This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

Margaret Rose Bostelmann’s ideals are clear from one glance at her well-kept ranch-style house in central Wisconsin.

A large American flag is mounted near the front door, and a “We Back the Badge” sign on her front lawn announces her support for law enforcement. Bostelmann, a Wisconsin elections commissioner, said she voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and added: “I will always vote Republican. I always have.”

But her fellow Republicans have exiled her and disparaged her, sought to upend her career and, on this day in July, brought the 70-year-old to tears as she discussed what she’s been through over the last several years because she refuses to support false claims that Trump won the state in the 2020 presidential election.

Bostelmann, who goes by Marge, previously served for more than two decades as the county clerk in Green Lake County, overseeing elections without controversy. But two years into her term in a Republican slot on the Wisconsin Elections Commission she became a target, denounced and disowned by the Republican Party of Green Lake County, which claimed she had failed to protect election integrity in the state.

Now a suit filed in June by a Wisconsin man who promotes conspiracy theories about election fraud seeks her removal from the commission. Citing her estrangement from the county party, the suit claims she’s not qualified to fill a position intended for a Republican.

The elections commission, which has an equal number of Republican and Democratic members, has faced an onslaught of discredited claims about election fraud in Wisconsin. The most recent drama involves the commission’s nonpartisan administrator, Meagan Wolfe, whose term is expiring and whose future in the role is in doubt. After the three Republican members of the commission supported Wolfe in a June vote, Republicans in the state legislature made it clear they wanted to find a way to get rid of her.

The Republican clashes in Wisconsin exemplify ongoing discord seen across the country, with elections officials shunned, berated and even driven away by members of their own party over their defense of the integrity of the 2020 election.

In Hood County, Texas — a solid red block in a red state — hard-line Republicans successfully pushed for the resignation of the elections administrator, even though Trump won 81% of the vote in the county. In Surry County, North Carolina, where Trump also won overwhelmingly, the Republican elections administrator was threatened with firing or a pay cut for refusing to give a GOP party leader access to voting equipment to conduct a forensic audit. And in Clare County, Michigan, officials are considering possible charges against a GOP activist accused of kicking the party chair in the groin.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has been sued by numerous parties, verbally attacked by voters and earmarked for elimination by GOP lawmakers. It has survived only because a Democrat still occupies the governor’s office and wields veto power.

In an April survey of local election officials nationwide, the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization, found that nearly one in three reported being abused, harassed, or threatened because of their job.

In a rare interview, Bostelmann wept at one point. For the most part, though, she was defiant, insisting the 2020 election was not stolen by Joe Biden.

“I’m a Republican who stands up for the truth and not for a lie,” Bostelmann said. And she predicted the latest legal gambit, which seeks her removal, would fail.

Don Millis, the Republican who chairs the Wisconsin Elections Commission, also has expressed frustration with the election conspiracy theorists. At the commission’s June meeting, he said he considered some of the agitators to be “grifters” who are conning people of goodwill into thinking there is something wrong with the election system.

“It’s not about winning or preventing fraud,” he said of the conspiracy theorists’ motives. “It’s about getting publicity or attention. It’s about grifting, convincing others to donate to their cause.”

In a recent interview with ProPublica, Millis said he was referring to a small set of people he believes are trying to raise money by spreading lies through social media or newsletters. “There are many people who believe them, who don’t know any better,” he said.

From Fraudster to Fraud Investigator

The man who brought the suit against Bostelmann is Peter Bernegger, grandson of the founders of Hillshire Farm, the Wisconsin deli meat and sausage company. Now 60, Bernegger has described himself as a “data analyst” and an “independent journalist.”

He has engaged in relentless — and so far futile — legal efforts to prove fraud in the 2020 election. This mirrors a different kind of legal fight from earlier in his life: trying to overturn his own fraud conviction.

A 2008 indictment accused Bernegger and a business partner in Mississippi of deceiving investors, bilking them of $790,000 in various ventures — including the development of a gelatin, intended for pharmaceutical or cosmetic companies, made from the carcasses of catfish. A federal jury acquitted the partner, who has since died, but convicted Bernegger of mail and bank fraud. He was sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $2.2 million in restitution.

Bernegger overwhelmed the courts with claims to clear his name, alleging procedural errors, insufficient evidence, judicial bias, ineffective counsel, violations of his constitutional rights and other misconduct.

“Mr. Bernegger, you file an awful lot,” said U.S. District Court Judge William Griesbach of Wisconsin. “Just let me say that. You file so many things. And in all honesty, I don’t have time to keep up on it all.”

Though most of his claims failed, Bernegger did succeed on one front: He got his restitution reduced to roughly $1.7 million. Ordered in 2019 to get a steady job to make payments on the debt, Bernegger testified that he had limited options.

He said his health was too poor for him to be able to lift heavy objects, drive a truck or operate heavy equipment. “I work odd jobs, a wide variety of them. And it is cash, but it’s legal,” he explained.

When ProPublica reached Bernegger by phone for this story, he immediately hung up. He did not respond to letters and emails seeking comment.

Much of his energy, it appears, is now devoted to stoking doubt about election integrity. In his social media posts and podcast appearances, he has railed against Wolfe, the Wisconsin elections commission administrator, while repeating sweeping, unsubstantiated claims about problems in voting systems across the country. Along the way, he has made alliances with like-minded individuals beyond his home state.

Bernegger has ties to Omega4America, a website promoting a super-fast computing method to identify fraud by matching voter data with property tax records and other large databases. The site solicits donations to a nonprofit called Election Watch Inc.; Bernegger founded a tax-exempt organization with that same name in 2022.

The Texas Tribune has reported that the Omega4America project was initially funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist close to Trump. Omega4America makes glowing claims about programming marketed by Texan Jay Valentine as a powerful tool that could replace the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate consortium that ferrets out duplicate voter registrations across states. ERIC has been the subject of heavy criticism from conservatives who believe its work identifying unregistered voters for states bolsters the rolls for Democrats.

In a podcast, Bernegger mentioned that he has access to the “Valentine fractal programming system” as he seeks to uncover voter fraud. Valentine, who is listed on the Omega4America website as the site contact, declined to discuss his work or Bernegger, telling a ProPublica reporter: “I have nothing to say to you.”

In an April episode of a podcast called The AlphaWarrior Show, Bernegger said he’s now part of a team of 10 scouring federal campaign data for oddities. He named James O’Keefe as a member of that team. O’Keefe is the former head of Project Veritas, a conservative group known for secretly recording liberal organizations, and has a new media company that encourages “citizen journalists” to investigate election fraud. ProPublica’s attempts to reach O’Keefe for comment were unsuccessful.

Toward the end of the AlphaWarrior podcast, the host urged viewers to “smash” the blue donate button on an Election Watch website to show support for Bernegger and his team.

“It means we sacrifice a movie or a fancy dinner and we throw a couple dollars their way,” he said.

“I Don’t Know That I’d Be Welcome”

Marge Bostelmann still doesn’t fully understand how it got to this point, how she became such a target of Bernegger and others, including people she once thought held similar values.

But she does know that things in Green Lake began to change in 2020, during Trump’s reelection bid. Bostelmann said she stopped paying membership dues to the county party after the party chair became critical of her and of the way the 2020 election had been run in Green Lake County by her successor.

By November 2021, as conservatives carried out investigations into voting accommodations made in Wisconsin during the pandemic — including the use of drop boxes and allowing unsupervised absentee voting in nursing homes — Bostelmann and others on the elections commission came under attack for their votes shaping those procedures.

Kent McKelvey, the Green Lake County GOP chair at the time, issued a press release saying Bostelmann’s actions on the Wisconsin Elections Commission “do not reflect the principles, values and beliefs of the Green Lake County Republicans, in this case, supporting the proper enforcement of the law and of election integrity.”

The press release said flat-out that “Ms. Bostelmann is no longer a member of the Republican Party of Green Lake County.” McKelvey did not respond to requests for comment.

The snub hurt. Bostelmann, a former foster parent who knows many local Republicans through her activities with her church and the Rotary Club, said she stopped attending many local GOP events. “I don’t know that I’d be welcome,” she said.

Even as efforts to prove fraud in Wisconsin fizzled, the pressure on the commission remained intense. Powerful Republicans in the state Senate called for Wolfe’s ouster, blaming her for what they saw as regulatory overreach by the commission, though in her role she carries out the orders of the six voting members.

Prior to the commission’s key June vote on Wolfe, Bostelmann said, she received a disturbing phone call from an acquaintance who had been critical of Wolfe. “The patriots would not be happy” with her, she was told, if she backed Wolfe. Bostelmann took that as a threat.

Still, she and the panel’s two other Republicans voted to reappoint Wolfe. Bostelmann defended Wolfe publicly at the June meeting, saying the administrator had been unfairly targeted “as the scapegoat” by people dissatisfied with the commission and the outcome of the 2020 election.

