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Cold Cases

The verdicts that never came — and the 2026 Fir Road case, charged

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Some open files are not unsolved; they are untried — acquitted, escaped, or never brought to a verdict — and this section separates them from the never-solved. The regional record adds the acquittals that shaped famous cases: Ray Lamphere, convicted of arson and acquitted of murder in the Gunness case in La Porte County; the railroad detective acquitted of manslaughter, after three trials, in the 1897 killing of South Bend Officer Christensen; Robert David Little, tried and acquitted in the Eyler accomplice case; and, on the Crime Stoppers roll, a Benton Harbor case in which one suspect, Arthur Jermaine Bland, was charged with armed robbery but not convicted. Against that class, this section's live question was a Granger one, and it carried two banked gap numbers. Both are answered here, as far as the open record answers them.

GAP-CRIME-6 asked whether charges would be filed in the 2026 Fir Road gun case. They were. The South Bend Tribune's reporting of 7–8 July 2026 establishes the sequence: on a Tuesday morning at about 7:15 to 7:40 a.m., a man was reported firing a handgun at and near Indiana 23 and North Fir Road, Granger, and was seen walking through the Walgreens parking lot at 15005 Indiana 23; St. Pius X Church, at 52553 North Fir Road, went on lockdown and was released; no one was injured. The man was taken into custody for questioning and then arrested on suspicion of criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon. A probable-cause affidavit by Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Amy Cressy records that multiple callers reported twenty-four-year-old Phillip Willis shooting at people and/or passing vehicles, and that officers found a loaded Springfield XD Mod 4 9mm semi-automatic handgun in a holster just east of a barbed-wire fence in the wooded area, under a gray T-shirt; the prosecutor suggested to St. Joseph Superior Court that Willis be held until his bail hearing as a substantial danger to himself, others, or the community. One conflict in the Tribune's own copy is printed whole and not resolved: the headlines and URLs date the incident 7–8 July 2026, while the affidavit article's body dates it Tuesday, June 7, and Wednesday, June 8. July 7, 2026 was a Tuesday and June 7, 2026 was a Sunday, so the July dating fits the weekday and the June dating does not — but the paper printed both, and both are carried here. GAP-CRIME-2 asked for Willis's disposition. No verdict, plea, sentence, or dismissal appears in the press record reached, and the Indiana MyCase public search — the settling source this row names — is not indexed by the web search available. The disposition half of this row therefore closes as a named gap: it settles in the Indiana MyCase docket for the St. Joseph Superior Court cause filed on the July 2026 probable-cause affidavit, and nowhere else in the open record.

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Source: The verdicts that never came — and the 2026 Fir Road case, charged, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/granger/cold-cases/verdicts-that-never-came-and-the-2026-fir-road/