Casey Wagner had constitutional rights. So did Lois LaRoe. Those rights were not compatible with each other once Wagner’s conduct destroyed her hearing, caused her to be diagnosed with PTSD, and inflicted more than $17,000 in documented property damage. Constitutional rights end where they materially and continuously harm another person’s ability to live safely in their own home. Wagner’s alleged stockpile of stolen MDOC property — state-owned weapons and munitions — was never his to possess at all. Every official who had a documented, enforceable tool to stop this and chose not to use it made a constitutional choice. So did Rep. Gina Johnsen, when she discouraged constituents from petitioning the Attorney General. Rights do not work in one direction.
Lois LaRoe’s Story
Lois LaRoe has lived in her Ionia County home for 18 years. Before Casey Wagner moved in, she describes the neighborhood as quiet. Since then, for approximately five years, Wagner subjected her and her neighbors to what she describes as daily explosions and high-caliber gunfire, some of it at all hours, some of it appearing to be deliberate.
She has lost significant hearing. She has been diagnosed with PTSD. Her home and car have sustained more than $17,000 in documented damage. She has, on nights when the blasts were too much, slept in empty lots to escape the noise. Neighbor Greg Sipka, who lives around the corner, described the scene after Wagner’s arrest: weapons, explosives, riot gear, a case of 40-caliber ammunition, an under-barrel grenade launcher, and munitions detectives believe were taken from a state correctional facility.
Lois is not waiting for sympathy. She is waiting for officials to use the tools they have had the entire time. While that fight continues, a GoFundMe campaign is accepting support to help her recover what five years of official inaction cost her.
Help Lois Recover When Government Fails the People
Five years of documented harm. $17,000+ in property damage. Hearing loss. PTSD. A GoFundMe campaign is raising funds to help Lois rebuild what official inaction took from her.
The Constitutional Framework: Rights Run Both Ways
The American constitutional tradition is built on a premise that is as conservative as it gets: ordered liberty. Rights exist within a framework of mutual obligation. Your rights are secured by a government that is also obligated to secure your neighbor’s rights. The Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. It does not, and never has, protected the right to exercise that possession in a manner that systematically destroys another person’s health, safety, and property.
Every serious constitutional thinker from the founding forward has understood that liberty is not license. The common law doctrine of nuisance, which predates the Constitution by centuries, exists precisely because the right to use your property has always been bounded by the obligation not to harm your neighbor’s use of theirs. Repeated explosive detonations that cause permanent hearing damage, induce PTSD, and confine an elderly woman to her home are not a constitutional exercise of property rights. They are the destruction of someone else’s.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it plainly: the right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor’s face. The Second Amendment does not suspend that principle. Responsible gun owners understand this instinctively. Rights are not rights when they function as instruments of ongoing harm to others who share the same constitutional protections you are claiming for yourself.
The stolen MDOC property removes any constitutional complexity entirely. State-owned weapons and munitions alleged to have been diverted from a correctional facility are not lawfully owned property. Wagner had no legal right to possess them. Whatever Fourth Amendment protections might apply to lawfully owned firearms in a person’s home, they do not extend to property belonging to the State of Michigan that allegedly left a secure correctional facility in the hands of the officer responsible for its custody.
What Lois’s Rights Actually Required
The First Amendment’s Petition Clause is not a soft right. It is a foundational guarantee that citizens may bring their grievances to every level of government and expect that government to respond. Lois LaRoe and her neighbors exercised that right repeatedly and fully. They contacted the Sheriff. They contacted the Prosecutor. They contacted the Township. They contacted their elected State Representative.
The response was five more years of explosions.
Substantive due process, the constitutional doctrine that protects individuals from government action that is arbitrary and fundamentally unfair, applies here in a form that does not require exotic legal argument. When government officials have in hand a written legal opinion from their own attorney confirming that a tool to stop the harm is available and enforceable, and they choose not to use it, the failure is not passive. It is active. It is a decision to leave a citizen exposed to documented ongoing harm that the state had the authority and the specific instruction to address.
“When any duty is or shall be enjoined by law upon any public officer, or upon any person holding any public trust or employment, every willful neglect to perform such duty, where no special provision shall have been made for the punishment of such delinquency, constitutes a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year or a fine of not more than $1,000.00.” When the Township’s own attorney confirmed the disorderly conduct ordinance was enforceable and officials sat on that written opinion for months while the blasts continued, the question of whether MCL 750.478 applies is not rhetorical.
