The Correction: A Press Release, a Complaint, and 1.7 Grams

The Correction

On August 15, 2025, the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office issued a one-page press release under the heading “Re: Article titled ‘Wilson man pleads guilty to attempted possession of drugs’ published on WZMQ/Channel 19 News.” It was signed by Lauren Wickman as Prosecuting Attorney. It opened by saying that an inaccurate news article had been brought to her attention, that the article concerned a plea resolution for a defendant named Colton Brunette, and that the article was “highly misleading, as the case that was resolved was not in any way associated with the traffic stop that occurred in February 2025.”

The release then did what a correction is supposed to do: it separated two events that a reader had been led to conflate. The plea entered on July 31, 2025, the release said, came from a police interaction on June 6, 2025 — “over 3 months after the original traffic stop.” That interaction, the release continued, “occurred within the city of Escanaba and resulted in 1.7 grams of Ketamine being seized. No other controlled substances were located or seized during the June 6th interaction.”

That sentence is the reason this case watch exists. It is a specific, quantified, public factual assertion by the elected prosecutor about a criminal case, published to correct another outlet’s account. A reader who wanted to check it had no way to do so from public records, because the underlying charging document was not public in any searchable form. So a request was sent. FOIA 25-199 asked, among other things, for the charging documents and plea agreements associated with that June 6, 2025 stop, and for the office’s communications about its own press releases.

The office answered on September 8, 2025. It produced five documents, all of them press releases or social-media posts, including a draft of the very release that contains the 1.7-gram sentence. It produced the charging complaint. And then it did something that the rest of this page is about: it gave the same request three different dispositions in a single letter, and it priced the remainder at $2,711.67 with a $1,355.83 deposit.

The June 6, 2025 Interaction

The complaint describes the event as having occurred in Escanaba City, Delta County, on or about June 6, 2025. The police agency report number recorded on the form is MSPP80-2 84-1114-25, which indicates a Michigan State Police report. The complaining witness is Trooper Colin Immel. The district case number is 21-25000669-01, and the presiding judge is Steven C. Parks of the 94th District Court.

The witness block lists seven names: the defendant, Colton Troy Brunette, and six law-enforcement officers — Trooper Andrew Leinonen, Trooper Cole Tardiff, Deputy Joseph Gibbs, Deputy Sherry Vandeville, Trooper Colin Immel, and Trooper Zane Weaver. That is a substantial police presence for an interaction the press release describes as producing 1.7 grams of a single substance and no other controlled substances.

The warrant was authorized on June 19, 2025, thirteen days after the interaction. The plea was entered on July 31, 2025, which is fifty-five days after the interaction and forty-two days after the warrant. The press release correcting the news coverage was issued fifteen days after the plea.

Those dates matter because they establish the sequence the office itself relies on. The office says the June 6 matter and the February matter are “entirely separate and distinct.” The complaint supports the first half of that: the June 6 charge is a standalone possession count arising from a June 6 event in Escanaba. What the complaint cannot do is corroborate the quantity, because the quantity is not in it.

What the Complaint Actually Alleges

The charging document contains a single count. Under the heading “COUNT 1: CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE – POSSESSION/ANALOGUES,” it alleges that the defendant “on or about June 6, 2025, did knowingly or intentionally possess the controlled substance ketamine; contrary to MCL 333.7403(2)(b)(ii).” The maximum penalty is stated as “FELONY: 2 Years and/or $2,000.00.”

That is the entire allegation. There is no weight, no dosage-unit count, no mixture estimate, and no reference to a laboratory report. The statute cited, MCL 333.7403(2)(b)(ii), is the possession provision that applies to a schedule 3 controlled substance other than a specified list, and the penalty stated on the form — two years and/or $2,000 — is the penalty for that tier. It is not a quantity-graded charge. In Michigan, possession of ketamine is charged under this provision without regard to weight, which is precisely why a charging document can be silent on grams.

This is the crux, and it is worth stating plainly so that no reader overreads it. The absence of a weight in the complaint is not an irregularity. It is normal. Michigan’s possession statute does not grade ketamine possession by weight, so a prosecutor has no reason to plead a weight, and a court has no reason to require one. The complaint is doing exactly what a complaint of this kind does.

