Allegan County Certified in Writing That the Other Tom Siver Reports Don’t Exist. Here’s What Witnesses Can Do Now.

A deputy helped a woman leave Tom Siver’s home four days after the jet ski crash. Neighbors describe a deputy responding to a later lake complaint. The county now says, in writing, that no record of either exists.

If you have been following Clutch’s reporting on Allegan County judicial candidate Tom Siver, you already know about the June 2023 jet ski collision on Lake Sixteen and how thin the Sheriff’s Office file on it turned out to be. You also know about Marine Sgt. Todd Wagner, the officer who closed that file, and his years-long church connection to the candidate.

Sources and neighbors described other law enforcement responses involving Siver and the Lake Sixteen property. So I went looking for those records. Today, Allegan County answered.

Not exempt. Not redacted. The county certified that the reports do not exist.

That is not the end of the story. It is the part where you get to do something about it.

What I Asked For

On September 16, 2026, Clutch Justice submitted a FOIA request to the Allegan County Sheriff’s Office for incident records at Thomas Daniel Siver’s residence on Lake Sixteen in Martin Township. The request identified at least two incidents: a woman moving out of his home, and an incident around September 2023 in which people on the water were not wearing life jackets. It also asked for any other incidents at the property. The county logged it as SO-1116-2026.

The response arrived October 7. The County denied the request because, in its words, “the described public records do not exist.” The denial applies the standard in MCL 15.235(5)(b), which requires a public body denying a request on that basis to certify that the record does not exist under the name the requester gave or under any other name reasonably known to the agency.

That second clause matters. The Sheriff’s Office was not hearing about these incidents for the first time from a journalist. A victim advocate had already called the department asking for the move-out report. The department knew the address, knew the date, and knew the people. The certification covers every name the county reasonably knew, and it says there is nothing.

From a Phone Call to a Certificate

This is the third time the county has given some version of this answer.

First, according to a victim advocate, an Allegan County Sheriff’s Office employee told her by phone that neither the collision report nor the move-out report existed. Then Clutch Justice requested the collision report directly, and the county produced it: complaint 11474-23, a DNR boating accident form completed four days after the crash and closed by Marine Sgt. Todd Wagner as “service rendered.” Clutch published it on September 10. A record the department had described as nonexistent turned out to exist.

Now the county has put its answer about the other two incidents in writing, over a signature, with notice of appeal rights attached. A phone call can be a mistake. A certification is a position.

What Michigan Law Says Should Exist

The move-out

Clutch Justice has learned that on June 13, 2023, four days after the collision, the woman injured on Lake Sixteen left the residence she shared with Siver, and that a deputy was sent to help her retrieve her belongings after she told the department she was afraid of him. What she reported to the department that day was domestic violence. Sources place that move-out on the same day Wagner closed the collision complaint, without taking her statement.

Michigan does not leave the paperwork on a call like that to an officer’s discretion. Under MCL 764.15c, a peace officer who investigates or intervenes in a domestic violence incident must give the victim a written notice that includes the agency’s phone number, the officer’s name and badge number, and information on shelters and personal protection orders. The officer must then prepare a domestic violence report on the standard form developed by the Michigan State Police. That report records the address, date, and time; the victim’s and suspect’s information; any witnesses; who called; whether alcohol was involved; a narrative; injuries; property damage; and prior incidents between the two. The agency must keep the report in its files and send a copy to the prosecuting attorney within 48 hours.

The statute applies to an incident reported to law enforcement that involves an alleged crime by a current or former dating partner or someone who lives or has lived in the same household. Every element of the trigger was present in what was described to the department. The standby itself should also have generated a dispatch entry, an officer assignment, and a call disposition. The county certifies that none of it exists.

The life jackets

Neighbors describe a later gathering at the property, after Siver’s client Michael Null was acquitted in the Whitmer kidnapping plot trial in September 2023, at which guests rode personal watercraft without life jackets. They describe a neighbor calling the Sheriff’s Office and a deputy responding. No action followed.

Michigan’s personal watercraft law, MCL 324.80205, requires every person on a personal watercraft to wear a Coast Guard approved life jacket. Inflatable devices do not count, and having one on board does not satisfy the law. A violation is a misdemeanor under MCL 324.80219. A deputy who responds to a call about riders without life jackets has an enforceable law in front of him. Whatever he decided to do with it, the call, the response, and the outcome are the kind of thing a sheriff’s office writes down. The county certifies that it did not.

Why “Does Not Exist” Is Not the End of the Paper Trail

A sheriff’s office is not the only place a call leaves a trace. In Allegan County, 911 and non-emergency calls run through Allegan County Central Dispatch, which is a county department under the Board of Commissioners. The county’s own FOIA directory lists the County Administrator, not the Sheriff’s Office, as the FOIA coordinator for Central Dispatch. A request sent to the Sheriff’s Office for incident reports is not a request for dispatch logs, call recordings, or computer-aided dispatch entries. Those are separate records with a separate custodian.

