Joey Nagle Was Murdered June 16, 2022. Four Years Later, We May Finally Know Who Did It.

The deputy’s wrong LEIN query, undocumented verification steps, and a fatal encounter the released record still does not fully reconstruct.

That’s my read on the account’s reliability, not a claim that every sentence in it is false. MSP itself documented the wrong-plate query, and separately asked the deputy how the fight moved from Joey’s Impala to the patrol SUV. Whatever he told them in response, I could not find it in the released materials. [1, pp. 38, 44]

The investigation subjected Joey’s life to extraordinary scrutiny after his death. The deputy’s conduct, documented mistakes, procedural decisions, evidence handling, and account deserve the same scrutiny. The released record documents one LEIN plate query: EJV6675, not Joey’s EJV6635. It records the correct plate spoken over the radio, but no LEIN query of that plate and no LEIN driver-license query for Joey. [1, pp. 11–20, 33–38, 48]

Start by assuming the deputy is telling the truth. Can we reconstruct his version from the photographs, radio timestamps, autopsy, and documented evidence locations without supplying important facts ourselves? No, we absolutely cannot. The released record does not tell us enough about the movement between vehicles, the timing of particular actions, or the participants’ positions at the shot. A physically possible hypothetical is not a verified reconstruction.

Joseph Maverick Nagle was 22 when an Allegan County sheriff’s deputy shot him during a June 16, 2022 traffic stop on 26th Street in Monterey Township. The autopsy records one penetrating gunshot wound of the chest. The deputy’s June 21 letter acknowledges firing once. Koch declined charges. [3] [4] [24]

Scope: the 51-page MSP report, 93-page external-document packet, separate four-page deputy letter, autopsy, toxicology report, available scene images and inventories listing 145 photographs, and the prosecutor’s memorandum identified below. Page references are PDF page numbers. The raw LEIN drive, underlying recordings, complete phone extraction, unredacted file, and complete ACSO policies were not available for this edit. Family accounts remain separately attributed.

Report audit: inaccuracies, unsupported claims, and unresolved problems

Nineteen items came out of comparing the report against its own supporting packet. Each one below distinguishes an actual mismatch from missing corroboration, a procedural question, or an inference the evidence cannot establish; none of it labels every investigative gap a false statement. Tap any line for the evidence behind it, then keep reading, the sections that follow take the material findings further.

Running the stop against Michigan’s own training standard

Michigan’s basic-training curriculum, ACSO’s written policy, and constitutional law are three different standards, and they shouldn’t get blurred together. MCOLES sets training objectives. Allegan County still has not supplied its own traffic-stop and verification policy for comparison. None of that changes the one fact already on the record: the deputy ran the wrong plate. [1, p. 38]

MCOLES Module V-B-1, Vehicle and Driver Licensing, supplies the specific license-check objective. Under V.B.1.1, officers request a LEIN check of current license status: suspension or revocation, restrictions, wants and warrants, and repeat-offender status. Under V.B.1.3, registration information is verified through Secretary of State computer records, or INLETS through LEIN for out-of-state vehicles. [23, pp. 1–2]

The companion Module V-B-4, Stopping Vehicles and Occupant Control, addresses traffic-stop procedure. V.B.4.1 includes notifying dispatch of the stop location, reason, and vehicle license number. V.B.4.3 separately addresses determining the driver’s license and insurance status during the interview. [22, pp. 1, 3]

V-B-1’s history records a September 2021 review, before Joey’s June 16, 2022 stop, and a later November 2023 review. This establishes the module’s pre-stop history, but does not prove every word of this later copy was unchanged in June 2022 or when this deputy personally received the material. V-B-4 lists the same review dates. [23, p. 2] [22, p. 3]

The first four minutes deserve close scrutiny. Three minutes and 49 seconds elapsed between the stop call at 22:04:07 and the deputy’s report that testing was underway at 22:07:56. By that report, the only plate database query documented in the released material was the wrong one. No correct-plate LEIN query or driver-license LEIN query is documented. [1, pp. 37–38]

The timing alone does not establish that the deputy lacked a factual basis to investigate impairment. In his letter, he reported unusual stopping, travel below the speed limit, crossing the center and fog lines, marijuana odor, and agitation after Joey exited the car. He reported that Joey denied drug use. These are the deputy’s claimed observations and quoted responses, not independently verified findings about impairment. [3, pp. 1–2]

The deputy’s first documented database action was wrong. At 22:03:10 he queried EJV6675, not Joey’s plate, EJV6635. Fifty-seven seconds later he verbally gave dispatch the correct plate, but the released investigative record does not show that he ever ran EJV6635 through LEIN. Nor does it show a LEIN query of Joey’s driver’s license. Those are not minor bookkeeping questions in a traffic stop that escalated into a fatal shooting. The investigation scrutinized Joey’s conduct extensively. The deputy’s own mistakes deserve the same scrutiny. [1, pp. 37–38]

The deputy’s letter says Joey immediately handed him his license and that he later read its address. Possessing, reading, or visually inspecting the license does not establish database verification. The released Nagle record does not document a LEIN driver-license query. MSP’s narrative identifies the LEIN log as property item 28; this review has the released summary, not the underlying drive’s complete transaction data. [3, pp. 1–2] [1, p. 38]

Looking at a license and running it through LEIN are not the same act. The letter’s silence on a paper-document check does not prove one never happened, and V-B-1’s registration step carries its own computer-record component regardless. The table below sticks to what the released record actually documents. [23]

Other acts are documented: the stop and later status calls, the backup request, CPR, clearance for Fire/EMS to approach, and responders securing the scene. The deputy’s letter places the backup request before his arrest approach; the radio interval alone does not time the onset of physical contact. None of it undoes the wrong plate query or fills in the missing verification transactions. [1, pp. 37–38] [3, p. 3]

This comparison establishes an error and the verification steps missing from the released record. It is not a legal verdict on the shooting. The wrong query is not a debatable inference, it is a documented fact, and the training objectives alone make these omissions worth investigating. What ACSO’s own written policy required is the next thing that needs to be produced.

The movement MSP had to ask about

The stop is one problem. What happened after it is another, and it turns on a question Michigan State Police itself could not answer from the deputy’s own account. The deputy’s letter describes an encounter that moves repeatedly: first to the front of the Impala, then to the patrol SUV, back to the Impala for glasses, and back to the patrol SUV for attempted eye testing. That back-and-forth is worth pausing on. Sending Joey back to the Impala for his glasses only makes sense if he was already standing at the deputy’s own vehicle. The letter places him there twice, once for the initial test and again after retrieving his glasses, before the struggle even begins. Later, he describes Joey moving toward his driver’s door, placing his hands on his head, coming down onto the Impala’s hood, and standing and moving toward the middle of his car. A heavily redacted account of the struggle follows. [3, pp. 2–3]

Criger’s own contact notes hold a detail that never surfaces in the deputy’s narrated sequence above. Debriefing him at the sheriff’s department within hours of the shooting, Criger recorded a small light-colored mark on his vest and grass and soot on his pants, and asked directly whether Joey had touched those areas. The deputy said he did not think so, only that the marks were not there at the start of his shift. Criger’s own report says he went directly to the department after the call, met the deputy in a conference room, examined his firearm, and then photographed him in uniform, the marks on his face and neck, and the mark on his vest. [1, pp. 2, 4]

That description does not match the geography of his own claim. The deputy’s account places fifteen to twenty punches and three to five headbutts on one location, the left side of his face at the temple and jaw. Concentrated contact at that count, in that spot, is the kind of thing that leaves more than “marks.” What Criger’s own report and photographs document is marks on his face and neck and a mark on his vest, not a described temple injury, not a jaw injury, not swelling. Johanson’s independent account adds abrasions, cuts, and blood at the end of his nose, and none of that is specific to the temple either. [1, p. 41] The redacted medical records in the external-document packet are the one place this could be resolved with an actual clinical finding, and they are not available in this release. [1, pp. 46–49] Until they are, the injury the deputy says he received and the injury the record actually documents on him do not obviously match, and neither Criger’s report nor Koch’s memorandum appears to have asked why. [24]

Those department photographs carry embedded timestamps of 12:03 to 12:08 AM, the last photographs on that phone before a gap. The next embedded timestamp on the same model of device is 1:24:45 AM, the knife photograph, back at the scene. His own report narrates the department debrief, then the vehicle search, in that order, without giving a timestamp for when he left one for the other. [1, pp. 2, 41] [7, EXIF: IMG_0197–0200, IMG_0201]

