Same Detective, Same Lawyer, Different County: What Michigan State Police and the Attorney General Never Told Joey Nagle’s Family

Bryan Fuller wasn’t working alone. Shane Criger co-built the case that cost the state $14.5 million, then led the investigation into Joseph Nagle’s death as if Nagle were the suspect. Michigan State Police employed both men. The Attorney General’s Office defended both men, then declined to take up Joey’s case despite knowing both men were actively being sued. Neither conflict was disclosed.

Two Detectives, One Case, One Verdict

I want to be direct about something the coverage since 2023 has flattened into a single name. It was not just Bryan Fuller.

Ray McCann Jr. was a reserve Constantine police officer who joined the search for eleven-year-old Jodi Parrack in 2007. He suggested searchers check the cemetery. Her body was found there. That single fact turned McCann from searcher to suspect. Seven years later, a Michigan State Police cold case team led by Sgt. Bryan Fuller reopened the investigation. Fuller did not work it alone. According to Prison Legal News, Fuller and fellow detective Shane Criger arranged for McCann to testify under oath, then used surveillance video to claim his account was false, while separately telling McCann his DNA had been matched to the killer. It had not. McCann denied any involvement eighty six times across twenty interrogations before pleading no contest to five counts of perjury in 2014. He served twenty months.

The real killer, Daniel Furlong, was arrested and confessed after McCann was already in prison. St. Joseph County Prosecutor John McDonough vacated McCann’s conviction. The Michigan Innocence Clinic’s investigation found that the surveillance video Fuller relied on did not actually establish what he had claimed, and that the evidence shared with McCann during interrogation was fabricated to entrap a man detectives had already decided was guilty.

McCann sued in December 2019. The case went to trial in September 2023. A seven person federal jury deliberated roughly four hours before awarding McCann $12.5 million in compensatory damages and $2 million in punitive damages, a verdict explicitly meant to send a message to other officers. On the stand, Fuller acknowledged lying to witnesses during the investigation and called it, in his own words, not the preferred method but not improper either. Michigan State Police settled with McCann for $11 million weeks later. Fuller, the reporting confirmed, kept working for the state police. So did Criger.

The Attorney General Defended Both of Them

I think this is the part that gets lost, because it is easier to write about one detective than about the institution that stood behind two of them.

The Michigan Attorney General’s Office represented Fuller and the other named Michigan State Police investigators throughout the McCann litigation, at public expense, for the four years between the filing of the lawsuit and the verdict. At trial, Assistant Attorney General Mark E. Donnelly argued that the detective and the other investigators followed the process and did not violate McCann’s constitutional rights. Donnelly told the jury Fuller did not want to railroad McCann. What Fuller wanted, Donnelly argued, was to solve the crime. He made that argument on behalf of a detective who had already told the same jury, under oath, that lying to witnesses was something he had done before and would do again. The jury rejected the defense by $14.5 million. Donnelly declined to comment to reporters on whether the state would appeal.

The Attorney General’s Office is Michigan’s accountability mechanism for state actors. In the McCann case, it was also Fuller and Criger’s defense counsel. Those two roles do not sit easily together, and the McCann verdict is the proof: the office charged with policing constitutional violations by state employees spent four years arguing that the violations documented in this case were not violations at all.

The Timeline

The dates matter here more than almost anywhere else in this investigation, because they show two things happening in parallel that no one connected in public until now.

June 16, 2022: Investigating the Victim Like He Was the Suspect

Joseph Maverick Nagle was twenty two years old when an Allegan County Sheriff’s deputy shot him once in the chest during a traffic stop in Monterey Township, northwest of Wayland. There was no body camera and no dash camera. Allegan County had not yet equipped its patrol deputies. There was no independent witness. The autopsy classified the death a homicide, with the bullet traveling front to back and slightly downward, and gunpowder stippling near the wound consistent with close range. Michigan State Police’s Fifth District Special Investigations Section took the case. Criger led it.

The report Clutch Justice reviewed for the September 2025 investigation into Nagle’s death documents a Taser that was never deployed despite being available and functional, a location that shifts across multiple records, and a vehicle re-examination that found no damage matching the deputy’s account of how the struggle began. It also documents an extensive toxicology and behavioral history built around Nagle: witness accounts of strange comments during a delivery route earlier that day, cocaine and THC in his system, secondhand reports from acquaintances describing a downward spiral. What the record does not contain, as far as Clutch Justice’s review shows, is a comparable documented toxicology screen or conduct review for the deputy who fired the fatal shot.

That asymmetry is a pattern, not a coincidence, and it is the same pattern that put McCann in prison. Investigating to confirm a conclusion already reached, rather than investigating to find out what happened, is what the McCann jury spent a week hearing evidence about. Criger was one of the two detectives who built that case. Three years later, he was the lead detective deciding what mattered in a dead man’s file.

