The Cameras Come After: Barry County Gets Body Cameras Two Years After Jeremiah Johnson, and the MSP Team That Investigated His Death Has a Record

Barry County deputies started wearing body cameras this week, 23 months after a deputy shot Army veteran Jeremiah Johnson five times in the back inside his own bedroom with nothing recording. Allegan County ran the same sequence after Joey Nagle. The same Michigan State Police district investigated both deaths, and the people on that team have a record of their own.

The Accountability That Arrives Late

Let me tell you what I notice immediately when I read this week’s coverage of Barry County’s new body cameras. The story is written as progress. Deputies are getting equipment, the policy is approved, the field testing is done. All of that is true. What it leaves out is the order in which things happened.

That sequence is not unique to Barry County. It is the same one Allegan County followed after Joey Nagle, and it is the same one a long list of Michigan agencies followed before them. Accountability tools arrive after the person they would have protected is dead, and the record of what happened to that person is permanently whatever the officers said it was.

What Happened in Hope Township

On October 28, 2024, Siphiwe Johnson called 911 from her home on Kingsbury Road in Hope Township and reported that her husband, Jeremiah Johnson, had threatened her and was holding a gun to her head. Johnson was 37, a U.S. Army veteran. His family told WOOD TV8 he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and his autopsy report documents PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and chronic migraines, along with a blood alcohol level of 0.218.

Two Barry County deputies responded. Siphiwe Johnson told Target 8 that they entered the bedroom without announcing themselves while her husband stood by the bed, yelling, holding a gun she said was pointed down and no longer at her. She said one deputy told him to get down, the other shouted that he had a gun, and the shooting began immediately. By her account, there was no struggle.

The autopsy report obtained by Target 8 shows a deputy shot Johnson five times in the back. It could not determine how far the deputy was from Johnson when he fired. Johnson had a .45-caliber pistol, and investigators recovered a loaded magazine under his body.

Two Accounts, No Video

The deputies gave a different account. According to Prosecutor Julie Nakfoor Pratt, one deputy was fighting Johnson over the gun, Johnson pointed the handgun at a deputy during that struggle, and the second deputy fired to protect his partner and Johnson’s wife. Pratt ruled the shooting justified in February 2025. WOOD TV8 reported that she had not laid out what physical evidence supported the deputies’ version.

Those two accounts are not reconcilable on their face. One describes a close-quarters fight over a weapon. The other describes an unannounced entry and immediate gunfire. The autopsy’s five wounds to the back sit between them, and no camera recorded which one is true. Siphiwe Johnson recorded audio on her phone moments after the shooting. It is the only recording of any part of that night.

She also told the station that the prosecutor had framed it as her word against the deputies’. In a case with no video, that framing decides the outcome before any evidence is weighed, because the word that counts is the one that belongs to the people wearing badges.

Barry County’s own leadership did not dispute that the missing video mattered. Undersheriff Kevin Erb told WOOD TV8 in March 2025 that cameras had been discussed for a long time, but that the Johnson shooting “has made this a need.” Board of Commissioners Chairman David Jackson told the station that in a disputed situation like this one, video would have been critical, and that it was sad the county did not have it.

Allegan County Did This First

On June 16, 2022, an Allegan County deputy stopped 22-year-old Joseph “Joey” Nagle on 26th Street in Monterey Township. About nine minutes into the stop, during field sobriety testing, the deputy reported a fight. Fifty-five seconds after that, he reported a shot fired. Nagle died on the roadway. He was unarmed, and the deputy’s Taser, according to MSP’s own download, appears not to have been used.

The deputy wore no body camera. His patrol car had no dash camera. Allegan County had been approved to buy body cameras in January 2022 and had started putting roughly 75 of them into the field that spring, but Sheriff Frank Baker said the vendor could not train deputies until August, so only a fraction of road patrol had one. The deputy who shot Nagle was not among them. Michigan State Police troopers did activate their own body cameras, when paramedics arrived. The cameras came on after the shot.