There is a log. A handwritten scene sign-in sheet headed “Tab for Team” records investigators signing in and out by name and time, separate from the earlier responder log already cited above. Petersen signed in at 2348, close to his own report’s “approximately 11:45 PM.” Criger signed in at 0058, fifty minutes after his last department photograph, and signed out at 0237. [2, p. 15] That entry, not a photograph, is the closest thing the released record offers to a documented return to the scene. It still leaves two gaps to account for. A present-day routing calculation puts the drive from the sheriff’s department to the 26th Street scene at roughly 11 miles and 17 minutes; actual travel time that night is not documented. [32] Even granting an immediate departure and a direct drive, that leaves roughly half an hour of the fifty-minute gap between the last department photograph and the 0058 sign-in unexplained. A further 26 minutes and 45 seconds separate that sign-in from the 1:24:45 AM knife photograph, the first documented act back at the scene after he signed in. Whatever filled either gap, the search Petersen describes could not have happened with Criger present any earlier than the sign-in log puts him back on scene. [1, p. 41]

CPR is one place the grass could come from: the deputy was doing compressions on Joey when Holscher arrived to take over, and Joey’s final documented position was in the grass. But that account comes from Holscher, not from the deputy. [1, pp. 9–10] The letter this review draws from is cited here only through the shot itself. It never narrates him moving to Joey afterward. It never places him in the grass during the struggle either. In his own words, released to the public, he has not explained how he got there. The same man MSP had to press for an explanation of how the fight moved from the Impala to the SUV has not explained this movement either, and nobody made him. [3, pp. 2–3]

He also gave an account to a colleague before he gave one to MSP. Sgt. Scott Johanson of the Gun Lake Tribal Police, who did not witness the shooting, told investigators that when he reached the deputy afterward, the deputy said: “I just kept letting him hit me.” Johanson recorded seeing abrasions and cuts on the deputy and blood at the end of his nose. That line later ran as a FOX17 headline; it originates here, in MSP’s own file, independent of the press. [1, p. 41]

That is a specific claim: one man striking, the other absorbing it. It sits uneasily next to Joey’s own injuries, detailed later in this review, abrasions on the backs of his fingers, his forearms, and his palm, the locations a forensic examiner would want to test against a raised, blocking arm, not only against a fist thrown again and again. Nobody in this file ran that comparison, and nobody at FOX17 checked the quote against the autopsy before running it as a headline. A man defending himself with a raised arm ends up with abrasions on the backs of his fingers and his forearm. That is what the record documents on Joey. It is not what “I just kept letting him hit me” describes.

Criger’s follow-up is specific. He asked whether the deputy knew or remembered how they got from the front of Nagle’s vehicle to the front or front side of the deputy’s vehicle. On July 7, Criger received an answer through attorney Mike Woronko. He recorded that it was unsigned because it came through an email exchange, but would serve as the deputy’s official answer. [1, p. 44]

The question demonstrates a gap in the original account. It does not establish that MSP found the movement physically impossible. Nor does this release establish that the answer was withheld from the prosecutor: Criger said it would be included in external documents, and later wrote that the report and all external documents would be forwarded for review on August 11. I could not locate the substantive July 7 answer in the supplied packet. [1, pp. 44, 49]

The evidence is spread between two vehicles

Absent that answer, the physical evidence is the closest thing to one. The photographs show keys on the Impala’s driver’s seat. The reports place Joey’s glasses and driver’s license on the roadway near that car, and the deputy’s flashlight in the grassy shoulder between the vehicles. The casing was documented near the patrol SUV; the lab describes its collection location as southwest of that vehicle. Joey’s final documented position was in the grass near the SUV’s passenger-side front wheel. [1, pp. 4–5] [2, pp. 8–9, 80–81] [7]

That distribution calls for an explanation of movement, recovery, and scene changes. A final position documented after lifesaving efforts is not automatically the precise position at the instant of the shot. The casing also cannot, by itself, fix the shooter’s location.

Research on cartridge-case ejection shows why a blanket “within a few feet” rule is insufficient: firearm and ammunition characteristics, magazine condition, human factors, and the environment affect where cases land. A useful reconstruction would test the recovered location against the actual firearm and relevant conditions, including possible deflection or later movement. [8] [9]

There was firearm examination here. The laboratory identified scene item L1 as fired by the submitted Glock 22 Gen4 .40-caliber pistol. The recovered projectile comparison was inconclusive: it shared class characteristics but lacked sufficient reproducible individual characteristics for identification. That is neither a positive projectile match nor an exclusion. These tests address the firearm; they do not explain the participants’ positions. [2, pp. 83–84]

The hood check and the downward wound path

The bullet entered the front of Joey’s chest and traveled toward his back and lower in his body, ending in his spine. That is what the medical examiner means by a downward wound path. The deputy, meanwhile, described himself as starting to drop before releasing Joey’s wrist, drawing his gun, and firing. The released record needs to explain how the gun and Joey’s body were positioned for that account to produce the wound the examiner found. I could not locate a reconstruction that supplies that explanation. [4, pp. 3–4] [3, p. 3]

“Downward” here describes the bullet’s direction within Joey’s body, toward his feet, using the body’s normal upright position as a reference. It does not automatically mean the gun was pointed downward toward the road. If a person’s torso is tilted, those directions can differ. The wound therefore cannot, by itself, prove whether the deputy was standing, crouching, or falling. But it gives investigators a concrete physical finding that any reconstruction must explain. [4, p. 4]

Koch’s memorandum recounts the deputy’s claims of repeated punches and headbutts, blurred vision, and weakening legs. Those are his reported experiences; the wound path does not independently verify them. The relevant question is precise: where were Joey’s torso and the gun’s muzzle at the instant of the shot, and what evidence establishes those positions? A statement that the men were close together does not answer it. [24] [3, p. 3]

The hood presents a separate corroboration problem. After reviewing the deputy’s statement, Criger examined the Impala and found no hood damage or dents. He found dents on the rear driver’s door and rear quarter panel, but could not determine when or how they occurred. The precise passage that prompted his inspection is redacted. The inspection supplied no damage to corroborate the claimed hood contact, although contact does not necessarily leave a dent. [1, p. 7]

The examiner also recorded a scrape around part of the entrance wound and small gunpowder marks around it, with no muzzle imprint or soot. Those details belong in a forensic reconstruction; they do not independently locate the deputy to Joey’s “upper right” or establish either man’s posture. The full reported path was front to back, slightly right to left, and downward. [4, pp. 3–4]

Koch reports that Dr. Brooks estimated the muzzle was six to eighteen inches away in a September 2022 discussion. That supports a close-range shot. It does not tell us how either man was leaning or where the gun was relative to Joey’s chest. [24] No known-distance test-firing procedure was located in the released materials reviewed. The firearms report documents two comparison shots, but not an experiment comparing powder patterns at measured distances. [2, pp. 83–84]

As released, the deputy’s explanation does not give me a coherent, evidence-supported picture of the shooting. That is an unresolved reconstruction problem, not proof that a downward wound makes his account physically impossible. Investigators needed to connect his claimed movement to the wound and the scene. The public should be able to examine that connection rather than be asked to assume it.

The unused Taser deserves direct scrutiny. The deputy had a less-lethal weapon, serial X2900EM21; MSP’s downloaded history indicated it was not used during this incident. [1, pp. 8, 44–45] [2, pp. 63–75] Koch concluded it was not a viable option during the close struggle. That is her assessment, not a case-specific technical finding established here. [24] The investigative question includes earlier opportunities: was there a reasonable chance to use less-lethal force, disengage, create distance, or wait for backup before the encounter reached the deadly-force threshold the deputy described? The release does not resolve that question, and Allegan County has not tried to. What it has offered instead is silence about a working less-lethal weapon that sat unused while a man died.

