Wisconsin “John Doe” Whistleblower Michael Lutz dead, apparent suicide
Had accused “John Doe” Prosecutor John Chisholm of political motives.
We previously have featured the story of Michael Lutz, the Wisconsin whistleblower and former prosecutor who alleged that the union-operative wife of “John Doe” prosecutor John Chislhom was behind the targeting of conservative activists that recently was thrown out by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Was Prosecutor’s union-operative wife behind “John Doe” investigation of Scott Walker? (quote via Stuart Taylor):
Now a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis high school, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”
Citing fear of retaliation, the former prosecutor declined to be identified and has not previously talked to reporters.
Chisholm added, according to that prosecutor, that “he felt that it was his personal duty to stop Walker from treating people like this.”
Lutz stuck to his story even after furious pushback, as reflected in this interview with Charlie Sykes:
Lutz also appeared on Fox News to tell his story:
Now Lutz is dead, of what police are terming an apparent suicide (via Instapundit via Althouse). The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, a harsh critic of Lutz, reports:
Former aldermanic candidate Michael Lutz died early Sunday morning of an apparent suicide, according to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Lutz, 44, a former Milwaukee police officer, suffered an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound “while in the presence of Menomonee Falls tactical officers after a brief tactical situation,” the medical examiner’s office said in a release issued Sunday.
Lutz was pronounced dead in the 12300 block of W. Mill Road in Milwaukee at 4:05 a.m., the release said. An autopsy is scheduled for Monday.
Menomonee Falls police are investigating the incident.
Lutz finished fourth in Tuesday’s primary in the 11th Aldermanic District to fill the Common Council seat left vacant by the death of Joe Dudzik. He received 426 votes out of 4,155 ballots cast.
He retired from the Milwaukee Police Department after 17 years, initially receiving taxpayer-funded duty disability pay for post-traumatic stress disorder. His pay was later converted to a regular retirement.
In 2005, Lutz was shot in the arm after he and his partner chased a suspected drug dealer into a house on the city’s near south side. He never returned to active duty.
Lutz later became a criminal defense attorney and was the anonymous source for a series of stories last year critical of Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm.
The circumstances are not clear at this moment, as there apparently was a police tactical unit on the scene:
The Medical Examiner’s Office says Lutz died as a result of one apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound while in the presence of Menomonee Falls tactical officers — after a brief tactical situation.
We will update as more details become known.
UPDATE 8:50 p.m. Eastern: M.D. Kittle of Wisconsin Watchdog, who was the authority on the John Doe cases, has more details, A tragic end for a John Doe whistleblower:
Menomonee Falls Assistant Police Chief Mark Waters said his department’s tactical unit responded to reports of a suicidal man in the 12300 block of W. Mill Road in Milwaukee County. The incident had begun in Menomonee Falls.
“We tried everything we could do to prevent it, but he eventually committed suicide in our presence,” Waters told Wisconsin Watchdog.
Lutz was pronounced dead at 4:05 a.m. Sunday.
The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office was expected to release an autopsy report Monday.
Waters said the police department would not make additional comments or issue a press release on a suicide.
Sources close to the situation told Wisconsin Watchdog that Lutz argued earlier in the day with his ex-wife, Lori, who resides in Menomonee Falls, and had threatened to hurt her boyfriend.
Police had Lutz’s vehicle information and stopped him, sources said. One of the officers responding thought he heard the racking of a firearm as he approached Lutz’s vehicle. They backed off and called in the tactical team.
Sources said Lutz never threatened officers but did not comply with orders. He eventually got out of the vehicle, placed a Glock handgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Apparent suicide? This reeks to high heaven.
Vince Foster unavailable for comment.
Were Menomonee Falls tactical officers used in the John Doe raids?
Oh my.
Anybody know why the cops were there?
Shades of Vince Foster?
Shades of Obama’s 3 murdered “boy” friends from Rev. Wright’s church???????
Smells like yet another convenient conservative “child porn [randomly?] found on victim’s PC” situation.
BTW- just about anyone can have “child porn” put into their hard drives by a determined foe.
It doesn’t always mean the victim/suspect was “guilty”.
And he died of “..an apparent suicide in THE PRESENCE OF …tactical officers”????
Maybe you could cite to an instance where kiddy porn was shown to be planted on some conservative’s computer.
See, I think we need to be careful about propagating urban myths who’s effect is to instill irrational fear.
Rags, instead of citing evidence of it happening, how about I just point out that it would not be difficult for any number of script kiddies.
How ’bout I point out I could easily coast .30 pills into the brain pans of political enemies nationwide?
That doesn’t begin to support the idea I have. Does it?
I had no idea you were so naive and/or unaware of what is technically possible. Cops have been caught planting evidence in nearly any circumstance or situation imaginable. What makes you think they don’t plant evidence on computers? Do you think it’s beyond their technical capability? Because past performance indicates that it’s not beyond all cops’ sense of morality. Technology changes, human nature does not.
Did I suggest ANYTHING like it couldn’t happen?
No, dummy. As with my shooting political enemies, I know what’s POSSIBLE.
