The Pattern Around Tom Siver: A Family He Controlled, a Client He Abandoned, and a Campaign That Won’t Disclose Until It’s Too Late

Three separate Michigan records point to the same attorney, now asking Allegan County voters to make him a judge.

A Traffic Stop With No Camera and No Charge

Joseph Maverick Nagle, 22, of Comstock Park, was pulled over just after 10 p.m. on June 16, 2022, on 26th Street near 136th Avenue in Monterey Township, Allegan County. Michigan State Police’s incident report lists the location as Monterey Township. Several contemporaneous news accounts placed it in neighboring Salem Township, also in Allegan County, one of several small inconsistencies that run through the file. The Allegan County Sheriff’s Office had no dashcams and no body cameras at the time, so there is no video of the stop, the field sobriety tests, or the altercation that followed.

According to the deputy’s own account, recorded in the prosecutor’s memorandum, Nagle became agitated during sobriety testing, and the encounter escalated into a physical struggle in which the deputy suffered a nose bleed, facial bruising, and a gouge behind his ear. The deputy told investigators he feared losing consciousness and believed Nagle intended to kill him. Nagle was shot once in the chest. The bullet traveled through his heart and lodged near his lower spine. He was pronounced dead at 22:34. Toxicology later showed THC and cocaine metabolites in his system. He was not found to be armed.

Allegan County Prosecutor Myrene Koch reviewed the Michigan State Police file, medical records, and Taser data, and declined to charge the deputy on September 19, 2022, applying the legal standard for reasonable use of force by an officer. Siver held a news conference the same day and said he would ask the Michigan Attorney General’s Office to review the case. Clutch Justice has previously reported that the Attorney General’s office did not take up that request.

The Attorney Becomes the Channel

Four days after the shooting, on June 20, 2022, Siver and Associates sent a letter identifying the firm as counsel for the Nagle family, including Kelly Nagle and the estate of Joseph Maverick Nagle. The letter demanded preservation of nearly every category of evidence connected to the incident, including body camera and in car video the department did not have, and instructed investigators to “not have any direct or indirect communications” with the family. Michigan State Police’s own case file independently documents the same instruction, recorded by Detective Sergeant Todd Workman on the same date.

Three days later, on June 23, 2022, Siver emailed Detective Sergeant Christopher Hayward, Workman, and the Allegan County Prosecutor’s Office directly, copying a second attorney, Damian Nunzio. The subject line read “Evidence Preservation Letter and Other Evidence.” Siver thanked investigators for their communication, noted that his office had spoken with the family that day, and said he was attaching evidence his office had gathered. That evidence included an audio recording of an interview Siver had personally conducted with a witness, and screenshots of public Facebook discussion theorizing about the shooting. MSP’s report notes that no eyewitnesses were identified in the material Siver provided.

Timeline: What Happened, in Order

What a Plate Query Can Return, and What This One Didn’t

A Michigan license plate or vehicle query is not a single yes or no check. The Michigan State Police’s own description of LEIN access states that the network’s hot files and the National Crime Information Center feed it draws from cover stolen vehicles, stolen license plates, wanted persons, and missing persons, alongside registration and title information returned through the Secretary of State. Michigan’s own guidance for auditing LEIN vehicle entries confirms that a vehicle related transaction produces the Secretary of State response and the National Crime Information Center response together, as one package, not two separate systems a deputy would have to check independently.

That matters here because MSP’s supplemental report states plainly that Deputy [redacted] ran plate EJV6675 at 22:03:10, then notes that the plate on Nagle’s vehicle, EJV6635, is similar to the one he ran. The sentence continues. The rest of it is blacked out in the copy of the report that was released. Fifty seven seconds after that query, the deputy called out the stop using Nagle’s correct plate.

The Witness Siver Reached First

A neighbor near the scene told MSP during Hayward’s June 17 canvass that he heard a male voice shout “no” three times, each one sounding more desperate, followed by a single gunshot. He said he could not tell whether the voice belonged to someone young or old, and could not describe its pitch.

By June 23, MSP learned that Siver had already interviewed the same man. According to Siver’s account relayed to investigators, the witness described the voice as sounding like a younger male. That detail had not appeared in the witness’s original statement to MSP. When Detective Sergeant Workman went back to the witness directly to ask about it, the witness said he could not actually characterize the voice as younger or older, and could not say it was high pitched. He described someone who sounded panicked, nothing more specific than that.

