‘A valuable human has lost his life,’ says judge who sentenced father to prison for son’s backyard pool drowning
Updated Jan 18, 2021;
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GRAND HAVEN, MI A former Grand Rapids Community College assistant professor has received his sentence for the backyard pool drowning death of his son.
Koets, 51, was sentenced Monday, Jan. 18 in Ottawa County Circuit Court to a minimum of two years and a maximum of 15 years in prison on an involuntary manslaughter charge.
The charges stemmed from a March 2019 incident where Koets’ 16-year-old son, Samuel Koets drowned in the backyard pool at the family’s home in Georgetown Township.
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Michigan man sentenced to prison in drowning of autistic son
A former western Michigan college professor has been sentenced to prison after pleading guilty in his severely autistic teenage sonâs drowning death in an icy backyard pool
ByThe Associated Press
⢠4 min read
Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.The Associated Press
GRAND HAVEN, Mich. A former western Michigan college professor has been sentenced to prison for manslaughter in the death of his autistic teenage son, who drowned after spending an hour in an icy backyard pool with his arms restrained.
Professor dad is jailed for between two and 15 YEARS after his unsupervised and severely autistic son, 16, drowned in an icy backyard pool with his hands bound
Timothy Koets, 51, was sentenced to between two and 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter
His severely autistic son, Samuel, 16, drowned in the family swimming pool in March 2019
On that fateful day, Koets left for work, claiming he thought his sleeping wife and 13-year-old daughter would keep an eye the boy
His daughter later texted him a photo of Samuel in the icy pool, to which he replied: Would you make sure freak is okay?
there as you head out today. thanks for waking up with us. i m sarah simmons. i m steve chenevey. glad to be along with you this morning. tony perkins with us as we try to dry things out today. we had some overnight rain, a couple more showers out there to the east. we ll see improvement through the course of the day although i think a lot of clouds will hang around. we ll show you how things are shaping up early this morning. you will see that the precipitation is off to the east now. each of our radars give us a slightly different image but most of that precipitation is now pushing out has pushed out of eastern maryland to look at this. offshore and up into the philadelphia area, and nothing going on around washington. current conditions being reported, 42 degrees at reagan national. relative humidity is up there at 96%. winds are oust northeast at seven miles per hour. forecast for today, lots of clouds around today. maybe a few rays of sun later but our high tempera