The question the case watch raises is therefore not “why did the complaint omit the weight.” It is the narrower and more interesting question: if the charging instrument does not establish a weight, where did the 1.7 grams in the press release come from, and why was a precise figure published to correct a news story when the charging document that would prove it contains no figure at all? The office was free to publish a number. It was also free not to. What it was not free to do, and did not do, was produce any record in this FOIA that states the number.

The Number Problem

There is a second number in the packet, and it makes the first one harder to place. On February 18, 2025, the office issued a press release about a February 16, 2025 traffic stop that led to the arrest of Colton Troy Brunette and Tristan Russell Halfaday. That release itemized what was found: approximately 136.12 grams of cocaine, approximately 35.43 grams of powdered fentanyl, approximately 64.94 grams of “blue pill” fentanyl, approximately 61.83 grams of MDMA, approximately 1.950 grams of ketamine, and prescription pills.

So the office’s own February release puts ketamine at 1.950 grams. The August release puts the June 6 ketamine at 1.7 grams. The two figures are not the same, and they should not be, because they describe different events four months apart. But they are close enough that a reader encountering both in the same packet has to work to keep them apart — and the office, in the August release, was explicitly trying to help readers keep them apart.

This is where the documentary record becomes genuinely useful. The February release is a detailed, quantified inventory of a large seizure: over 300 grams of controlled substances across five substances. The June 6 event, by the office’s own account, produced 1.7 grams of one substance and nothing else. The charging decision reflects that difference. In February, Brunette was arraigned on four felony counts, all conspiracy charges: conspiracy to deliver or manufacture narcotics in an amount of 50 to 449 grams under MCL 333.7401(2)(a)(ii); conspiracy concerning ketamine under MCL 333.7401(2)(b)(ii); conspiracy concerning fentanyl under the same provision; and conspiracy to deliver or manufacture methamphetamine under MCL 333.7401(2)(b)(i). Bond was set at $75,000 cash or surety with a GPS tether. In June, the charge was a single possession count with a two-year maximum.

Nothing about that contrast is improper. It is what a proportionate charging decision looks like when one event yields 300 grams and the other yields a gram and a half. The point is that the office’s own documents demonstrate it knew how to quantify a seizure when it wanted to — precisely, to two decimal places, substance by substance. It did so in February. It did so again in August, with one decimal place. What it did not do, in either release, was point a reader to the record that would let them check the number, and in the June case the record it later produced contains no number to check.

The February File, Described Three Ways

The August 15 release ends its substantive discussion of the February matter with a sentence that is careful and, on its own terms, fair: “The matter from February 2025 is still under investigation. However, the two matters are entirely separate and distinct from one another. The conviction resulting from the June 6, 2025 interaction would not preclude our office from further pursuing charges related to the February 2025 traffic stop, should the necessary evidence be obtained.”

That is a prosecutor saying, publicly, that a file is open. Twenty-four days later, the same office answered a request for the February records with a different characterization entirely. The September 8 letter denies the February charging documents and plea agreements because “these records have already been provided to you in response to FOIA Request 25-171,” citing Densmore v. Michigan Department of Corrections for the proposition that a requester must explain why a second copy will not suffice.

And in the very next paragraph, the office denies the February trial-preparation records on a third ground: that a review of the records reveals they do not exist, with a formal certificate of nonexistence signed by the FOIA coordinator.

Three postures toward one file, in one packet, twenty-four days apart:

There are innocent explanations, and the record does not exclude them. “Still under investigation” may refer to a different defendant or a different aspect of the February stop than the records requested. The records produced under 25-171 may have been the charging documents only, leaving trial-preparation material genuinely uncreated. A file can be open as to one person and closed as to another. But the office had the request in hand, knew it was being asked about the February file, and chose to answer each sub-part in a separate paragraph without ever reconciling the three answers. A reader is left to do that work, and the packet does not supply the materials to do it.

One further detail is worth recording because it is easy to miss. The citation in the letter reads “Densmore v Michigan Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363, 266 (1994).” The case is real and the year is right, but the reporter citation as printed is garbled; Densmore is reported at 203 Mich. App. 363. That is a typographical matter, not a substantive one, and it is noted here only because this page quotes the letter as written and a reader checking the citation should know why it does not resolve cleanly.

