“Mutual Combat” with a 9-Year-Old? Why Did Former Allegan County Prosecutor Myrene Koch Let a Drunk Man Decide What Counts as Abuse?

The Case at the Center of It

An adult male, 18 years old, kicked and beat a 9-year-old girl. A Michigan State Police trooper responded and prepared the case for the Allegan County Prosecutor’s Office. Steven Lanting, then an assistant prosecutor in that office, declined to charge the adult, citing “mutual combat” as his justification. The framing requires a 9-year-old child to be a legal equal in a physical altercation with an adult man. No coherent prosecutorial standard supports that conclusion. Mutual combat, to the extent it is recognized in any jurisdiction, addresses consensual altercations between adults with full legal capacity. It has never been applied as a bar to charging an adult for assaulting a child.

The decision was signed off, filed, and the case was closed. The child had no further legal recourse through the prosecutor’s office.

What the Office Knew and When

According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the workplace impairment was not a secret within Koch’s office. Multiple attorneys were reportedly aware that Lanting was appearing at work under the influence of alcohol. The office’s response was to terminate him quietly. No public disclosure was made. No referral to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission was filed on the public record. No case review was announced to identify matters that may have been affected by impaired judgment.

The practical consequence of non-disclosure is that Lanting’s record at the AGC is clean, the cases he handled remain unchallenged in the official record, and the victims in any case where impairment affected the charging decision have no legal pathway to raise the issue because no one told them the issue existed.

The Safe Harbor Question

Koch served as administrator of Safe Harbor Children’s Advocacy Center, which exists specifically to provide coordinated investigative and support services for child abuse victims. In a case involving an adult physically assaulting a child — precisely the category of case Safe Harbor was created to address — Koch’s office reportedly did not engage the center. The basis for that decision has not been publicly explained.

Clutch Justice is documenting this as a sourced allegation based on information from sources with knowledge of the situation. It has not been independently verified through court records. It is included here because it is directly relevant to the institutional failure pattern in the underlying case.

Trooper Desch and the Pattern

The responding officer in the assault case was MSP Trooper Eric Desch, Wayland Post. Desch is not a new name in Allegan County accountability coverage. In 2018, Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker sent an ex parte communication to Prosecutor Koch in which she reportedly criticized Desch’s investigative work in a separate matter, saying he had not done a very good job. That communication is itself a documented judicial conduct problem. The intersection of the same trooper with the same prosecutor’s office across multiple accountability failures is a documented pattern, not a coincidence.

The children and families whose cases Lanting handled during the period when his impairment was reportedly known to the office have no way of knowing, on the current record, that those decisions may have been made under those conditions. That is the result of an office choosing a quiet termination over public accountability. It is the result that the system produces when the supervisors who are supposed to report don’t.