Allegan County Called Christopher Fitzhugh’s Accommodation Impossible. His Guardian Found It in Benton Harbor.

The court was told a cognitive interpreter for Christopher Fitzhugh could not be provided. According to the victim’s son, the first place his guardian looked had one. By then, the statute that ended the case had put it nearly out of reach.

Steve Fitzhugh called me on September 28. He wanted to tell me about the interpreter.

The one the court said could not be provided.

The one he says his nephew’s guardian found at the first place she looked.

I have covered this case since July 2025. Every installment has circled the same question: how a homicide prosecution ended on a competency finding the record never fully explained. This is the first time the answer has a location. Benton Harbor.

What the Probate Court Was Told

William Fitzhugh died on December 12, 2021, at 82. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. Two grandsons who lived with him, Cory Nethery and Christopher Fitzhugh, were charged. Christopher had been in jail since February 2022 when a guardianship hearing opened before Probate Judge Michael Buck on March 14, 2024.

The transcript of that hearing is the clearest public account of how the criminal case reached its end. Guardian ad litem Kevin Miller summarized two forensic reports from the criminal file. Dr. Steven Turnbull, he said, believed Christopher was competent if certain accommodations were provided, but those accommodations were not specifically identified. Dr. Michael Wolff found Christopher incompetent, could identify no accommodation that would change that, and concluded he could not be fully restored. Miller then read from Judge Bakker’s order dated March 4, 2024, finding Christopher incompetent to stand trial and not restorable, and noted the prosecuting attorney had been directed to file a mental health treatment petition in probate court.

Christopher’s criminal defense attorney, Paul Klein, then addressed the court. He described Turnbull’s recommendation as unprecedented in Michigan and said it came down to a cognitive interpreter, someone who could translate facts to Christopher in real time so he could take part in his own defense. He told the court that is all the reports say. Then he described what happened to that recommendation. It was, in his words, “impossible to accommodate.” Judge Bakker had done a search, he said, and her order concluded Christopher was incompetent and not restorable for purposes of the criminal case.

Those two accounts, given minutes apart in the same hearing, describe the same reports differently. If the reports never named the accommodation, the court was asked to accept that something undefined could not be found. If they named a cognitive interpreter, the question becomes how hard anyone looked. Turnbull’s full report is the document that settles it, and it sits in a criminal file the public has not seen.

Klein also told the court that both evaluators described Christopher’s deficits as lifelong and not treatable with medication. That is the strongest case for the finding, and it is exactly why the accommodation carried so much weight. If the deficits were never going to change, the accommodation was the only road to a trial.

Why Was the Judge the One Searching?

Klein’s account raises a question the record does not answer. Finding a service provider is not a trial judge’s job.

Michigan courts handle foreign-language interpreters through court administration under MCR 1.111. Disability accommodations, which is what a cognitive interpreter would be, run through court administration too, usually the court’s ADA coordinator, under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And in an adversarial case, the parties carry the evidence. The defense’s expert made the recommendation. The prosecution had the most to lose if the accommodation was never found. Those are the people expected to put a provider, or proof that none exists, on the record.

A judge’s own search, if that is what happened, leaves nothing either side can test. Who did she contact? What qualifications was she looking for, when the reports may not have named any? Did the prosecution offer a name or ask for time to find one? Was the court’s ADA coordinator involved? None of it appears in any public document. All the public has is one sentence from a defense attorney, spoken in a different court after the finding was already made.

Benton Harbor matters because of that gap. If Steve’s account holds, the guardian found the accommodation by doing the looking that someone with the job would have done. The record never says who had that job.

Klein also told the court where the criminal case stood that morning. Christopher was through the criminal process, he said, except for the waiting period, with a bond review and status conference set before Bakker that could be the last hearing. Four days later, on March 18, 2024, Christopher walked out of the Allegan County Jail. FOX 17 reported his case was set for review on May 6.