What MSP and the Prosecutor Never Told Joey Nagle’s Family

Allegan County Prosecutor Myrene Koch received the Michigan State Police investigative packet on August 12, 2022. She declined to file charges. Nagle’s mother, Kelly Nagle, told reporters at the time that the family intended to ask the Michigan Attorney General’s Office to review the case. There is no indication in the public record that the family, the prosecutor, or the Attorney General’s Office was ever told the lead detective on that investigation was, at that exact moment, a named defendant in an active federal lawsuit alleging he had fabricated evidence to convict an innocent man.

And there is another layer: Joey Nagle’s family did not just hope someone else might look at the case. After Koch declined to file charges, the family sought review from the Michigan Attorney General’s Office. According to family documentation reviewed for this reporting, the Attorney General’s Office declined to take up Joey’s case.

That refusal is not neutral in context. By then, the Attorney General’s Office was already defending Bryan Fuller, Shane Criger, and the other Michigan State Police investigators in McCann’s active federal civil rights lawsuit. In other words, the office asked to review Joey’s death was the same office already representing the MSP detectives whose credibility and investigative methods were being challenged in federal court. It knew Criger was actively being sued. It knew Fuller was actively being sued. It knew the allegations involved fabricated evidence, coercive interrogation, and constitutional violations. And it still declined to take up a fatal police-shooting case led by Criger without disclosing that conflict to Joey’s family.

That is the red flag. The Attorney General’s Office was not some outside agency learning these names for the first time. It had direct institutional knowledge of the McCann litigation because it was inside that litigation. When it declined to hear Joey’s case, it did so while holding information that went directly to the credibility of the lead detective whose report helped close the door on criminal charges.

That is not a Barry County disclosure failure. Allegan County has never worked with Fuller or Nakfoor Pratt’s office. This is Michigan State Police and the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, the two institutions that had direct knowledge of Criger’s documented conduct in the McCann case, failing to flag that knowledge in a second, unrelated county, in a fatal shooting, to the one prosecutor whose charging decision depended on trusting the investigation in front of her.

MSP Owns the Duty. So Does the Attorney General’s Office.

Michigan State Police was not a bystander to Fuller and Criger’s conduct. MSP employed both men, assigned both men, and controlled the personnel decisions that kept both men in the field after a federal jury found their investigative conduct violated a citizen’s constitutional rights. That is not third party knowledge. That is an employer’s direct knowledge of its own employees’ documented conduct.

Michigan State Police has since adopted an internal policy, reviewed by Clutch Justice, governing disclosure of potential impeachment information tied to officer misconduct. Institutions do not typically write detailed disclosure procedures for problems that do not exist. The policy is best read as confirmation that MSP understood the underlying duty well before it formalized the paperwork. Brady and Giglio obligations did not begin the day that policy was adopted. They existed for as long as MSP employed detectives whose credibility was under active federal litigation. The policy documents an admission of the category of duty. It does not, on its own, answer whether MSP ever audited the cases Fuller and Criger touched during the years the McCann suit was pending, and it does not answer whether Criger’s Nagle assignment was ever reviewed against it.

The Attorney General’s Office carries a parallel version of the same duty. Donnelly’s office had direct knowledge of what the McCann evidence showed about Fuller and Criger’s methods, because that office spent four years defending those exact methods in federal court. An institution that has argued, in writing and in open court, that a detective’s conduct did not violate constitutional rights is not positioned to claim it lacked the knowledge needed to flag that detective for future disclosure. It knew. It argued the opposite in court, and lost.

That knowledge matters even more because the Attorney General’s Office was later asked to review the Nagle case and declined to take it up. The conflict was not abstract. The office was being asked to evaluate a fatal police-shooting investigation led by a detective it was already defending in another federal civil rights case. If the office believed that conflict did not require disclosure, explanation, referral, or independent screening, then that belief deserves public scrutiny. If it recognized the conflict and declined anyway, that deserves scrutiny too.

How the Actors Connect

Seven names and offices run through this story. None of them sit in isolation. Click a node to see how it connects to the rest.

Scoring the Institutional Response

Not Just Barry County’s Shame

I keep this publication rooted in Barry County because that is where my own family’s case sits, and because the pattern there is deep and documented. But I want to be direct about why this particular story does not belong there. Fuller and Criger’s conduct in the McCann case was built and defended at the state level, by Michigan State Police and by the Michigan Attorney General’s Office. The consequences of that conduct reached into a second county, Allegan, in a fatal shooting case that has nothing to do with Barry County’s judges or its prosecutor’s office. If the same detective who helped fabricate a murder case can go on to lead a fatal shooting investigation two counties away with no one along the chain flagging his record, and if the Attorney General’s Office can then decline to hear that case while knowing exactly what it knew about him, then the failure is not local. It is structural, and it sits with the two institutions that hired him, defended him, and kept deploying him.