What FOIA 25-199 Asked For

The request is dated August 16, 2025 and was received by the office on August 18, 2025. The packet includes two Zimbra fax-receipt messages showing that it arrived by fax, which is how the office stamped it. It contained three numbered requests.

Request one asked for all internal and external communications — including emails, text messages, memos and draft statements — created, received or exchanged by Prosecutor Lauren M. Wickman, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Beth Wickwire, or Assistant Prosecutor Lauren Mattson between January 1, 2025 and August 16, 2025, that reference or relate to media statements, press releases or public communications by the Prosecutor’s Office; coverage by WZMQ/Channel 19; or the case or cases involving Colton Brunette.

Request two asked for charging documents, trial-preparation records and plea agreements associated with Colton Brunette, specifically those connected to the June 6, 2025 traffic stop in Escanaba and the February 2025 incident referenced in the August 15 press release.

Request three asked for any internal policy, directive or guidance documents regarding communications with media outlets and the handling of “ongoing investigation” statements.

The request also contained a public-interest statement. It cited three earlier requests — 25-186, 25-188 and 25-183 — as examples of the office having denied charging-decision records as nonexistent, denied trial-preparation records as duplicative, and withheld communications and case notes. Those are the requester’s own characterizations of those earlier responses, not findings of this page, and they are recorded here as part of the request rather than as established fact.

Request three is the one that should have been cheapest to answer and is in some ways the most revealing. A prosecutor’s office that issues press releases about pending cases, and that tells the public a matter is “still under investigation,” either has written guidance on when and how to do that or does not. The office says it does not. That answer is itself a fact about how the communications function is run.

How the Office Answered

The determination letter is dated September 8, 2025, twenty-one calendar days after the request was received, and is signed by Lauren Wickman as both Prosecuting Attorney and FOIA Coordinator. The packet also contains a Notice to Extend Response Time with the box for “a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” checked. The date fields on that notice are handwritten and are not legible in the produced copy, so this page does not state what dates were entered.

The response breaks the three requests into seven separate dispositions:

The Notice of Denial form attached to the packet has boxes 1 (exempt), 2 (record does not exist) and 3 (redaction) all marked, which is consistent with a response that mixes all three dispositions. The letter closes by telling the requester that an appeal may be filed with the chairperson of the Delta County Board of Commissioners or that judicial review may be sought in Delta County Circuit Court, and by noting the possibility of attorney fees, costs, actual or compensatory damages, and punitive damages of $1,000.

Granted and Nonexistent in the Same Letter

The most consequential thing in the packet is not the fee and not the quantity. It is that the office answered one request three ways.

First, under request one, the office wrote that the request for “all media statements, press releases, or public communications by the Prosecutor’s Office, between January 1, 2025, and August 16, 2025” was GRANTED, and listed five documents it was providing: a press release dated 02/18/2025 regarding the 02/16/2025 traffic stop; a press release dated 02/19/2025 regarding the 02/15/2025 traffic stop; a Facebook post dated 02/19/2025; a press release dated 08/15/2025 regarding WZMQ/Channel 19 News; and a DRAFT of the press release dated 08/15/2025 regarding WZMQ/Channel 19 News.

Second, immediately after that list, the office wrote that the request for “[a]ll internal and external communications (including emails… and text message) created, received or exchanged by” the three named prosecutors between the same dates was GRANTED, subject to necessary redaction pursuant to statutory exemptions, beginning with MCL 15.243(1)(a) for personal information including “defendant names, victim or witness names, addresses, dates of births, telephone numbers, etc.”

Third, six pages later, the office quoted the identical communications request back — the same three names, the same January 1 to August 16 window, the same subject matter — and wrote that it “is Case Files Colton Brunette” is DENIED as a review of the records reveals they do not exist, followed by a formal certificate of nonexistence.

Those three answers cannot all be right. If the communications exist and are being granted subject to redaction, they are not nonexistent. If they are nonexistent, there is nothing to redact and nothing to grant. The letter does not explain the sequence, and the quoted sentence in the third disposition is itself garbled — the phrase “is Case Files Colton Brunette” appears to be a fragment left over from editing, dropped into the middle of the denial.

