Before I get rolling with this one, I want to again express my gratitude to the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety officers who rushed to our house on July 26th, 2015 with every intention of saving my young nephew's life. They know who they are.
And I know they meant to do it because I was able to ride virtual shotgun with every one of them, having watched all of their police car DVD's (which we acquired long before the Medical Examiner's Office did in their own leisurely way). I consumed hours and hours and hours of video and audio so that I wouldn't have to guess what had happened.
Or have to listen to anybody else try to misrepresent it.
One employee of the police department who was not at the scene that night was, ah, Shannon Bagley. He seemed to be more along the lines of a captain or something, not a guy in body armor, but like an office guy.
When we began our inquiry as to why the MEO - through its contractor WMed - would fraudulently, maliciously and arbitrarily rule little Charlie's death a Suicide, Bagley ended up being one of the interference runners for the City as they and the County played Monkey in the Middle with us.
One of our complaints was, and is, that it took the detectives over two hours to arrive that night. Bagley presented himself as a person who would look at this with a fresh set of eyes... Inspiring rhetoric. Almost like a politician.
But he didn't do what he said he would.
Instead, he husked up and started defending his Department, insisting that the detectives had shown up in a timely manner. When I saw the effect that this official gaslighting had on my already-destroyed sister, I opted to interject.
I emailed Bagley and explained that cop car video actually shows that the blond detective Sheila Goodell did not come flouncing onscreen until well after 10pm - over two hours after the original 911 call, more than an hour and a half after they stopped doing chest compressions on Charlie, who was still laying on the ground while we all waited in the darkness.
I asked him to define, then, what he understood to be a timely manner. I explained that, in the computer age, timely means something less than what it may have used to. I asked him to respond to my email in a timely manner, and he did not.
So, about an hour later, I posted on YouTube the dash cam footage showing the time of night, with the audio clearly capturing the grim exasperation of those exhausted officers as they literally asked each other where the hell the detectives were. I sent the video link to Bagley and asked him if he still thought the detectives' arrival was timely.
Instead of replying to me like a decent public servant, Bagley sent an email to my sister's attorney, griping that I had contacted him, mistakenly referring to me as Charlie's father (meaning he did not even read the entirety of what was sent to him).
I then took the video down, because I felt I had made my point, and I had also discovered that Shannon Bagley was not someone I could trust. Or anything even close to it.
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Here we are, six days shy of five years later, and who but Shannon Bagley is running for office in our County? He wants to be the Sheriff! Right here in Nottingh-- sorry, Kalamazoo. See? He was a politician the whole time, a sheep in wolves' clothing.
I was over at my Dad's house a while ago, and I saw the glossy postcard on the kitchen table advertising his campaign. I explained who Candidate Bagley was and what all had happened with that.
An avid voter, Dad squinted and said, "What's the name?"
"Shannon Bagley."
He shook his head. "I never heard of her."
I shrugged and threw the postcard in the trash. I figure that's good enough.
pH 7.2o.2o
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(Editor's note: She lost to incumbent Sheriff Richard Fuller.)