The discrepancy does not establish that anyone did anything improper. It does establish that Siver was functioning as an informal parallel investigator whose additions to the evidentiary record required MSP to go back and re-verify them directly with the source, rather than through the family’s attorney.

A Tip That Reached the Family, and Where It Doesn’t Connect

After Clutch Justice’s earlier reporting on this case circulated, a commenter named Gary Farris offered a different explanation for what happened that night, framed as a contribution for the family to weigh rather than a settled account. His theory: that Allegan County deputies had a tip about a wanted man from South Haven, believed they had found him when they encountered Nagle, and that the encounter escalated from there.

The documented facts line up with part of that theory and not all of it. Benjamin William Ewart was wanted out of South Haven Township on warrants including felonious assault, tied to a May 31, 2022 report that he threatened someone while possibly armed with a gun. He was arrested June 14, 2022, two days before Nagle’s stop, in a tent at a campground in Clyde Township, Allegan County, the same county where Nagle was pulled over. Contemporaneous police descriptions listed Ewart as 33 years old, not in his early twenties as the tip described. Photos of the two men available from that period show a real physical resemblance, which may be part of why the mix-up theory has taken hold even though the documented age does not match.

Nothing in the record ties Ewart to the license plate query at 22:03:10, and nothing documents that the deputy who stopped Nagle had any reason to be looking for Ewart specifically. Two facts sit close together in time and geography. The file does not connect them, and this reporting does not either. It is presented here because the family deserves to know what has been raised, not because it has been established.

Two Small World Facts, Kept Separate

Sergeant Scott Johanson of Gun Lake Tribal Police responded to the scene as backup and later told MSP he approached the involved deputy, whom he said he had previously known from work. That is not unusual. Gun Lake Tribe’s own public safety department states plainly that all of its officers are deputized through the Allegan County Sheriff’s Department, meaning tribal officers and county deputies routinely work the same calls under the same authority.

Separately, and with no documented link to Johanson, a June 2023 Allegan County boating accident report for a jet ski collision on Lake 16 lists Thomas Siver as the operator and owner of one of the two personal watercraft involved, and lists Deputy William Greene, badge 382, as the officer who received that report. That does not prove Greene was Nagle’s shooter. It does not prove a favor was exchanged. It does not prove Siver suppressed anything. No public record Clutch Justice has reviewed has ever named the deputy who shot Nagle, in this file or any other. Whether Greene has any connection to that identity is an open question the record does not answer, not a finding this record supports.

What the Family Says About the Attorney They Hired

Kelly Nagle told Clutch Justice in writing that Siver became angry when she declined to appear on television, and that he asked to take over writing Joey’s obituary. An obituary is not a legal document, and writing one is not a lawyer’s job. Asking to control it reaches past representation into something more personal: how a family grieves and how they choose to describe their son, a decision that belongs to them alone. That request, alongside the documented record showing Siver already controlled the family’s formal channel to law enforcement from four days after the shooting onward, describes a consistent pattern of taking control of things he had no professional claim to.

A Different Client, the Same Silence

The Nagle file is not the only documented instance of Siver going quiet on someone who needed him responsive. On February 20, 2023, Siver was appointed to represent a defendant in Kentwood’s 62B District Court. Fourteen days later, the presiding judge removed him from the case, on the record, in an email to the parties.

“I removed Mr. Siver from this case on the record today. He failed to appear for a Bond Revocation Hearing and a Probable Cause Conference set at 1:45pm without making contact with the Court or the People. Defendant indicated he had not made any contact with her to date. He was appointed on February 20, 2023. Please appoint substitute counsel. The Probable Cause Conference and Bond Revocation Hearing have been reset for March 13, 2023 at 3:00pm. Defendant is in custody at KCCF.” Amanda Sterkenburg, District Judge, 62B District Court, email to counsel and parties, March 6, 2023, 4:23 p.m.

The email does not include a case number or name the underlying charge, and Clutch Justice has not obtained the full case file. What is documented, in the judge’s own words on her own letterhead, is the sequence: an appointment, two weeks of apparent silence toward a client sitting in custody, two missed court dates, and a judge removing an attorney from her docket without waiting for an explanation. It is the same posture that appears in the Nagle file from the other direction: a family that could not reach anyone except through Siver, and here, a client Siver himself apparently did not reach at all.