In a tactical move, Democrats abstained from voting, leading to a final tally of three yes votes. That appeared to mean that the panel did not have the requisite four votes to send the matter to the state Senate for final consideration, and it was widely thought Wolfe would continue in her post because of the impasse.

But the Senate, surprisingly, decided the three affirmative votes were enough for it to take up her nomination. Wolfe’s reappointment is now pending before the Senate elections committee. No public hearing or vote has been scheduled.

Lawsuits are expected, though for now she remains on the job.

“Some judge will tell us who our administrator is. That’s my guess,” said the commission chair, Millis, a tax attorney who favored retaining Wolfe.

Like Bostelmann, Millis has been the target of Bernegger, who on Twitter has ranted about Millis ignoring election system problems, referring to him as “Blind Don.”

Robert Spindell, the third Republican member of the commission, said he hasn’t been chastised for his renomination of Wolfe. He said he thought it best that the Senate take up the matter. “I haven’t had anybody call or criticize me,” he said, noting: “Most of the people I know on this election stuff are not shy.”

Through a spokesperson, Wolfe declined a request for an interview.

Bernegger’s suit against Bostelmann demands that the circuit court remove her from her seat on the commission, citing the disavowal from Green Lake County Republican Party. “She cannot prove she is a member of the Green Lake County Republican Party and is otherwise qualified to hold the designated Republican seat,” he wrote.

The statute that governs commission appointees does not specifically require them to be dues-paying party members.

Records show Bernegger has bombarded the Wisconsin Elections Commission with official complaints and demands for data, often accompanied by threats of legal action and accusations of criminal conduct. In one email he referred to a commission staffer as a “prick.”

“Please note that I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this individual’s erratic behavior that is directed at myself, our staff and local election officials,” Wolfe wrote to the commission in October 2022. In May of this year, Wolfe told the commission Bernegger made her feel “incredibly unsafe” when he noted her home address in bold in an email to the commission and called her a “pathological liar.”

The commission fined Bernegger $2,403 in March 2022 for filing frivolous complaints. Records show commission staff have, at times, forwarded his correspondence to the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

On July 7, the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Criminal Investigation Division served Bernegger with a letter at his home in New London, stating that his actions could reasonably have made Wolfe and others at the commission feel “harassed, tormented or intimidated.” It warned that he could be arrested for stalking if he continued his behavior.

One of Bernegger’s lawsuits over records against the commission is still ongoing.

He has also sued officials in Dane, Door, Grant, Marathon, Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties, the town of Hudson, the city of Hudson, the city of Milwaukee and the town of Richmond in Walworth County. The suits are related to broad public record requests he made for absentee ballot applications, images of ballots, router logs and other materials and involve disputes over costs and access. While many of those have been dismissed, four are still pending.

“We’re all trying to do our jobs to the very best of our abilities. It makes it difficult when we are constantly being undermined and questioned,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood. Her office provided Bernegger with some information when he inquired but denied him certain documentation that Trueblood said was exempt from release. He sued, but a judge dismissed the case.

Another clerk, Vickie Shaw of the town of Hudson, said she had to go to court three times to deal with a Bernegger suit over records. A judge threw out the case, Bernegger appealed, and it was tossed again.

Before Bernegger’s suit, Shaw had quit in 2021, finding the job too burdensome and confrontational. But she returned the following year because, she said, the town “didn’t have anybody to run the April election.”

Bostelmann expressed dismay with Bernegger’s tactics against her and the other election clerks.

“It’s bullying is what it is. It’s truly bullying,” she said. “It’s almost like they are trying to get people who are knowledgeable, and do a good job, to quit to have people who don’t know how to do the job to come in.”

Bullied by her own party, a Wisconsin election official’s GOP roots mean nothing in volatile new climate is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

When the clerk at VJ’s Food Mart confronted Corey Stingley, the 16-year-old handed over his backpack. Inside were six hidden bottles of Smirnoff Ice, worth $12, and the clerk began pulling them out one by one.

Stingley watched, then pivoted and quickly moved toward the door, empty-handed. But there would be no escape for the unarmed teen in the light blue hoodie.

Three customers, together weighing 550 pounds, wrestled the 135-pound teen to the floor of the West Allis, Wisconsin, store. They pinned him in a seated position, “his body compressed downward,” according to a police account. One of the men put Stingley in a chokehold, witnesses would later tell investigators.

“Get up, you punk!” that man, a former Marine, reportedly told Stingley when an officer from the police department finally arrived. But the teen didn’t move. He was foaming at the mouth, and his pants and shoes were soaked in urine.

He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury from a loss of oxygen and never regained consciousness. His parents took him off life support two weeks later. The medical examiner ruled Stingley’s death a homicide following his restraint in “a violent struggle with multiple individuals.”

That was more than 10 years ago.

None of the men, all of whom were white, were criminally charged in the incident that killed Stingley, a Black youth. Police arrested Mario Laumann, the man seen holding Stingley in an apparent chokehold, shortly after the incident in December 2012. But the local district attorney declined to prosecute him or the other two men, arguing they were unaware of the harm they were causing.

When a second police review led to a reexamination of the case in 2017, another prosecutor sat on it for more than three years, until a judge demanded a decision. Again, there were no charges.

Prosecutors move on, but fathers don’t. Refusing to accept that the case had been handled justly, Corey Stingley’s dad, Craig, last year convinced a judge to assign a third district attorney to look at what had happened to his son.

That prosecutor, Ismael Ozanne of Dane County, is scheduled to report back to the court on Friday. He could announce whether charges are warranted.

The case has parallels to a recent deadly subway incident in New York City. Both involve chokeholds administered by former Marines on Black males who had not initiated any violence. But unlike in Wisconsin, New York authorities acted within two weeks to file a second-degree manslaughter charge in the case.

While the New York subway incident grabbed national headlines, Corey Stingley’s death — which happened the same day as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut — did not gain much notice outside of southeast Wisconsin.

Years later, Craig Stingley tapped an obscure statute dating back to Wisconsin’s frontier days to convince the system to take a fresh look at his son’s death. The law states that if a district attorney refuses to issue a criminal complaint or is unavailable to do so, a private citizen can petition a judge to take up the matter. Today, it’s loosely referred to as a “John Doe” petition, though in this instance there was no doubt who restrained Stingley’s son: Laumann, who has since died, along with two other store patrons named Jesse R. Cole and Robert W. Beringer.

No one is alleging that the men set out to kill Corey Stingley. His father is asking the prosecutor to consider a charge of reckless homicide or even a lesser offense for using extreme force to detain his son.

“He wasn’t trying to harm anyone. He was trying to leave that store,” said Craig Stingley, who thought his son made a youthful mistake. “I believe he was scared.”

“You Guys Killed That Kid”

VJ’s Food Mart is a typical small convenience store, packed with chips, candy, soda, beer, cigarettes and liquor. On Sunday mornings it offers a special deal on hot ham and rolls, a local tradition for an after-church meal. To combat theft, the store is equipped with security cameras.

On Dec. 14, 2012, Thomas Ripley and Anthony Orcholski stopped by the store for beer and snacks. Only a few steps in, they saw that three men had someone firmly pinned on the ground.

Security video shows Ripley and Orcholski pausing next to the pile of people and watching intently. In statements to police they both said they saw Laumann lying on the ground with his arms around Stingley’s neck in a “chokehold.” Beringer had grabbed Stingley’s hair, they said; the third man, Cole, had his hands on Stingley’s back.

Ripley told police the teen was not moving and appeared to be limp.

“I don’t think he could breathe,” Ripley would later testify during a special review of the case to determine if there should be charges.

Orcholski told a detective that he was concerned about the teen on the ground and may even have instructed the men to let Stingley go.

A decade later, Orcholski is still bothered by what he saw. “I’m upset,” he told ProPublica. “Three men thought they were going to be heroes that day because a 16-year-old boy was shoplifting. There could have been numerous different ways to restrain him other than choking him to death.”

He added, “It’s common sense: When you squeeze somebody that hard for that long, they’re not going to be alive after it.”

The security video is grainy, and much of the confrontation took place out of view of the cameras.

Authorities had a third witness, though. Troubled by what he’d seen, store customer Michael Farrell felt compelled to go to the West Allis police station that evening and give a statement.

“I felt bad. I’m a dad,” he explained, court records show.

Farrell told police he could see through the store’s glass door that a man with a “crazed look on his face” had someone in a chokehold, very near the entrance. The guy was “squeezing the hell out of this kid and never let up,” he said. Farrell picked Laumann out of a photo lineup. (Farrell and another witness, Ripley, couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.)

Corey Stingley and his dad lived just a couple of blocks from the store, making them one of the few Black families in a predominantly white neighborhood and city on the border of Milwaukee. Comments from the three men who held Stingley down imply that they saw him as an outsider.

Ripley told police that Beringer, 54, held Stingley by the hair and shook the teen’s head a couple of times. “You don’t do that,” he said Beringer scolded Stingley. “We’re all friends and neighbors around here.”

