Articles labeled: Michigan

Police in Detroit are searching through neighborhood dumpsters after they received a report from a woman telling them that her boyfriend threw their baby in the trash.

The Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and broadcast reports say police were looking for the baby Tuesday night and Wednesday morning following the 29-year-old woman’s examination Tuesday at a hospital. They are also searching for her 35-year-old boyfriend, the baby’s father.

The Detroit woman, who was bloodied and caked with mud when she checked herself into the hospital, said she had suffered a miscarriage. But police say she later said her boyfriend had taken the baby from her and threw it into a trash bin.

Authorities have reunited a mother and her 11-year-old son, who had been missing for 3 days. The boy’s stepfather has been arrested and charged with kidnapping.

Grand Rapids Police found the boy and arrested Mikell Huff on kidnapping charges after receiving a call from the youngster. David told police he was at the home of a classmate in Grand Rapids, and police picked him up and reunited him with his mother early Wednesday evening.

“I just hugged him and hugged him and hugged him,” Leah Huff said tonight.

Earlier today, Mikell Huff called his wife and said the two were in Saginaw and the child was fine. At the time, police were in the process of seeking a warrant for his arrest.

A Michigan teenager defies all odds as she walks away nearly unscathed after being struck by lightening. So good was her luck, that the next day she won the lottery! Mind you, it was only $20, but hey, you gotta give her props for her all her good karma.

BLANCHARD, Mich. — BreAnna Helsel escaped serious injury after being struck by lightning while inside her house.

The teenager’s good fortune continued the next day, in the form of a winning lottery ticket.

Helsel, 16, was at her home in Blanchard, about 48 miles northeast of Grand Rapids, watching thunderstorms roll by on June 6 when she noticed rain entering an open kitchen window.

“She went to close the window and the lightning came through and hit her,” her mother, Linda Johnson, told The Daily News of Greenville. “We think it must have hit the house or something.”

A 12-year-old boy with autism fell into a creek in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was caught up in the current.

The river rescue team helped Conner Folkertsma, 12, up and over a fence to dry land around 12:30 p.m. Monday.

His sister told 24 Hour News 8 he wanted to go down to the creek behind West Catholic High School’s stadium and the neighboring cemetery. He was told no, but ran off along the swollen creek bank, lost a shoe, and fell into the racing waters.

“I kept telling him (to) grab onto something,” his sister Danielle Folkertsma said. “He tried so hard to grab on to something and he just kept yelling and it took him away. I couldn’t get him.”

The parents of a Michigan toddler that drowned have been sentenced to 400 hours of community service after a judge ruled their neglect was responsible for the drowning. Seems like a rather light sentence…

Misty Harvey, 29, and Jamie Harvey, 33, will serve that sentence and spend three years on probation under an order fashioned by county and state authorities as punishment for Grandon Harvey’s death.

The couple pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after they found their boy inside their home on Sept. 25. A charge of marijuana possession was dropped as part of the plea deal. They could have faced up to 15 years in prison.

An 11-year-old boy was hiking through the woods in Manistee County, Michigan, when an eagle came out of nowhere and attacked him. On later reflection he realized that wearing his mouse costume wasn’t such a good idea.

Radio station WKLA reported Alex Birch was attacked by the eagle about 9 p.m. Sunday in Copemish. He was treated at a local hospital for numerous cuts and scratches to his back, head and neck.

It was not clear what led to the attack.

Copemish is located in the northern portion of the Lower Peninsula about 25 miles southwest of Traverse City and 105 miles north of Grand Rapids.

When we were teens we had a hard enough time finding weed to smoke, much less bake with. (Minor Topics does not endorse marijuana use, kids!)

West Bloomfield School District officials have suspended a boy believed to be the baker of a batch of brownies laced with marijuana that cut short a Cedar Point trip for 275 students.

And West Bloomfield High School Principal Bob Pyles said another male student who is believed to have been involved in the distribution of the brownies could be suspended.

According to school officials, a boy was sickened after he said he ate a brownie Wednesday while on a chartered school bus en route to the Sandusky, Ohio, park.

Our Thin Mints habit probably put her over the top. And apparently she’s a fan as well:

And now, with 17,323 boxes sold under her name, [15-year-old Dearborn girl Jennifer Sharpe] is believed to have sold more cookies in a single season than anyone in the U.S. ever has, according to Girl Scout officials who’ve planned a ceremony in her honor today.

Jennifer, a fan of the Thin Mints, used a retail-inspired strategy. She set up shop in a church parking lot from 3 to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, she sold cookies outside an auto parts store from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

“When I was young, I knocked on doors,” said Jennifer, in her 10th year of Scouting. “Now that I’m older, I get too many rejections face to face. People don’t want to buy from a 15-year-old.”