The timing of evidence collection was materially different. MSP’s property entries record the deputy’s uniform shirt and Taser as seized from D/Sgt. Arnsman on June 22, six days after the shooting. The Taser history was downloaded July 7, three weeks after the shooting. Criger records receiving medical records through counsel on August 4. Evidence from Joey, including blood, fingernail clippings, a DNA card, and clothing, was collected through the June 17 autopsy and immediate death investigation. Most related property entries carry June 17; the shirt entry carries June 18. That disparity deserves explanation. [1, pp. 8, 22–26, 44–45, 48] [4, p. 7]

The record also identifies immediate collection involving the deputy: his firearm, ammunition, and radio earpiece connector were seized June 16, and his injuries and uniform were photographed. Casperson separately records drying and securing Joey’s clothing before repackaging it June 22. These details matter when comparing treatment of the evidence. The later seizure and receipt dates do not, by themselves, establish a custody break. [1, pp. 2–4, 22]

Criger searched the vehicle the crime lab refused to touch

The vehicle itself raises a parallel custody question. This detail is explicit in MSP’s laboratory report: the Impala’s front driver and passenger windows were rolled down; its rear windows were up. The patrol SUV’s four doors were closed and its windows were up, although its rear hatch was open. These are documented scene conditions, not proof that every window remained in that position throughout the stop or subsequent response. [2, p. 80]

“Since a search warrant was not obtained, the CSRT did not search the … Impala.” [2, p. 80]

Criger and D/Sgt. Todd Petersen entered that same vehicle anyway, before it was towed, and called it an inventory. Petersen’s own supplemental report lists it as one of three things he did while he was still on scene that night: interviewing three officers, “assisting D/Lt. Criger with searching the suspect vehicle,” and standing by for the Medical Examiner’s Office, and eventually “releasing the scene once the Grand Rapids forensic laboratory was completed with the scene.” By Petersen’s own account, the vehicle search happened somewhere inside that sequence, before the scene was released, not afterward. [1, p. 41]

The report calls it “the suspect vehicle” on that same page, and “the suspects vehicle” again two pages later, listing it alongside the patrol SUV as one of the two vehicles towed from the scene. [1, pp. 41, 43] By the time anyone searched that car, Joey was already the man the deputy had shot and killed. He was not a suspect being pursued. He was the person this entire report exists to investigate the death of. The report’s signature page credits this document to both investigators jointly, Criger and Petersen. The word choice belongs to the report, not to one officer misspeaking. [1, p. 43]

The photo metadata puts a number on that window. A Michigan State Police Crime Laboratory camera, body serial 362073002689, timestamped a wide scene photograph at 1:17:40 AM showing the Grand Rapids crime lab van still parked on scene. The first located photograph of the knife, an iPhone 11 image, carries an embedded capture time of 1:24:45 AM, roughly seven minutes later. The same crime-lab camera kept working the scene well past that: another of its photographs is timestamped 1:49:49 AM, more than twenty minutes after the knife photo. Those are the devices’ own embedded timestamps, not estimates. The lab’s cameras were documenting the scene before the knife photo, and they were still documenting it well after. [7, EXIF: IMG_7852, IMG_0201, IMG_7945]

The same crime-lab camera, body serial 362073002689, first photographed the inside of Joey’s Impala at 1:54:23 AM, twenty-nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds after the knife photo. This review examined all 88 of that camera’s photographs between its 1:17:40 AM scene shot and 1:54:53 AM, the complete run released in that window. None of them shows the inside of Joey’s car before 1:54:23 AM. In the time between, the camera documented the roadway, the evidence markers, and an extended series on the responding patrol Explorer’s own interior and cargo, before it ever turned to the Impala. Sixteen seconds after that first interior frame, at 1:54:39 AM, the same camera photographed Joey’s rear passenger compartment and captured a large air compressor occupying a substantial part of the back seat. It is not a small item, and it is not listed anywhere in Criger’s “items of note.” Whenever the lab got its own camera inside that car, Criger and Petersen had already been inside it with an iPhone for nearly thirty minutes, and the compressor they photographed was never inventoried. [7, EXIF: IMG_7959, IMG_7961]

An inventory that follows established departmental procedure can be a lawful exception to the warrant requirement. The Michigan Supreme Court set that standard directly: both the impoundment decision and the inventory itself must follow standardized departmental procedures, and neither can be used “as a pretext for criminal investigation.” The U.S. Supreme Court recognized the same narrow exception in South Dakota v. Opperman and Colorado v. Bertine, an inventory has to serve a real administrative purpose under standardized criteria, not function as a search for evidence. Allegan County has never supplied the procedure Criger says he followed, in this review or the one that preceded it. [31] [25] [26]

What Criger actually logged does not read like an inventory. His report says the vehicle “was searched to take inventory of any valuables inside the vehicle,” then immediately narrows to four “items of note”: a folding knife, a marijuana cigarette, a dish holding two more, and a cell phone. Every one of those is evidentiary. None of it is what a valuables inventory exists to catch, cash, electronics, and personal effects logged so the county cannot be blamed later for what goes missing. [1, p. 5]

None of those four items was independently documented by the crime lab’s own camera. This review examined every photograph released from both devices that worked this scene that night, the crime lab’s full run of roughly 117 frames from 1:16 AM to 3:18 AM, and the iPhone’s ten frames from 12:03 AM to 1:35 AM. The knife appears, but only on the iPhone, not once on the lab’s camera, and not in the position Criger’s report describes; the close-up images show it already recovered. The marijuana cigarette, the dish holding two more, and the cell phone do not appear in any photograph in the released material, on either device. Criger’s narrative and the property log are the only documentation those three items have. [7]

The gap in that inventory has its own paper trail. Joey’s mother asked for his wallet and his varsity jacket. On July 28, six weeks after the shooting, Workman found the wallet sitting in the center console, exactly where an inventory of valuables should have caught it the first time. A supplemental report dated August 10 states it without qualification: “The varsity jacket and wallet are not listed in property.” Six weeks is not a clerical delay. It is the record showing that whatever Criger and Petersen were doing inside that car, cataloguing Joey’s valuables was not it. [1, pp. 46, 48]

MSP’s own crime lab looked at the same locked car and decided it needed a warrant. The lead investigator looked at it and decided it needed an inventory, then inventoried four pieces of evidence and missed a wallet sitting in the console for over a month. Those cannot both be the caretaking function the law requires. Allegan County can produce the procedure Criger says he followed, or it can explain why a search that found a knife and missed a wallet should still be called routine.

Open windows make access to the interior a separate, legitimate scene-integrity question on top of this one. They do not by themselves establish that someone introduced an object. The useful questions are who accessed the vehicle, when the interior was first photographed, and whether those photographs precede or follow each search or handling event.

The Milwaukee Knife: A Missed Fingerprint Opportunity

The released photographs show the knife. They do not show it where Criger says he found it. Criger reports finding a red folding knife, blade out, between the Impala’s front passenger seat and passenger door. The close-up images identify a Milwaukee-branded knife, but I found no photograph in the reviewed release documenting it in that reported position before removal. A photograph of an item after recovery cannot independently establish where it was recovered. [1, p. 5] [7, IMG_0201–0202]

That leaves a material part of the evidence story dependent on Criger’s account. Given his reported involvement in the McCann investigation, discussed below, I do not find him a reliable narrator whose account should be accepted without independent corroboration. The answer is an in-place photograph, a recording, a contemporaneous recovery record, or another independently documented observation. His report should be tested against such evidence, not treated as a substitute for it.

Fingerprints were an obvious investigative question. Joey’s fingerprints and palmprints were collected at autopsy, yet I found no disclosed latent-print examination or comparison result for the knife, no disclosed DNA result, and no documented determination of ownership. The release does not explain whether testing was requested, attempted, or declined. That is the missed opportunity in the public record: a physical item was introduced into the account without disclosed forensic work establishing who handled it. [4, p. 7] [1, p. 5]

A fingerprint examination would not guarantee a usable print or settle ownership by itself. But that does not answer why the released investigation supplies no result or explanation. Investigators pursued Joey’s phone contents, alleged drug use, workplace behavior, and personal history in detail. Readers deserve an equally specific account of what they did to test the knife’s connection to him.

According to Joey’s mother, this was not a type of knife she recognized him as carrying, and MSP never asked her about it. That omission is telling. Asking whether she recognized the knife would have been a straightforward ownership inquiry. Her answer would not, by itself, settle who owned or handled it, but investigators should have sought it rather than leaving that obvious lead unexplored. Criger places it inside the car, not on Joey’s person or beside his body. Holscher, who took over chest compressions, recalled no weapon on Joey or on the nearby ground, while explaining that his attention was on lifesaving. The deputy’s released statement does not describe Joey threatening him with this knife. Its reported discovery therefore does not establish that it played any role in the confrontation. [1, pp. 5, 10] [3]

The scene photographs also show a Milwaukee-branded work light and a survey target. The shared brand does not identify the knife’s owner or prove that a responder brought it. It is a reason to ask an ownership question, not an answer. [7] The missing in-place documentation and undisclosed testing are the stronger issues.