By September 20, 2022, the week Prosecutor Myrene Koch declined to charge the deputy, Baker told WOOD TV8 that every Allegan patrol deputy and sergeant now wore a camera. The station noted what that meant: if the stop happened again, there would be video. It did not happen again. It happened once, to Joey, with none.

Joey’s mother, Kelly Nagle, has since spoken at county meetings where agencies still lacked body cameras, including Ottawa County, arguing that cameras protect everyone involved. She is doing the prevention work the institutions did not do before her son died. Clutch Justice’s full review of the Nagle file is in Four Years Later, and the minute-by-minute radio traffic is in the Allegan Central Dispatch recording.

The Same Team

A camera gap is a hardware problem. What happens next is a people problem. When there is no video, the investigation becomes the record, and the credibility of that record depends entirely on who built it.

Johnson’s death was investigated by the Michigan State Police 5th District Investigative Response Team, working out of the Wayland post. According to the team roster reviewed by Clutch Justice, it was staffed as follows.

The McCann record is not ambiguous. Fuller and Criger jointly conducted the interrogations of Ray McCann in the Jodi Parrack murder investigation, told him his DNA matched the killer’s when it did not, and built a perjury case that sent him to prison for 20 months. The real killer later confessed and his DNA matched. The Michigan Innocence Clinic found that evidence shown to McCann during interrogation was fabricated, and McCann’s conviction was vacated in 2017. On the witness stand in 2023, Fuller acknowledged lying to witnesses during the investigation. A federal jury awarded McCann $14.5 million on September 19, 2023, and MSP settled for $11 million in 2024. Both detectives kept their jobs.

The Johnson shooting happened on October 28, 2024. That is 13 months after the jury verdict and roughly two months after the settlement. The detectives whose last major credibility test cost the state eight figures were, within weeks, assembling the official account of a death with no video and one surviving civilian witness who says the deputies’ version is false.

Criger’s role extends past individual cases. His own professional profile describes him as an instructor in interview and interrogation, and in officer-involved shooting investigation, at the Michigan State Police training academy, and a facilitator at the MSP Homicide School. The detective who led the Nagle investigation while an undisclosed federal defendant, and who coordinated the Johnson investigation after the McCann verdict, is also teaching other investigators how to conduct exactly these investigations.

Nothing in the public record shows that the Johnson family was told the investigating team included two detectives from the McCann litigation. Clutch Justice documented the same nondisclosure in the Nagle case in Same Detective, Same Lawyer, Different County.

The Allegan/Barry Way

Set the two cases side by side and the prosecutorial pattern is the same in both counties. There is no video. The officer’s account is adopted as the operative narrative. The dead man’s toxicology and condition move to the front of the public explanation. The civilian evidence that complicates the officer’s account is minimized or left out. The shooting is ruled justified.

In Allegan County, Koch’s declination memo listed cocaine alongside THC without distinguishing a confirmed blood finding from a presumptive urine screen the lab itself flagged as unreliable and never confirmed. Her memo did not mention the neighbor who heard someone shout “no” three times before the gunshot, and it did not address the deputy’s documented wrong-plate query at the start of the stop. Press coverage then reported that Nagle was on cocaine when he was shot.

In Barry County, Johnson’s blood alcohol level, PTSD, and brain injury became the backdrop to Pratt’s ruling, while the physical evidence that would have tested the deputies’ struggle account against five wounds to the back was not laid out publicly. The widow’s eyewitness account was treated as one side of a tie.

The effect in both counties is the same. The officer is protected by the absence of evidence, and the person who died is characterized by whatever evidence exists about him. That is not a neutral outcome of missing video. It is a choice about which side the gap is allowed to favor.

A Crisis Call Is Not a Gunfight

Jeremiah Johnson’s call was dangerous. His wife reported a gun to her head, and she called because she needed help. Nothing about that makes the response beyond scrutiny. It makes the quality of the response the whole question.

A veteran with PTSD and a traumatic brain injury, intoxicated, armed, in his own bedroom, with his wife beside him, is a crisis. If the widow’s account is accurate, the response to that crisis was an unannounced entry and immediate gunfire, and it ended with five rounds in a man’s back. Crisis intervention training, co-responder models that pair officers with mental health clinicians, and veteran-specific crisis protocols all exist because the fastest way to end an armed mental health emergency is not always the way that leaves the most people alive. Whether Barry County’s deputies had any of that training, and whether any of it was used in that bedroom, is not answered anywhere in the public record.