With Stingley subdued, the store clerk held a phone to Beringer’s head so he could talk to a police dispatcher. “We have the perp, three of us have the perp on the ground holding him for you,” Beringer said, according to a transcript of the 911 call.

Police estimated that the men held Stingley down for six to 10 minutes. When Stingley stopped struggling, Cole later told police, “I thought he was faking it.”

He added: “I didn’t know if he was just, you know, playing limp to try and get real strong and pull a quick one, you know.”

When an officer arrived, she handcuffed Stingley with Beringer’s assistance but then realized that he wasn’t breathing and called for help.

Beringer walked outside the market, according to Farrell, only to be confronted by another bystander who said, “You guys killed that kid.”

“We didn’t kill anyone,” Beringer responded.

At nearby Froedtert Hospital, doctors concluded Stingley’s airway had been blocked while he was restrained.

He had petechial hemorrhages — tiny red dots that appear as the result of broken blood vessels — to his eyes, cheeks and mouth. A deputy medical examiner attributed this pattern to “pressure applied to the neck.” There also was a bruise at the front of Stingley’s neck, she testified.

She noted that his asphyxia also could be linked to compression of the chest.

Doctors put Stingley in a medically induced coma, attached him to a ventilator and inserted a feeding tube. As the situation became increasingly hopeless, his family spent Christmas at his bedside. Four days later, his parents made the agonizing decision to take him off life support.

“Mario Did Have a Temper”

In the New York subway case earlier this month, it took less than two weeks for the Manhattan district attorney to charge Daniel Penny, a former Marine, with second-degree manslaughter for the choking death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man who had yelled at other subway passengers. A prosecutor emphasized that Penny continued to choke Neely even after he stopped moving.

Penny’s lawyers have defended his actions by saying he was protecting himself and other passengers. Laumann, in contrast, never claimed Corey Stingley was a danger. But he did dispute that he put his arm around the teen’s throat.

Interviewed by police that night, Laumann, then 56, recalled “just leaning on him.”

Pressed by a detective, Laumann appeared less confident, saying, “A headlock is when you got your arms locked, right? And I didn’t have him locked.” He added: “I had my arm around like this, yeah, but I didn’t have him in a headlock. Unless maybe I did, maybe I — I don’t, no, I, I don’t remember that, no.”

His account conflicted with that of witnesses. And Laumann’s older sibling Michael, also a former Marine, isn’t so sure, either. Chokeholds are a part of basic combat skills, he said, used to restrain a person and take them down.

“That’s the first thing they teach you, not only in boot camp but also in subsequent infantry training. It becomes an automatic restraint, to save your own life,” Michael said. “I’m not saying that Mario did that. Because I don’t know the situation. But all I’m saying is that when you’re in the Marine Corps you’re taught how to save your own life. And to save the lives of your brotherhood. Sometimes it becomes, say, an automatic response.”

Michael Laumann said he and Mario — who died last year at age 65 — seldom talked, and when they did, the store incident never came up.

Mario Laumann, who worked in construction after leaving the Marines, lived about two miles from the store. His family had been dealing with a variety of crises. His wife was battling cancer. She had been arrested four years earlier for driving under influence of prescription medications. She died in 2013.

And, by the time of the encounter with Stingley, Laumann’s youngest son, Nickolas, was serving time in prison for sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl, intimidation of a victim and theft.

Writing online while in prison, Nickolas said his father would “scream at me” for drug use and “whoop my ass.” The police report about Stingley’s death notes that Laumann had been arrested twice for battery, but charges in both cases had been dismissed.

“Mario did have a temper,” another brother, Mennas Laumann, said recently.

The three men who held Stingley down didn’t know each other. Beringer, who lived next door to the food mart, told police he only recognized Laumann as “a neighborhood guy.”

Like Laumann, Beringer had had previous encounters with police. In 1996, Beringer pulled a gun on a Pakistani-born man and told him he hated “fucking Iranians,” according to a police sergeant’s sworn criminal complaint. Beringer pleaded guilty to misdemeanor gun charges and was jailed briefly then put on probation. A judge ordered him to complete a course in violence counseling or anger management and continue with mental health treatment, court records show.

Beringer, who no longer lives in West Allis, declined to talk to ProPublica. He came to the door of his apartment building and when asked to discuss Stingley’s death said, “No, no, see you later,” and closed the door.

The third man to wrestle Stingley to the ground, Cole, was a 25-year-old electrician who lived about a mile from the store. He’d gone there to get cigarettes. The prior year he had pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, for carrying a Glock handgun in the center console of his car and a magazine with 11 hollow-point bullets in the glove box. Cole didn’t respond to ProPublica’s attempts for comment.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, all three men cooperated with police.

Cole said that as he and the others tried to halt Stingley’s attempt to flee, the teen took a swing at him and landed a punch. He ended up with a black eye.

Asked by police why he restrained the teen, Laumann replied: “Because he’s a thief.”

“He Was My Buddy”

Several days after the struggle, West Allis police arrested Laumann and processed him for second-degree reckless injury. It was up to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm to decide whether to prosecute him and the other men.

Chisholm eventually arranged for a judicial proceeding where sworn testimony could be heard. There, the three men invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in declining to answer questions. The original witnesses recounted seeing Stingley grabbed around the throat.

Though Farrell said he couldn’t recall telling police that Laumann was “squeezing the hell out of” Stingley, he didn’t back away from his original description of a chokehold.

Months went by with no word on charges. But Craig Stingley, a facilities engineer, couldn’t just sit and wait. He rallied support from politicians in the community and tried to keep the pressure on Chisholm.

Stingley brought state Sen. Lena Taylor to meetings with the prosecutor to discuss the case. They came away discouraged. Taylor got the impression that the case was challenging for prosecutors on many levels. The video was not sharp, for one thing. Taylor also believed that race relations in Milwaukee County fed Chisholm’s concern that a jury might not convict anyone in the case.

At one meeting, Taylor said, she questioned what would have happened if the people involved had been of different races. “They wouldn’t let a group of Black guys do that to a young white guy, without any consequences,” she said.

More than a year after the incident, in January 2014, Chisholm announced he would not bring charges, on the grounds that the men did not intend to injure or kill Stingley and didn’t realize there was a risk to his life or health. “It is clear that the purpose of restraining Corey Stingley was to hold him for police,” Chisholm wrote in a five-page summary of his investigation.

“None of the actors were trained in the proper application of restraint,” he added

Corey’s mother, Alicia Stingley, was stunned. “It’s just mind-boggling to me, just the decision that was made that it was more so because he didn’t think he could win a case or didn’t think what they did was on purpose,” she said. “There were no repercussions for a grown man taking a young child’s life — by choking him.”

For Craig Stingley, it’s inconceivable the men did not know his son was in distress during the prolonged time they held him down. Applied properly, a chokehold “can render an aggressor unconscious in as little as eight to thirteen seconds,” according to a 2015 Marine Corps instructor guide.

Chisholm is still the district attorney. Through an assistant, he declined comment, citing the new review. Among the questions sent by ProPublica to Chisholm was whether he investigated Laumann’s training in restraints as a Marine.

Chisholm’s decision sparked media coverage and community protests. To Craig Stingley, Corey was more than a symbol, he was a cherished son.

“He was my buddy,” Stingley said, describing how he and Corey would watch sports together. A skilled athlete, Corey Stingley was a running back on his high school football team and a member of the diving team. He took advanced placement classes in school and made the National Honor Society at school, his father said. He also worked part-time at an Arby’s.

His social media accounts include references to girls and partying. It also catalogs his love of Batman, the Green Bay Packers and Christmas and shows him gently mocking his friends and family.

“My dad just got texting and he’s experimenting with winky faces,” he wrote in 2012, ending with “#ohlord.”

Craig Stingley and his ex-wife filed a wrongful death suit in 2015 against the three men and the convenience store, which led to a settlement. Records show that Laumann’s homeowners insurance paid $300,000, as did Cole’s. (Beringer didn’t have homeowner’s insurance.) There was no admission of wrongdoing by the defendants. In court filings the three men said their actions were legal and justified, citing self-defense and their need to respond to “an emergency.”

A good portion of the proceeds from the suit went to pay for hospital and funeral costs and lawyer fees, Stingley said.

In the civil suit, an expert forensic pathologist hired by the Stingley family’s lawyer concluded the teen died because his chest was compressed and he was strangled.

“Once his airway became completely obstructed,” Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen of the University of Michigan wrote, “Corey would have experienced severe air hunger, conscious fear, suffering and panic with an impending sense of his own death for a period of 30 seconds to approximately one minute until he was rendered into a fully unconscious state.”

Craig Stingley still obsessed about what had happened and how to revive a criminal case. He relived his son’s death over and over, watching the surveillance video of his last moments frame by frame, looking for something new.

Using a movie maker app on his computer, he slowed the video down and grabbed individual frames. He concluded that Cole initially had his son in a headlock, but that Laumann too had an arm around his neck before bringing him to the ground. That conflicted with Laumann’s statement to police.