Two readings are available, and the record does not choose between them. The charitable reading is that the office meant to grant the press releases and posts, deny the underlying email and text communications as nonexistent, and that the second paragraph — the “granted subject to redaction” one — was boilerplate that should have been deleted when the office decided the communications did not exist. Under that reading, the letter contains a drafting error, not a substantive one, and the operative answer is the certificate.

The less charitable reading is that the office did not resolve its own position before writing, and that a requester cannot tell from the face of the letter whether a search for the communications was completed, what it covered, or why the same request appears twice with opposite results. Either way, the practical consequence is the same: a requester who wanted the internal communications about the press-release campaign has no reliable statement from the office about whether they were searched for, whether they exist, or whether they were withheld. A certificate of nonexistence is a sworn statement. A grant subject to redaction is an admission that records exist. The packet contains both, unqualified, about the same records.

The Five Documents Produced

All five documents listed under request one were in fact produced, as image scans inside the eight-page responsive-document PDF. They are the complete paper trail of the press-release campaign, and they are more informative than the letter that transmitted them.

The February 18, 2025 press release announces the February 16, 2025 traffic stop and the arrest of Colton Troy Brunette and Tristan Russell Halfaday by the Delta County Sheriff’s Office. It reports that Halfaday had a pistol and that a backpack contained approximately 136.12 grams of cocaine, 35.43 grams of powdered fentanyl, 64.94 grams of “blue pill” fentanyl, 61.83 grams of MDMA, 1.950 grams of ketamine, and prescription pills. It states that Brunette, 24, was arraigned on February 18, 2025 on four felony conspiracy charges and that bond was set at $75,000 cash or surety with a GPS tether and other conditions. A continuation page records that Halfaday, 20, was arraigned the same day on eight felony charges, including three counts of carrying a concealed weapon and a felony-firearm count, with bond at $85,000 cash or surety, a probable-cause conference on February 27, 2025 closed to the public, and a preliminary examination set for March 6, 2025.

The February 19, 2025 press release covers a different event: February 15, 2025 traffic stops by a Michigan State Trooper and Gladstone Public Safety, in which approximately 208 grams of methamphetamine was discarded in the woods and Corey Allen Racine and Jenny Lynn Donahue were arrested. Donahue, 40, of Gwinn, was arraigned February 18, 2025 with bond at $20,000 cash or surety. Racine, 35, of Gwinn, was arraigned February 19, 2025, initially granted a personal-recognizance bond because of a medical issue, and then — over the People’s objection, according to the release — placed on house arrest with a GPS tether requiring an upfront payment of $1,400, with the court allowing payment until noon on March 3, 2025.

The February 19 Facebook post is a different kind of document. It explains that bond is set by the court and not by the prosecutor, and it uses a specific case to make the point: “just today, on February 19, 2025, the Delta County District Court refused to place a cash bond on a defendant who was charged with Possession with Intent to Deliver 208 grams of Methamphetamine… over the Prosecutor’s strenuous objection.” The post records 158 reactions and 96 shares. It is, in substance, the office arguing publicly about a bond decision in a pending case.

The August 15, 2025 press release and its draft are the correction described in Section 01. The draft is stamped DRAFT vertically on the page and is otherwise identical in text to the final version. Its existence in the file is the single most useful thing the office produced, because it shows the 1.7-gram sentence was written, reviewed, and then published deliberately rather than arising from a stray remark.

Read together, the five documents show a communications operation that issues detailed, quantified press releases about pending cases, argues about bond decisions on social media, and drafts its corrections in advance. That is not improper. It is, however, directly relevant to request three, which asked whether the office has any written policy governing exactly this activity. The office says no such policy exists.

The Price of Looking: $2,711.67

The fee itemization runs seven pages and is, unusually, arithmetically checkable. It prices two lines of labor and nothing else.

Line 1, labor cost to locate. The office estimated approximately 500 emails at 3 minutes each, which is 1,500 minutes, or 100 quarter-hour increments. The hourly wage with fringe benefit on this line is $24.82, giving a charge of $6.21 per quarter hour. One hundred increments at $6.21 is $621.00.