The questions remain direct: who first saw the knife, who removed it, what documented its original position, who handled it afterward, and what forensic examinations were performed? If those records exist, release them. If the work was not done, explain why.

Joey’s hands deserve a forensic comparison, not an assumption

This is the comparison the deputy’s line to Sgt. Johanson invites. “I just kept letting him hit me” describes one man throwing punches and the other only absorbing them. The autopsy describes scattered abrasions on Joey’s right arm and forearm, left forearm and elbow, a diagonal abrasion across his right palm, and abrasions on the backs of the end joints of his right third through fifth fingers, locations consistent with a raised, blocking arm as much as with a swinging one. It separately describes faint contusions over the right metacarpophalangeal joints, the main knuckles. These are the examiner’s findings. The report does not classify them as a tally of defensive wounds versus punching injuries. Older scars are described separately and should not be counted as injuries from this encounter. [4, pp. 3–4] [1, p. 41]

My concern is that this spread of injuries calls for serious examination of shielding, bracing, grabbing, grappling, or falling, rather than simply treating injured hands as proof of an attack. Whether those mechanisms explain particular marks is a question for a forensic pathologist reviewing the complete evidence. The faint knuckle contusions also have to be considered when testing the claimed blows. Neither their presence nor their relative faintness establishes how many punches were thrown.

What is a “fight bite”? It is a wound caused when a clenched fist strikes another person’s teeth, often breaking the skin over a knuckle. It does not require the other person to deliberately bite. Such a wound can injure deeper structures and introduce bacteria. A bruise over a knuckle is not, by itself, a fight bite. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Joey’s autopsy does not identify a fight bite or describe a tooth-related knuckle laceration. That does not prove he never struck anyone: a punch need not hit teeth or leave a distinctive wound. It does mean the injury descriptions should be tested against the claimed approximately 15 to 20 blows, rather than assumed to corroborate that number. [4, p. 4] [24]

The claimed headbutts need their own forensic comparison

The deputy’s account of headbutting should be tested against Joey’s documented head injuries. The autopsy describes a 1/4-by-1/4-inch abrasion at the right temporal region of the forehead and a small abrasion inside the lower lip. It does not describe those findings as head bruises or identify them as injuries caused by headbutting. The distinction matters: an abrasion is a surface injury; a contusion is a bruise. [4, p. 4]

I do not regard these findings as adequate corroboration of the claimed headbutts. But the report does not establish that headbutting was impossible or that these injuries are medically inconsistent with it. That requires a forensic comparison of the claimed points of contact, the injuries to both men, and the complete photographs. A reviewer should explain whether the findings support the described impacts, whether they could reflect other contact during the struggle, and what can actually be distinguished. The deputy’s account should not supply its own corroboration.

The blood evidence also needs precision. The autopsy records 650 mL of blood in the right chest cavity and 300 mL in the abdominal cavity, as well as hemorrhage along the bullet path. A photograph showing little pooled blood outside his body does not negate that documented internal bleeding or, by itself, locate the shot. [4, pp. 1, 4]

The license, scene access, and what Spoelma’s report actually establishes

Trooper Tyler Spoelma’s report says Joey was identified through a Michigan driver’s license located on the roadway near the Impala. It also describes Spoelma arriving during CPR, securing the scene with Tatrow and Sgt. Baker, and starting a log that Brown continued. Brown separately confirms that Spoelma completed the first page. [2, pp. 6–7, 13]

The handwritten log is headed “As of 2230 hrs, below units were on scene”, and includes earlier arrival times. It is not a record beginning with the shooting or a contemporaneous log of every first entry. Tatrow’s approximately 22:38 police-line assignment is a separate event. Responders and lifesaving equipment were already within the scene before this documentation. The access history therefore needs to be reconstructed alongside dispatch, recordings, photographs, and responder accounts. [2, pp. 5–7, 16]

The face-down license in the photographs raises an obvious handling question: who read it, whether anyone lifted or turned it, and when its photographed position was established. The report does not say that Spoelma personally picked it up. Nor does its failure to describe a conversation with the deputy establish that physically lifting the card was Spoelma’s only possible source of identifying information. [2, p. 6] [7]

My reading is that Spoelma disturbed the scene and then realized what he had done. That is my assessment of the identification account and the unexplained handling of the license, not something the report admits. I do not find the missing handling chronology acceptable. Spoelma’s report lists activated body-camera and in-car recordings. Release them. Show who handled the license, when it was moved, and whether its original position was documented. The public deserves that sequence, not an assumption that the photographs show an untouched scene. [2, pp. 6–7]

The reconstruction must also distinguish three positions: where Joey was when the shot was fired, where he initially fell, and where responders treated him. Photographs near the patrol vehicle document a treatment/final location; they do not automatically establish the first two positions. The investigation needs to account for any movement between them instead of collapsing all three into a single point. [7]

What the clock does and does not show

Return to the clock, this time with MSP’s dispatch summary rather than a single line in a table. MSP’s radio summary records the stop at 10:04:07 p.m.; testing status at 10:07:56; “still testing” at 10:11:19; a backup request at 10:13:19; “fighting with one” at 10:13:46; and “shot fired” at 10:14:41. That is 10 minutes 34 seconds from the stop call to the shots-fired report, 82 seconds from backup request to shots-fired report, and 55 seconds from fight report to shots-fired report. These are radio intervals, not direct measurements of the start of physical contact or the instant of firing. [1, pp. 37–38]

The Letter describes aborted and restarted horizontal gaze nystagmus (HGN) testing.

A model that automatically adds 90–120 seconds for a completed HGN test misrepresents that account. Nor can the entire stop, glasses retrieval, and testing sequence be squeezed into the final 55 or 82 seconds: those activities are described earlier.

The deputy’s own account does not document proper administration of the eye test. He describes Joey retrieving and putting on his glasses but never describes removing them before testing, as NHTSA’s instructions require. That discrepancy deserves an answer. If Joey kept his glasses on, the test departed from that instruction; the omission in the statement alone does not establish whether they stayed on. Investigators should have clarified this basic procedural question. [3, p. 2] [10, Session 3, p. 20]

Who the records identify as not having shot Joey

The same clock that raises those questions also fixes who was where, and when, which makes it possible to say clearly who this file rules out. Names appear throughout a fatal-shooting file because people respond, provide medical aid, document evidence, or investigate. Their presence in the paperwork is not evidence that they fired the shot. The following exclusions are based on the reported response chronology, not an independent forensic examination of every person’s firearm.

This is a record-supported exclusion list, not a method for guessing a redacted name. The involved deputy remains unnamed in these released documents. Unit A6 and the patrol vehicle’s plate are not, by themselves, a reliable basis for identifying him.

ACSO transparency earns an F under the disclosure criterion stated above. The deputy is unnamed in the released materials, preventing a reliable officer-specific review of his background and disciplinary history. The public should not have to identify the person who used fatal force by eliminating names from an agency assignment page. The file documents firearm collection, injury photographs, medical records, Taser data, and a request for clarification. The issue is whether that work adequately tested his account and whether the public has been given the information needed to examine it. [1, pp. 2–4, 8, 44–45, 48]

The deputy’s letter identifies his assignment as the Leighton/Dorr contract. Clutch was able to locate a June 10, 2022 Wayback Machine snapshot of Allegan County’s contracted-patrols page as naming Bernard Austhof and Matt Langlois. Interestingly, by 2023, Langlois is the sole remaining contracted officer listed.[21] Austhof’s post-shot response is documented independently. If the retained snapshot lists only those two deputies, that makes the other listed deputy a concrete identification lead. A public assignment page still does not establish who actually worked the shift or account for substitutions. That is why the duty assignment matters. Duty rosters and administrative-leave records are the relevant next sources. Clutch has pending requests for those records and the deputy’s disciplinary and promotion history[3, p. 1] [1, p. 38]

The phone, the floor mat, and the identification question

Identity cuts the other way too, toward what the deputy actually knew about Joey, and toward what happened to Joey’s belongings afterward. The phone was not merely mentioned in passing. Petersen seized it from the dashboard as property item 23. Criger delivered it to Computer Crimes on July 7. The July 19 examination report says the iPhone arrived damaged, that a full file-system extraction was obtained, and that two notes and two videos were tagged for the investigator’s review. Criger later acknowledged that he did not personally examine every part of the large extraction. [1, pp. 6, 44, 48] [2, pp. 37–39]

It is worth emphasizing that the phone was found after the incident in damaged condition, on the dash. But the Deputy’s statement claimed Joey had been driving with the phone in his lap.