Stingley took his findings to the West Allis police, where a detective agreed they’d missed this detail. The department wrote a supplemental report for Chisholm, who asked a judge to appoint a special prosecutor for another look.

Racine District Attorney Patricia Hanson got the case in October 2017. But what followed was more waiting.

Stingley said he called Hanson’s office routinely in the years that followed, but she never met with him. Reached via email recently, Hanson declined to comment.

The case “has not even been assigned a referral or case number after three years in that office,” state Rep. Evan Goyke complained in a December 2020 letter to Milwaukee County Circuit Court Chief Judge Mary Triggiano. “This is unacceptable,” he wrote.

In later correspondence, Triggiano noted Hanson had refused to say when her decision would be forthcoming because in the midst of the pandemic, she had a lot of cases needing attention.

In March 2021, Hanson told the court in a one-page memo that she had reviewed Chisholm’s file and agreed with his earlier decision: “I do not find that criminal charges are appropriate at this time.”

“My Son Got His Humanity Back”

John Doe proceedings allowing citizens to directly ask a court to consider criminal charges date back to 1839, when Wisconsin was still a territory, according to an account in state supreme court records. The law is used infrequently, legal experts said, and rarely successfully.

Petitions have been filed by prisoners, by activists alleging animal cruelty in research experiments and by citizens claiming police misconduct. The efforts typically fail, ProPublica found in reviewing court dockets, news accounts and appellate rulings. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin’s most populous, there were only 19 such cases in 2020, dockets show, including Stingley’s. None succeeded.

Other states have similar methods of giving citizens a voice, but none are exactly like Wisconsin’s. According to the National Crime Victim Law Institute, six states — Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and Oklahoma — allow private citizens to gather signatures to petition a judge to convene a grand jury to investigate an alleged crime. In Pennsylvania, individuals can file a criminal complaint with the district attorney; if rejected, they can appeal to the court to ask it to order the district attorney to prosecute.

Milwaukee attorney Scott W. Hansen, who has served as special prosecutor in a John Doe case, is critical of the Wisconsin process. He said it allows citizens to present a one-sided, skewed version of facts to a judge, “without benefit of cross-examination or adverse witnesses.”

The law, however, does state that the citizen’s petition must present facts “that raise a reasonable belief” a crime was committed.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske described the John Doe petition as a check and balance on prosecutors by citizens. “If people believe a crime has been committed, and you’ve got prosecutors not living up to their responsibilities, and you think somebody ought to be held accountable, it’s a way to have some judicial review,” she said.

Stingley has known all along that the odds were against him, so turning to a longshot petition didn’t daunt him. Writing to Chief Judge Triggiano in late 2020, he alleged “dereliction and breach of legal duty” by the Milwaukee and Racine county district attorneys to conduct thorough criminal investigations into his son’s death.

Triggiano assigned the case to Judge Milton Childs. He formally appointed Ozanne, the first Black district attorney in Wisconsin, as special prosecutor last July. Ozanne’s inquiry has included reviews of court transcripts and interviews with West Allis police and others.

Craig Stingley was pleased that Ozanne and his staff met with him for several hours to listen to his concerns and to hear about his son.

“When I left that meeting,” Stingley said, “my son got his humanity back.”

A black teen who had tried to shoplift died from asphyxia. Why was no one ever charged? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on government integrity and quality of life issues. Sign up for our newsletter for more stories straight to your inbox.

After the judge in her Wisconsin divorce case ruled that her ex-husband — a man who had sought treatment for anger and alcohol issues — would get legal custody of and equal time with their four children, Julie Valadez vowed to fight back.

But in every key ruling that followed, the Waukesha County Circuit Court judge overseeing her case, Michael J. Aprahamian, found Valadez’s concerns about her ex-husband not credible and her actions unacceptable. Aprahamian took away her ability to co-parent her children. He held her in contempt four times. And after Aprahamian ordered her arrest, she braced herself for jail.

Valadez, whose accusations of domestic abuse had led to her husband’s arrest, ran through a string of attorneys and represented herself at times. Eventually she found a Milwaukee civil rights attorney to represent her, along with a public defender, and enlisted the help of a Washington, D.C., legal service for domestic violence survivors.

And in recent weeks, with a pair of rare appeals court victories and Aprahamian’s decision to remove himself from the case, Valadez has found reason to hope that better days are ahead for her and her children.

Appellate reversals in these kinds of cases are unusual, in part because of the time and money it takes to pursue them. Valadez’s case provides a window into the largely unexplored world of family court, the appeals process and the problems encountered by women who say they’ve been victims of domestic abuse.

A common concern in these situations is that family courts will favor shared custody even if one parent says the other is abusive, sometimes misapplying the law and forcing long, expensive legal battles. ProPublica reported in September on another woman’s lengthy family court ordeal, which also took place in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County, but before a different judge. That story explored how Wisconsin courts, in working to give fathers equal parenting rights, often fail to deal with the complexities that arise in these cases and downplay women’s concerns about their own safety and that of their children.

State systems, according to women’s advocates, often put mothers who survived domestic violence at a disadvantage, liable to be seen as noncooperative when the court seeks some sort of compromise.

Valadez, believing that her case was being mishandled, went to great lengths to be heard while also fending off accusations that she was unruly or was somehow failing to do what’s best for her children.

Then, late last year, Valadez won her state appeal challenging Aprahamian’s custody decision on the basis that Ricardo Valadez, her former husband, had not completed the legally required treatment for domestic abusers. In its rebuke, the state Court of Appeals in Waukesha County found Aprahamian had “failed to explicitly apply the proper legal standard” required in cases involving domestic abuse.

The court stated in its Dec. 29 opinion that the judge “read words into the statute that are not there” and “ignored words that are there.” It ordered Aprahamian to reconsider the Valadez decision.

In the wake of that ruling, a January court session drew several spectators from the community: mothers who wore “#Julie4Change” T-shirts, a reference to a website Julie Valadez set up to bring attention to her legal quest.

But from the bench, Aprahamian declined to immediately alter the custody arrangement. The two sides were ordered to appear in court again at a later date.

“Why do we have to wait that long?” Valadez whispered to her attorney.

Weeks later, in early February, Valadez won at the appellate level again, as the court found that the judge had erred when he held her in contempt for emailing him after he had told her not to, failing to sign a release of records and refusing to undergo a psychological exam.

The contempt charges were a reflection of the tense atmosphere inside the court and how Valadez’s own actions have come under heavy scrutiny.

Ricardo Valadez’s lawyer has said that Julie Valadez has made unsubstantiated claims against her ex-husband and undermined the relationship between father and children. Guardians ad litem appointed by the court to determine the best interests of the children also have generally favored her ex-husband and supported the idea that Julie Valadez is being unreasonable. The judge, meanwhile, described her as disruptive and unwilling to follow his instructions.

Aprahamian has since acquiesced to her request for a new judge and is now off the case. He said he could not discuss the case with ProPublica. Ricardo Valadez, through his attorney, also declined to comment.

The victories have given Julie Valadez a measure of satisfaction, but they have yet to produce the desired effect: She’s still separated by court order from her four children, ages 8 to 16. The next hearing is set for Thursday.

“It’s been torture,” Valadez said of the legal battle that’s been going on since 2018 and now includes more than 800 documents. “I don’t even know what will happen to our family; it’s truly horrifying.”

Alcohol, Outbursts and a Fractured Marriage

Julie Valadez was a bride at 19 and a mother at 21. Her husband was 27 when they married. He studied to become a pastor and also sold life insurance.

They had three more children over their 16-year union, and Julie spent her days taking care of the brood and doing volunteer work. Two of the children are autistic, and she primarily handled the doctor’s appointments and school schedule and arranged for help from behavioral therapists, life-skill helpers and outside specialists.

In court papers, she described enduring her husband’s intimidating and violent outbursts, property damage, verbal insults and alcohol abuse. In about 2014 she took refuge for a couple of days at a domestic violence shelter, her husband acknowledged on the witness stand. She then returned home.

The Valadez marriage hit a breaking point in December 2017 when, according to a criminal complaint, Ricardo Valadez came home drunk, yelled and cursed at his wife for being on her cellphone and smashed an iron to pieces. Officers with the City of Waukesha Police Department found him “visibly intoxicated,” handcuffed him and took him out of the house.

He was formally charged months later, in May 2018, with one count of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor classified as domestic abuse. It later was downgraded to a municipal ordinance violation after he started participating in counseling.

At one point, Ricardo Valadez described his therapy sessions in criminal court, saying: “I cried, and I dealt with my alcohol issues. We dealt with my anger issues. We dealt with, obviously, my whole life changing, no longer in a marriage and seeing my children as much as I wanted to see my children.”

He added, “I continue to do counseling just because I want to improve myself as a person. I want to be a better dad, obviously providing for my children.”

He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.

By then, Julie Valadez had filed for divorce and secured a restraining order against him, describing incidents of stalking, harassment and violence, according to court records. “He always has threatened me if I was to ever leave him,” she wrote in her request for the restraining order. “He has said a number of times that he would kill me; and if I was ever with someone else, he’d kill them.”