Line 3a, labor cost for separating exempt from non-exempt (redacting). The office estimated 4 minutes per email “due to large number of attachments associated with emails,” which for the same 500 emails is 2,000 minutes, or 133.33 quarter-hour increments. The hourly wage with fringe benefit on this line is $62.71, giving a charge of $15.68 per quarter hour. The stated labor cost is $2,090.67.

Lines 2 (duplication labor), 3b (contract redaction), 4 (copying) and 5 (mailing) are all zero. The subtotal is $2,711.67. The good-faith deposit is 50 percent, or $1,355.83, and the office estimates it will take approximately 60 days from receipt of the deposit to produce the records.

Three observations follow from the arithmetic itself, and none of them requires an assumption about motive.

First, the redaction rate is two and a half times the search rate. The office is permitted to charge, on the locate line, no more than the hourly wage of its lowest-paid employee capable of searching for and examining the records. On the redaction line it charges the wage of the employee who actually does the redacting, with fringe benefits. The result is that the same 500 emails cost $621.00 to find and $2,090.67 to review. Seventy-seven percent of the total bill is the review.

Second, the estimate is built on a volume the office never substantiated. Five hundred emails is an estimate, and the itemization says so. But the office simultaneously certified that the communications do not exist. A fee estimate premised on 500 emails that will take 2,000 minutes to redact sits oddly beside a certificate stating that there are no such emails to redact.

Third, the deposit is demanded before any of the disputed material is produced. The five press releases and the draft were produced without charge. Everything else — the communications, the trial-preparation records, the policy documents — is either certified nonexistent or gated behind $1,355.83. The effect is that the only material a requester can obtain for free is the material the office had already chosen to publish.

The Waiver That Was Never Granted

The request asked for a public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234. The response does not address the waiver, does not grant it, does not deny it in so many words, and does not reduce the fee by a dollar. The itemization contains a line for a $20 indigence discount and a line for a $20 nonprofit discount; neither box is checked. The subtotal is the full $2,711.67.

This is worth pausing on because of what the request was about. The subject of FOIA 25-199 is not a private dispute. It is the office’s own public communications: the press releases it chose to issue, the social-media posts it chose to publish, and the internal guidance, if any, that governs both. A request that asks an agency to account for what it told the public is close to the paradigm case for a public-interest waiver, because the benefit of disclosure runs to the public rather than to the requester.

MCL 15.234(1) permits a public body to waive or reduce fees if disclosure of the information is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester. The office did not engage with that standard. It priced the request at full cost and asked for half up front.

The practical consequence is a familiar one in this archive: a request that is squarely about government operations is priced as though it were a private commercial order. A requester who cannot pay $1,355.83 learns nothing about whether the office searched for the communications, because the certificate of nonexistence and the fee estimate arrive in the same envelope and point in opposite directions.

What the Law Requires

Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq., sets out a short list of things a public body must do when it receives a written request. Under MCL 15.235(1) it must respond within five business days, and under MCL 15.235(2) it may extend that period by up to ten business days by written notice stating the reason. The office used that mechanism here, checking the box for a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records.

Under MCL 15.235(4) a public body that denies a request must do so in writing and must state the specific statutory basis for the denial. Under MCL 15.235(5) a public body may certify that a record does not exist, and that certification must be signed by the FOIA coordinator and state that the record has been searched for and does not exist under the name given or any other name reasonably known to the body. The certificate in this packet follows that form.

The operative difficulty is that these are alternatives. A body grants, or it denies on a stated exemption, or it certifies nonexistence. When a single response does two of those for the same record — granting communications subject to redaction and certifying that the same communications do not exist — it does not satisfy the statute’s requirement that the requester be told which basis applies. A requester cannot know whether to appeal a denial, challenge a redaction, or accept a certificate.

On fees, MCL 15.234(1) limits what may be charged. A public body may charge for the cost of searching for, locating and examining records, for duplication, and for the cost of separating exempt from nonexempt material. The search charge may not exceed the hourly wage of the lowest-paid employee capable of performing the search, regardless of who performs it. The separation charge may be based on the actual employee’s wage with fringe benefits. That structure explains the two very different rates in this itemization, and it is lawful on its face.