MSP also documented Joey’s mother’s request for the phone’s return on July 26. The family states that it has not been returned. We still don’t know what’s on Joey’s phone. I found no receipt documenting its return to the family in the supplied packet. The 2022 documents establish seizure, extraction, and a return request; they do not independently establish the phone’s present custodian or the current reason for retention. [1, p. 48]

The family account in the supplied draft also reports a floor mat missing when the vehicle was returned. In my review, I did not locate a floor-mat property entry or a before-and-after custody record resolving that concern. Separately, the report documents a family request for Joey’s wallet and varsity jacket, a later search that found the wallet, and failure to locate the jacket. [1, pp. 46, 48, 51]

The wrong-plate query and the absence of documented driver-license verification do not establish that the deputy entirely lacked Joey’s identity. The deputy’s statement claims Joey handed over his license and that he later read its address. Responders report identifying Joey from the license recovered in the roadway; which means they admittedly disturbed the crime scene. And with that, the incorrect database findings remain: EJV6675 was queried; EJV6635 and Joey’s driver’s license have no documented LEIN query in the released material. [1, p. 38] [3, pp. 1–2] [2, p. 6]

When MSP came to inform Joey’s family of the shooting, the family attributes the remark “That’s him then” to the deputies. Establishing what that remark meant requires the speaker, context, and any recording; the phrase alone does not resolve what the deputy knew before firing.

Scrutiny of Joey and scrutiny of the investigation

The file examines Joey’s prior behavior, workplace allegations, alleged drug use, social-media activity, and selected phone contents. If investigators were willing to examine Joey’s life at that level, the deputy’s own verifiable errors and procedural decisions should not receive less scrutiny. The wrong query, undocumented verification, unused Taser, collection dates, observed injuries, and unresolved scene reconstruction deserve direct examination. That is a comparison of documented investigative work, not a finding about investigators’ motives. [1, pp. 8, 11–20, 28, 33–38, 44–48]

Joey’s toxicology is disclosed in detail. The deputy’s is not. No deputy drug or alcohol toxicology result was located in the released materials reviewed. Medical treatment and injury records do not substitute for that testing. The hospital record says, “Phlebotomy contacted for legal draw per patient supervisor,” and the next page records phlebotomy at bedside. Those entries require follow-up: what was collected, what analysis was requested or performed, who received it, and where are any results? The visible laboratory entries concern HIV and hepatitis exposure testing, not a drug or alcohol screen. The record does not justify treating those entries as proof of either a completed toxicology test or a decision never to test. [2, pp. 48–54] [5, pp. 1–3]

The toxicology distinction is exact. NMS confirmed delta-9 THC and its inactive carboxy metabolite in iliac blood. Cocaine/metabolites appeared in an unconfirmed presumptive urine screen, for which the laboratory recommended a more definitive confirmation technique. Blood cocaine/metabolite confirmation was performed. No confirmed positive cocaine finding was reported in blood. A presumptive urine finding is NOT a confirmed measure of cocaine intoxication during the stop. Those tests are designed to work quickly, and are prone to false positives. [5, pp. 1–3]

FOX17’s subheadline stated that Joey “was on cocaine when shot.” Its text reported positive toxicology without distinguishing the presumptive urine result from confirmed blood findings. That presentation overstates what the laboratory report establishes. It omits the confirmation limitation and implies certainty about the time of the shooting that the reported result does not supply. They failed at their due diligence, likely because Myrene Koch’s office wanted to push the narrative as quickly as possible. [19] [5, pp. 1–3]

That same conflation was not confined to the press. It sits inside Koch’s own memorandum. She lists cocaine alongside THC among the substances in Joey’s system, the same unqualified framing WoodTV and FOX17 both carried straight from her reasoning, and she draws no distinction between the two: one confirmed in blood, one a presumptive urine screen the laboratory itself flagged as unreliable and recommended confirming further. That further confirmation was not obtained. She charged ahead with the unconfirmed result anyway. [24] [5, pp. 1–3]

This is not a subtle scientific point. It is printed in the lab report she had in hand before she wrote her declination. Knowing the difference between a presumptive screen and a confirmed result is not an advanced forensic skill; it is on the front page of the report. The Allegan County Prosecutor, deciding whether a deputy who killed a man would face charges, either read that distinction and left it out because it complicated the narrative, or never read it at all. Neither is acceptable from the person the county trusted to get this right.

If Myrene Koch cannot correctly read a toxicology report, or catch the wrong-plate query and the missing verification transactions this review found sitting in the same file, what confidence should anyone have in the charging decisions she made in the cases nobody is reviewing?

There are limits to broad claims about neglected evidence. Fingerprints and palmprints were collected at autopsy. Scene coordinates and photographs were obtained. The firearm was tested. The deputy’s injuries were photographed and described, and the external-document packet contains redacted medical records. The narrower question is whether the relevant items were tested and the results used to resolve the contested account. I found no disclosed knife latent-print/DNA result, ejection-location experiment, or body-position reconstruction answering those questions. Once again, another poor investigation carried out by MSP at taxpayer and the Nagle family’s expense. [4, p. 7] [2, pp. 8–9, 40–62, 79–84] [1, pp. 4, 28, 48]

The Kent County dispatch supervisor and the shop allegations

The referral appears on page 11 of the supplement that identifies Shane Criger and Christopher Hayward as investigators. It describes a Kent County Sheriff’s Department dispatch supervisor, whose name is redacted, relaying what Wilderness Expressions workers told him. The supervisor is not described as witnessing Joey’s traffic stop or shooting, or personally witnessing the shop encounter. Calling this a law-enforcement-linked lead is supported; calling it independent firsthand corroboration is not. In fact, if we’re being honest, Supervisor Shawn Holthrop, by his own admission, was a regular at that store, making this entire thing hearsay.[1, pp. 9–11]

The supplement describes later interviews with shop witnesses, so the investigation did not stop at that referral. Their accounts require individual treatment: one co-owner did not recognize the driver from news photographs, while another employee said she did. Some identification information came through other delivery drivers and online photographs. The shop’s own recording was reportedly overwritten before the June 21 interviews; Hallmark video was obtained. Those are concrete questions about identification and preservation. [1, pp. 11–15]

Clutch was able to identify the redacted supervisor as Shawn Holtrop, as cited on Holtrop’s Linkedin and Kent County staffing records. [20] The supported finding does not depend on naming him: the referral was a law-enforcement-linked secondhand lead, followed by separately documented witness interviews. [1, pp. 11–15]

I do not accept “lost” as the end of the shop-video inquiry

I do not believe the shop video was simply “lost.” That is my assessment of the explanation, not proof that someone deliberately destroyed it. The report attributes the missing footage to an overwrite cycle. An experienced investigator’s handling of that evidence deserves examination: when was the recording first requested, when was preservation discussed, and what steps were taken to recover it? The missing recording could have tested the very allegations investigators were collecting about Joey. [1, pp. 11–15]

The McCann history makes that scrutiny especially important. Prison Legal News reports that Bryan Fuller and Shane Criger arranged Raymond McCann’s sworn testimony and used surveillance footage to support perjury charges. It reports that the footage did not show the trailhead where McCann said he had been, and attributes false testimony about it to Fuller. McCann’s conviction was later vacated. That is a specific history involving surveillance evidence and a wrongful conviction, not merely a general concern about investigative experience. [12]

I also believe Criger’s experience with surveillance footage gave him a practical understanding of how quickly businesses can overwrite recordings. My inference is that he knew the shop’s footage would no longer be available by the time investigators sought it. That is my assessment, not knowledge established by the released record: experience with surveillance does not prove familiarity with this particular system or its retention settings. The reported five-day overwrite cycle makes the timing of the first contact, preservation request, and any discussion of retention critical. Those records could support or undermine my inference. [1, pp. 11–15]

In my view, the McCann investigation railroaded an innocent man. Criger’s reported participation is a reason to demand a documented account of the shop footage here, not to accept “overwritten” as a complete answer. It does not establish that Criger erased or suppressed Joey-related footage. Preservation requests, communications with the business, recording-system information, and recovery attempts are the evidence needed to test that possibility.