What the record does show is how the aftermath is handled when there is no video. The deputies’ account becomes the finding. The investigation is conducted by detectives with a documented history of building cases on interrogation rather than evidence. And the lead coordinator of that investigation trains others to do the same work.

The Next Fight: Getting the Footage

I will make a prediction, and I want to be direct about it because it is the part of this story that gets skipped. The next accountability fight in Barry County will not be over whether deputies wear cameras. It will be over whether anyone outside the institutions ever sees what those cameras record.

The law gives agencies room to withhold. Michigan’s Law Enforcement Body-Worn Camera Privacy Act exempts from FOIA any body camera recording made in a private place, which the statute defines as somewhere a person can reasonably expect to be safe from intrusion or surveillance. A bedroom in Hope Township is a private place. The act also allows agencies to withhold footage tied to an ongoing criminal or internal investigation, and footage connected to a civil lawsuit in which the requester and the agency are opposing parties. Had cameras been rolling in the Johnson bedroom, the family’s path to the video would still have run through every one of those exceptions.

The local track record gives no reason for optimism. On May 11, 2026, the Hastings City Council took up a FOIA appeal from Jeffrey Allen Snowden II challenging a Hastings Police Department records denial, and upheld the denial. Snowden’s criminal docket in Barry County shows a months-long fight over body camera footage, officer credibility material, and disclosure. Clutch Justice covered that dispute in Hastings Just Upheld Another FOIA Block. Hastings Police has worn cameras for years. Having footage and releasing it are different commitments, and Hastings has already shown which one it prioritizes when they conflict.

The Sheriff’s Office says it approved a body camera policy before distributing the devices. State law requires any agency using body cameras to have a written policy on their use, maintenance, and disclosure. That policy should be public now, before the first contested encounter, so residents know what triggers recording, when deputies may turn cameras off, how long footage is kept, and who decides what gets released. Clutch Justice has not located a published copy.

A Sheriff’s Priorities

Sheriff Dar Leaf has not been short on investigative energy. It has gone to elections. About a month after the 2020 presidential election, Leaf opened an investigation into claims of voter fraud, sought to seize local voting equipment, and assigned one of his office’s two detectives to the probe full time. By his own account, it turned up nothing.

The Barry County Board of Commissioners, all Republicans, noticed where the time was going. In October 2022, the board voted 6-0 to pull roughly $100,000 in funding for a third detective position. Board Chair Ben Geiger said the money had been found so the office could solve violent crime, and a year later that had not happened. A special prosecutor later declined to charge Leaf in the state’s voting machine tampering investigation, finding insufficient evidence to prove a crime.

Two years after the board’s vote, a Barry County deputy shot Jeremiah Johnson five times in the back, with no camera running, because the department had none. The sheriff who could find a detective for an election that his own probe cleared could not find a camera for his deputies until a veteran was dead and the county had spent 23 months catching up.

I will say this plainly. Sheriff Leaf should be a little less worried about elections and a lot more worried about the injustices happening in his own county. His own probe found nothing wrong with Barry County’s ballots. The record of how Jeremiah Johnson died was not preserved at all.

Why This Matters Beyond Barry County

Body cameras are sold as accountability. They are not accountability by themselves. They are a record, and a record only produces accountability if three other things are true: the people investigating a death are credible, the prosecutor weighs the record without deciding in advance whose word counts, and the footage reaches the people with a right to see it.

Allegan County and Barry County each learned the first lesson only after someone died. Both deaths were then investigated by the same Michigan State Police district, with the same detective at the center, and both ended with the officer’s account standing as the finding. The cameras fix none of that on their own.

I want to be clear about what I am watching for next. The first contested encounter a Barry County deputy has on camera. The first family that asks for the footage. The first denial, and the exemption it cites. That is where this county will show whether the cameras were bought to create a record for the public or to protect one for the department.