Start with the arithmetic. Five men were found dead over roughly ten months, all within a single mile of a public trail in the capital of a state with one of the country's largest universities a few minutes away. Four had head or facial injuries. One was stabbed. Only now, with the fifth body, is the police chief saying publicly that investigators are weighing a serial killer.
I don't know what Lansing police knew or suspected along the way, and I won't pretend to. Investigators have good reasons to keep quiet, and the cases may turn out to be unrelated. A 23-year-old has been arrested in connection with the stabbing of 22-year-old Daniel Lusk, and nothing in the public record ties him to the other four deaths. He is presumed innocent, and the temptation to fold five separate tragedies into one monstrous narrative should be resisted. But the unlinked version should disturb us nearly as much. If there is no single killer, then a one-mile stretch of riverfront was simply a place where unhoused men could be beaten or stabbed to death at a rate that would be a citywide emergency anywhere else.
That is the real story. Gino Chouinard, Dennis Dunnebacke, Robert Smith, Daniel Lusk and Louis Woodruff were not killed in some remote wilderness. They died along a trail the city builds, maintains and promotes as a civic amenity. Under its bridges is where people with nowhere to go end up, because the places we have designated for them are either full, inaccessible, or conditioned on terms some people can't meet. Meanwhile the rules we have written for sleeping outdoors push people out of sight rather than into housing. Since the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in *Grants Pass v. Johnson* made it easier for cities to punish camping, the incentive for local governments everywhere has been to treat visibility as the problem. Hiding people is not the same as sheltering them, and in practice it means putting them in the darkest, most isolated corners of a city, where nobody is watching and nobody would hear.
This is not unique to Lansing. Unhoused people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it, a fact that sits awkwardly with the way public debate usually frames homelessness, as a threat to housed residents' sense of order. We talk about encampments as a danger to the park. We rarely talk about the park as a danger to the people in the encampment. The men who died here were, by every indication in the public record, not menacing anyone. They were sleeping.
There is also a quieter problem with how a death gets noticed. A body under a bridge invites the lazy assumptions: overdose, exposure, illness, a fall, a life that was always going to end this way. It takes something unmistakable, a stab wound, a pattern, a fifth victim, to make the system look up from the paperwork. Whether that happened here is a question the city owes its residents an answer to once the investigation allows it. How were the earlier deaths first classified? When did anyone notice the geography? What were the unhoused community and the outreach workers who know them saying in the meantime? Those who live outdoors usually know who is dangerous long before a press conference does, and they are rarely asked.
The police deserve credit for saying the words "serial killer" aloud rather than hiding behind a vague "ongoing investigation." Now the city has to show that it takes these deaths as seriously as it would had they happened on a residential street near the university. That means more than patrols along the trail, which can easily become another way to clear people out. It means outreach staff with the authority to place people indoors tonight, lighting and emergency access that serve the people actually sleeping there, and a standing commitment to investigate deaths among the unhoused with the same urgency as any other.
A society reveals itself by whose death it treats as an anomaly and whose as background noise. Five men in a mile is a long time to have been background noise.
How it may affect me
If you use the Lansing River Trail between Old Town and Kalamazoo Street, police have not said there is a general threat to the public, and the victims so far were all unhoused men. Anyone with information about the deaths can give tips to Lansing police, and anything you saw or heard near the bridges in the past year may matter, even if it seemed minor at the time. If you or someone you know is sleeping outside in the area, Michigan 211 (dial 2-1-1) can connect people with shelter and outreach services, and sleeping in a spot visible to others or with someone nearby is generally safer than sleeping alone in an isolated spot. If you know a person who lives along the trail, telling them about the investigation, and letting police know if they've gone missing or you haven't seen them lately, is one concrete way to help.
