Trial begins for ex-Grand Rapids officer charged with murder in fatal shooting of Black motorist
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(GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.) — Opening arguments in the trial of Christopher Schurr, the former Grand Rapids police officer who is charged with second degree murder in the fatal shooting of Patrick Lyoya, began in a Michigan courtroom on Monday morning. The trial began three years after the Black motorist’s death.
A jury was sworn in on Wednesday, with jurors and alternates consisting of four men and 10 women, with 10 white jurors, one Black and three Hispanic, according to ABC affiliate in Grand Rapids, WZZM.
Schurr was charged with second-degree murder in June 2022 and his appeal was denied by the Michigan Supreme Court in December 2024. He has pleaded not guilty.
Schurr was charged with second-degree murder in June 2022 and pleaded not guilty. Schurr fought the charge in court, arguing that he should not have to stand trial because he was acting within his rights as a police officer. His final appeal was denied by the Michigan Supreme Court in December 2024.
Video appears to show Lyoya, a 26-year-old immigrant who came to the U.S. to escape violence in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo, being shot in the head by Schurr after the officer pulled him over for an unregistered license plate on April 4, 2022.
Body camera video, which was released nine days after the shooting, showed Schurr pulling Lyoya over for a license plate violation. When Lyoya began walking away from Schurr, the video shows the officer shouting at Lyoya to “get back in the car.” Then a struggle ensued between the two men during which the video appears to show Lyoya reaching for Schurr’s stun gun.
The body camera was deactivated during the struggle, according to police, and does not show the moment Shurr shot Lyoya. But the fatal shot is seen on cell phone video captured by the passenger of the vehicle.
The video appears to show Schurr telling Lyoya to let go of the stun gun several times, and while Lyoya is on the ground with his face down and Schurr on top of him, the officer appears to shoot Lyoya in the back of his head. The Kent County medical examiner confirmed Lyoya died from a gunshot to the back of his head.
Schurr was fired on June 15, 2022 amid an investigation into the incident.
After the charges were filed, Schurr’s attorneys told WZZM on June 10, 2022 that Lyoya’s death was “not murder but an unfortunate tragedy, resulting from a highly volatile situation.”
“Mr. Lyoya continually refused to obey lawful commands and ultimately disarmed a police officer,” they wrote in a statement. “Mr. Lyoya gained full control of a police officer’s weapon while resisting arrest, placing Officer Schurr in fear of great bodily harm or death.”
Lyoya’s family filed a $100 million civil lawsuit against Schurr and the city of Grand Rapids in December 2022. Schurr denied wrongdoing in a response to the complaint, and in August 2023 a federal judge dismissed Grand Rapids from the lawsuit.
ABC News reached out to Shurr’s attorneys and the family of Lyoya ahead of the trial for further comment.
Before the trial, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Schurr’s legal team’s request to hear an appeal in the lawsuit filed by Lyoya’s family against the former officer.
Schurr’s defense team asked the court to decide whether the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong in determining it could not consider qualified immunity for Schurr at the time of the killing, WZZM reported.
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that protects government officials and police officers from being found individually liable in civil lawsuits.
(Grant County, Ind.) — Over 50 years after a mom was killed and her daughter was left abandoned with her body, the young mom’s cold case murder has been solved, Indiana authorities said.
On the night of July 7, 1972, Phyllis Bailer, 26, and her 3-year-old daughter were driving the 100 miles from Indianapolis to Bluffton, Indiana, to visit Bailer’s parents — but they never made it, the Indiana State Police said.
The next morning, around 10:30 a.m., Bailer’s car was found empty in Grant County, Indiana, police said.
About one hour later, a woman driving in Allen County, Indiana, discovered Bailer and her daughter along the side of the road in a ditch.
Bailer had been sexually assaulted and shot to death, police said. Her 3-year-old daughter was with her and unharmed.
No arrests were made.
Years later, a partial DNA profile was developed from Bailer’s clothing, which eliminated authorities’ main suspect, police said.
The murder continued to go unsolved for decades.
Last year, “a much stronger DNA profile” was developed from Bailer’s clothes, police said, and investigators started working with a forensic genealogy company.
