A Bay County woman has admitted to acquiring about $2,000 in ill-gotten funds, both from a fundraiser she started for a deceased local boy’s family and by embezzling from an adventure park.
At the same time, she’s started another online fundraiser to offset the costs of her “mental health crisis.”
An Essexville man is to spend at least seven years in prison for drunkenly killing a community-beloved mother of four and elementary school paraprofessional.
“This is a very somber experience today,” said Bay County Circuit Judge Jessie Scott Wood at the outset of the sentencing of Kelvin T. Trask on Tuesday, June 30.
A jury on May 14 convicted Trask of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated causing death and operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated causing serious bodily impairment.
Trask’s convictions stem from the Feb. 18, 2024, traffic crash that claimed the life of 52-year-old Polly Ann Christensen, a paraprofessional at Verellen Elementary School. Severely injured in the wreck was Christensen’s youngest child, then-14-year-old Mason Christensen.
When a detective asked a Saginaw caregiver why she seemingly kept her sister-in-law confined to a basement, with buckets to use as latrines, she replied she did so out of concern for the older woman.
“She always referred to being her caretaker and she didn’t want her to get out because it was dangerous out there, or didn’t want her to walk the streets alone,” the investigator testified. “She always said if she got bit by a dog, how would that look as a caretaker?”
The detective testified during the June 25 preliminary examination of Tasha T. Beamon, 48, who is charged with first-degree vulnerable adult abuse and unlawful imprisonment. Both charges are 15-year felonies.
Three more former residents of a shuttered Wolverine Human Services facility in Saginaw County have filed a lawsuit, alleging staff subjected them to prolonged sexual abuse.
They join more than a dozen others who have filed similar suits against the operators of the juvenile detention facility.
In the span of 33 seconds, two strangers confronted each other in a Saginaw Township mobile home park, wrestled each other to the pavement, and just as abruptly parted ways.
As one man sped off in an SUV, the other man stood and appeared shocked to discover he’d been repeatedly stabbed.
“Oh my God!” shouted the wounded man, 33-year-old Brandon M. Armstrong, before the brief footage ended.
For the past couple of months, YouTube has been inundated with short, AI-generated videos depicting the collapse of Jonestown. I wrote this piece for The Jonestown Institute analyzing the various permutations of the slop. Suffice to say, if you thought the victims of Nov. 18, 1978, couldn't have their dignity insulted any further, buckle up.
A former Michigan corrections officer and Saginaw schools security guard is accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl.
Prosecutors allege 38-year-old Alfonzie Pipkins on Dec. 16 was coaching teens in an unspecified sport at the YMCA of Saginaw. He entered the girls’ locker room and encountered a 16-year-old girl who was under the influence of marijuana, prosecutors allege.
Everytime I step out of my house into the back yard, little Fern here makes it a point to immediately climb the screen door. If the sliding glass door is open even an inch, she finagles her way inside enough to scale the screen all the way to the lintel.
There is no stopping her, no deterring her. Maybe roasting her will change that...
Nine years before the remains of at least four people were found on a rural Genesee Township property, a naked woman fled from another nearby piece of land owned by the same man.
Michigan State Police on Wednesday, June 10, announced they are investigating how four sets of human remains came to be inside a residence formerly owned by Duane W. Reynolds at 7104 Willard Road in Forest Township.
Whose skull did construction workers find while digging near a former church in Bay City’s Banks District?
Investigators don’t know for sure, but they have a few leads.
Maybe it belonged to a person buried more than a century ago in the church’s graveyard, only to be left behind when the bodies were relocated.
Or maybe it hailed from an indigenous person buried centuries before that.
A busy afternoon of fires in Bay City saw a house and a mobile advertising vehicle erupt in flames within an hour. It’s the second time in less than two months that such a vehicle caught fire downtown.
A Michigan man is having buyer’s remorse after accepting a plea deal in the 2003 sexual assault and homicide of a Birch Run grandmother.
Or, as prosecutors put it, the defendant’s family is having buyer’s remorse and compelling their relative to resist the consequences for the brutal slaying.
A Bay City man has admitted to helping his younger brother cover up the fatal shooting of their father. He did this, he explained, by trying to make it appear his father’s death resulted from a random drive-by shooting.
Last year, a Bay County woman took it upon herself to raise funds for the family of a local teen who died from a sudden medical event.
Police allege she ended up keeping the donations she raised, leading to her facing three criminal charges.
As a federal judge, Thomas L. Ludington has sentenced numerous people to prison from the bench in downtown Bay City.
After drunkenly crashing his car in northern Michigan, the 72-year-old jurist found himself on the business end of a gavel as he was ordered to spend the next few months on probation with the threat of jail hanging over his head.
In a few days’ time, a Michigan man went from promoting what he hoped would be the country’s largest historical book burning to asking a judge to reduce his guaranteed jail time.
With handcuffs around his wrists and walking with a limp, 23-year-old Jayden D. Scott on Monday, May 11, appeared before Bay County Circuit Judge Jessie Scott Wood for arraignment on a bench warrant she issued in March. The warrant stemmed from an ongoing custody dispute in which Scott’s son’s mother is the plaintiff.
A former teacher at Michigan Lutheran Seminary is heading to prison for sexually assaulting a student. Addressing the sentencing judge, the ex-teacher’s teenage victim said she is wracked with guilt over her abuser’s fate and hopes to one day speak with him again.
Her mother, in contrast, was not as open to giving the assailant a second chance.
“Carl Boeder used his roles as teacher and trusted church leader at his private Lutheran school to groom my daughter,” she said. “He manipulated her through his role as educator, posed as a friend to our family, undermined his school, and betrayed his calling.”
A Bay County-based digital creator has been convicted of interfering with police when he used his drone to livestream their activity.
The defendant's attorney disagreed with jurors’ findings and said their verdict could have far-reaching implications.
“I think this is really problematic for news agencies and for pretty much anybody that wants to cover police activity with a drone if the police can basically take you out of the sky,” he said.
Jessica M. Burke was a committed mother to her son with special needs, so protective that she would not allow others to hold him, testified a longtime friend. Burke’s fear of her son being harmed extended to medical professionals and state officials, with whom she often disagreed.
Despite Burke’s dedication, her 4-year-old son, Noah J. Whitmire, died weighing 10 pounds in her Bay City apartment. Prosecutors assert the boy starved to death due to his mother’s negligence. Burke’s defense attorney maintains Noah’s death was all but inevitable from his litany of health issues, issues the state itself was not equipped to deal with.