Zachary James Currie, a 19-year-old Black male from Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, died on July 24, 2016, after Michigan State Police were called around 9:30 a.m. to the 5400 block of Willis Road in Augusta Township and found him lying in the front yard outside a home. Investigators treated it as a homicide almost immediately, saying he had been shot, and later court records described the wounds as three gunshots.
The night before blurred into the early hours of the morning, the kind of late-night visit that didn't look dangerous until it was already over. Court records say Currie went to see his girlfriend, Kalynne Leclair, at her house late on July 23 or very early on July 24, and while they sat together he used a video messaging application on his phone. Leclair later testified that she was close enough to the screen to see the other person's face for a couple of minutes, a brief digital window into someone she did not yet know. Sometime in the early morning, Currie left the house. By daylight, he was found outside near the road, already dead.
In the first public days of the investigation, police had no immediate arrests to announce and urged anyone with information to contact the Michigan State Police Brighton post. The details released then were spare—where he was found, the fact that he had been shot, and the insistence that someone out there knew what happened and needed to speak up.
As the case moved from scene to courtroom, the outline of a suspect formed. In the appellate record, prosecutors charged Marcus Leonard Palmer with open murder and felony-firearm. Leclair's testimony became a key part of how investigators and prosecutors tried to stitch the final hours together: she described seeing the person on the phone's video feed the night of the killing, then later recognizing Palmer after seeing him appear in court beginning in November 2016, and eventually identifying him under oath at a preliminary examination in March 2017. She told the court there was never a photo or in-person lineup arranged by police, and she described how she tried to be sure of what she thought she saw—years of consequences hanging on a few minutes of a face on a screen.
At trial, the jury rejected first-degree murder but convicted Palmer of second-degree murder and felony-firearm. The Michigan Court of Appeals later affirmed the convictions in a November 26, 2019 decision, but vacated the sentence and sent the case back for resentencing. Michigan Department of Corrections records show Palmer was ultimately sentenced on July 30, 2020, in Washtenaw County to 25 to 50 years for second-degree murder, along with a consecutive two-year felony-firearm term, and remains imprisoned with an earliest release date listed in 2043.