Witnesses’ accounts of investigative pressure need independent review

Sources tell Clutch Justice that MSP detectives conducting this investigation were forceful with witnesses. One source described the experience this way: “they put words in my mouth.” That is a source’s allegation about the interview process, not a finding established by the released summaries. It is serious enough to require comparison of the complete interview recordings, questions, notes, and final reports. A summary cannot resolve an allegation that the summary or questioning changed what a witness meant. Source: confidential reporting to Clutch Justice.

An independent reviewer should ask whether detectives used leading questions, accurately preserved uncertainty, and gave witnesses an opportunity to correct the record. The same standard must apply whether an answer favors Joey, the deputy, or neither.

Criger’s record and Siver’s role

The people asking these questions about Joey have their own records, and those deserve the same scrutiny. The federal docket names Michael Shane Criger as a defendant in McCann’s 2019 civil-rights suit, brought over his wrongful 2015 perjury conviction connected to the 2007 murder of eleven-year-old Jodi Parrack in Constantine. Michigan State Police reopened that cold case in 2011. Fuller took it over; according to Prison Legal News’s account, Criger worked it alongside him. McCann’s DNA did not match an unidentified male profile recovered from Parrack’s body. Investigators pursued him anyway: they had him testify under oath about his whereabouts during the search, then used surveillance video to claim he had lied about being at a trailhead, while separately telling him his own DNA matched the killer’s. It did not. McCann pleaded no contest to one perjury count and served twenty months. He had already been paroled when a different assault led police to Daniel Furlong, whose DNA matched the profile recovered from Parrack’s body; Furlong confessed and is serving a sentence for her murder. McCann’s perjury conviction was vacated in December 2017. Prison Legal News reports a jury verdict against Fuller in September 2023 and a later MSP-funded settlement; the same account gives a $14.5 million headline verdict figure alongside a $12 million compensatory plus $2 million punitive breakdown that does not sum to it, and reports the eventual settlement at $11 million. That distinction matters: the cited reporting does not establish a jury verdict against Criger individually. His involvement in the earlier investigation warrants review without misstating the litigation’s outcome. [11] [12]

There is also an unpublished appellate opinion concerning destroyed evidence in People v. Przewoznik. The 2006 appellate opinion describes Criger’s testimony that meth-lab materials were destroyed under hazardous-materials policy. The court found no showing of bad faith and rejected the due-process claim. Citing the destruction without that disposition would misstate what the court decided. [13, pp. 1–2]

The family account in the supplied draft describes Thomas Siver approaching in the immediate aftermath while Kelly was in shock and expresses dissatisfaction with his representation. The investigative record documents that, on June 20, he advised MSP that his firm represented the family and estate and asked that communication go through his office. It also documents his submission of a witness interview and Facebook screenshots. [1, p. 36]

That interview should be handled fairly. The witness could not confidently identify the age or pitch of the voice he heard shouting “no.” Uncertainty about the voice’s age does not erase his report of repeated shouting followed by a shot, and does not establish that Siver invented the observation. The released police file alone cannot show the complete work performed by the family’s lawyer. It can support a direct question: what steps did counsel take to obtain the missing explanation, test the physical account, and resolve the family’s property concerns? [1, p. 18]

“As I was walking over there, I started hearing someone like shouting no. And it started progressing to like a more, I don’t know, like desperate, started getting more desperate, and three times I heard no, and then a gunshot.” “Somebody was screaming no, then I heard a gunshot, then he went silent.” “It sounded like a younger male saying no.” “The no stopped after the gunshot.”

Koch’s September 16, 2022 memorandum to Criger, the document carrying her charging reasoning, does not mention this witness or the account he gave. [24] Whether that is because the memo was never meant to catalog every piece of evidence, or because the account went unweighed, is not something the released record answers. What the record shows is a witness account and a declination memo addressed to the same investigator, with no visible link drawn between them.

Line up what the memo does engage with and the pattern is consistent. The deputy’s own account of the punches, headbutts, blurred vision, and weakening legs. The autopsy, cited to confirm a struggle occurred. Dr. Brooks’s muzzle-distance estimate. The Taser assessment. Every one of those either comes from the deputy directly or corroborates a detail of his account; none of it tests it against a competing version. The one document in this file that does not corroborate him, a witness account collected and forwarded before Koch closed the case, is the one her charging memorandum does not mention. [24]

Do the arithmetic Koch never did. MSP’s own dispatch summary puts “fighting with one” at 10:13:46 and the first “shot fired” report at 10:14:41, fifty-five seconds apart. [1, pp. 37–38] The deputy’s account puts fifteen to twenty punches and three to five headbutts inside that window, eighteen to twenty-five blows to the head, at least one blow every three seconds if the low end is true, faster than that at the high end. In the same fifty-five seconds, his account also has Nagle standing up, turning to face him, a spoken exchange running four separate lines (“don’t do this,” Nagle’s reply, “please don’t do this,” “I don’t want to shoot you”), Nagle breaking away again, and the deputy letting go of one hand to key the radio for the fight call itself. That is the pace and the choreography Koch’s declination accepted without comment. Nobody in this file appears to have run that math against the department’s own clock before she closed the case.

Officers at the scene: misconduct allegations and documented case history

Criger and Siver are not the only names in this file with a record worth checking. Each entry identifies the person’s Nagle role and what the separate record actually establishes. Later lawsuits and rulings are dated explicitly; their existence does not establish what anyone knew in June 2022. Being a defendant, testifying about an investigative failure, and being found liable are different things.

This is a targeted public-record review, not a complete disciplinary-history database or an exhaustive scene roster. “Not verified” means the reviewed sources do not establish the proposition. Bryan Fuller’s McCann verdict remains relevant background to Criger’s history, but no supplied scene record establishes Fuller’s presence at Joey’s shooting, so he is not listed as an on-scene officer.

Prior local arrests and force complaints deserve an audit

Leighton Township’s policing history supplies a concrete lead: the Katherine Lindsey Henry prosecution. The 57th District Court register identifies case 20-3569-SM, citation SD166684, and officer LANGLOIS/MATTHEW, with an alleged offense date of November 3, 2020. This is a court-record connection to a specific prior citation, not speculation from a shared surname. [27, PDF p. 24; printed p. 197]

On July 7, 2022, 21 days after Joey’s June 16 shooting, the court granted Henry’s motion to dismiss with prejudice. The checked provisions directed destruction of the arrest record and biometric data and removal of the LEIN entry concerning the dismissed charges; a companion order directed immediate destruction and certification to Henry. The underlying prosecution predated Joey’s death; its dismissal followed three weeks later. These orders do not themselves find that Langlois committed misconduct. They do establish an identifiable prior case worth auditing from the initial encounter through the dismissal, including the arrest basis, reports, recordings, prosecutor’s decisions, and reasons for dismissal. They do not identify Joey’s shooter. [28, pp. 1–2]

The shared Leighton/Dorr contract assignment matters. Clutch Justice reports that both cases involved Leighton/Dorr Township contracted deputies. In Joey’s case, the deputy identifies that assignment in his own statement. In Henry’s case, the court register identifies Matthew Langlois, whom Clutch Justice identifies as a Leighton/Dorr contracted deputy. The retained contract roster remains needed to independently substantiate that assignment, as noted above. This connection makes the contract’s staffing, supervision, complaint history, and review of officer conduct specific subjects for investigation. The shared assignment and 21-day interval do not, by themselves, establish that the same deputy was involved or that Henry’s dismissal was connected to Joey’s shooting. [3, p. 1] [27]

There is also a separate Allegan County traffic-stop force case arising from a 2019 encounter, according to Clutch Justice’s reporting. Clutch Justice viewed video and describes Deputy Murphy pulling the driver from the vehicle and beating them. That is Clutch Justice’s firsthand assessment of the footage, not a finding attributed to a court. Clutch Justice reports that Judge Kengis handled the case before it was dismissed on May 16, 2022, one month before Joey’s shooting, and is withholding identifying case details to protect the individual’s privacy. The reported dismissal therefore preceded Joey’s death; the case was not still pending when he was shot. The video account deserves scrutiny even though the case was dismissed. Without the dismissal order, this article does not assign a reason for that outcome or treat it as a ruling that the force was justified. [29]

