In this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, I examine the heartbreaking Grand Haven, Michigan family tragedy that claimed the lives of Mandy Karolkiewicz and her six children. Rather than focusing solely on the perpetrator, I share who the victims were, the lives they lived, and the devastating impact their loss has had on their family and community. Drawing from my experience as a forensic death investigator, I explain how investigators reconstruct scenes like this, why determining the sequence of events matters, and what forensic evidence can reveal. We also explore the phenomenon of family annihilation, discuss common warning patterns identified by researchers, and examine how financial stress, loss of identity, and access to firearms can contribute to these tragedies. This episode is a compassionate look at a devastating case and an important conversation about prevention, awareness, and remembering those whose lives were taken.
When an entire family is lost, it's easy for the headlines to focus on the person responsible. In this episode, I wanted to do something different.
I'm taking you to Grand Haven Township, Michigan, where Mandy Karolkiewicz and her six children lost their lives in one of the most heartbreaking family annihilation cases of the year. Before we talk about the investigation, I want to remember the people whose lives mattered most, the victims.
Using my experience as a forensic death investigator, I'll walk you through how investigators process a scene involving multiple homicide victims, how forensic evidence helps determine the sequence of events, and why details like wound analysis, fire patterns, and scene reconstruction are so important.
We'll also discuss the research surrounding family annihilation, the psychological and behavioral patterns often seen in these cases and why recognizing risk factors may help save lives in the future. While we may never fully understand why these tragedies occur, we can learn from them, support those in crisis, and continue advocating for families before violence reaches a devastating conclusion.
This episode is shared with deep respect for Mandy, her six children, and everyone whose lives were forever changed by this tragedy.
* Listener Discretion Advised
00:06
Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I'm your host, Julie Matson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner. Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. I have several guest host appearances this month and next month, and I haven't really mentioned what shows they were gonna be on because I don't know the air dates yet. But when I know a little bit more about when they're gonna air, I'll be sure and let y'all know. I will say that Pushing Up Lilies will be at the Denton Day of the Dead Festival this year. Again, we are not participating in the coffin races this year, but I went ahead and applied for a booth, so we will have merch there, and that's October 24th, which is a Saturday. So, we'll be there all day with special merchandise, and we will probably do some live interviews with some of the fans and do some videos for our YouTube channel.
Also, we are in the process of planning our second annual Pushing Up Lilies murder mystery event, and we're not 100% sure where it's gonna be yet. It will be a weekend in October, obviously not the 24th 'cause we'll be at the Day of the Dead Festival, but we've got a lot of exciting things coming up. We've got some specials we're gonna run on the subscription box. I need to make sure that everything is up to date on the website for purchase because we do have some exciting new merch that I brought back from CrimeCon with me. I have already applied for Creators Row for CrimeCon 2027, which is in Orlando, Florida. It's gonna be in September of next year, and I've already got my hotel, and it's sold out. So, I'm really glad that I was able to get in on that because it's so difficult when you're traveling with merch and you have to be at an event, to have to Uber back and forth and stay at a different hotel. I'm sure that many of y'all have done that before, and it's just difficult. It complicates things tremendously, and it's not always easy to get a ride when you're traveling, especially in places like Vegas and Orlando, and there's just a lot of traffic, and it is heavily populated during the summer months. Hopefully, everything will go smoothly, and hopefully, y'all can all go ahead and secure your rooms at a nearby hotel so that you can gear up for CrimeCon 2027.
This week, I wanna talk about a case in Michigan, and we kinda talked about the huge influx of murder-suicides last week. We see them all the time, even in a small town where I was, but it just seems like we've had a lot of cases lately, and there's a lot of people going through a lot of things. I just want everybody to be nice to each other. I know it's hard sometimes. Sometimes that's the hardest part of life is smiling and just pretending everything's okay but just be nice to other people. It can make a big difference in how their day goes. Sometimes when we're traveling, I'll go to Starbucks and buy even a $5 gift card, and I'll give them to my flight attendants, just something to make someone's day.
