I thought I was going to die. Sheriff George Lasiter

Oct. 4, 2006

I walked into Sheriff George Lasater’s office in Charlevoix. It was my mission that day of get to know the law enforcement guy. Meet the big gun in charge, ask if he has any stories, anything that I should be covering.
There wasn’t much news that day, but we talked about the time Sheriff Lasater was on the front page. Three years ago a guy named John Shulick came close to killing him. Wearing camo and two bandoliers full of Winchester shotgun shells, he jammed the end of a black, pump action 12-gauge shotgun into the sheriff’s mouth and took out his five front teeth and ripped off his upper lip. Lasater isn’t sure because he was knocked out cold, but he thinks he saw Shulick’s finger pull the trigger.
He woke up moments later and saw a pool of blood the size of a basketball. “I thought I was going to die.”
It was the beginning of the end of the way Lasater looked at the world.
Now, John Shulick is trying to get out of prison and has just filed a motion for a new trial. It’s possible that Lasater may have to relive his nightmare all over again in a courtroom; but, then again, he relives the nightmare every so often when he goes to sleep at night. His pain is palpable.
No one realizes what happens to your mind and your body after someone tries to kill you. The media quickly moves on after a news story, but the victim’s pain can take years to fade.

PREACHING, NOT PRACTICING
Shulick was no stranger to Lasater on the day of the incident.
Barbara, whom Shulick married at the age of 21, had filed for divorce in August of 2000, contending that she couldn’t take any more of the verbal abuse that her 44-year-old husband had dished out over the last four years. Like many in Northern Michigan, her husband pieced together a livelihood, raising vegetables, poaching game, and painting billboards, houses and signs. But his passion wasn’t in his work. It was studying the Bible. He preached to anyone who would listen, particularly to his wife and three kids. She brought in the steady paycheck, working as a Child Family Services specialist for the Family Independence Agency (FIA).
Lasater got a dose of Shulick’s verbal abuse after he landed in the Charlevoix jail for acting like a jerk during their divorce hearing in December of 2000. He told the judge that he lived by God’s law, and God does not allow divorce. He wrote to Judge Richard Pajtas: “A person would have to be either an ignoramus or a complete heathen to give any credence to a law that is in direct contradiction to GOD’S LAW!” To show how much he disrespected the judge, he took off his shoes during one of the hearings and knocked them together. “I’m knocking the dust off my feet, okay?” (Some believe this is a Biblical reference, meaning, “I’m done with you.”)
Judge Richard Pajtas wasn’t amused and threatened to hold him in contempt. He wasn’t charged, but ended up in jail anyway for confronting a sheriff’s sergeant outside of the court during a subsequent hearing. He threw the divorce order at him and yelled, “Tell Judge Pajtas to roll it up and shove it down his throat!”

CHAINS & SHACKLES
Shulick’s trip to jail only made him madder. He tried to cover the jail cell’s video camera with his shirt. That got him belly chains and leg shackles, but somehow he still managed to throw wet toilet paper on the camera lens with an underhand toss. After he was shackled even tighter, he commenced kicking the door over and over again. And so he was sent to a mental institution for a month for evaluation; the psychiatrist found nothing wrong. A trial for contempt ended with a hung jury.
Later that year, Tom, his oldest son, got into trouble. Like his six-foot dad, Tom was very slim, although much shorter at 5’9. He was barhopping, drinking with his friends the night of April 28, 2001. Then he left his friends and went to the marina in downtown Charlevoix where he saw some guys, his age -- in their early 20s -- partying on a boat. They didn’t like him, asked him to get off their boat, there was a fight, he kept going back, and it fatally ended in the early morning hours when Tom Shulick stabbed one of the men in the stomach. The victim, Scott Cook, ran after Shulick for a short distance and then fell, bleeding on the street.
Tom was stunned the next day after hearing that Cook was dead.
During the murder trial in January of 2002, John held a Bible in his hand. His son, also deeply religious, was sentenced 30 to 50 years in February for premeditated murder (the sentence was appealed and later reduced). Barbara was at the trial, too, but their son’s travails did not bring them together. With the divorce final in May of 2002, she was desperate for John to leave the house, especially because their 13-year-old daughter had been placed in foster care due to John’s alleged physical abuse, and Barbara couldn’t get her back until he left.

