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AFTER THE UNIT · THE GROUND'S SMALL, COMPLETE DOCKET
Since the metro units dissolved, this ground's serious-crime docket is short enough to print entire, and it is the truest measure of the suburb the farm ground became. In March 2021 the old machinery still ran: on March 21, a Goshen police officer's attempted stop in Elkhart County became a vehicle flight and then a foot pursuit toward the 11600 block of East Anderson Road, in Harris Township's east side, where officers heard a gunshot and found the fleeing man wounded — he had encountered an armed homeowner in the woods — and the Metro Homicide Unit, activated per protocol for the multi-agency shooting, worked the scene; the man was hospitalized, and the investigation closed around a homeowner's shot at a fleeing stranger, the kind of case a farm ground produces when a highway pursuit crosses it.
The two gun cases that follow are smaller, and their sameness is the record's point. On the morning of Tuesday, June 7, 2022, calls reported shots from the Walgreens lot at 15005 Indiana 23, at the State Road 23 and North Fir Road corner; callers described a man "shooting at people and/or passing vehicles," officers recovered two 9mm casings and an unfired round and found the gun — a Springfield XD — hidden under a gray t-shirt east of a fence, and the county police arrested Phillip Willis, twenty-four, who told detectives he had argued with his boss all morning and shot the gun "to get his anger out." The prosecutor's probable-cause affidavit, filed June 8, 2022, charged criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon and asked that Willis be held as "a substantial danger to self, others or the community"; the case's final disposition was not reached in the record pulled for this build and is carried as a named gap. Four years later, on the morning of Tuesday, July 7, 2026, the same corner produced the same call: shots near the Indiana 23 and Fir Road intersection, a man walking the road with a handgun, the Walgreens lot at the center of it, St. Pius X — the parish school a half-mile north — placed on lockdown and released, no one injured; the county police took a man into custody without incident and arrested him on suspicion of criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon, forwarding the case to the prosecutor for a charging decision, where the record reached for this build leaves it. The responding agency in every line of this docket is the same: the St. Joseph County Police Department — patrol first, detectives after — with the state police at the frame's edge and no other department in the story. That is the modern course of policing on unincorporated ground, printed at its full size.
Sources: St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit release, March 21, 2021 (the Anderson Road investigation). South Bend Tribune, June 2022 (the Willis arrest and the probable-cause affidavit of Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Amy Cressy, quoted). South Bend Tribune, July 7–8, 2026 (the Fir Road incident; Assistant Supervisor Alex Dempler of the county police; the lockdown; the arrest and referral). The unnamed man of July 2026 is unnamed in the reports reached and is unnamed here.