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And so, I try to do one thing a day for somebody, even if it's as simple as letting someone in front of me when they're trying to get onto the road and there's a lot of traffic or holding the door open for somebody. It doesn't have to be a family of 12's dinner. Just put it in your mind that you should do one nice thing for one person a day. And that's my challenge for you. But I wanna talk about this Friday morning in late July when a call came in. There was a fire, a house on Riverside Trail in Grand Haven Township, Michigan, a quiet stretch of West Michigan near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. And this was the kind of place where people raise big families. They're comfortable leaving their garage doors open. Ottawa County sheriff's deputies and fires crews rolled out, and when they got there, there were eight people dead. A mother, a father, and six children ages five to 15. Every single one of them had been shot in the head. And then someone had set the house on fire. Now, I've worked death scenes for a long time, and I've stood in rooms that most people will never stand in. But this case kinda stopped me because this wasn't a stranger and it wasn't a random act of violence. This was a father. He was a husband and a man who took those kids in, and he sat at the dinner table, and he was supposed to protect every single one of them. And instead, on July 24th, 2026, Christopher Karolkiewicz took a gun and ended his family.
So today we're gonna talk about what happened in Grand Haven. We're talking about Mandy, and we're talking about those six kids and the pattern, because this wasn't random and it wasn't unforeseeable, and we need to understand why cases like this keep happening. Now, before we talk a little bit about what happened, I need you to know who was lost, because in cases like this, it's real easy to let that perpetrator take up all the space. The case gets named after him, and the headlines are about him, and the people who actually mattered, the ones whose lives were stolen, actually get reduced to just a body count, but not in this case. Now, Amanda, Mandy Karolkiewicz was thirty-nine years old.
Her cousin, Emily Jones, said she was sweet and bubbly and kind, and her parents, Steve and Becky Lawwill, said she was very kind, and that's what they led with. They didn't lead with her accomplishments or her resume, but her kindness. She was a substitute teacher at Grand Haven Area Public Schools, and she was beloved. Her children attended schools in the same district. She was also present in the community in the way that good people are present, quietly, consistently showing up. She loved to travel, and in the weeks before her death, she had taken her two youngest daughters, who were both adopted, on a trip, just her and the girls. She wanted them to see things, and she wanted them to have memories. That was important to her. She also wrote a book. There was a book that she dedicated to her six children. She was building things. She was thinking about the future. She was putting her love on pages that would outlast her, though none of us knew it would work out that way.
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Mandy and Christopher got married in two thousand and nine, and they actually had four biological sons, and then they later adopted two daughters who were both eleven at the time of their death. Now, the six children ranged in age from five to fifteen. So again, four of them were boys, and two of them were girls. Now, the children haven't been publicly named, and I'm gonna respect that. The family actually deserves that privacy and grief. But what I will say is this. A fifteen-year-old had their whole life in front of them. A five-year-old hadn't even started kindergarten. And everyone in between, every single one of those kids had people who loved them, teachers who knew them, and friends who'll spend the rest of their lives with an empty seat at the table or next to them at school. Grand Haven Area Public Schools actually opened counseling support for students and staff after this news broke because those kids went to school with Mandy's kids and because Mandy taught in those buildings. And the grief in that community was very personal and specific.
And let me tell you what first responders found because the scene itself tells a story. Crews were dispatched on Friday, July twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-six to a fire at the Karolkiewicz home on Riverside Trail in Grand Haven Township. Now, Ottawa County Sheriff's deputies responded alongside the fire departments, and inside the burning home, they found eight bodies. The Ottawa County Sheriff's Office, led in press communications by Captain Jake Sparks, immediately classified the deaths as suspicious, as we all would. And that's standard when you find eight dead people in a burning house. You don't assume that this is an accident. So, they secured the scene, they called the medical examiner, and then they started working. Autopsies were conducted, and the results were unambiguous. Every person in the house, Amanda Karolkiewicz, all six children, and Christopher died of gunshot wounds to the head.
Now, investigators determined that Christopher had shot his wife and their six children before setting multiple fires inside the home, and then he turned the gun on himself. The medical examiner ruled the deaths of Amanda and the six children as homicides, and of course, Christopher's death was ruled a suicide. Captain Sparks later confirmed publicly that Mandy's believed to have been killed first. The mother died before the children. Now, I want you to sit with that for a moment. She didn't know. She couldn't warn them. She couldn't fight for them because she was already gone. And then he turned to the kids. I've worked homicide scenes, and I've documented injuries on bodies that carry the story of what happened to them. And when I read that Mandy was shot first, naturally my gut tells me that that's deliberate because he didn't want her to fight back, and he didn't want her to run, and he didn't want her to be able to get the children out. He wanted to completely control that sequence of events. And that actually matters when we talk about what kind of person does something like this to their entire family.