This is not the only other documented conduct question involving Siver. A separate Clutch Justice investigation examined an unrelated 2023 jet ski collision on Lake 16 that Siver has also declined to discuss. That reporting is available here. The matters are unconnected in substance. What connects them is a candidate with more than one documented conduct question and no public response to any of them.

The Campaign That Won’t Disclose Until It’s Too Late

In September 2026, Rita Williams conducted a visual inventory of Siver’s campaign booth at a county fair: banners, shirts and hats, an initiatives poster, balloons, table coverings, printed literature, and yard signs. Priced at typical vendor rates for each category, the visible branded inventory totals an estimated $1,400 to $2,800.

Michigan’s Campaign Finance Act lets a candidate committee skip detailed periodic disclosure if it does not expect to receive or spend more than $1,000 in an election, a reporting waiver set out in state law and explained on the Allegan County Clerk’s own campaign finance page. A booth priced above that threshold means the waiver does not apply. It does not mean the spending becomes public any sooner. Under Michigan election law, a candidate committee’s pre-election campaign statement is due no later than the eleventh day before the election. For the November 3, 2026 general election, that places the deadline on October 23, 2026. Michigan also mails no reason absentee ballots roughly 40 days ahead of Election Day, meaning ballots reach voters around September 24, about a month before Siver’s committee owes its first detailed accounting of this cycle’s spending.

After Williams posted the booth cost breakdown publicly, a commenter familiar with both campaigns’ filing status replied that Siver is not under the reporting waiver and that his campaign will file when a statement is legally due in October. The same commenter noted that fellow Allegan County judicial candidate Chris Burnett filed a campaign statement during this year’s primary, despite the fact that no primary occurred in that race and no filing was legally required of him.

Burnett’s early filing is not itself a finding about either candidate’s character. It is a data point about what is possible: a candidate can choose to disclose spending before the law requires it. Siver’s campaign, by its own account, will not.

What Siver Never Asked, and What He Never Told the Family

Two questions sit underneath everything documented so far, and the released record does not answer either one.

The first is simple. Did Siver ever learn the deputy’s name? He exchanged evidence and information directly with the lead detectives for months, reviewed material MSP shared with him, and became the family’s only formal channel to the investigation. Every version of the file made public, including the prosecutor’s own memorandum, redacts the deputy’s identity. Whether Siver’s direct dealings with investigators ever surfaced that name, and whether he told Kelly Nagle if they did, is not something this reporting can establish from the documents available. It is worth asking directly, because an attorney positioned as a family’s gatekeeper to information is either passing it through or becoming another place it stops.

The second question is sharper. The lead Michigan State Police investigator on Nagle’s case throughout the file, Detective Lieutenant Shane Criger of MSP’s 5th District Special Investigations Section, matches by name, rank, and unit the Shane Criger named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit Raymond McCann II filed in December 2019. That lawsuit alleged Criger helped arrange testimony used to charge an innocent man with perjury, part of what McCann’s suit called a corrupt scheme to pressure a false confession in the killing of 11-year-old Jodi Parrack. A Kalamazoo jury awarded McCann $14.5 million in September 2023, and Michigan State Police paid an $11 million settlement the following month. Clutch Justice could not confirm through public records exactly how the claims against Criger himself were resolved as the case moved toward that verdict, but the lawsuit naming him, alleging fabricated evidence in a wrongful conviction, was either pending or freshly resolved for the entire period he was leading the investigation into how Nagle died.

A family’s own attorney, with direct access to the investigative file and to the investigators themselves, is exactly the person positioned to raise a credibility problem like that. Nothing in the released record shows that Siver did.

Why This Still Matters

Attorneys route communications through their office for grieving families constantly, and there is nothing improper about that on its face. What makes the Nagle file worth documenting is what the arrangement coincided with: a basic investigative anomaly, logged by MSP’s own detectives and never publicly resolved, sitting inside a case where the one person outside law enforcement with sustained, direct access to investigators was also positioning himself as the family’s spokesperson, information gatherer, and gatekeeper all at once. Neither of the other two records stands alone as proof of anything either. An appointed client going two weeks without a word from his own lawyer is a documented failure regardless of what caused it. A late disclosure deadline is a feature of Michigan law, available to every candidate, that Siver’s campaign is using and Burnett’s is not. What connects all three is a candidate now asking Allegan County voters for a courtroom of his own, whose documented conduct keeps landing in the same place: people who needed a direct, responsive line to him did not get one, at the exact moments it mattered most. The plate query at 22:03:10 is still not explained. Nobody with standing to force that answer appears to have tried.