At one point during the divorce, Valadez said, she abandoned her home and moved with her children to a protected address under Wisconsin’s Safe at Home program.

Wisconsin’s family law prizes cooperation between exes, but the law anticipates that interaction between parents in abusive relationships can present a dangerous, if not lethal, situation.

The law instructs court-appointed attorneys for children, called guardians ad litem, to investigate possible domestic abuse in families and then advise judges on their findings. A 2021 study by the University of Wisconsin, however, found that guardians ad litem typically don’t have enough resources for evidence collection or expert help, and they lack training about domestic abuse.

Julie Valadez has argued in her case that the initial guardian ad litem did not investigate the abusive dynamics in her marriage; she alleged that a second such attorney, appointed later during the appeal, dragged her and her ex back into court over parenting issues after the custody decision, even though neither parent had filed a motion requesting circuit court intervention about the children.

As the case wore on, Julie Valadez exasperated the court officials, including the guardians ad litem and the judge. Aprahamian deemed some of her allegations about her ex-husband “vindictive and picayune.”

As a result of her complaints, police arrested her ex-husband twice for allegedly violating the restraining order — once after he sent her reproachful electronic messages about money and once after he stepped inside the house when she wasn’t there to bring a child to a school bus. Ricardo Valadez was not prosecuted for entering the home and was found not guilty of violating the restraining order for sending the messages.

Kurt M. Schuster, Ricardo’s attorney, accused Julie in court filings of creating an unsettling environment for her children. “I don’t think she’s capable of putting her children’s best interest above her own,” Schuster said in an interview.

To Julie Valadez, the notion that she has benefited in any way from the custody battle is laughable. For instance, she said, she took a huge financial hit when she left the large house that her husband was making payments on for an apartment she had to pay for.

“It was a disaster for me,” she said. “I lost everything.”

A Skeptical Judge

The Valadez divorce trial, in early 2020, lasted five days.

Julie Valadez testified in detail about her allegations of abusive behavior by her husband. She recalled one incident in which she said he was “very drunk and being aggressive verbally and physically” as they struggled over car keys and another in which she said he grabbed her arm “to the point where it hurt and left red marks.” She testified that he threatened her, saying she would regret leaving him and he would “make me pay for this.”

She described for the judge outbursts by her husband where, she said, he punched holes in the walls of their homes. “He had punched them next to my head or he kicked a hole in the wall,” she said in court.

While on the stand, Ricardo Valadez refused to answer certain pointed questions about his wife’s allegations of domestic violence, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The questions included: “Isn’t it true you have physically hurt Miss Valadez?”

Aprahamian issued a 34-page decision in April 2020.

He agreed with recommendations by a court-appointed social worker and the first guardian ad litem that the couple exchange the children weekly. The handoffs were to be done at a police station.

Shared legal custody, however, was a different matter because of questions whether the former spouses could cooperate (although the social worker thought it unwise for either of them to act without the other’s input). Julie Valadez argued that a restraining order she obtained in 2018 against her husband made communicating with each other problematic and that she alone should have legal custody.

Aprahamian made note in his ruling of Ricardo Valadez’s 2017 arrest. Referencing incidents that spurred the divorce filing, the judge wrote that there was a “pattern of domestic abuse occurring coincident to the initiation of this case.” But he said he would not take into consideration Julie Valadez’s other accusations.

“The Court does not find credible Ms. Valadez’s other allegations of abuse and battery, including uncorroborated allegations of sexual abuse, physical abuse, stalking and property damage,” Aprahamian concluded.

The judge acknowledged that Ricardo Valadez, whom he described as an alcoholic, had lied to the court about his sobriety. Still, he wrote, “As a general matter, the Court found Ms. Valadez not credible.”

“She was evasive in answering questions and repeatedly asked to have simple, straightforward questions repeated prior to answer,” Aprahamian ruled.

For example, asked by the then guardian ad litem Katherine J. De Lorenzo if she believed she could cooperate with her ex-husband if awarded joint legal custody, Julie Valadez said at trial: “I have been cooperative.”

“Can you answer the question?” the judge asked.

“If I would be cooperative, is the question? Can you repeat your question?” she replied.

De Lorenzo obliged but warned: “Try and listen to my questions. They’re pretty simply stated, Ms. Valadez.”

Valadez said in an interview that in this and other similar instances she merely was trying to make sure she understood what she was being asked.

Aprahamian concluded that Ricardo Valadez “likely would put his children’s interests above his own.” He ruled that Ricardo should have sole legal custody, giving him control of decision-making on major issues in the children’s lives, though he was instructed not to change the kids’ school or doctors.

For Julie Valadez, the ruling was a harsh blow. She worried about how her ex would manage all the special services the children needed and about his drinking and anger issues.

“It was just a dangerous situation,” she said. “To me it seems obvious.”

She first undertook handling her own appeal in June 2020 but later had assistance from Washington, D.C., attorney Jay C. Johnson, acting as pro bono co-counsel with DV LEAP, a nonprofit that seeks to help victims pursue appeals in cases involving domestic violence.

Judges have wide discretion in custody cases and appeals are rare, said Elizabeth Vogel, DV LEAP’s managing attorney. Many litigants in family court don’t have a trial attorney, discover it’s hard to find an attorney to pursue an appeal and face short deadlines to file challenges.

DV LEAP saw merit in Julie Valadez’s case because the judge had recognized a pattern of domestic abuse but had concluded wrongly that her husband still had satisfied conditions for custody despite not receiving adequate counseling.

“Julie’s case is, sadly, such an excellent example of how judges take liberties in their reasoning to get around statutes that are meant to protect survivors,” Vogel said.

The Court of Appeals agreed that Ricardo Valadez was not entitled to sole legal custody because he had not shown he had successfully completed state-mandated treatment for batterers from a certified program.

Also, though Aprahamian required “absolute sobriety” from Ricardo and ordered the exchange of children at the police department, the appellate court ruled he did not make the safety of Julie and her children a “paramount concern” in determining who the children would live with, as required by state law.

Reversing the judgment by Aprahamian, the appellate court sent the case back to family court for reconsideration.

After the favorable appellate court ruling, Johnson tweeted that the decision “sets strong precedent for domestic abuse victims who are seeking custody of their children.”

Appealing to a Higher Court

During the year and a half that the case was on appeal, Vogel said in an interview, Aprahamian appeared to subject Julie Valadez to “an extreme level of retaliation” through his multiple rulings.

That’s not unheard of. Women across the country have told ProPublica that family courts have not only overlooked their allegations of domestic abuse but have acted to punish them by taking away much or all of their time with their children for making what the court considers to be false, or minor, allegations of abuse.

When these women openly complain, file motions or defy the court orders, judges can view them as mentally unfit or hold them in contempt.

In Valadez’s case, tensions between her and the judge never seemed to abate, and along the way she lost the ability to regularly see her children.

Aprahamian appointed a new guardian ad litem, Molly Jasmer, in September 2020 to interact with the appellate court and represent the children’s best interests.

In April 2021, Jasmer filed a 38-page brief with the appellate court outlining why Aprahamian’s ruling was correct. The brief was also signed by Ricardo Valadez’s attorney.

A month earlier, Aprahamian had taken away Julie Valadez’s parenting time with her second oldest child, then 13, after she didn’t make the boy available to meet with Jasmer. Because the judge had already ruled on custody a year earlier, Valadez questioned Jasmer’s involvement.

Jasmer declined to comment for this story.

Valadez contested the no-contact order not just in family court but in a suit she brought against Aprahamian and Jasmer in federal court in June 2021. That suit was dismissed.

“From my standpoint, it’s not personal,” Aprahamian said of the federal suit in a July hearing on the Valadez custody case. “It’s like ‘The Godfather.’ This is just business.”

Less than a month later, Aprahamian issued a bench warrant for Julie Valadez’s arrest for failing to comply with his directive to sign over certain records and undergo a psychological exam requested by Jasmer. At the same hearing, he suspended her parenting time — in effect, preventing her from seeing any of her children except under limited, supervised circumstances.

Her attorney at the time, Will Green, was taken aback. “Holy cow,” he said in court.

“Am I saying she is going to cause harm to them intentionally? That’s not what I’m saying,” the judge explained. “I’m finding she’s taken steps that are not in the best interests of the children and continues to do so.”

The judge had expressed frustration, for example, with Valadez bringing her children along with her when she served Jasmer with the federal suit.

Psychological testing is widely used in custody cases when there is a concern about a parent’s fitness.

The use of such tests, however, can be unwise when there’s a history of abuse, according to the Domestic Abuse Guidebook for Wisconsin Guardians Ad Litem. Abuse victims, it notes, may reasonably show symptoms associated with a large range of mental health difficulties, such as anxiety, paranoia, trouble sleeping, frequent worry or blaming others for their problems.

Ricardo Valadez was not asked to undergo such an exam.