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So, who was Chris Karolkiewicz? He was forty-seven. He and Mandy again had been married for seventeen years at the time of the killings. They had built a large family, six children. They had a home on Riverside Trail, a life in the Grand Haven community. And then in the weeks before the shootings on July twenty-fourth, his employment ended. His former employer confirmed that his employment ended in the weeks leading up to the murders. Now, the exact circumstances, whether he was fired, laid off, or resigned, haven't really been fully detailed in public reporting, but the timeline is very specific. The employment loss came first and then the murders. Now, I wanna be careful here 'cause I'm not gonna tell you that losing a job turns someone into a killer. That's not what the data says, and it's not what I believe because millions of people lose their jobs every year, and they don't turn around and kill their families. But what job loss does is trigger a crisis of identity and a crisis of control, and that's kinda what we need to talk about because this case actually fits a very specific and well-documented pattern and understanding that pattern is the only way that we can start to prevent it. The Ottawa County Sheriff's Office used a specific term when they discussed this case, and that's family annihilation. Family annihilation sounds almost clinical, but it's not. It's actually one of the most devastating categories of homicide in the country. It follows patterns so consistent that researchers have built entire frameworks around it.
The Carroll-Kewitz murders represented at least the eighth family annihilation in the United States in twenty twenty-six, and we're not even to the end of the summer, y'all. It's not even September. Eight families, eight perpetrators, almost always male, almost always the husband and the father. Eight sets of victims who were told they were loved and protected by the very person who turned around and killed them. Let's talk a little bit about what family annihilation is. Criminologists who've studied these cases identify that there are several distinct perpetrator types, but the most common profile in cases like this is what's sometimes called the civil reputable killer, and this is a man who's built his identity around his role as a provider and a patriarch for the family, for whom his family is not a source of love and connection, but a reflection of his status and worth. When something threatens that, like a job loss or some sort of financial collapse, he doesn't experience it as a personal failure he can recover from. He experiences it more as annihilation of self, and in that distorted thinking, if he is annihilated, so is everything else around him. He kills the family not out of hatred, or at least not only hatred, but out of a twisted sense of ownership because in his mind, they're his, and this is an extension of him, and if he is destroyed, they should be too. And it's not a defense, and it's not an excuse. It's a pattern that we need to recognize because recognition is the only early warning system we have. The job loss in the weeks before the murders fit this profile precisely.
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Whatever was happening in that household, and of course, we don't know the full picture, we never know what happens behind closed doors, something shifted, something had been lost, and rather than seek help or to be honest with his wife and face the issues at hand, he made this catastrophic, irreversible choice, and Mandy and those six kids paid for it with their lives. I keep coming back to Mandy. She was thirty-nine. She was a teacher, loved to travel, wrote a book for her kids, had just gotten back from this wonderful trip with her two adopted daughters. Somewhere they had memories of now, somewhere that existed in the photographs, somewhere that felt like the future, but she had no idea of what was coming. So, one of the cruelest things about family annihilation is that the victims don't know what's about to happen. They don't see it coming. We think about domestic violence, and we picture couples getting in these fights that escalate and fear and a history of bruises and abuse. Sometimes that's present, and we've seen it a lot, but in many of these cases, in this civil reputable profile, the family seems normal to the outside world. Neighbors think they're quiet and nice and unremarkable, and the violence really doesn't leak out in advance. It just festers, and then it explodes.
So, her school opened counseling because students lost this wonderful substitute teacher that they loved, and the students have classmates that will never come back. Now let me put on this clinical hat for a minute because this is where my background lets me give you a little something different than you'll read from a standard news article. All eight people, Mandy, the six children, and Christopher, died of gunshot wounds to the head. Now, medical examiners actually confirmed this through autopsy. The deaths of Mandy and the children were ruled homicides, and Christopher's death was ruled a suicide. And then investigators confirmed that there were multiple fires set inside the home, and that's significant for a few reasons. So, let's talk about that. First, fire is frequently used in homicides to try to destroy evidence, wound characteristics, transfer evidence, biological materials, because fire degrades all of that.