NOW, NAME an INSTANCE.
Or STFU.
I certainly wouldn’t put it past prosecutors or law enforcement, especially in whistle-blowing &/or highly politically-motivated cases, to see to it that you were delivered some malware that could do precisely this.
STILL looking for ANY evidence it has happened.
Should you be soiling yourself over potentials?
Sorry. I decline.
You speak of “irrational fear,” and I get where you’re coming from, yet before the John Doe raids in Wisconsin were exposed… well if someone spoke of the possibility of just such a thing happening, I think that might have been dismissed as tinfoil-hattery and propagating urban myths whose effect is to instill irrational fear.
The more that police & prosecutors lower the bar, the more willing I am to believe the worst about them.
Ah, so you APPEAR to agree with me.
Let’s KEEP IT REAL. Reality is fully bad enough. We don’t need wild BS.
Urban myth CAN be used by our enemies to instill fears that are DELUSIONAL. (Do you know who started this line? I mean, have you seen this poster before?)
And I HOPE you know by now how I feel about delusions.
Sounds as though it is a very rational fear……
So, it should be easy to cite to an instance of it happening.
Or you can “rationally” curl up under the dining table after you unplug your computer.
Maybe this is just a tragic “coincidence” or maybe this what we have to look forward to with the criminalization of politics. It’s like a black hole — even light can’t escape.
There have been way too many these “tragic “coincidence(s)” since the Democrats stole the White House……
Did he leave a sort-of suicide note like Vince Foster, retracting his accusations and accusing the GOP of lying?
Didn’t a judge shut down this John Doe operation in no uncertain terms? So why was a tactical team at the Lutz home at 3AM Sunday morning?
SWAT’d?
That looks pretty bad no matter which way you slice it.
What’s the cyber equivalent of a throw down bag of weed? I’d be particularly concerned if it was discovered after the computer had been confiscated. But, anyway, why were the cops there?
The planting of Child Pornography onto a hard-drive. How often (if) it occurs is a matter of debate. See discussion above. Somehow I don’t think that was what was going on here. See below.
Lutz finished fourth in Tuesday’s primary in the 11th Aldermanic District to fill the Common Council seat left vacant by the death of Joe Dudzik. He received 426 votes out of 4,155 ballots cast.
Depression makes the brain do bad things. There is a note that he had suffered from PTSD from being shot as a police officer, and had never returned to duty. The likelihood is that he was black-balled from doing any sort of governmental work. He went from one very high stress job (police) to another very high stress job (criminal defense attorney). Both of these professions are higher-than-average suicide risks.
Tread with caution on this one. Question everything, but don’t let a conspiracy theory get too far afield. The answer may be that he was depressed, threatened to shoot himself, the tactical unit was called, and he saw no way out without being arrested (and possibly suspended from practicing law for mental instability) and proceeded TO shoot himself.
Point taken, that he absolutely might have been depressed enough to take his own life, but I have to say I’m puzzled at the idea of siccing a SWAT team on someone for being suicidal. Our gung-ho paramilitarized SWAT teams aren’t exactly known for de-escalating situations.
Calling a tactical response team or even just the local cops on a suicidal friend or loved one is pretty much a guarantee that they’ll end up dead, one way or the other.
Yeah, those trained negotiators are just wanton killers.
Poor Amy…
Now now Rags. Play nice. That being said, see my response immediately above to Amy.
Er…. Immediately ~below~ to Amy….
My understanding is that the Tactical Teams (aka SWAT) are the umbrella section that handles this sort of incident, regardless of if it is a “hostage” situation or if it is a “self-identified” suicide risk where effectively the person is holding themselves hostage.
There’s a reason for that: Sometimes people go off the deep end, threaten suicide and put the gun to their head, but can’t pull the trigger (for whatever reason) and instead they choose to start shooting wildly about, hoping that someone else will shoot them (also known as “suicide by cop”).
As for WHY someone calls the cops on a suicidal friend: That is the “trained” response of the sheeple. Something bad is happening, don’t try to stop it yourself, get away from the situation and call the police. They’re the ‘trained’ responders to an emergency. Let them handle it.
You have NO IDEA how many times I’ve had to have a conversation with a young couple that was having a knock-down, drag-out argument, where one party slapped the other, the slapped party (or the neighbors) called the cops, and one of them is carted away and charged with “Assault Family Violence.” If everybody had just kept it in the house, nobody would have been charged, and they wouldn’t be out between $800 – $2500 dollars in court costs, fees and classes (that doesn’t count my attorney’s fees, by the way, which 99+% of the time in those cases, is “indigent defense” paid for by the County of El Paso, Texas).
Well, and a lot of times the LEOs are trained to be helpful.
Take the corporal that was the focus of the Great Pool Party Maaaaas-a-cre of a few weeks ago. He’d responded to two suicides that morning. He managed NOT to shoot anybody (“Damn! I di-ent getta bus’ a cap on anybody!”) He DID manage to help save a teenage girl, but he missed out on another.
http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/01/07/orig-police-prevent-suicide-in-jetblue-flight.cnn
http://www.nj.com/bergen/index.ssf/2015/03/port_authority_police_prevent_suicide_at_gwb_agency_says.html
Amy doesn’t get that cops successfully prevent suicides a lot more than they are forced to have to shoot.