MCL 15.234(3) permits a public body to require a good-faith deposit of up to one-half of the estimated fee when the estimate exceeds $50. The $1,355.83 deposit is exactly half of $2,711.67 and is within that limit.

On waiver, MCL 15.234(1) allows a public body to waive or reduce fees where disclosure is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of government operations and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester. The statute permits; it does not compel. The office’s silence on the waiver is therefore not a violation. It is a choice, and it is recorded here as a choice.

On remedy, MCL 15.240(1) allows a person denied all or part of a request to appeal in writing to the head of the public body or to sue in circuit court, and MCL 15.240(1)(b) sets a 180-day limit running from the public body’s final determination. For the September 8, 2025 determination, that window ran into early March 2026. It has closed. Any further challenge to this specific determination would have to proceed on a new request rather than on an appeal of this one.

Finally, MCL 15.243(1)(a) exempts information of a personal nature where disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy. The office invoked it to redact “defendant names, victim or witness names, addresses, dates of births, telephone numbers.” The complaint produced in the same packet names the defendant and six law-enforcement witnesses in full, which is consistent with the well-established treatment of law-enforcement officers’ names in charging documents but does sit uneasily with the breadth of the stated basis.

Open Questions

FOIA Request Details

The Documents

Both PDFs are reproduced below as redacted copies. The requester’s name, address, telephone number, e-mail address and fax identifiers have been removed from the response letter and the request stamps. Nothing substantive has been altered. The unredacted originals are retained privately.

What was withheld

The internal and external communications of the three named prosecutors from January 1 to August 16, 2025 — granted subject to redaction in one paragraph and certified nonexistent in another. The June 6, 2025 trial-preparation records, certified nonexistent. The February 2025 charging documents and plea agreements, denied as already produced under 25-171. The February 2025 trial-preparation records, certified nonexistent. All internal policy, directive or guidance documents on media communications and “ongoing investigation” statements, certified nonexistent. Personal identifiers on the plea sheet, withheld under MCL 15.243(1)(a).

Remedies and Next Steps

The 180-day appeal window for the September 8, 2025 determination has closed. That does not end the matter, because the underlying questions were never answered on the merits. It changes the route: the way to test this response now is a new request written narrowly enough to force a single disposition on each point.

Four follow-ups follow directly from the packet and are now published, with full draft text, in their own section of the our internal working list page. In summary: a request for the specific record that states the weight of the ketamine seized on June 6, 2025; a request that forces the office to choose between granting and certifying the internal communications; a request for the media-communications guidance in a narrower form that cannot be answered with a blanket certificate; and a request for the fee-waiver decision record itself.

Each of those is deliberately small. The lesson of the $2,711.67 estimate is that breadth is what makes a request expensive and easy to refuse. A request that names a single document, a single date range and a single custodian is cheap to answer, hard to price out of reach, and — if denied — produces a denial specific enough to challenge.

Sources and Method

Everything on this page is drawn from two documents produced by the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office in response to FOIA 25-199: the 27-page response packet dated September 8, 2025 and the 8-page responsive-document set. The press releases, the Facebook post, the draft, the charging complaint, the plea worksheet, the cost itemization and the denial and extension forms are all reproduced in those two files and are linked above.

Quotations are transcribed from the produced copies. Where the office’s own text contains a typographical error — the garbled sentence in the communications denial, the reporter citation in the Densmore reference, the “great than fifty dollars” phrase in the fee paragraph — the quotation preserves the error and this page notes it rather than silently correcting it. Where a handwritten field could not be read reliably, this page says so and does not guess; that is why the extension dates are described as illegible rather than supplied.

Arithmetic in Section 10 was recomputed from the figures printed on the itemization: 500 emails at three minutes is 1,500 minutes and 100 quarter-hour increments; 500 emails at four minutes is 2,000 minutes and 133.33 increments; $621.00 plus $2,090.67 is $2,711.67; half of that is $1,355.83. The figures reconcile exactly, which is itself a finding: the estimate is internally consistent, so the objection to it is about scope and waiver, not about math.

This page does not rely on news coverage of the underlying case, on statements by the defendant, or on any characterization of the February 2025 events beyond what the office itself published. Where the record is silent, the page says the record is silent. That is the standard applied to every case watch in this archive.