Genetic genealogy is an investigative tool — first used in 2018 in the arrest of the Golden State Killer — in which unknown DNA from a crime scene is identified by comparing it to family members who voluntarily submit DNA samples to a database.
Through genetic genealogy, police identified Fred Allen Lienemann as the person who left DNA on Bailer’s clothing, authorities announced on Wednesday.
Lienemann, who was 25 years old at the time of the murder, “had no known connections to Phyllis Bailer but had a significant criminal history,” police said.
Lienemann was killed in Detroit in 1985, police said. If he was alive, prosecutors would charge him with Bailer’s murder, police said.
“Phyllis Bailer never made it to Bluffton to visit her family,” state police spokesperson Sgt. Wes Rowlader wrote on social media. “After years of questions, this family finally has answers about what happened to her.”
(NEW YORK) — Luigi Mangione asked a federal judge in New York on Friday to stop the government from seeking the death penalty if he’s convicted of federal charges related to the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing the Justice Department made a “political, arbitrary, capricious” breach of protocol.
“When the United States plans to kill one of its citizens, it must follow statutory and internal procedures,” defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo said. “Mangione seeks Court intervention now not merely because the Government has failed to follow these procedures but because it has abandoned them.”
The defense motion followed a press release by Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this month that said she ordered the death penalty for Mangione to “carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”
The defense said it was never given the chance to argue for a reprieve.
“The stakes could not be higher. The United States government intends to kill Mr. Mangione as a political stunt,” the defense said. “We appreciate, and will address, the province and discretion of the Executive Branch of government, and how, in the usual course, courts defer to the Executive’s established procedures. But the Attorney General’s actions and public statements in this case have not followed the usual course. Because the Attorney General has chosen to proceed in this way, Mr. Mangione’s Due Process rights have already been violated and the manner in which the Government has acted has prejudiced the grand jury pool and has corrupted the grand jury process.”
Agnifilo argued Bondi’s statement, issued before Mangione has been indicted on federal charges, was improper and “prejudiced the grand jury process.” She asked the judge to preclude the government from seeking the death penalty and she demanded the government turn over documents and notes that relate to the attorney general’s directive.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.
Mangione is accused of gunning down Thompson outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan as the CEO headed to an investors conference on Dec. 4. He was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, five days after the murder.
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge in Boston said he denied the request to block the buyout offer because the federal unions who brought the case lacked standing to sue and because the District Court lacks jurisdiction to review the case.
Three federal employee unions — with the support of 20 Democratic attorneys general — have argued in a lawsuit that the Office of Personnel Management’s deferred resignation offer is an “unlawful ultimatum” to force the resignation of government workers under the “threat of mass termination.”
According to U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr., the federal unions who challenged the policy are not directly impacted by the buyout offer; rather they are subject to collateral impacts such as a reduction in union membership and needing to answer their members’ questions about the policy.
“The unions do not have the required direct stake in the Fork Directive but are challenging a policy that affects others, specifically executive branch employees. This is not sufficient,” the judge wrote.
The judge also determined that the district court lacks jurisdiction to review the dispute because the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute sets out an administrative review process before courts can take over.
“According to this complex scheme, disputes must first be administratively exhausted before the employing agency and the relevant administrative review board and any further challenges are properly heard in a court of appeals,” the order said.
O’Toole Jr. did not include any interpretation about how the buyout deadline is impacted in his order.
“This Boston Buyout Ruling is the first of many legal wins for the President. The Court dissolved the injunction due to a lack of standing. This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday.
During an hour-long hearing Monday, a lawyer for the Department of Justice framed the deferred resignation offer as a “humane off-ramp” for federal employees before President Donald Trump enacts sweeping changes to “rebalance and reorganize the federal workforce.”
“President Trump campaigned on a promise to reform the federal workforce,” DOJ attorney Eric Hamilton said, outlining Trump’s plan to reduce the size of the federal government and his return-to-office executive order. “We understand these announcements may have come as a disappointment for some in the federal workforce.”
Hamilton argued that any further delay of the buyout would cause irreparable harm because the Trump administration plans to enact the next steps of reshaping the federal government as soon as the buyout window closes.
