William “Billy” Craig Buchanan II was 32, male, and white when he was killed in Free Soil Township, Michigan, in April 2019. In the early hours of Tuesday, April 16, authorities were called to a home in the 10000 block of North US-31 after a woman inside the house reported a shooting. Deputies and troopers rushed in, set a perimeter, and moved quickly to get the wounded caller and two children out of the residence while they tried to learn what had happened deeper inside.
As officers cleared the chaos, they were told there was another victim still inside and that the suspected shooter had barricaded himself in a room. After a tense standoff that ended with the man inside surrendering, investigators entered and found Buchanan dead from gunshot wounds. Reports from the initial charging period described the second victim as a woman who had been shot in the arm and taken to the hospital, later released, while the children were not physically harmed.
The man taken into custody at the scene was Corey Ryan Beekman of Free Soil Township, who lived at the address where the shooting occurred. Prosecutors moved fast: Beekman was arraigned the next day, and the case opened with severe allegations—open murder in connection with Buchanan’s death, assault with intent to murder related to the injured woman, and felony-firearm counts. A high cash/surety bond was set as the case began winding toward circuit court.
Over time, the charges shifted as the case moved through preliminary proceedings. Reporting on the court process said the open-murder count was amended to second-degree murder, and the assault-with-intent charge was reduced to felonious assault, with explanations focusing on what could or could not be proven—especially the element of premeditation. A jury trial was scheduled for spring 2020, but the court date was adjourned amid COVID-era disruptions, pushing the family’s wait for answers even further into the future.
Then, in September 2020, the prosecution dismissed the case without prejudice on the day trial was set to begin. According to the prosecutor’s office, the reason was witness unavailability, with repeated attempts to serve subpoenas on the key witness—identified in local coverage as Katlin Buck, along with her two children—described as unsuccessful. The dismissal meant Beekman was no longer facing active charges at that moment, but it also left the door open for the case to be brought again in the future, since homicide has no statute of limitations in Michigan.
In the years that followed, Buchanan’s family continued pressing publicly for the case to be revived, describing a wound that never closed because the arrest had not led to a trial and no conviction had been secured. As of later updates, Beekman had been free after the dismissal, while the killing remained unresolved in court, hanging on the same missing piece that halted the prosecution: witnesses willing and available to testify to what happened inside that Free Soil Township home.