She has a kink…
He got Vince Fostered.
Kind of WAY late in the day, wouldn’t you say?
But, hey, grab you ASSumptions and your pitchfork…!!!
Chuck Skinner. You may be right. After all, seventeen unlikely things have got to happen to somebody, eventually.
The following http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2007-02-22-julie-amaro_x.htm
is about an average, normal prosecutor who got his teeth into a porn case.
He’s just an average prosecutor.
He’s not a scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, corruptocrat, fascist political hack. So, given the Amero case with an average prosecutor, the worst Chisholm might do is hard to imagine.
Except it’s a complete fantasy as applied to what little we know about this case, introduced by a poster I’m not at all familiar with.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2015/07/wisconsin-john-doe-whistleblower-michael-lutz-dead-apparent-suicide/comment-page-1/#comment-603595
The propensity to accuse people of outrageous stuff is not limited to prosecutors.
Is it?
Sad … so he threatened his ex wife’s boyfriend, allegedly, right before this. Hard to tell how the John Doe attacks made his life stressful for years.
Whatever else we know about Mr. Lutz, he was a brave, honorable man in the role he played in exposing Chisholm, a man who he knew for years and liked very much.
Rags: Couple of points. To imply that, because such a thing has never been proven–not that it never happened but that we don’t know for sure that it has–does not forbid presuming it may have, or may in the future.
Given the Amero case, it stands to reason that, although Chisholm may not have planted porn, it is entirely reasonable to think somebody like him would, if given the opportunity. This is the point.
To insist that imagining that which Rags doesn’t like means tin-foil hat territory is one thing. The real dance is what happens after….it happens. Then it’s….hey, look, a squirrel.
When you wake up fully, read what you just wrote. It’s actually quite funny.
What does child porn have to do with this case? Not one damn thing.
Really, it appears as a non-sequitur in the thread, and could easily have been a moby troll operation.
I think both sides of the “what’s on the computer” question are over reaching.
Do we know if anything is on Lutz’s computer? Not that I’ve read.
Could something be planted on someone’s computer? Sure. That’s how zombie nets are formed. A coworker found that local gamers were using his computer as a game server. Common knowledge that third party computers are sometimes used as porn servers so dealers and perverts do not have illegal stuff in their own possession. Dig into computer security.
Past my bed time. Night.
Rags. Missed the point.
First question: What might have made Lutz consider offing himself?
Answer. Possibly damning stuff showing up on his computer.
Why kiddy porn? Because the cops never find anybody bragging about defrauding his ailing grandmother or cleaning out the petty cash account.
Cops sometimes provide, one way or another, necessary evidence. Why not this time?
Chisholm, being a Class One fascist hack, can certainly be imagined to have done such a thing.
Which is the point, kiddy porn being the generic for damning evidence planted.
The Amero case is hauled in to show how much fun a normal prosecutor can have with a porn case, despite not having any evidence. Chisholm is worse.
But, to repeat, the point was speculation on what might have made Lutz suicidal and planted kiddy porn was the metaphor for something underhanded from Chisholm.
First question: What might have made Lutz consider offing himself?
Answer. Possibly damning stuff showing up on his computer.
So, you insist on wallowing in fantasy.
Why? I mean, you’ve so inexplicably abandoned Occam when you have actual FACTS on which you can answer you own question.
Is child porn planting POSSIBLE…???
Well, yeah. Just like me shooting political opponents in the head is POSSIBLE (see above). I never said, hinted, or suggested otherwise.
What I HAVE said is there is NO evidence of it here, or anywhere in the fossil record.
And I won’t let fantastic BULLSHIT urban myth to go unanswered, because it is stultifying.
Rags: You know the difference between speculation and proof. This is a matter of speculation. We know two things: Chisholm is a fascist hack. Kiddy porn could be planted. Or some other damning evidence, kiddy porn being the generic.
The way it works is… “snork, tin-foil hat territory. prove it. never happened.”
Then, after it happened. “Sure it happened. Big deal. What’s the issue here, anyway. You some kind of nutcase?”
We get it. We know the dance.
No, dear. Here’s how it works.
We have to be destroyers. Clean, sharp, fighting things.
Every time we let “kiddie porn”, “they just get millions in damages”, “every politician is a crook” urban myth propagate, it’s like letting barnacles foul your hull. It’s self-defeating, enervating bullshit.
“We” can embrace that. I won’t.
I knew Mike and I know his sister. There is no conspiracy here so please stop starting rumors. Please respect their family during this troubled time. Mike was suffering a lot recently plus he was diagnosed with PTSD in regards to a previous incident while on duty. The article is 100% accurate with what happened. This was the case of a man who was sick, in need of help and didn’t know how to ask for it, and family and friends were oblivious to how severe the situation was. It happens too much in the world and we don’t need jerks using the anonymity of the internet to spread falsities.