“I was found to be a fit parent,” Julie Valadez said of the initial custody order. “I was never found to be an unfit parent. They had provided no valid reason for me to have a psych eval.”

Aside from some therapy sessions together, she said, she hasn’t had any significant time with her one son for nearly a year and her other three children for several months.

Valadez avoided jail when the Waukesha County public defender’s office got involved and persuaded the Court of Appeals in September 2021 to quash the bench warrant and stay the jail term during her appeal of the custody decision.

She received additional help when, last fall, William F. Sulton, a Milwaukee civil rights attorney, agreed to represent her.

“The case is so unusual in that the judge tried to put her in jail,” Sulton said. “So I really believe she was at risk of losing her liberty.”

Said Sulton: “Unfortunately, the court system does not treat unrepresented people with the respect that they deserve. And so it is not uncommon to see judges and other lawyers singling out, with draconian measures, people who are unrepresented.”

In reversing Aprahamian last month, the appeals court found that the type of contempt the judge used was “punitive” and not lawful — except in one instance when the judge used it to preserve order in the court when he took issue with Julie interrupting him. It vacated the three other contempt rulings.

Getting those rulings took months of perseverance, as Valadez chased down transcripts, switched attorneys, filed court documents and appeals and studied the intricacies of Wisconsin law and court procedures. She believes her appeals exacerbated tensions inside Aprahamian’s courtroom.

“They didn’t want this,” she said. “It’s a big deal to get reversed like they did.”

At the crux of the appellate court’s ruling in the custody case were the counseling sessions Ricardo Valadez attended as a result of his criminal case and Aprahamian’s decision to accept those as proof of rehabilitation even though they weren’t certified by the Wisconsin Batterers Treatment Providers Association.

Ricardo Valadez’s lawyer said his client has received additional counseling. A few days after Christmas, he filed a new document with the court stating Valadez completed a 20-week domestic violence treatment program from a certified provider.

Aprahamian’s replacement will now have to rule on custody and other related issues. Sulton said in an interview that the latest treatment program completed by Valadez should be disregarded because it came too late and is inadequate because there is no proof it reduces violence.

Still to be determined is when Julie Valadez can be an active mother to her children again.

“I just want to get my kids back,” she said. Their Christmas gifts, she said, are still waiting for them, by the fireplace in her apartment.

She said her husband was abusive. A judge took away her kids and ordered her arrest. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Jennifer Moston was about seven months pregnant when, she said, her husband grabbed her by the arms, picked her up and threw her against the staircase. Each time she tried to get up, he pushed her down again.

Such abusive episodes continued for several years, she said, until 2016, when he allegedly tried to strangle her. She went to the police and filed for divorce.

It seemed obvious to Jennifer that her husband, Ryan, shouldn’t get custody of their 3-year-old son, as Ryan now faced felony charges of domestic violence. How could someone with a violent history be trusted with a child? How could she stay out of harm’s way if she was interacting with him for drop-offs?

Jennifer assumed that the family court in her Wisconsin county would make her safety and that of her son a priority, and that the system would help her cut off contact with Ryan.

But it didn’t.

Court professionals handling her case disregarded or downplayed her allegations despite the pending criminal charges, plus 20 pages of notes she took describing more than 50 incidents in which she said Ryan had physically attacked or threatened her. On top of that, in a separate proceeding, he had admitted to abusing his first wife.

Jennifer Moston eventually got the protections she sought. But it took 2 1/2 years, and it wasn’t in family court.

Following Ryan’s 2018 conviction for assaulting her, she pleaded with a criminal judge to take a hard line. “Please,” she said, “do not let this man around my son again … keep me safe from him.”

The judge listened. He ordered Ryan imprisoned for 8 1/2 years and barred from seeing his son for another 10.

Ryan Moston, who has maintained his innocence and is appealing his conviction, did not respond to a written request for an interview for this story.

Wisconsin is considered a leader in the movement to treat fathers as equal caregivers, and its percentage of cases with shared custody is among the highest in the nation. But that model, while based on altruistic goals, still has not adjusted to the realities of domestic violence.

To examine the impact, ProPublica interviewed a dozen survivors of domestic abuse in Wisconsin, reviewed court documents and police files, and talked to experts in the field. Spouses who’ve been abused say the courts seem unwilling to listen to their fears and then unable to keep them safe. Jennifer Moston, who has become a voice for survivors of domestic violence, was startled to find that the difficult decision to leave her abuser left her facing a new battle in court: a harrowing fight for credibility and protection.

Advocates for women in Wisconsin describe the family court system as unprepared for the complexities presented by domestic violence, often giving little consideration to the risk of harm to women and children and compounding the trauma they face. And experts from around the country say the court process is still influenced by outdated ideas about abuse and abusers — held not just by judges but by lawyers and social workers who assist victims.

“The culture prefers to cling to its belief that most men are fine, and a lot of women are liars or vengeful or crazy,” said Joan Meier, the lead author of a widely cited 2019 national study of custody decisions involving alleged child abuse or domestic violence.

That’s exactly what a group of mothers in La Crosse, Wisconsin, complained about last year when they began a campaign to draw attention to what they saw as the failure of local courts to take domestic violence accusations seriously. But they remain frustrated by a lack of action in their county.

Absent convincing proof of a parent hitting a child, some family courts seem to view domestic violence as unrelated to parenting, experts say. Judges who don’t understand the complex dynamics of domestic violence sometimes conclude that once a couple splits up, the toxicity will end and the abusive spouse will be a decent parent, said Jenna Gormal, director of public policy at End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, a statewide anti-violence coalition that trains judges and other legal professionals.

Yet even when the child is not at risk, the abused spouse can remain a potential target for more violence.

In Calumet County in January 2018, the local prosecutor asked that Robert K. Schmidt not be allowed contact with his three children while free on bail after allegedly holding a gun to his wife’s head on New Year’s Eve, tying her up with cord and duct tape and raping her. But the criminal court judge disagreed.

Schmidt’s wife, Sara, who had filed for divorce after the New Year’s Eve attack, was dropping off her children at her in-laws for a visit with Robert five days after the judge’s decision when Robert emerged from the house with a gun. He fatally shot her, then used the same gun to kill himself.

The law and the reality

Like most other states, Wisconsin uses what it determines is in “the best interest of the child” in deciding custody cases. Domestic violence is one of more than a dozen factors the courts must weigh, including such things as the child’s wishes, whether the parents can cooperate and whether a parent has a drug or alcohol problem.

The state presumes that parents will share the responsibility of legal custody — making major decisions for a child — unless there is a “pattern or serious incident” of domestic violence. Similarly, for deciding the proportion of time a child spends with each parent, domestic violence should upend the goal of giving both parents “regularly occurring, meaningful periods” of time with their children. In such cases, state law says, the safety of the abuse survivor and the children must be “paramount.”

But the current law, passed in 2003, leaves a lot of room for interpretation. It does not specify that an abusive spouse cannot have any interaction with their child. Courts can provide for the safety of survivors of abuse by requiring children to be exchanged “in a protected setting” or insisting that visits be supervised by a relative or a social worker.

Dolores Bomrad, who heard custody cases in Washington County, said it can be “hard to reach the level of proof” needed to show that a parent is unsafe.

“It’s very, very difficult in Wisconsin law for there to be no contact between a parent and a child,” said Bomrad, who was a court commissioner, someone appointed by a judge to help handle family law matters. “The general rule is it’s best for children to have contact with both parents, but that’s as long as it’s safe. And as long as it’s in the best interest of the child and isn’t placing the child at risk.”

A 2018 study by End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin concluded that decisions in family court are not sufficiently accounting for domestic violence.

Researchers in 20 Wisconsin counties reviewed every divorce case between 2010 and 2015 in which one parent had a prior conviction for felony domestic abuse or misdemeanor battery against the other parent. There were a total of 361.

They found that half the cases resulted in joint legal custody, requiring victims to cooperate in decision-making with their abusers, despite the law’s protections. The study’s authors were surprised that so many survivors ended up working jointly with their abusers to make legal decisions for their children. In more than 80% of all cases reviewed, the parties reached negotiated settlements. Researchers concluded that family court lawyers “adhere to the notion that divorcing spouses must learn to cooperate.”

When it came to apportioning time with children, final custody orders placed them solely or primarily with the abuse survivor in about two-thirds of the cases, but the courts typically did not include any safety provisions for visits, the study found.

The reviewers also found that only 27% of the cases made any reference at all to domestic violence, despite the prior criminal convictions.

“It suggests that Wisconsin family law case processing does not systematically account for abuse,” the findings, published by the State Bar of Wisconsin, concluded.

Wisconsin for Children and Families, a support group made up largely of fathers who’ve gone through family court, gives little weight to the End Domestic Abuse study. Tony Bickel, the group’s president, said the results shouldn’t be seen as a failure of the court system, because the majority of custody decisions are made through voluntary agreements between two parents.