THE EVICTION
Lasater and deputies tried to serve him papers nine times to vacate, but he evaded them every time. In August, he refused to accept Barbara’s check in court for half the value of the home. Finally in September—two full years after Barbara had filed for divorce—the judge signed an order for Shulick to leave the house, by force if necessary. Lasater said that Barbara asked him to help her. She told him she’d leave a door unlocked for him to enter before Shulick went to work. He agreed after she faxed the request in writing.
Lasater left Charlevoix around 4:30 the morning of September 23, 2002 to the Shulick home outside of Boyne City. Two deputies and the under sheriff also drove over, all in marked cars.
Barbara said that John had come home from a downstate trip at around 6 a.m. He had picked up some meatloaf and asked her to put it in the fridge and offered her a cookie. Tim, her son, had come home a couple of days earlier and was up, too. John asked her if she had talked to the police or spoken to her attorney or talked to their daughter, according to a statement she gave to police later that day.
She told John she had gone that to a retirement party that weekend in St. Ignace and gotten back after midnight. “He went into a “big spiel, ‘Why go to a retirement party of a fornicator?’” Then he saw a red light outside, and said, “Is that the pigs outside? Yeah, it’s the cops.” He ran upstairs, yelling, “I’m not home!” and Barbara yelling back, “I’m not going to lie.” Tim turned off the lights in the house. Barbara went to the door, let in the sheriff and under sheriff, and pointed upstairs without a word so that John wouldn’t know she was involved.
“She looked scared,” Lasater said. “She always looked scared.”
WARRIOR REGALIA
The next thing Barbara heard was “Back off!” and she went and sat in the car.
Lasater said he walked up a few steps, carrying a flashlight, and John jumped out in warrior regalia of camouflage clothes and bandoliers. Lasater didn’t flinch, but tried to explain he just wanted to serve him some papers. Shulick jammed the barrel of his shotgun in his mouth. Lasater said the next thing he knew, he was lying on a linoleum floor gazing at a huge pool of blood, his tongue probing the bloody gums where his teeth used to be. He thought, “Oh God, he shot me in the face. I’m dying.”
Shulick, who was later convicted of assault, had a radically different version of what happened. He testified that he heard a loud commotion at the door, like an army was breaking into the house. He thought there was an intruder and got ready to defend himself with a shotgun. The intruder came up the stairs and shone a flashlight in his face, blinding him. He yelled to drop it, and then there was a struggle over the gun. He said that the intruder grabbed the barrel, slipped, and that the barrel hit the intruder in the mouth as he tumbled backward.
Former Prosecutor Mary Beth Kur charged Shulick on three counts: assault, resisting an officer, and use of a firearm during the commission of a felony. The trial lasted for five days; the jury met for less than two hours before finding Shulick guilty on all counts. At the sentencing trial in March of 2003, Shulick showed no remorse. Quite the opposite. He let the judge have it—for 10 minutes, hurling insults and threats of a cursed afterlife. The judge stayed calm, but significantly exceeded the sentencing guidelines for two reasons: the sheriff’s injuries, and Shulick blaming everyone but himself.

BEYOND THE CALL
All this information came from the sheriff’s file box that included deputy reports, interviews, clippings from the Traverse City Record-Eagle, and a photo of George Lasater, half his front lip nearly lopped off, looking lifeless. I sat in a small room looking at the file box of papers, feeling a little queasy. Lasater came in and offered me some lunch.
He came back with a tray of tomato soup in a metal bowl and a burrito on a silver metal plate. Was it jail food? And then Lasater’s world kind of folded in on me as I heard him take one phone call after another of someone done wrong, asking for him to fix it. The bad food, the jail, the violent people, the institutional hallways. How do you stay on top of it without it getting on top of you?
But he loves it or so it seems. His office is packed to the gills with old police hats, antique guns and police knick-knacks. He even framed his bloody shirt from the attack and keeps it at the side of his desk. We stopped at his house where he is building a replica of an old-time jail cell. He’d like to retire, perhaps two years from now, when his term ends.
He told me “the rest of the story” of the attack—how a deputy dragged him to a patrol car and left him alone so he could join the search party for Shulick. An ambulance took him to the hospital where Lasater, always the cop, asked for a photo of his injury before his lip was sewed back on. His wife, on her way to work, heard on the radio that her husband had been shot dead. But she soon learned it wasn’t true, and met him at the hospital. From there it was to the dentist, who cleared his entire docket for him. It was a really bad day. First the attack, and then 12 hours with the dentist.
So this is the amazing part. Lasater had previously agreed to help the FBI bring in a man who was wanted on several felony counts the next day. Forty agents from the FBI and SWAT team had come up from downstate to bring him in, and they needed Lasater to negotiate with the man so they wouldn’t have to use force. So the next day, Lasater got up at 5 a.m., drove to the suspect’s house and talked to the man who agreed to surrender. Lasater went home and slept. He took another two days off and went back to work.