The guardianship petition had been filed by David Gange, a friend and former employer of Christopher’s, who told the court he was prepared to give Christopher housing and work. Steve Fitzhugh, in the courtroom, told Judge Buck that Gange had hidden Christopher in his garage when the arrest warrant issued. Buck declined to appoint Gange, citing the appearance of self-dealing in a guardian who would also be Christopher’s landlord and employer, and appointed a professional guardian instead. He left it to her whether Gange would still provide housing or work. Steve told the judge he supported that choice.

The Interpreter in Benton Harbor

Steve says that guardian never accepted the finding.

In our September 28 conversation, he told me she paid roughly $1,400 out of her own pocket to have Christopher retested. She went looking for the accommodation the court had been told did not exist. According to Steve, the first place she tried was in Benton Harbor, a clinician who said he could provide the interpretation and then conducted the testing himself. The result, Steve says, was that Christopher is not incompetent.

Steve put it plainly. “They never looked is what it is. She found him right away.”

He says the results were given to the Allegan County Prosecutor’s Office, and the family was told the case was closed.

That account refines my earlier reporting. In July 2025 I wrote that Steve located an interpreter himself, and in September 2025 I attributed the retest to the guardian ad litem. The record now shows two different people in two different roles. Miller was the guardian ad litem who reported to the court in March 2024. The guardian who commissioned the retest is the professional fiduciary appointed that day, who Steve says also serves as guardian for his mother and his younger brother.

Steve also told me Christopher held a valid driver’s license before he was charged. The family did not learn that until well into the proceedings.

What the Next Prosecutor Inherited

Two days after Christopher’s release, FOX 17 aired a story on the family’s reaction. The station identified Michael Villar as a local attorney speaking on behalf of the Fitzhugh family. Villar explained what he understood had happened: Christopher was found incompetent, spent 180 days without being restored, and at that point, he said, “Circuit Court is forced to release him back into the community.” He added that the usual practice is for the court or prosecutor to coordinate with community mental health beforehand so a guardian can be put in place.

Five months later, Villar defeated Myrene Koch in the August 2024 Republican primary for Allegan County Prosecutor. It was his second run against her. He lost the 2020 race by 17 votes. Between those races, Villar was the challenger who obtained the Koch and Bakker emails that became People v. Loew.

He took office in January 2025, ten months after the competency order. Everything that gives a prosecutor leverage over a nonrestorability finding happens before it is entered: the evidentiary hearing, the cross-examination of the evaluators, the fight over what the accommodation is and whether anyone can provide it. That window belonged to the prior administration, and it closed on March 4, 2024.

Clutch Justice has been told that Villar has described the competency ruling he inherited as an extremely difficult legal obstacle. The statute explains why.

Steve is frustrated that the retest did not reopen the case, and after nearly five years that is understandable. But the wall the family keeps hitting may be written into the law itself.

Why the Law May Keep the Case Closed

Michigan presumes every defendant competent. Under MCL 330.2020, a person is incompetent only if a mental condition leaves them unable to understand the proceedings or to assist in their defense in a rational manner. A person can hold a job, ride a dirt bike, and still meet that definition. A person can also be found incompetent on a record that never tested the accommodation that might have changed the answer.

When a defendant is found incompetent, MCL 330.2044(1) allows the charges to be dismissed in only two ways. Under subsection (1)(a), they end when the prosecutor notifies the court that the office will not proceed. Under subsection (1)(b), they end automatically 15 months after the defendant was first found incompetent. Subsection (2) then bars refiling the same charges, with one exception written into subsection (3): if the dismissal came under (1)(b) and the offense carries life imprisonment, the prosecutor may petition the court at any time for permission to file again.

Felony murder in Michigan carries mandatory life. That makes the subsection everything. If the charges ended under (1)(a), current law will not let them be refiled, by Villar or anyone else. If they ended under (1)(b), the door is not locked, but it is not open either. The statute lets a prosecutor ask. It does not require the court to agree.