Bickel said that people with domestic violence convictions often can co-parent effectively and that many parents agree to do just that. He said that the courts must distinguish between someone who makes a “one-time mistake” and a habitual abuser.

“We feel shared parenting is best in most cases for our kids, and we have to find a way to safely do that,” Bickel said, pointing to a 2018 Wake Forest University review of 60 studies showing that children in joint custody arrangements fare extremely well. If need be, safety provisions could include exchanging kids at police stations or public places with many cameras, he said.

To an abused spouse, such arrangements can seem incomprehensible. Many can’t afford a lawyer or the court fees to fight drawn-out legal battles, so they reluctantly settle.

“Can you imagine if you are a survivor who was beaten or raped or hurt by this person and now you have to turn over your child? It’s a reasonable reaction, I think, to be afraid and to be cautious, and many women are put in that position,” said Carmen Pitre, president and CEO of the Sojourner Family Peace Center, in Milwaukee. The center is the largest nonprofit service provider for survivors of domestic abuse in Wisconsin.

Jennifer Moston, who suffered from regular abuse, found the court system’s safeguards flimsy. At least once, she told a judge, she had to hand over her son in the early morning at a small-town police station. At that hour, it was unstaffed.

‘He wishes I were dead’

Jennifer was not the first woman to allege abuse by Ryan.

His first wife, Tracy, won a restraining order against him in 2008 after she described the terror she felt when he lashed out. She detailed how Ryan had threatened her, slapped her and spit on her during their brief marriage. He did not dispute her allegations.

“On one occasion after an argument Ryan grabbed a rock we have in the bathroom and said I would like to smash you in the head with this,” Tracy wrote. “He has also said on several occasions that he wishes I were dead.”

In their 2008 divorce, a Jefferson County court commissioner had expressed concerns about Ryan’s “ability to control his rage and impulses.”

He was ordered into a lengthy batterers’ treatment program because of the incidents with Tracy. The program consisted of six individual therapy sessions and 28 group sessions, court records state.

While Ryan was in treatment, Jefferson County allowed him frequent visits with his eldest child, including overnights to be supervised by Ryan’s dad.

Then, after he completed the batterers’ program, under the terms of his divorce settlement with Tracy, he was allowed to spend a few hours unsupervised with the boy one or two weeknights and overnight two weekends a month.

Those visits filled Tracy with fear. Fear that her son might be harmed by a man she knew to be violent. Fear that her son might witness violence in the new relationships Ryan was forming.

“You bring this beautiful child into the world,” said Tracy, who asked that her last name not be published to protect her family’s privacy. “The last thing you want to do is put them in an environment where they’re getting hurt.”

Ryan, at the time a school teacher, married Jennifer, the managing director of a financial services firm, in 2013. She had three children from a prior marriage and soon bore another son with Ryan.

In the spring of 2014, while dropping off her stepson at Tracy’s, Jennifer confided to her: “I’m being abused by Ryan. I’m scared. I don’t know what to do.”

Tracy said she understood Jennifer’s concerns, and didn’t hesitate when it came to helping her. At Tracy’s suggestion, Jennifer secretly began keeping a journal of the abuse she endured. She emailed detailed, dated entries to herself, in case she needed evidence later for a restraining order or, worse, if she was found dead. She noted when Ryan made his hand into the shape of a gun and pretended to shoot her in the head. When he called her vulgar names and threatened her. And how he broke her wrist in a 2015 incident.

One night in January 2016, police were summoned to their home in Waukesha County. Jennifer alleges that Ryan tried to strangle her in bed, she screamed and her brother, who was visiting, rushed to her aid. Ryan and the brother fought. When police questioned Jennifer and Ryan together, she denied being attacked.

Ryan’s older son, who had been in his father’s home that night, told Tracy about the police visit, and Tracy became alarmed. She obtained the police report, then called Jennifer. The call prompted Jennifer to go to the Oconomowoc police station to admit she had lied about not having been attacked by Ryan, and to ask for help. Tracy met her at the police station for emotional support.

Jennifer petitioned the Waukesha County court for a restraining order against her husband and attached what a judge later described as a “diary of domestic violence.” The court granted the order of protection.

Five days later, Tracy filed a motion asking the family court in neighboring Jefferson County to restrict Ryan’s parenting time with the son they shared. She included a copy of Jennifer’s restraining order and excerpts from a 2014 deposition given by an earlier girlfriend of Ryan’s who testified he had threatened to slit her throat with a buck knife.

Jefferson County held a family court hearing in March 2016 and issued an order barring Ryan from being alone with his older son, citing the “number of incidents of battery and domestic abuse, the severity of the incidents, and the dimensions and pattern of domestic abuse alleged.” Eventually he was allowed supervised visits for two hours once a week.

In Waukesha County, in Jennifer’s case, the district attorney charged Ryan with one count of strangulation in April 2016 for the alleged attack on Jennifer. Jennifer filed for divorce the following month.

Initially a court commissioner allowed Ryan to spend alternate weekends and Tuesdays overnight with the boy. As with Ryan’s oldest son, these would be supervised by Ryan’s dad.

Only after prosecutors in Waukesha County filed nine additional criminal counts against Ryan in August 2016, including stalking, false imprisonment and numerous incidents of battery, did the Waukesha family court tighten its conditions. Ryan Moston could spend one evening a week visiting with his son at a local library for two hours, under the supervision of a social worker.

When women are not believed

In Wisconsin family court, judges rely heavily on the input of attorneys appointed to advocate for the best interest of the child.

By law, these “guardians ad litem” have a vital task: to investigate whether there’s evidence of domestic violence and report back to the judge.

A 2021 University of Wisconsin report on family court cases involving domestic abuse described the challenges guardians ad litem face. They do not have enough resources for evidence collection or expert help, and they lack training about domestic abuse.

These court-appointed advocates, concluded the study produced by the university’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, “are often asked to do a job that exceeds the original boundaries of their role, one in which they do not currently have the expertise and resources to achieve. This can make addressing a large societal problem, like domestic abuse, very difficult or nearly impossible in some situations.”

The researchers surveyed guardians and published some of their anonymous comments. Said one: “Some GALs meet with scared kids for 15 minutes at their office and then think they know everything about the children, and then the court takes the GAL’s recommendation as gospel. It’s frightening, really.”

That respondent said the inconsistent approach of guardians turns the process into a “free-for-all”: “There’s no clear definitions of what is in the best interests of the children, so it leaves it up to each individual GAL to define for themselves.”

As a result of the End Domestic Abuse study, the state Supreme Court agreed as of Jan. 1 of this year to require guardians ad litem to obtain at least three credit hours of training in family violence. Compliance, however, is not tracked by the state.

And throughout the system, even in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, there remains distrust of women’s stories of abuse, according to women’s advocates.

In Dane County, a family court judge denied a restraining order requested by a woman who claimed her partner tried to throw her off a balcony and pointed a gun at her in front of a child. The judge told her to “take a deep breath and try to co-parent more effectively” because “injunctions make family cases worse,” according to a 2019 report by Domestic Abuse Intervention Services, a nonprofit in the county, summarizing observations from its Court Watch program. Staff in the program monitor proceedings to gauge how well courts respond to requests for restraining orders.

According to the report, the judge reasoned that the pain documented in the woman’s medical records was “not severe” and that the petition detailed “only one incident.”

Kimberly Theobald has represented parents as an attorney and has been an advocate for children as a guardian ad litem. She represented Ryan Moston in family court when Tracy sought to limit his contact with their son. Theobald told ProPublica she believes that, at times, men and women lie in custody cases. She noted there can be a financial incentive to lie: The parent awarded more time may receive more in child support.

“Be very clear on this: that someone who has truly been abused is not worrying about the money from that angle. They’re worrying about their safety, and they are worrying about their child’s safety,” Theobald said in an interview. “What I am saying is there are people who make the allegation where there’s not even smoke, much less fire, in order to gain an upper hand in the custody and placement wars.”

She said of Jennifer Moston’s claim to police of being strangled: “It was an act.”

Joan Meier, a professor of law at George Washington University, set out to gather data on the outcomes of family court cases in which parents accuse each other of abuse or alienation from their kids. Her 2019 report studied a 10-year period and found 222 published court opinions across the nation where fathers claimed mothers were lying about abuse to keep them away from their children. In those instances, the researchers found the tactic was highly successful in deflecting the abuse allegations. The courts were almost twice as likely to disbelieve the mothers’ claims of abuse in those scenarios.

What’s more, in half of the cases the moms lost custody.

The study urged greater awareness of the bias and dangers in outright rejecting abuse claims and called for “new and mandated trainings to return the courts to their most important mission: protecting at-risk children.”

In Waukesha County, Jennifer felt first rejection during her court case, and then outrage.

By April 2017, Waukesha County family court social worker Deanna Stevlingson and Lori Fabian, the guardian ad litem for Jennifer’s son, had listened to Jennifer’s litany of abuse and seen her documentation. They were aware of the serious charges Ryan was facing.

