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THE COUNTY METRO HOMICIDE UNIT · CREATED 1993 · DISSOLVED JANUARY 1, 2022
For twenty-eight years, a death on Granger ground activated a unit: the St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit, created in 1993 under the prosecutor's office, which combined detectives from the South Bend, Mishawaka and county police departments into a single countywide homicide squad. The unit was reorganized in 2003 under Prosecutor Michael Dvorak, alongside the Special Victims Unit formed the same year, and by its last full year it stood twelve strong — four South Bend officers, three county officers, one Mishawaka officer, and four from the prosecutor's office, commander included. Its protocol reached every corner of the county: when a Goshen pursuit ended with a wounded man in a Granger woods in March 2021, it was the Metro Homicide Unit that was activated "per protocol," and when a Granger parking lot filled with gunfire that June, its commander — Michael Grzegorek, the county's sheriff of the decade before — stood in the lot estimating the crowd. The two great Granger cases of this section, 2013 and 2021, are both, institutionally, Metro Homicide cases.
The unit's end was a staffing decision that became a public fight, and the fight's numbers are printed whole, as the house prints conflicts. In September 2021 the South Bend Police Department, citing a shortage of officers, announced it would withdraw its investigators from the metro units at the year's end; the homicide and special victims units dissolved, and from January 1, 2022, the county's departments have investigated their own major crimes separately — for this ground, a return to the sheriff's detectives alone. The prosecutor's office defended the unit's record with a solvability rate of 79 percent for the county from 2003 to 2021 (and, in the county's statement of 2026, 365 homicides investigated with 78 percent solved); five years on, in October 2026, the mayor of South Bend attacked that record with the city's own subset — the unit, he said, had closed only 53 percent of its South Bend cases from 2016 to 2021 — and the prosecutor's office answered with its own count of the same years, 107 investigated and 73 solved, a 69 percent clearance. The two series measure overlapping things by different rules, both stand in the official record, and neither is harmonized here. For the designated place the operative fact is simpler and stands clear of the quarrel: the unit that would have investigated a Granger killing no longer exists, and since 2022 this ground's deaths are worked by the county police department's own detectives, as they were before 1993.
Sources: Statement of Prosecutor Ken Cotter, September 2, 2021 (the units' histories — the homicide unit since 1993, the Special Victims Unit since 2003; the 2021 staffing). South Bend Tribune, September 3, 2021 (the withdrawal; separate investigations from January 1; the 2003 reorganization under Dvorak; the prosecutor's jurisdiction homicide counts). South Bend Tribune, October 2026 (the mayor's figures and the prosecutor's answer, printed whole above). The unit's own releases of March 21, 2021 (the Anderson Road activation) and the Tribune's coverage of June 2021 (Commander Grzegorek at Heritage Square).