Elena Goldstein, a lawyer representing the unions that brought the challenge, hammered the Trump administration for attempting to enforce an “unprecedented program” with a “slapdash exploding deadline”
“For the last two weeks, confusion has rained for millions of career civil servants,” Goldstein said. “This is a program of unprecedented magnitude that raises questions about the rationality of OPM’s decision-making.”
The buyout offer, part of Trump’s effort to trim the size of government through billionaire Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, was sent out two weeks ago in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road” — the same language Musk used when he slashed jobs at Twitter after taking over that company in 2022.
The offer from the Office of Personnel Management offered full pay and benefits until September for any federal employee who accepted a deferred resignation by Feb. 6, with no obligation to work after they accepted the agreement.
While Goldstein acknowledged that Trump has the right to downsize the federal government, she emphasized that OPM has not gone through any of the steps necessary to carry out such a sweeping move — including analyzing the cost and benefits of their approach, evaluating its impact on the government’s function, and accessing potential conflicts of interest for Musk. She added that the exact terms of the buyout are “shifting” for thousands of employees who have gotten inconsistent guidance from their agency.
“OPM appears to be making this up as they are going along,” she said. “When the government wants to decide, there are ways to do this correctly … none of that happened here in the two weeks since they enacted this program.”
Arguing for the government, Hamilton criticized the plaintiffs’ argument as “legally incoherent and at odds with their theory of the case,” because a further delay of the buyout would “insert more uncertainty” into the lives of federal employees.
While the plaintiffs raised concerns that the buyout program violates federal law by using money that Congress never appropriated, Hamilton attempted to push back on the claim that the buyout changes the government’s financial obligations.
“Nothing about the voluntary resignation changes anything about the federal government’s financial obligations. It just changes what employees are expected to do and not do during their period of employment,” Hamilton said.
Goldstein argued that a preliminary injunction is necessary to prevent what she said was an unlawful offer to reshape the federal government while the Trump administration continues to “put additional pressure on employees.”
“This is an unprecedented action taken on an unprecedented timeline,” she said.
Just hours ahead of Thursday’s original deadline for employees to accept the offer, Judge O’Toole — who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton — temporarily blocked the offer until Monday so he could consider issuing a temporary restraining offer pausing the order.
“I enjoined the defendants from taking any action to implement the so-called ‘Fork Directive’ pending the completion of briefing and oral argument on the issues,” Judge O’Toole said in his ruling. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today.”
The Trump administration, in response, “extended” the deadline for the offer, which more than 65,000 federal employees have already taken.
The unions who brought the lawsuit argued that Trump exceeded his authority as president with the offer, which they described as a “slapdash resignation program.”
According to the plaintiffs, Trump’s offer violates federal law, lacks congressionally appropriated funding, and does not offer employees reassurance that the president would follow through with the offer. Their claim in part relies on a federal law from the 1940s called the Administrative Procedure Act that governs how federal agencies create and enforce rules.
“In the tech universe, ‘move fast and break things’ is a fine motto in part because they’re not playing with the public’s money, and it’s expected that most initiatives are going to fail,” Loyola Marymount law professor Justin Leavitt told ABC News. “Congress knows that, so in 1946 they basically said, ‘When agencies do stuff … they have to be careful about it. They’ve got to consider all aspects of the problem.”
The plaintiffs also argued that the buyout is unlawful because it relies on funding that Congress has yet to appropriate, violating the Antideficiency Act.
“Defendants’ ultimatum divides federal workers into two groups: (1) those who submit their resignations to OPM for a promised period of pay without the requirement to work, and (2) those who have not and are therefore subject to threat of mass termination,” the lawsuit said.
Lawyers for the federal government have pushed back on those claims, arguing that Trump has the legal authority to provide the buyout for employees within the federal branch, and that any further delay would do more harm than good.
“Extending the deadline for the acceptance of deferred resignation on its very last day will markedly disrupt the expectations of the federal workforce, inject tremendous uncertainty into a program that scores of federal employees have already availed themselves of, and hinder the Administration’s efforts to reform the federal workforce,” DOJ attorney Joshua E. Gardner wrote in a filing last week.
