Eight people were found dead in one house near Grand Haven on Friday. Six of them were children, ages five to fifteen.

Firefighters had already been out to that neighborhood once on Friday morning — around 8:30, for the odor of smoke nobody could find the source of. They looked, found nothing, and left. At 11:42 they were called back to Riverside Trail in Grand Haven Township, Michigan, this time for white smoke coming off a house. It is the kind of street the word “safe” was built for — tree-shaded, quiet, half-million-dollar homes a few minutes from the Lake Michigan shore. A neighbor watched them go in and watched them come back out. “I could see it in their faces,” he told a reporter. “I could see they saw something bad.”

Inside were eight members of one family, all dead. Relatives have identified the parents as Mandy Karolkiewicz, 39, and Kris Karolkiewicz, 47. With them were their six children, ages five to fifteen. Some of them had been shot. The Ottawa County Sheriff's Office called the deaths suspicious, said it is not looking for anyone else, and named the thing investigators keep trying not to say out loud: one early theory is a murder-suicide. A gun was in that house and it was turned on the youngest and most defenseless people in it. Six kids who were alive on Thursday — who had backpacks and bedrooms and a first day of school coming — are gone. The oldest was fifteen. The youngest was five.

There is nothing I can write that is equal to that, so I am going to do the only useful thing a page like this can do and point you at the people already standing in it. The Youth Peace & Justice Foundation — a national youth-violence nonprofit, formerly the Uvalde Foundation for Kids — is raising money to cover the burial costs and related expenses for the six children. That is what the money is for. Putting six kids in the ground. We take nothing here and never have; the button below goes straight to them, not to us.

The second thing costs nothing. Neighbors have built a shrine of candles and flowers and notes near the house, and tonight — Sunday, July 26, at eight o'clock — Grand Haven is holding a vigil for the family at Duncan Woods, off Sheldon Road between Taylor and Woodlawn. If you are anywhere near that town, go stand there. Nobody is asking you for anything at that one. They are asking for company.

That is the whole of it. Say their ages out loud once — five to fifteen — and then do the small thing, if you can. It is not enough. On a day like this, nothing is. But it is not nothing.

— Michael

Spotlight Dispatch · July 26, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com