Allegan County’s use-of-force record does not stop at the roadside. In February 2014, Aaron Henderson was booked into the Allegan County Jail following a mental-health-related police contact that left him agitated and disoriented. According to his federal lawsuit, a deputy kneed him in the head during a struggle, slamming him into a wall and breaking several facial bones. Henderson has said the bleeding was severe enough that he wrote on his own cell wall in blood, believing he was going to die there. He was segregated from other inmates afterward and, per the complaint, went roughly eight hours before medical staff examined him and another five before he reached a hospital. Allegan County settled the resulting federal case, Henderson v. Allegan County, for $300,000 in January 2016. [30]

That gives this file four separate, independently documented use-of-force or force-adjacent matters tied to Allegan County law enforcement across roughly eight years: a jail cell in 2014, a traffic stop reviewed on video in 2019, Katherine Henry’s dismissed prosecution by a Leighton/Dorr contract deputy, and a still-litigated excessive-force claim against Sheriff Baker and Mike Larsen filed in 2022. Different personnel, different buildings, the same county badge. A department does not get to treat each one as an isolated bad day when the public record keeps producing another.

These cases are not equivalent in severity. In my assessment, the beating Clutch Justice describes in the Murphy footage, the jail beating Henderson documented in his own lawsuit, and Joey’s fatal shooting are far more severe harms than the arrest and prosecution Henry endured. That comparison does not excuse Henry’s treatment or turn her dismissal into a judicial finding of misconduct. It explains why the cases deserve attention without flattening their consequences. Henry’s case ended with dismissal, and she was able to return to her family. Henderson got a settlement check and, by his own account, a body that still carries what happened to him. Joey did not get to go home to his. The shared policing context warrants scrutiny precisely because the consequences in these encounters were so different, and for Joey, irreversible.

Institutional self-protection is a question worth investigating

In my assessment, investigators were looking for an out: material from Joey’s life that could shift attention away from the deputy’s decisions and toward the man he killed. That is why Criger’s pursuit and use of Joey’s phone contents matters. The record documents the extraction and Criger’s discussion of selected material about fighting and drug use, while the deputy’s wrong database query and missing verification transactions remain unanswered. The Henry prosecution and Clutch Justice’s viewing of the separate Murphy footage sharpen my concern about how local police conduct was scrutinized. This is my interpretation of the investigative choices, not a motive established by the released documents. The communications, instructions, and selection criteria behind the phone review deserve examination. [1, pp. 44, 48] [2, pp. 37–39]

If investigators were willing to examine Joey’s life down to his phone contents, prior behavior, workplace allegations, and drug history, the deputy’s own verifiable errors and procedural decisions should not receive less scrutiny. The public deserves the same persistence when the subject is the officer who survived.

The tribal-police theory also requires evidence this release does not provide. The reports identify the involved shooter as an Allegan County sheriff’s deputy. The named Gun Lake Tribal Police responders describe arriving after the shot. Their presence does not establish that the shooter worked for the tribal department or that two departments would be liable.

Even proven dual employment would not automatically establish claims against two agencies. Individual and governmental liability are separate questions; tribal sovereign immunity adds another distinction. In Lewis v. Clarke, the Supreme Court distinguished a claim against a tribal employee personally from one against the tribe itself. Employment status alone does not answer who can be sued or on what basis. [14]

WOOD reported Samuel Sterling’s family demanding video and the officer’s name after his death involving an MSP cruiser in April 2024. WOOD report

That story needs its subsequent history. MSP announced the video’s release and referral to the Attorney General on May 10, 2024. The Attorney General charged Brian Keely later that month. A federal judge dismissed the charges on Supremacy Clause immunity grounds on May 28, 2025, finding the necessary-and-proper standard satisfied; the state appealed. Those developments show an accountability dispute involving investigation, prosecution, and immunity, not a case in which no review or prosecution occurred. [15] [16] [17] [18]

McCann and Sterling provide reasons to demand transparent, independently testable findings. Neither substitutes for evidence of what happened to Joey.

The account still needs to be tested

Strip away the theories, and the record still has to answer for itself.

Koch’s memorandum addresses the stop, force, injuries, Taser, and ACSO use-of-force policy; it does not address the wrong-plate query or the missing verification transactions. [24] Read end to end, the memorandum’s weight falls almost entirely on the deputy: the blows he says he took, the vision that blurred, the legs that weakened, the fear he describes, the reasons his response was justified. Joey appears in that same document mainly as the source of the threat and a toxicology result. A declination memo is not required to eulogize the person a deputy killed. But when the entire analytical weight of the reasoning falls on one man’s account of what was done to him, and none of it falls on the fact that the other man did not survive the encounter, that is a choice about whose experience gets treated as the case. Joey Nagle is dead. Koch’s own explanation for why no one answers for that spends its words on someone else. [24] The released investigative record documents the deputy querying EJV6675 at 22:03:10 and speaking Joey’s actual plate, EJV6635, over the radio fifty-seven seconds later. It documents no LEIN query of EJV6635 and no driver-license LEIN query. Those findings remain unanswered by a no-charge decision. [1, pp. 37–38]

The family should not have to supply a competing theory before those matters receive answers. A reliable reconstruction needs the substantive July 7 clarification, the scene-access and recovery chronology, the forensic work bearing on disputed items, and a clear accounting of Joey’s property. The deputy’s wrong query is a fact. The missing verification transactions are not documented. No deputy drug or alcohol toxicology result is disclosed in the reviewed material, despite the hospital’s legal-draw entry. Those findings deserve the same clarity and scrutiny applied to allegations about Joey.

Allegan needs to come clean. Residents should demand answers.

People in Allegan County, and people in Kent County concerned about the law-enforcement-linked referral described in this file, should contact their Boards of Commissioners and demand public accountability. Ask for records, named responsibility, and written answers. Ask Allegan officials to explain the deputy’s identification, contract assignment, relevant history, wrong LEIN query, missing verification transactions, and the scope and outcome of any administrative review.

MSP should revisit this investigation through reviewers independent of the original team. That request rests on the documented error, unresolved reconstruction, undisclosed deputy toxicology, and reported witness pressure. It also requires accurate treatment of Joey’s toxicology: THC was confirmed, while no confirmed positive cocaine finding was reported in blood. “No drugs were found” would be inaccurate. The laboratory’s actual findings are reason to challenge the cocaine narrative, not replace it with another unsupported claim. [5]

Criger’s documented involvement in the investigation behind McCann’s wrongful conviction, discussed above, makes independent scrutiny of his work here especially important. His selection of material from Joey’s phone deserves examination alongside the unanswered questions about the deputy. The records cited here do not establish a broader history of Criger personally wrongfully convicting multiple people; this article’s demand for review rests on the specific history and investigative choices it documents.

Allegan needs to come clean. Joey’s family should not have to reconstruct official accountability from redactions, missing records, and a process of elimination. The public should insist that the deputy’s conduct receive the same scrutiny investigators applied to the man he killed.