The Johnsen Problem: What She Knew and What She Did with It
Rep. Gina Johnsen received the Township attorney’s September 2024 legal opinion along with Township Supervisor Kurt Scheuer. She was aware of documented constituent concerns about Wagner months before the criminal investigation became public. She publicly characterized Wagner as not breaking any laws. And in documented text messages reviewed by Clutch Justice, she explicitly discouraged constituents from contacting Attorney General Dana Nessel, warning that escalation would hurt gun rights and damage Republicans in the district.
This is not a political critique. It is a constitutional one.
The First Amendment right to petition government for redress is not limited to petitioning one’s State Representative. It encompasses the right to contact the Attorney General, the Governor, federal authorities, and any other governmental body the citizen believes can address their grievance. When a State Representative tells constituents not to contact the Attorney General because doing so will hurt her party politically, she is not protecting constituents. She is suppressing accountability.
September 2024: Township attorney confirms ordinance is enforceable. Johnsen is copied. No action taken.
September 2024 (text messages): Johnsen warns constituents not to contact AG Nessel, citing political damage to Republicans. Frames a documented public safety matter as a “disrespect issue” rather than a firearms concern.
Pre-arrest: Johnsen publicly states Wagner is not breaking any laws. This position was contradicted by her own Township attorney’s written opinion.
Post-arrest: Wagner’s home yields 196 firearms, homemade explosive devices, an under-barrel grenade launcher, and alleged stolen MDOC munitions. The “not breaking any laws” position is no longer sustainable.
March 2026: A constituent seeking answers about Johnsen’s prior defense of Wagner is warned by the House Sergeant-at-Arms that continued contact could constitute a misdemeanor. The constituent had been using a number provided by a legislative staff member.
The question is not whether Johnsen had the right to form her own view of the Wagner situation. She did. The question is whether an elected official has the authority to discourage a constituent from escalating a documented public safety concern to a state law enforcement authority on the grounds that it is politically inconvenient. The answer, grounded in the First Amendment, is no.
The Timeline That Demands a Legislative Inquiry
The Attorney General Was Contacted. She Did Not Act.
The irony of Rep. Johnsen warning constituents not to contact Attorney General Dana Nessel is that the warning was unnecessary. The AG’s office was contacted anyway. By multiple parties. And it did not act.
Lois LaRoe contacted the Attorney General directly. Johnsen constituents who had been warned against escalation escalated anyway, reaching out to the AG’s office with documented concerns about Wagner’s conduct and the pattern of official inaction surrounding it. A third-party advocate — a Veterans’ rights advocate who had independently raised concerns about Casey Wagner’s conduct with local officials — also made contact with the AG’s office. None of these contacts produced a response that altered the trajectory of the situation. Wagner continued firing weapons. The Township continued not enforcing its ordinance. The harm to Lois continued.
The million dollar question of course bcecomes this: is it bad faith, a structural gap, or both? The Attorney General’s office has no statutory obligation to respond to constituent complaints about local official inaction within any defined timeframe, or at all. When a Township attorney confirms in writing that a local ordinance is enforceable, when the local officials who received that opinion do nothing, when the county prosecutor declines to act, when the state representative discourages escalation, and when the AG’s office receives multiple contacts and takes no visible action — there is no backstop. The accountability structure has no floor.
Lois LaRoe: Contacted the Attorney General’s office directly regarding Wagner’s conduct and the failure of local officials to enforce the confirmed enforceable ordinance. No responsive action documented.
Johnsen constituents: Contacted the AG’s office despite Johnsen’s explicit warning that doing so would be politically damaging. The warning did not stop them. The AG’s office did not act on the contacts in a manner that affected the situation on the ground.
Veterans’ rights advocate: Independently raised concerns about Wagner’s conduct with local officials and the AG’s office, stressing the seriousness of the misconduct. The contacts fell on the same proverbial deaf ears as every other escalation attempt prior to Wagner’s February 2026 arrest.
Result: Wagner was not arrested until February 2026 — not because any of the escalation channels worked, but because a criminal investigation finally produced charges. The AG contact record is not evidence of malice at the state level. It is evidence of a system with no mandatory response obligation and no enforcement mechanism when local actors fail.