And whether Christopher was trying to conceal what he'd done or whether the fire was part of the act itself, it complicated the evidentiary picture. The fact that the cause of death was still definitively established as gunshot wounds tells you that the medical examiner did their jobs well because the careful documentation of the wound morphology, trajectory, and tissue damage before degradation could have progressed further. Now the sequence also matters. Investigators actually concluded, again, we said Mandy was killed first. And how do we establish sequence in a case like that? Now, in part, it's through wound analysis and the nature of the injuries and the presence of defensive wounds. How were they positioned?
18:35
In part through blood evidence and pattern analysis at the scene, though fire complicates that significantly, but they reconstruct the physical scene, where each person was found, and what that tells us about whether they were mobile, whether they could have responded to what's happening to the other victims. And the fact that investigators were confident enough to state publicly that Mandy actually died before the children means that the evidence supported that conclusion clearly enough to actually put it on record. Now, third, gunshot wounds to the head in a family annihilation scenario are significant from a forensic perspective because they typically indicate close range, deliberate, controlled injuries. It was not a chaotic scene. It was very methodical. The perpetrator moved through the house with intent. That level of deliberateness, the forensic term would be organized, actually tells us something about his state of mind. It wasn't just a snap break from reality. This was a decision that he made and actually carried out.
Now, I've examined a lot of gunshot wounds, and I've documented them on living patients who survived working in the emergency room, and I've seen what they look like in the forensic world. In close range, gunshot wounds to the head leave very specific patterns. They leave stippling from unburned powder, fouling from the combustion gases, contact burns if the barrel was actually pressed to the skin. So, the morphology of a contact wound versus an immediate range wound versus a distant wound tells us about the relationship between the shooter and the victim in the moment the shot was fired. How close were they to that person, and how controlled was this? Of course, I don't have the full autopsy reports, but I can tell you that the investigators had them, and the conclusions that they drew were grounded in that evidence.
Now, Ottawa County is in Western Michigan, Lake Michigan shoreline. There's a lot of small cities. Again, it's the kind of place where people know their neighbors. It's a beach town. It gets touristier in the summer. Riverside Trail, where they lived, is a residential street. It just wasn't the kind of neighborhood where people expected something like this, but it never is. Mandy's father-in-law, who was Christopher's father, also spoke publicly and said that he still loved his son, but that he was devastated, and he may never understand why. Grief is complicated. Families of perpetrators suffer, too, in their own particular complicated way. And what I will say is that the question of why is both the human question and in these cases, often the least answerable question. Sometimes we just don't know. We can identify the pattern, and we can identify the precipitating stressors, but the final decision, the moment that that person crossed from crisis into deciding to kill people, that lives in a place that we really can't fully reconstruct. What we can do is look at what came before and ask whether we could have seen it. That's a part of the conversation I think about the most. Christopher lost his job weeks before the murders.
22:25
Did anybody know? Did he tell anybody? Did Mandy know? Did friends or family know that the household might be under financial strain? We don't really have answers to those questions.What we do know is that his employment ended. What we don't know is how that manifested at home, what Mandy's understanding of the situation was, whether she noticed changes in him, and whether or not it worried her or bothered her. A family friend was quoted in some reporting hinting at the possibility of tension, but there was nothing definitive and nothing that a police report would have flagged. And that's how these cases work. They don't always come with a paper trail. They don't usually come with nine one one calls or visible injuries. They come with a man who's quietly internally imploding and who has decided that the solution is violence. Now the research on intimate partner homicide risk factors, and yes, this case, even with the suicide falls within that framework, it's clear about a few things that elevate risk significantly, and financial crisis is one. Job loss, foreclosure, debt, events that threaten a man's self-concept as a provider. We see this over and over in data. Access to firearms is another. The presence of a firearm in a household where there is escalating stress and possible mental health crises or domestic tension dramatically increases the risk of a lethal outcome. And that's not my opinion. That's actually data. Now, the third is what researchers call the decision to exit. And in family annihilation cases, the perpetrator has typically made a decision to die. This is a murder-suicide at its core. He wasn't planning to go on afterwards. He was ending everything, himself included, and that decision to exit, to take everyone with you, is distinct from a domestic homicide where the perpetrator intends to survive. It's also harder to interrupt because there's no self-preservation instinct working against the plan. He's not planning on sticking around.