So that is where I am going next. Clutch Justice is filing a FOIA request with Allegan County for Central Dispatch call records, computer-aided dispatch entries, and audio tied to Siver’s Lake Sixteen address for June 2023 and September 2023. If a call came in and a deputy went out, Central Dispatch logged it. This article will be updated with the county’s answer.

The domestic violence statute also creates a second copy by design. If a report was written on June 13, 2023, the law required it to go to the Allegan County Prosecutor’s Office within 48 hours. That office is now led by Prosecutor Mike Villar, who took office in January 2025. Clutch Justice has already forwarded its reporting on the 2023 collision to his office with a request for an independent investigation.

And the woman herself is entitled to her own report. The notice the statute requires officers to hand a domestic violence victim tells her she may obtain a copy of the incident report by calling the agency. If she was never handed that notice, that is its own answer.

What You Can Do Now

This section is for the people who were there: neighbors on the lake, guests at the property, anyone who saw a deputy arrive, anyone who made a call. The county says it has no record of what you saw. You can create one.

Questions for the Marine Division

Marine Sgt. Todd Wagner administered the Sheriff’s Office Marine Division during this period and closed the collision file. The certification leaves specific questions that the department, and Wagner, can answer in writing. Did the deputy sent to the residence on June 13, 2023 report to Wagner or to road patrol, and who assigned the call? Was the domestic violence report form completed, and if not, who decided it was not required? Did the September 2023 life-jacket call get routed to the Marine Division, and who decided how it was resolved? Were any of these calls entered into Central Dispatch, and under what address or name? What policy did the department have in 2023 for documenting a standby at a residence connected to an open injury collision?

Clutch Justice will publish any written response in full.

What Fixing It Would Actually Require

None of this requires new law. The duty to document a domestic violence intervention already exists, and so does the life-jacket requirement. What is missing is any mechanism that catches a response that was never written down.

First, every call for service that results in a deputy being sent should produce a dispatch record with a disposition, and the Sheriff’s Office should be able to search its own reports against that log. A call that went out without a matching report is a gap a supervisor can see the same week, not a reporter three years later. Second, any call coded as a standby, civil assist, or welfare check at a residence where one person reports fear of another should be screened against the MCL 764.15c trigger before it is closed. Third, when a records custodian certifies that a record does not exist, the response should state what was searched: which systems, which names, which addresses, which date range. Fourth, prosecutors should audit the 48-hour domestic violence report copies they receive against dispatch logs. The statute built in a second copy precisely so that one office can check the other.

He Did This as a Lawyer. Now He Wants to Be the Judge.

Tom Siver is not a bystander to the law. He is a licensed Michigan attorney and an officer of the court. He represented a defendant acquitted in 2023 in the state’s Whitmer kidnapping plot trial in Antrim County. He knows what a domestic violence report is, because prosecutors charge from them and defense lawyers pick them apart. He knows the personal watercraft law, because it governs the lake he lives on. He knows what happens to a case when the record is thin, because every trial lawyer learns early that the side with the paper usually wins.

At his own home, on his own lake, involving watercraft he owned, the paper is missing. The woman injured in the collision left his house with a deputy at her side. Neighbors describe a deputy at his property again a few months later. Clutch Justice has asked Siver about this reporting repeatedly. He has not answered once.

Here is what I keep coming back to.

As a lawyer, he lived inside a record that stayed quiet.

As a judge, he would be the one deciding which records count.

The 57th District Court is where Allegan County’s misdemeanor cases are heard, including domestic violence charges. It is where a judge sets the bond conditions that decide whether a man arrested for domestic violence goes home that night, and to whom. It is where felony cases get their preliminary examinations, the hearing at which a judge decides whether a deputy’s report and testimony are enough to send a case to trial. It is where the marine citations written by Sheriff’s Office deputies on Allegan County lakes are heard. Every one of those decisions turns on what an officer wrote down, and on whether the judge treats a missing report as a gap or as a shrug.

Some of those cases would come from the Marine Division that the county’s own website lists Marine Sgt. Todd Wagner as administering. Wagner closed the file on Siver’s collision. Wagner is the pastor of the church whose food ministry Siver features in his campaign mailer. Canon 2 of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct tells a judge not to allow family, social, or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment, and Michigan’s disqualification rule, MCR 2.003, reaches both actual bias and the appearance of impropriety. Would a Judge Siver disclose that relationship on the record? Would he step aside from every case Wagner’s division brings to his courtroom? He has not said. Voters are entitled to the answer before November 3, not after.

Why This Matters

Domestic violence cases and marine safety cases live and die on what a deputy wrote down at the scene. In Siver’s own case, the county says nobody wrote anything down.

I want to be clear about what that means. It does not mean nothing happened. People were on that lake. A deputy went to that house. Someone called. The absence of a report is a choice somebody made, and the people who watched it happen still have time to put their own account on the record.

The certification closes one door. The statute of limitations keeps another one open until 2029. Use it.