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THE BOUNDARY DISCIPLINE · THREE EXCLUSIONS, PRINTED
Three cases surface under Walkerton's name in the appellate record and the press, and none of them is Walkerton's — printed here, at the checklist's boundary discipline, so they are never counted into this town's record by anyone building on this section. The first is a burglary with a Walkerton victim and a Starke County seat: Ralph Allen Puckett "lived in Walkerton, Indiana, in Starke County," the Court of Appeals writes in Kwiatkowski v. State, No. 75A03-0806-CR-295 (Ind. Ct. App. Nov. 13, 2008), and it was to the Starke Circuit Court that his case went — a September 13, 2007 break-in that took a computer, a home theater system and the tools of his construction company, an Indiana State Police arrest, convictions for Class B felony burglary and Class D felony theft, fifteen years in aggregate, affirmed on appeal. The ground was Starke County's portion of the postal town; the case is Starke County's whole, and this section carries the pointer and the exclusion only. The second is a rape case whose own record cannot seat it in town: in Gramm v. State, 376 N.E.2d 1120 (Ind. 1978), the victim rode with two men in a truck "on a trip to Walkerton to buy drugs," was assaulted on a side road after the truck passed through Walkerton, and was found by a St. Joseph County police officer, Nagy, who came on the truck blocking both sides of the road and heard her screaming. Her testimony placed the assault after passing through North Liberty and Walkerton; the officer testified she had pointed out a spot between North Liberty and Walkerton. The Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the twenty-one-year jury sentence without fixing the seat further, and this section fixes it no further either: unincorporated county ground on the North Liberty road, a county police case, the town named as the errand's destination and nothing more. The third is a trap of the surname: the county's 2021 murder prosecution of Javante Walker — the killing of Montell O'Neal at 821 East Washington Street, South Bend, a jury conviction and a sixty-year sentence in 2024 — retrieves under Walkerton searches on the defendant's name alone. It is a South Bend case on South Bend ground, excluded on its face, and printed here only so the exclusion stands visible.
Sources: Kwiatkowski v. State, No. 75A03-0806-CR-295 (Ind. Ct. App. Nov. 13, 2008) (the seat in the opinion's own words; Starke Circuit Court; convictions and sentence); Gramm v. State, 376 N.E.2d 1120 (Ind. 1978) (the trip, the conflicting location testimony, Officer Nagy, affirmance); St. Joseph County Prosecutor's Office releases, June 28, 2023, and March 14, 2024 (the Walker prosecution — 821 E. Washington Street, South Bend; sixty years) — excluded, name trap only.