The March 14, 2024 record points toward (1)(b). Klein described the case as finished but for the waiting period, which is the language of the 15-month clock, not of a prosecutor’s notice declining to proceed. FOX 17 reported a court review set for May 2024, after Christopher’s release. Under People v. Miller, 440 Mich 631 (1992), the 15 months count cumulatively and need not run continuously. Depending on when Christopher was first found incompetent, the clock may have expired late in Koch’s final year in office or early in Villar’s first.

The dismissal order will say which. If it is (1)(a), the question moves back to Koch’s office and why it gave notice it would not proceed in a homicide case.

Even on the (1)(b) path, the Benton Harbor retest runs into the statute. The Mental Health Code routes competency examinations through court orders: under MCL 330.2026, the court orders an examination by a certified or licensed examiner at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry or another certified facility. A retest a guardian arranges and pays for on her own sits outside that process. It can support a petition, but it cannot replace the examination the statute requires. A petition built on it would go to the same circuit court, and possibly the same judge, that found Christopher not restorable, and that court would decide whether to order a new examination at all. A prosecutor weighing that petition is not deciding whether Christopher is competent. He is deciding whether a court will let anyone find out.

People v. Davis, 310 Mich App 276 (2015), shows where the real leverage was. The trial court there found a defendant could not be restored without letting the prosecutor present evidence, and dismissed. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the prosecution was entitled to be heard and that MCL 330.2044(1) permits dismissal in only its two listed circumstances. Davis sets what a prosecutor can demand before a nonrestorability finding takes hold, and that moment came under Koch. Whether her office asked for that hearing in Christopher’s case, and whether it put on any evidence about the accommodation, is in the same criminal file as Turnbull’s report.

The Legislature Is Already Rewriting This Statute

House Bill 4596, introduced in June 2025 by Reps. Jennifer Wortz, Pat Outman, and Jamie Thompson, would amend MCL 330.2034 and 330.2044. It passed the House 64 to 36 on September 24, 2025.

Two changes matter for the Fitzhugh case. The bill would start the 15-month clock from the date a defendant is admitted for treatment at a state facility, rather than from the incompetency finding, when that date is later. And where current law says only that a prosecutor may petition to refile, the bill would require the court to grant permission if, after a hearing, it finds the defendant competent to stand trial. Under that language, a credible retest would not just open a door. It would oblige a court to walk through it.

The House Fiscal Agency found the bill would have no fiscal impact on the state or local governments. The family still waiting on an answer in Allegan County is exactly the case it would change.

Koch in Allegan, Koch in Berrien

Myrene Koch’s office prosecuted Christopher Fitzhugh from his 2022 arrest through her final months as Allegan County Prosecutor. She is now an assistant prosecuting attorney in the Berrien County Prosecutor’s Office, Niles division, and a candidate for Berrien County’s 5th District Court.

Sources in Berrien County told Clutch Justice that Koch has argued forcefully against incompetency findings in cases where the clinical record supported them.

Set beside Allegan, that is a contrast worth naming. In a homicide case where one evaluator said accommodations could make trial possible, her former office’s record, as far as the public file shows, includes no visible fight over the accommodation. In Berrien, sources describe an assistant prosecutor who fights incompetency even when it is warranted. Competency is supposed to be a clinical question with a legal consequence. Treated as a lever, it gets pulled hard in some cases and left alone in others, and either way the clinical question stops being the one that decides.

The relationship between Koch and Bakker is already part of the public record for a different reason. In People v. Loew, decided July 16, 2024, the Michigan Supreme Court’s lead opinion found that Bakker’s ex parte emails with Koch during an active criminal sexual conduct trial were unethical, violated the Code of Judicial Conduct, and required her to raise disqualification. The Court did not find a due process violation and affirmed the conviction, 4 to 3. Loew does not show anything about the Fitzhugh case. It does show the two officials who controlled it have communicated off the record during a prosecution before, and the court that wrote that opinion is the one now holding Cory Nethery’s application.

Where Christopher Is Now

Steve says Christopher lives and works at Days Tree Service in Pullman, the same place the family found him hiding when the original warrant issued, and that a man Steve calls Dave is paid to house him. Steve describes it as a meth house. He says the guardian had Christopher drug tested and the results showed drug use, that Christopher rides a new dirt bike on public roads, and that he has been kicked out of the stores in town. He says Christopher receives a monthly state benefit.

