Ludington's Jonesie Smollett

[XLFD]

You may remember the controversy surrounding actor Jussie Smollett back in 2019 when he staged an elaborate hoax, playing the part of a crime victim to get himself widespread attention and demonize those who he was politically opposite of.  Ludington has its own version of Smollett, and he just happens to be the Ludington Police Department's (LPD) Chief Christopher Jones, who recently posted a social media post about a crime, submitting a photo as his evidence that something illegal and sacrilegious had happened.  Jones, a known plagiarist, liar, and public extortionist (thief) may now have cemented another title to his name as a purveyor of hoaxes.

 Ludington Police Thief Christopher Jones recently speaking about child abuse cases-- while most of his corporate sponsors make their living off selling alcoholic beverages (40% of child abuse cases involve alcohol consumption by the abuser)

On Facebook, the LPD put out a late post on Monday night about an hour after the city council met where Jones attended and was seen going back to the LPD office.  The topic of illegal dumping as a crime came up in a comment made by Councilor Cheri Stibitz and coincidentally that crime is front and center in what we assume is Jones' posting made at a time when he would be the only administrator in the office.

At first glance, one might agree wholeheartedly with the post.  What kind of blasphemous person would take their grass clippings, cart them down to the cemetery, and dump them over gravesites? And yet, we saw something amiss and know how Jones operates, so we had to do what his officers often fail to do: conduct an investigation.   

Finding the site where his pictures were taken was the first difficulty as the post says it was in the NE corner of the cemetery, but it was closer towards the SE end of the cemetery, let's be generous and call it the middle east of the cemetery.   One would think that if they found the dumping of the grass clippings to be so objectionable and against all social protocols they would have removed the offending greenery or at least spread it as mulch throughout the rest of the overgrown area to help the ferns grow big and strong.  Nope, almost 24 hours after the pictures were posted, nothing had been done to remove the displeasing mass of vegetation.

As an aside at this point, we must admit that this one cubic yard of grass clippings would be less than many of our city's property owners would have after one good June mowing of their yard.  And many of us would be recycling those clippings back into their yard as a fertilizing agent with a mulching mower, a free way to enhance your lawn along with so many other benefits.

The concept of someone taking first the effort of bagging their clippings with their lawnmower, then taking those clippings down to Lakeview Cemetery to throw it on the ground in an area well away from where you can park a car suggests that is not what happened here.  Additionally, the grass could fit in one or at most two bags and the city offers the service of picking up such materials.

One notices that the grass at the cemetery has been recently cut and that they use equipment that bags the grass clippings (by the lack of any significant grass mulch).  Let's float a theory that one of the people that mow the grass at the cemetery had an issue with their bag on the way to dumping it in the leaf corral area. 

If you've ever operated a mower with a bag attached, you may have had it detach at some point and had a pile of grass to the side of your mower.  With a larger mower like the city uses, your pile would be greater.  Let's suggest that this happened here with the larger mowers the city uses, where the operator noticed the grass 'leak' when it occurred and fixed it.  They would likely not be able to immediately pick up the pile, so they would continue on.  Let's suggest that they may have forgotten about it, or maybe that it happened near the end of a long day.  This is a lot more plausible than suggesting what the chief did.

And then there's the indication that this was done on the top of gravesites, and I could not discern any markers that would indicate that this immediate area was a dedicated 'natural burial' site as defined by the city's ordinance that went into effect this year.  This appears to be the general area designated for that, but nobody appears to be buried there, and if they were, you have to wonder why a couple days later that the pile of grass wasn't removed by cemetery personnel, or our overly sensitive police chief so offended by what appears to be a grave error by a cemetery caretaker's lawnmower.  

Here's what offends us.  Jones threatens whoever did this, whether it's a negligent city employee or some crazed villain who carted his grass deep into the cemetery just to defile burial-sites-to-be, with a crime, the misdemeanor of illegal dumping, MCL 750.522(a):  

But are grass clippings or any other item we call 'yard waste' actually considered as either filth, garbage, or refuse?  Cut grass is not filth, nor is it considered garbage, nor does it seem to fall under the definition of 'refuse', which Webster defines as synonymous with garbage.  Let's look at what problems arise for city employees if we actually thought dumping yard waste into the cemetery area was a crime.   

Inside those woods in the picture above, on graveyard property, is a pile of wood chips.  Who do you think dumped them there?  That wood chip pathway you saw in the pictures above this one points toward city workers or their contractors.  

Are these stone and mulch piles less than 100 yards east of the criminal grass drop also in violation of the law?  One could say they are outside the cemetery proper, but the law doesn't give the cemetery any special privilege.  Has the city council or the people ever given specific permission to whoever dropped these piles to do that?  The Cartier deed with the city certainly hasn't, telling us the land shall in perpetuity be only used for park purposes, not for Home Depot style field warehousing.  Yes, that's a couple of deer you see in Cartier Park, several more were seen.

But then Cartier Park houses what used to be the city's "leaf corral" and which has become simply a holding ground of mulch for a private company based in a city a couple of counties away from ours, who sells that mulch for a profit, while charging our city for hauling it away.  This isn't a park purpose, it's solely for the commercial benefit of a company that profits from our city leader's folly.  Just south of the picture above was this colossal pile of mulch:

Police Thief Jones extends that folly, by criminalizing what appears to be an early season city employee mistake of having too much grass in the bag of their mower, while overlooking the bigger issue of the city misusing the park property deeded to the city.  The folly compounds thereafter by insinuating inhabited natural, green burial graves were debased by having natural, green grass clippings placed on them, even when there is no indication at all that anyone was buried there. 

There is no further need to preserve this crime scene, or preserve the hoax created by the leader of our police department.  Jones, get a rake and spread the clippings around, or find the city employee who did this, possibly unknowingly, and have him do it.