Court case resulting from incident w/ brother in law

Our attorney has advised us not to comment on this case publicly... yet.

Stay tuned.

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Any news from the Star Chamber yet?

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We're dieing here ZZZ....

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Date: 4/6/09. Man, His wife, and mother-in-law were at the Matt Giraud homecoming event in Kalamazoo, MI. Man was open carrying (rest were carrying concealed). After being there for roughly 90 minutes, they decided they weren't interested and decided to leave. Upon leaving, the group passed by a KDPS officer, and greeted them cordially.

Roughly two minutes later, as they were walking back to their vehicle, a squad car rushed them, stopped at an angle on the street in front of them, and the officer came out, drew his firearm, aimed it at the man (but they were all standing within inches of each other, so really at the whole group), and detained the man who was openly carrying, informed the other two to stay back and not get involved.

The officer immediately detained, disarmed, and cuffed the man, directing him to the back of the squad car by using the man's loaded (and chambered) Glock .45 caliber pistol on his back and shoulder to direct him (barrel first).

The wife and mother-in-law were visibly upset, having had a firearm pointed at the man (and themselves), and were protesting, claiming that he had done nothing wrong. During this process, an unidentified man claimed to be an "undercover officer" was talking with the wife and mother-in-law, and during the event (and even after) refused to be identified (Afterward, none of the officers claimed to know who he was, even though the man claimed to know the officer-in-charge at the event, and the officer didn't deny it then).

During their interaction with said "undercover officer," it came up in conversation that they, too were carrying, only concealed. "Undercover officer" then got a uniformed officer ("Did you hear that? They're carrying too!"), and then forced each of them to disarm and provide CPL/ID, and the officers ran the serial numbers of the guns.

At the end of the day, no one was charged, and everyone went home armed.

Some two weeks later, an officer comes up to wife and Mother-in-law's home, and serves them with a citation: Violation MCL 28.425f(3): Failure to immediately disclose when stopped.

The man who was openly carrying was never charged with a crime, because no crime was committed.

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I was able to watch the event unfold that day and have kept my observations to myself out of respect for the family since they wanted to keep it quiet under advice of counsel. Looks like it's safe for me to fill in some details now.

The whole scene seemed like a non-case to me. The first officer that testified came back into the room and sat in the crowd with the rest of us spectators, obviously, he was interested in the outcome. I believe he was the officer that drew his weapon on the man who was legally walking down the street oc. The second officer that testified was a real piece of work. His testimony was vague and purposely evasive in my opinion. A couple of his answers were,
"well I said things but I can't remember if I said that exactly," and
"Yes I dropped off some papers to them but I can't remember if it was those papers I gave them." (I'm going from memory here, these quotes are not necessarily word for word but it's something close to this, you get the idea)

In the end after a short recess, the judge returned and said that it looked to her like no laws were broken since the officer testified that when asked if they had cpl's they immediately answered in the affirmative. Then the judge went on to basically scold the defendents on how they shouldn't "push it" when it comes to guns and gun safety. Personally, I didn't think we needed the social commentary. Finally, the visably upset prosecuter stormed out of the room and that was that.

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