 pages of exhibits to the deposition of former Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe in the defamation action brought against him by David Busacca (MSP Trooper) and Lauren Shipani (former Investigator at AG’s Office). These documents show a grievance-filled man who could not believe another agency–the MSP, no less!–was going to show up in HIS town and investigate claims he and Paul Walton at the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office had ditched.
Here’s a crazy idea: Maybe in the years after Oakland County abandoned this child and this case, the abuse continued. Maybe the fact that the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office immediately decided the mother in the case was just out to get her ex-husband (aren’t they all??) and the deputy on the case liked what he heard from ex-cop Sean MacMaster and decided all was well on the child care front, the mother knew better than to trust Oakland County?
If anyone in Mike McCabe’s office had spent a small fraction of the effort he spent working for payback and retribution in this case on the actual child abuse investigation rather than quickly dismissing it, a child would have not been hung out to dry. But Oakland County loves them some polygraph tests, too, so MacMaster and the Orrs “pass” was good enough for the prosecutor. Contrary to the reckless statements that the CARE House interview of the child revealed no decision could be made about abuse, the record reflects that forensic interviewer Yvonne Cameron felt that “there was enough evidence to pursue,” and noted she planned to “document [the child’s] interview as a disclosure.”
IT WAS NOT YOUR CASE ANYMORE. Three and four years later, the guy is still writing two page, single-spaced outrage letters, bitching to Centerline Public Safety, sending nasty emails, working with defense attorney Alona Sharon to fuck over Trooper Busacca and exchanging emails about the DNA evidence in the case, as well as initiating “concerns” to get Lauren Schipani at the AG’s office fired, all the while feeding e-mails and selective information to reporter Heather Catallo (who ate right out of his hand). IT WASN’T YOUR CASE. YOUR OFFICE DID NOT HAVE SOLE JURISDICTION OVER A CHILD ABUSE CASE. WTF are you doing chatting it up with the defense attorney?
Your boy Paul DECLINED TO PROSECUTE in 2016 and you spend the next four years fucking with anyone who tried to get justice for this little girl. The only justice you were concerned about was for that of an ex-cop. It must be nice to have a defense attorney and a sheriff’s office on your team.
It’s a shame you and Sean had to cross paths under those circumstances. He sounds like he could have been a good fit for the sheriff’s office.
If my outrage this weekend seems overblown, I remind my readers of how I know this type of shit is systemic in Oakland County. Jessica Cooper and Paul Walton cooked up a Grand Jury scheme designed to shut my Dad up and put a shroud of silence over the entire case. He actually thought you fuckers were going to do something on his dead son’s case. They served him with a subpoena and then called him and his attorney before a collaborating OC judge and tried to charge him with a felony for disclosing the existence of the Grand Jury. To threaten his law license.
He did no such thing–he never even told his kids he had been subpoenaed. We don’t even know to this day if he testified before that Kangeroo Grand Jury. He never talked about it. Paul Walton said reporter Kevin Dietz told him my Dad disclosed to him. Dietz denied this and offered to so testify.
I learned in early 2020 that an assistant prosecutor for Jessica Cooper had years before taken that office’s child killer files to Sheriff Bouchard’s office where they were stored in order to evade further FOIA responses. That man should have lost his job, but was truthful about where the files went and is probably still in the OCP office today. When I later filed a FOIA request with Bouchard’s office for their records on the OCCK case, they responded in literally 15 minutes and said–No records here! Check with our friends as the state police. (The friends I’m sure their cold case team is collaborating and cooperating with.)
Further, I suspect Jessica and Paul were behind getting me audited by the IRS in 2015. I will write about that in the upcoming year. I know how that game works.
Finally, SEE ALSO Guarded By Jackals: Predators, the Public Officials Who Protected Them and Resolution of Michigan’s Most Notorious Cold Case, https://www.amazon.com/Guarded-Jackals-Predators-Officials-Resolution/dp/B0D9WFQV85?tag=googhydr-20&source=dsa&hvcampaign=books. Read it if you haven’t.
The focus of The Channel 7 Defenders’ segments in the MacMaster cases was all wrong. Disturbingly wrong. But it’s hard to bite the hand that feeds you.