Yet their report to the family court judge recommended that the Mostons share legal decision-making for their child and that Ryan be allowed to spend two weekends a month and every Wednesday overnight unsupervised with his son. (Attempts to reach Stevlingson and Fabian for comment for this story were unsuccessful.)

“We are jaws on the floor,” Jennifer’s lawyer, Scott Schmidlkofer, recalled of hearing the report’s recommendation. He found it inexplicable. But he said anybody, even an accused abuser, can be charming in an hourlong interview.

The report lists Stevlingson’s numerous record checks and interviews with people in Ryan and Jennifer’s lives. But that list did not include the district attorney prosecuting Ryan, the detective in the criminal case, Ryan’s first wife nor the girlfriend who in 2012 filed for a restraining order against Ryan in Dane County but settled for a mutual no-contact order.

The report mentions that Stevlingson reviewed records from three police departments and the Dane County Sheriff’s Office. But it makes no specific mention of the criminal case against Ryan in Waukesha County.

“This recommendation is based on the information available to me at this time,” Stevlingson wrote. “I believe it is in the child’s best interest.”

Stevlingson wrote that she attempted to obtain unspecified records from the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department but was told “they could not provide these records to me at this time.” The sheriff’s office is part of the same county — and in the same building — as Family Court Services, her employer.

In Jennifer’s view, the system had once again favored Ryan.

Under attack in family court

Jennifer Moston did have one important ally, however: her husband’s first wife.

The two women supported each other in parallel custody battles against Ryan in their neighboring Wisconsin counties.

Tracy’s custody case in Jefferson County, reopened because of the criminal charges, went to trial first. Jennifer was the first witness called by Tracy’s lawyer so she could recount what Ryan had done to her.

Ryan’s attorney was Theobald, the part-time guardian ad litem for children but in this case serving in her other capacity as a legal advocate for a parent. In closing arguments in June 2017, Theobald did everything in her power to discredit Jennifer, casting her as a desperate, conniving woman.

The diary Jennifer had kept? Fabricated, the lawyer claimed.

The pictures she took of her injuries? Too grainy to discern the marks or even say for sure the photos were of Jennifer.

Her support of Ryan’s first wife? Deceitful collusion.

Finally, Jennifer was dumbfounded to hear Theobald tell the judge that she had attempted to bait her estranged husband by wearing a “tight blouse” on the stand, “complete with her nipples being incredibly pronounced.”

“It literally made me want to throw up,” Jennifer recalled. “The thought of someone trying to accuse me of trying to come on to the man who tried to kill me.”

Theobald, in an interview, stood by her remarks in court, saying, “It was inappropriate attire unless she was going out clubbing somewhere.”

Theobald argued in court that Ryan Moston was a caring father and should continue to have contact with Tracy’s son. Ryan himself testified, “I love my son, and we have a great relationship. I never harmed him. I never would bring harm to him ever.”

Ultimately, the judge in Jefferson County sided with Tracy.

Calling it the “most significant case of domestic violence that I have ever experienced,” Judge Jennifer Weston expressed doubt that Ryan would change. He’d already gone through two certified batterer’s programs by then: in 2009 and voluntarily during the pending of his criminal charges.

“We’re not proactive. Is there a point at which we have to become proactive because there’s so much history that supports that the next 10 years are going to be the same as the past 10 years?” Weston asked.

Two months later, Weston issued a 28-page decision stripping Ryan, “a chronic batterer,” of all contact with his eldest son. “This is a full denial, to include no telephone contact or contact by any other means,” the judge wrote.

“The trauma to Tracy, and now to Jennifer, is recurring every day they are required to release their children” to Ryan, Weston wrote, “even into the hands of a supervisor.”

The boy “is in danger — physically, mentally and emotionally — every time he is with his father,” the judge concluded, finding that Ryan “is able to snap at any second having failed to learn how to cope.”

It had taken Tracy a decade of court hearings and legal negotiations to get what she thought was best for her son.

Jennifer, however, remained skeptical of what would happen in her case in the adjacent county. The April 2017 report from the guardian ad litem and the social worker, as well as her conversations with them, made her concerned about how a judge would rule.

On the advice of her lawyer, Jennifer and Ryan did not go to trial over their divorce but arrived at a settlement in October 2017.

Ryan agreed to give Jennifer sole legal custody of their son, then nearly 4, according to the divorce decree. He was allowed phone calls three times a week with the boy and hourlong weekly visits to be supervised at Parents Place, a social service agency.

Schmidlkofer considered it the best deal he could get for Jennifer, given the position of the guardian ad litem and the social worker and the likely influence this would have on the court. Had Jennifer gone to trial, he said, her total legal fees could have easily reached $50,000.

In custody cases, he said, “99.9% of people get joint legal custody. She got sole.”

Still, it was not enough to ease Jennifer’s fears.

Fixing the system

Family court drama typically is hidden from public view. But it garnered attention in Wisconsin recently when a group of nearly 30 women in La Crosse, a small city on the Mississippi River, joined forces to speak out about the system and call for change.

On their website, and in public forums, the women described their frustration with court-appointed evaluators, including guardians ad litem, who recommend parents cooperate in child rearing even when there are accusations of domestic violence. The women had hoped that county officials would listen and begin to make reforms. But that hasn’t happened.

“When we look at the family court system, there are no checks and balances,” said Elizabeth Cline, one of the La Crosse moms, whose own court battle has stretched over six years.

Wisconsin Judge Ramona Gonzalez, a past president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, is among those who believe family courts should respond more effectively. The emphasis by courts on shared parenting does not work in cases involving “coercive, controlling people,” said Gonzalez, who is based in La Crosse.

For instance, the law in Wisconsin talks about a pattern or serious incident of interspousal battery. But there are a whole host of behaviors that many consider abusive that do not involve violence, including a spouse restricting another’s access to money, tracking their movements, monitoring their emails or cutting them off from friends and family.

Advocates also are trying to address what they describe as other blind spots in the state law. For instance, a bill pending in Madison would allow family court judges to check their own criminal court system to learn whether a parent had any prior conviction for domestic violence or child abuse or was subject to a restraining order.

The goal is to address an information gap that can hinder family court judges when litigants are not represented by attorneys or when the reports from evaluators are thin. Under the Wisconsin Code of Judicial Conduct, judges are prohibited from conducting independent investigations. As neutral parties they can only consider evidence the parties bring to them, though they are allowed to question litigants.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Robert Brooks, said in an April committee hearing that the legislation would enable the judges to “have all of the relevant information” when deciding custody cases. The bill has passed out of the state Assembly but still needs approval from the Senate.

“The court,” he said, “is frequently unaware if a family has a history of domestic violence, even when a parent has a conviction or injunction that is publicly available in court records.”

Free of fear, for a time

On Sept. 14, 2018, a Waukesha County jury came back with its verdict against Ryan Moston. He was acquitted on the strangulation charge against him. (A police officer had testified that he saw no marks or redness on Jennifer’s neck.) But the jury found Ryan guilty of felony charges of stalking, false imprisonment and battery with intent of bodily harm, as well as six misdemeanor charges.

At sentencing the following month, Jennifer and Tracy urged Waukesha Judge Michael P. Maxwell to incarcerate Ryan for the maximum time possible. The women wanted years free of violence, manipulation and fear.

“I beg of you,” Jennifer told the judge. “Family court is not going to save [my child] or me.”

The judge’s sentence fell short of the maximum, but he still gave Ryan 8 1/2 years in prison and another 10 years of “extended supervision” in the community, during which time Ryan can have no contact with Jennifer or their son.

There have been no allegations that Ryan ever tried to hurt his children. But Maxwell rejected any notion that Ryan was a good and devoted father.

“The first job that a father has to do with a son is to demonstrate to that son how to treat women,” the judge wrote in his opinion. “The first place you do that is how you treat that child’s mother. Whether you show that child’s mother respect, whether you show that child’s mother kindness and caring, those are the first things that a boy picks up on. In this case, based upon the evidence that was brought in, Ryan Moston failed that job miserably.”

Ryan Moston is incarcerated at the Oakhill Correctional Institution in Dane County.

Jennifer is working, raising her family and trying to help raise awareness on issues related to violence against women. She testified at a 2019 hearing in Madison on the need for more training for guardians ad litem and, more recently, shared the story of her marriage for a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about the rise of domestic abuse during the pandemic.

Now twice divorced, Jennifer said she will never remarry “because he had so much control over me … and I don’t want to be that close to someone again.”

She is pro-gun, supports concealed carry laws and plans to get a firearm for self-defense. “He’s going to be out in six years,” she said. “One hundred percent I am having a gun to protect my family. It’s scary. I think about it every single day.”

Jennifer knows that the boy, now 7, may want to see his dad when he becomes an adult. She doesn’t want her son exposed to Ryan’s hostile treatment of women, to perpetuate a cycle of abuse.

“I do not want to say it’s better for him growing up without a father,” she said. “It’s better for him to not have that father.”

He beat her repeatedly. Family court tried to give him joint custody of their children. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.