And the high school athletic director was not amused.

Thirteen members of a high school lacrosse team have been disciplined for baring their bottoms to extend a prom invitation from one player to a girl.

The varsity lacrosse players at Huron High school displayed the question: “Will You Go To The Prom With Me? Yes or No?” on their backsides, which they revealed during a junior varsity game last week.

School officials suspended the 13 players for an undetermined number of games and ordered them to perform 20 hours of community service. The players were also suspended from school for one day.

“Inappropriate is inappropriate,” school athletic director Dottie Davis told The Ann Arbor News on Monday. “It disrespects women, and that’s the clear message we need to have the students understand — what may be fun to them isn’t necessarily fun to everyone else.”

A 7-month-old stopped breathing last Sunday while at a day care center in Ironwood, Michigan.

Ironwood Public Safety officers were called to the center shortly before noon Sunday after the operator realized the infant was not breathing.

The Daily Globe identified the child as Aden Michael Cannons.

We used to live in an apartment building where the landlord seemed even more paranoid about our child falling out a window than we were. And for good reason.

Police in Oakland County’s Waterford Township are investigating the death of a 4-year-old who fell from a second-story window of his home and landed on his head.

They said the boy fell in a subdivision near Cass Lake. That’s about 25 miles northwest of Detroit. He fell Wednesday evening and died early Thursday.

Authorities said the boy’s mother was home when he apparently pushed through a window screen.

There’s been yet another handgun accident. What’s really tragic is that these kinds of accidents could easily be avoided.

A 3-year-old girl, who found a gun in a bedroom in her home on Detroit’s west side, shot herself in the head this afternoon.

Detroit Police said the shooting took place at the girl’s home in the 12800 block of Lahser around 2:30 p.m.

The girl found the handgun, reportedly owned by one of her parents, and shot herself in the right side of the head. At least one of her parents was home at the time of the shooting.

The girl did survive, but her current condition is unknown.

A little know-it-all from Allegan, Michigan went to the Smithsonian Museum for vacation and noticed a mistake in an exhibit that had been there for 27 years. Bet those curators are a bit embarrassed at the moment.

On a winter break trip with his family to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, the 11-year-old southwestern Michigan boy noticed that a notation, in bold lettering, mistakenly identified the Precambrian as an era.

Since it opened in 1981, millions of people have paraded past the museum’s Tower of Time, a display involving prehistoric time. Kenton was the first to point out the error.

Kenton Stufflebeam, who lives in Allegan but attends Alamo Elementary School near Kalamazoo, said his fifth-grade teacher, John Chapman, had nearly made the same mistake about the Precambrian in a classroom earth-science lesson before catching himself.

Uh, anyone else remember learning this kind of stuff in 5th grade? We had barely learned the 50 state capitals by then.

A 2-year-old boy in Plainfield Township, Michigan has died after falling ill at a home daycare while his parents were vacationing in Mexico. An autopsy has shown that the boy died from ingesting rubbing alcohol.

Toxicology testing found traces of acetone in Keenan Marshall’s body fluids. The chemical is the active ingredient in nail-polish remover and a byproduct of deteriorating rubbing alcohol.

Kent County sheriff’s deputies ruled the death an accident, saying there were no signs of trauma.

The boy fell ill on Feb. 18, three days after arriving at the day care center in Plainfield Township. The center’s operator, a woman, took him to his doctor on Feb. 20 and was told to keep the toddler hydrated after he vomited and felt weak.

The next morning, the woman found him dead. The chemical had slowly damaged his brain, the autopsy found.

A West Bloomfield, Michigan man accused of raping his 15-year-old daughter had all charges against him dropped, because his daughter — who is severely autistic — could not testify.

The case was controversial from its beginning because the 15-year-old girl, who cannot speak, made the claims through facilitated communication, a widely discredited method of communication in which a teaching aide helps such students type words into a keyboard. Experts testified that scientific evaluations of the method have proven that the teaching aide, consciously or unconsciously, authors the messages.

Oakland County Assistant Prosecutors Paul Walton and Barbara Morrison defended their decision to press the case until it became clear the girl would not testify.

“We wanted to make sure we were giving her the same kind of opportunity to have her voice heard in court as every other kid,” Morrison said.

“We’re never going to feel good about this case,” Walton said. “Have we sent a child back to a potentially dangerous situation?”

We were first prone to outrage when we read the headline and first paragraph of the story until we got to the bit about “facilitated communication” — prosecutors might as well have said the girl told them she was raped by ESP. On the surface, this makes the Duke lacrosse team rape case look well run in comparison.

Here’s more on the farce of facilitated communication, which serves only to cruelly give parents of these kids false hope.