Steve says the guardian has petitioned the court to move Christopher out of Pullman at least two or three times and has been blocked each time. A proposed move, he says, has stalled over concerns that Christopher could be hurt because people know his name. In March 2024, Steve told the probate court that Christopher would be living two miles from him and two miles from the house where his father was beaten. That is where he is.

He believes Christopher has been protected because he has worked as a police informant, pointing to roughly 21 assault charges that he says never stuck and to officers he has seen socializing with Christopher at a Pullman gas station. Clutch first reported the informant allegation in July 2025. No public record has confirmed or ruled it out.

The Hearings Steve Says He Could Not Attend

Steve describes the early court dates the same way every time. Hearings noticed for 9 a.m. would already be over by the time the family arrived, he says, with proceedings held around 8:30. He says a member of the prosecutor’s staff physically blocked the family from entering at least once, and that Christopher was brought in and out through a back door while Nethery was walked past the family in the open.

Article 1, Section 24 of the Michigan Constitution gives crime victims the right to attend trial and every other court proceeding the accused has the right to attend. A hearing moved earlier without notice to the family, if that is what happened, empties that right without formally denying it. The court’s own scheduling records and registers of action for those dates will show the noticed times against the times the proceedings were held.

Cory Nethery’s Case Is Not Over

In October 2025, Nethery moved to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming his original attorney, now 57th District Court Judge Christopher Burnett, was ineffective. Bakker held a Ginther hearing over two days, November 6 and November 14, 2025, and denied the motion. Her written order entered November 17.

Nethery’s appellate counsel, Michael Skinner, sought leave in the Court of Appeals, which denied it on January 23, 2026. He applied for leave to the Michigan Supreme Court on February 26, 2026, under Supreme Court No. 169728. That application is the last open door in the co-defendant’s case. If it led to a vacated plea and a trial, Christopher’s competency would stop being a closed chapter and become a live witness question.

What Fixing This Would Actually Require

Every competency report that conditions competency on an accommodation should be required to name it, describe the qualifications of the person who would provide it, and say whether the evaluator knows of anyone who can. A recommendation too vague to search for should not be the basis for a finding that it cannot be found.

Before any court finds a defendant not restorable because an accommodation is unavailable, the search should run through court administration’s ADA process, with notice to both parties, and be put on the record: who was contacted, when, and why each option failed. A judge should not be left doing the looking, and a one-line reference to a search is not a record anyone can test.

Victims and their families should receive notice and a chance to be heard before a prosecutor gives notice under MCL 330.2044(1)(a), because that notice permanently forecloses prosecution. A decision that final should not be made in a hearing the family learns about afterward.

When credible new evidence of competency surfaces in a life offense dismissed under subsection (1)(b), there should be a defined route back to a certified examination, one a guardian, a prosecutor, or the court can trigger, so new evidence does not have to start as a petition a court can simply decline. HB 4596’s mandatory-grant language would give prosecutors in Villar’s position something to work with. It has been waiting on the Senate since passing the House.

And when one professional guardian serves both an accused person and members of the victim’s family, as Steve says happened here, the probate court should be required to address the conflict on the record.

Why This Case Matters

I keep returning to the arithmetic of it.

One evaluator said trial was possible.

One accommodation would make it possible.

The court was told a search came up empty, and the record does not say whose search it should have been.

A guardian found it on her first try and paid for it herself.

By then, the statute had moved the question nearly out of reach of the prosecutor who inherited it.

The law does not require Christopher Fitzhugh to be convicted. It requires the system to have exhausted what it was told would make a fair trial possible before deciding no trial could ever happen. On this record, it is not clear anyone did, or that anyone was assigned to. The answers are in a criminal file the public has not seen, and the fix is in a Senate committee holding HB 4596. The Fitzhugh family has waited almost five years for either one to move.