Source notes

1. 50-260-22R.pdf, 51 pages. MSP original and supplemental reports, incident 050-0000260-22. Key pages: 2–8 (deputy evidence, searches, hood, shirt and Taser); 22–26 (autopsy evidence); 9–11 (Holscher and recorded aftermath); 18 (witness recontact); 36 (Siver); 37–38 (radio and LEIN summaries); 41–43 (responders); 44–45 (clarification, Taser download, phone); 46–49 (property, medical records, extraction, prosecutor submission).
2. 50-260-22X.pdf, 93 pages. Key pages: 2 (Duesterberg); 4–5 (Austhof/Tatrow); 6–13 (MSP response and survey); 15 (handwritten investigator sign-in/sign-out log, “Tab for Team”: Petersen in 2348, Casperson in 0005, Karsten in 0057, Bommarito in 0057, Criger in 0058, Crum in 0013, Hayward in 0111 and out 0118, Casperson out 0118, Workman out 0118, Jelenek in 0216, Spoelma out 0231, Criger out 0237, Karsten/Bommarito/Crum out 0340, Jelenek out 0345, Dangl/Brown out 0346, Petersen out 0346); 16 (earlier handwritten scene log, “As of 2236 hrs”); 37–39 (CCU extraction); 40–62 (redacted medical material); 63–75 (Taser history); 79–81 (GR22-3102 scene report, record 1); 83–84 (firearms report, record 2); 88 (vehicle release authorization).
3. June 21, 2022 deputy letter, four-page, less-redacted copy supplied as d80cdb7e-dfcb-426c-9cd5-b2ba149eb49f 2.pdf. The counterpart at X pp. 90–93 is more heavily redacted. Date on the letter is not independently verified receipt time.
4. W22-0791_Nagle__Joseph.pdf, eight-page postmortem report signed Jared Brooks, July 25, 2022. Pages 3–4 specify the wound and anatomical direction; p. 7 lists recovered evidence and prints. “Homicide” is the medical manner-of-death classification, not a determination of criminal guilt.
5. 220617-122_Nagle__Joseph_M.pdf, NMS workorder 22216784, issued July 12, 2022, three pages. Interpret findings with specimen type, method, and reporting limits.
6. Associated Press / ClickOnDetroit, September 21, 2022: charging decision.
7. Photos1.zip, Photos2.zip, Photos3.zip, 50 + 50 + 45 images. References: department debrief photographs 21310962_IMG_0197.jpg, 21310965_IMG_0198.jpg, 21310989_IMG_0199.jpg, and 21310992_IMG_0200.jpg (Photos1, embedded capture times 12:03:17, 12:03:31, 12:03:42, and 12:08:05 AM, iPhone 11); knife 21310995_IMG_0201.jpg and 21310998_IMG_0202.jpg (Photos1, embedded capture time 1:24:45 AM, iPhone 11); crime-lab van 21400505_IMG_7852.JPG (Photos1, embedded capture time 1:17:40 AM); roadside duffel bag 21400784_IMG_7945.JPG (Photos2, embedded capture time 1:49:49 AM); Impala first interior frame 21400826_IMG_7959.JPG.jpg and second interior frame 21400829_IMG_7960.JPG.jpg (Photos3, embedded capture times 1:54:23 AM and 1:54:28 AM); rear-compartment/compressor 21400832_IMG_7961.JPG.jpg (Photos3, embedded capture time 1:54:39 AM); all three crime-lab-camera frames body serial 362073002689; SUV passenger glass 21400694_IMG_7915.JPG.jpg (Photos2); full run of the crime lab’s camera reviewed in sequence via contact sheets, 21400502_IMG_7851.JPG.jpg (1:16:35 AM, evidence-case whiteboard slate) through 21400976_IMG_8009.JPG.jpg (3:18:41 AM, metal-detector display), roughly 117 frames total; the full run of the iPhone’s ten frames from that night, 21310962_IMG_0197.jpg (12:03:17 AM) through 21311019_IMG_0206.jpg (1:35:44 AM), also reviewed in sequence; neither camera’s full set documents the marijuana or the cell phone Criger’s report lists as recovered, and only the iPhone documents the knife. Impala open front windows 21400859_IMG_7970.JPG.jpg; keys 21400865_IMG_7972.JPG.jpg; glasses/ID IMG_7973–7977; casing IMG_7985–7987; work light/survey target 21401003_20220617021820.jpg (Photos3). Selected details examined at enlarged resolution, including each image’s embedded EXIF capture timestamp; supplied redactions remain intact.
8. Determining the accuracy and errors of estimating a shooter’s position based on cartridge case ejection patterns, Forensic Science International, 328 (2021), 111045.
9. Kerkhoff et al., Magazine Influence on Cartridge Case Ejection Patterns with Glock Pistols, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 63(1), 239–243 (2018).
10. NHTSA SFST Refresher Instructor Manual, revised February 2018, Session 3, p. 20. Supports the eyeglass-removal procedure cited above.
11. McCann v. Fuller et al., W.D. Michigan, 1:19-cv-01032, docket listing.
12. Prison Legal News, $11 Million Settlement for Exonerated Michigan Prisoner, August 15, 2024.
13. People v. Przewoznik, Michigan Court of Appeals, No. 258010, unpublished opinion, January 12, 2006.
14. Lewis v. Clarke, U.S. Supreme Court, April 25, 2017. Individual-capacity claims and tribal sovereign immunity.
15. MSP statement on the Sterling investigation and video release, May 10, 2024.
16. Michigan Attorney General charging announcement, May 28, 2024.
17. Michigan v. Keely, No. 1:24-cr-115, ECF 109, W.D. Michigan, May 28, 2025. Dismissal opinion.
18. Michigan v. Brian Keely, Sixth Circuit No. 25-1573, appeal docket. This article describes the documented appeal filing, not a verified final appellate disposition.
19. Karie Herringa, “’I just kept letting him hit me’: MSP release report on shooting death of Joseph Nagle,” FOX17, September 16, 2022.
20. Rita Williams, “Shot in the Dark: The Death of Joseph Nagle and the Missing Record of Justice,” Clutch Justice, September 3, 2025. Earlier reporting.
21. Wayback Machine snapshot, Allegan County contracted-patrols page, captured June 10, 2022.
22. MCOLES Basic Training Module V-B-4, Stopping Vehicles and Occupant Control. Objectives V.B.4.1 and V.B.4.3; history lists reviews in September 2021 and November 2023.
23. MCOLES Basic Training Module V-B-1, Vehicle and Driver Licensing. Objectives V.B.1.1 and V.B.1.3; history lists reviews in September 2021 and November 2023. The review history does not establish unchanged wording since 2021.
24. Myrene K. Koch, memorandum to Det/Lt. Shane Criger, September 16, 2022, eight-page document reproduced by WZZM News on Scribd. The memorandum’s text, rather than the hosting page’s AI-generated description, supplies the cited findings. It is a prosecutor’s assessment; the complete ACSO policy it references is not reproduced here.
25. South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364 (1976). Supreme Court opinion on an administrative inventory of an impounded vehicle.
26. Colorado v. Bertine, 479 U.S. 367 (1987). Supreme Court opinion addressing standardized inventory procedures and impoundment criteria.
27. Henry appellate appendix, reproduced court register, PDF p. 24, printed p. 197. The 57th District Court register connects Katherine Lindsey Henry, case 20-3569-SM, SD166684, and LANGLOIS/MATTHEW. Court record reproduced on the litigant’s website; advocacy elsewhere in the appendix is not adopted as a judicial finding.
28. Henry dismissal and biometric-data/arrest-record orders, July 7, 2022, two pages, certified copies linked from Henry’s July 12, 2022 Restore Freedom post. Checked boxes and dates visually reviewed. Destruction and LEIN removal were ordered; these copies do not establish agency compliance.
29. Clutch Justice’s firsthand video account and author-supplied account of a separate Deputy Murphy traffic-stop force case, arising from a 2019 encounter, including Judge Kengis’s involvement and dismissal on May 16, 2022. These dates come from the author’s reporting. Identifying case details are withheld for privacy. The account describes Clutch Justice’s reporting, not a judicial finding about the force or reason for dismissal.
30. Henderson v. Allegan, County of, et al., No. 1:15-cv-00430, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, filed May 2, 2015. Docket. Underlying incident: February 2014. Settlement and case facts: CBS News Detroit, “Lawsuit: Jail Inmate Severely Beaten, Medical Care Delayed”; CBS News Detroit, “$300K Settlement Reached In Lawsuit Over Excessive Force In Michigan Jail” (Jan. 30, 2016); WZZM13, “Ex Allegan jail inmate settles brutality lawsuit.” The underlying complaint itself was not obtained for this review; facts here rely on court-docket identification plus contemporaneous news reporting of the lawsuit’s allegations and outcome.
31. People v. Toohey, 438 Mich. 265 (1991). Michigan Supreme Court opinion holding that an inventory search and the impoundment decision behind it must follow established departmental procedures and cannot be used as a pretext for a criminal investigation.
32. Driving-route estimate calculated via OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine, using current OpenStreetMap road data), Allegan County Sheriff’s Office and Corrections Center, 640 River St, Allegan, MI, to 136th Ave at 26th St, Monterey Township, MI: approximately 10.7 miles, approximately 17 minutes. This is a present-day routing calculation, not a documented travel time from the case file. It does not account for 2022 road conditions, actual route taken, or any stops.