Johnsen warned that contacting Nessel would hurt gun rights and damage Republicans. What the record actually shows is that contacting Nessel changed nothing for Lois. The political framing was beside the point. The structural problem — that no state actor had a mandatory obligation to act on documented local inaction — was the actual issue, and it remains unaddressed.
What a State Senator Can Champion
This situation did not require extraordinary legislative action to prevent. It required ordinary governmental actors to use the tools they already had. That they did not is now part of the documented record. What a State Senator can do is use that record as a foundation for four specific actions that would make the next Lois LaRoe harder to ignore.
The documented record raises open questions: when did Rep. Johnsen first receive information that Wagner’s conduct posed a public safety concern; what action, if any, did she take; what was the basis for her public statement that he was not breaking any laws; and what role, if any, did her office play in the Township’s failure to act on its own attorney’s September 2024 opinion. A formal legislative inquiry does not presuppose the answers. It creates a record for the public that the official record does not currently contain.
Wagner was an active MDOC arsenal sergeant throughout the period Lois was experiencing documented harm from his property. MDOC did not act until criminal charges were filed. An Ombudsman provision creating an independent reporting mechanism for off-duty corrections officer misconduct, with enforceable reporting obligations, would create a channel that does not depend on local officials choosing to escalate a complaint against a colleague.
Michigan does not currently have a statutory provision explicitly protecting a constituent’s right to contact any state agency, including the Attorney General, without facing discouragement from their elected representative. What Johnsen did was constitutional in the narrow sense — she was not legally barred from expressing her view. A statutory provision making clear that elected representatives may not frame public safety referrals to state law enforcement as politically dangerous, or warn constituents against exercising their petition rights, would close the gap her conduct exposed.
Lois has been seeking legal help to pursue compensation for documented harm. When officials possess a written legal opinion confirming that an ordinance is enforceable against ongoing conduct and choose not to enforce it, the resulting harm to the neighbor absorbing that conduct should be actionable. A civil cause of action against governmental units for willful non-enforcement of confirmed enforceable ordinances, in cases of documented ongoing harm, would give the next Lois LaRoe a legal tool that the current framework does not provide.
Michigan law imposes no mandatory obligation on the Attorney General’s office to respond within any defined timeframe — or at all — to constituent complaints about local official inaction on documented public safety concerns. The Wagner case demonstrates exactly what that gap produces: Lois contacted the AG, constituents contacted the AG, a Veterans’ rights advocate contacted the AG, and none of those contacts triggered any state-level intervention before a criminal arrest finally forced the issue. A statutory provision requiring the AG’s office to acknowledge and assess complaints that document both a confirmed enforceable local ordinance and a pattern of official non-enforcement would close that floor. It would not compel prosecution. It would compel accountability — the specific thing every channel in this case was designed to avoid providing.
The Conservative Constitutional Case
This is not a gun control argument. It is the opposite. The argument for accountability in the Wagner situation is an argument for what responsible gun ownership and constitutional rights actually require: discipline, respect for others, and the principle that your rights do not override your neighbor’s.
True Second Amendment advocates should be among the first to hold Wagner accountable. He is the kind of gun owner who provides ammunition — in the political rather than literal sense — to every advocate for restriction. An arsenal sergeant who allegedly diverted state munitions, built homemade explosive devices, and used them to destroy his neighbor’s hearing for five years is not a responsible gun owner exercising constitutional rights. He is a liability to every responsible gun owner in the state.
And the officials who protected him, whether through silence, inaction, or active discouragement of legitimate escalation, did not serve the Second Amendment. They served one individual’s continued ability to harm others without consequence. That is not constitutional governance. It is its failure.
Lois LaRoe has stood her ground for five years. She deserves at least one official in Lansing to stand up with her.
Sources
About the Author
Rita Williams
Rita Williams is a Michigan-based judicial oversight analyst and founder of Clutch Justice, an investigative platform focused on court system accountability, sentencing integrity, and SCAO policy. Her work examines how courts, policies, and administrative systems operate in practice, with a focus on where process breaks down and harm is created. Drawing on lived experience and systems-level analysis, she writes to make legal structures more readable, expose institutional gaps, and advocate for reforms grounded in both evidence and human impact. Rita’s writing bridges legal analysis, institutional critique, and public education, with a consistent focus on accountability without losing sight of the people most affected by the justice system.
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