Could somebody have known? Maybe not. These cases sometimes don't leave visible warning signs that distinguish them from just regular, ordinary financial stress or marital stress, the kind that millions of families navigate daily without violence, and that's the horror of it. That's why the conversation we need to have is less, why didn't someone see it, and more, what systems could exist to have these trajectories before they reach the point? Employee assistance programs, mental health resources that feel accessible and destigmatize for men who've been socialized seeking help as weakness. Domestic violence hotlines that center not just physical abuse from patterns of control and crisis, and financial counseling that creates an off-ramp from shame. None of that is certain to prevent every case, but in a country where we are averaging at least one family annihilation per month this year, we have to do something. I wanna end where I started, and not with Christopher, but with them, Mandy and the six children in that house, a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old, two 11-year-olds, another 5-year-old who just starting to understand the world. None of them chose this. None of them did anything to deserve it.
26:19
They were entirely dependent on the adults around them for safety, and the adult who was supposed to provide that safety was the one who took it away. This is a particularly cruel part of family annihilation. It exploits human trust, the trust that a child places in a parent. There's not really a tidy ending for this story, unfortunately. If you're in a situation that feels like it's escalating, whether it's financial crisis, relationship trouble, mental health crisis, or if you're afraid of someone in your home, please reach out. The National Domestic Violence Hotline number is 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours a day, y'all. 24 hours a day, someone is there. You can also text the word start to 88788. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting home to 741741. And these resources exist for moments like this when everything feels impossible.
To the Grand Haven community, I see you, and to Mandy's family, I see you, and to anyone who loved one of those six kids, I see you, too. This is a kinda case that really doesn't leave you, and I don't want it to leave us because as long as we carry it, we're carrying them. Now, be sure and listen every Wednesday on all podcast platforms. You can hear me. If this episode moved you, please share it, because the conversations we have out loud are the ones that can change things. I love being an advocate for people who struggle like this. I know I've talked to y'all multiple times about how I've been a victim of domestic violence. I anticipated something really bad happening and was able to get away, but not everybody's that lucky. And in this case, again, he shot Mandy first, so she couldn't even try to protect her children, and that is heartbreaking, because in many cases they don't kill the entire family. She might have thought, "Well, he's gonna shoot me, and then the kids will be fine. Somebody will take them and raise them. He'll go to jail for what he did." Who knows what goes through your head when you're in that moment, that moment where it's a guessing game, how volatile someone is, how angry they are, and what are they gonna do next? Sometimes you just don't know.
I wanna talk to y'all a little bit again. My friend Stephanie Smith, she owns Soaping Up Life, and she has the most amazing subscription boxes where you can get handcrafted soap and foaming hand soaps and bath bombs, and they're made in small batches, and the fragrances, man, y'all, they're amazing. I gave them as gifts before. I think I told y'all last Christmas I gave some of her little boxes to my friends and absolutely loved them. So, for the ultimate treat, join the Soaping Up Life subscription box and get this curated collection of handmade bath and body products delivered right to your door each month. Her website is soapinguplife.com, and you really should try to treat yourself, because it's amazing. She's on Facebook. There is an option to email her. You can order your subscription boxes, and they are fun because they're just different. It's not something that you can go down the street and get at a boutique.
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It's not something that your friend gave people and then y'all show up at the party with the same thing. It's very unique. She does a very great job and is very proud of her work as she should be. Soapinguplife.com. Don't forget, y'all, it's already August, so we really need to start thinking about Christmas. I don't know how many of y'all have been shopping yet, but I'm already thinking about it. I bought some stocking stuffers the other day. I know I'm gonna cave and give them to my granddaughter next week, because I always have these great plans in buying stocking stuffers and putting them back and saving them, but I know I won't be able to. She'll come over, and I'll cave and give them all to her. It happens every time. I know the drill, but it's hard. It's hard to keep a secret, especially when it's something cute that you know they'll love. Anyway, please be nice. Be nice to each other, even if it's just one person today, and take care of yourselves. I look forward to talking to y'all next week. Bye, y'all.
Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies. If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast. This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public. Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.