NIGHT TERRORS
Work was easy—he never missed a beat—but Lasater’s personal life suffered. How much so was reflected in a letter submitted by his wife for the sentencing hearing. “Initially there were night terrors. He would wake up in physical distress, heart racing, sweating, thinking he was dead or people would pop out at him, attempting to mutilate him or those he loved. During this time, he avoided going to sleep and was able to say in bed only two to four hours at a time. All that those who loved him could do was to be present and listen. So we were all sleep deprived.
“As one week became two, he developed numbness in his lip, refused to allow anyone to touch it, would not kiss me, was paralyzed with fear that it would not reattach and he would lose his top lip. He had nightmares about his lip falling off... This isolated him further and he said he became very “disembodied.” This was devastating to our whole family. ... Nothing tasted good to him, he could not chew solid food. He told me sometimes he felt he was dead. He should be dead. His life was hijacked and we all paid.
“My husband’s body image has been altered, it took months for him to be able to kiss me because he feels hideously mutilated by the scarring to his face and the loss of his teeth. His moustache covers most of this from view, but he knows and that changes a man… A good man is continuing to pay a terrible price, wondering if he should be alive …”
Lasater, now divorced, said that the nightmares don’t come nearly as often, maybe only once every couple of months. He told me that he had another nightmare just two days after we met: “It’s like I’m looking down, I’m not part of what’s going on, and I’m at my funeral. I look at the casket and I don’t have a head. Sometimes, I relive getting shot in the face. The dreams come over and over.”

JAILHOUSE LAWYER
This is John Shulick’s second legal attempt. He argued in an appeal two years ago that the judge was biased against him and should never have presided over the trial. The Michigan Court of Appeals denied the appeal, ruling that Shulick had a bias against the trial judge, not the other way around.
John Shulick argues in this 100-page motion for a new trial that Barbara was forced and coerced to lie in the first trial about what happened. He again argues that Judge Pajtas was biased against him.
His document includes an affidavit by Barbara Hurley-Shulick, who remarried Shulick in a July prison ceremony. Barbara lays out a pre-divorce conspiracy theory that begins long before the assault. She says that she was coerced by a number of people to portray John as an abusive father in return for a promise to remove her name from a child abuse registry list (for failing to protect her daughter from John’s abuse).
She also said the prosecutor then coerced her into falsely testifying at the trial. She said that despite the promises, her name was never removed from the registry, she was demoted, and then fired in 2004.
The appeal also contains an affidavit from his daughter, recanting that her father had ever hit her.
Antrim County Prosecutor Charlie Koop is dealing with the appeal because Mark Muniak, who now works as assistant prosecutor in Charlevoix County, once served as his ex-wife’s court-appointed attorney (thus a conflict of interest).

NO PROOF
In response to his most recent filing, Koop wrote that Shulick had not presented “one scintilla of proof” that Barbara was forced to lie during the trial, except for the affidavit itself. Koop argued that the prosecutor couldn’t have contrived a conspiracy, given that Shulick gave a written statement on the day of the assault. There was no time that day for her to meet with Kur in order to cook up a different story. The filing includes an interview with a friend to whom Barbara originally confided. In it, she said that Barbara had never changed her story throughout the years, and that she “very much wanted him gone.”
So is this a serious challenge?
“As I put in my brief, I believe Barbara’s affidavit is perjurous,” Koop said. “It is a rambling conspiracy theory from the beginning, and I don’t think it is coming from her. It appears that John wrote the affidavit and she signed it.”
Judge Pajtas will review the appeal and make a decision on whether to grant a hearing. The case law in Michigan doesn’t look favorably on recantations, especially if they’re several years after the fact, Koop said.
“I find it curious that after all these years, why the light suddenly goes on that she feels coerced,” he said.

THE LESSON...
Koop said that as he reviewed the case he is reminded of what happened to Denny Finch, a Traverse City sergeant who was killed in 1998 by a mentally ill man with an intense sense of private property.
“You believe that you’ve been doing this job for so long, you know how to talk to people, and with George, he’d been sheriff for 26 years, and he just believed so strongly in his abilities.
“George has always been a fair guy, always upfront with people. Treating them with dignity even if they don’t deserve it. He makes sure that people, the defendants in his jail, are treated fairly, and I think this was a big slap in his face. Some guy goes off on you and jams, not a rifle butt, but the barrel of a rifle in your mouth. I think the guy would have shot him, but he didn’t have time to load the gun. There is some statement in his testimony that he didn’t have time to load the gun.
“For someone who has served the community well for 26 years, it’s a devastating realization that some people don’t care. They don’t have respect for the law. John Shulick has the mentality that all government is evil and will never consent to the government controlling their lives.
“I think there’s a lesson from this. If you’re dealing with that mentality, with a militia mindset, there’s nothing you can do. No matter what time the sheriff had come to his house, no matter how he served the papers, no matter what he said, there was going to be a confrontation. It was Judge Pajtas’ order. John didn’t respect him, he didn’t respect the order, he was a free person, and it feeds on itself when you don’t believe you’re getting a fair shake. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Shulick -- convinced that the laws of man had violated the higher laws of God -- has no remorse over giving Lasater a lifetime of nightmares. Yet the sheriff is taking it in stride and will testify if and when the time comes.
“It means I have to relive it, but I gotta do what I gotta do. Right now, the man is where he ought to be.”