For three days, juvenile life Shawn M. Commire sat silently in a courtroom, his head down and eyes giving a thousand-yard stare.
Having decades before broken into a Bay City home and viciously killed the greatgrandmother who lived there, Commire listened as attorneys debated whether he merited ever walking free. As his victim’s children and grandchildren shared how their matriarch’s murder has devastated them, Commire took it all in, hearing how his heinous acts as a 16-year-old still ripple and resonate.
On June 9, the fourth day of his resentencing hearing, Commire had his chance to speak, apologizing for the ongoing anguish he’s caused. At the same time, he seemed resigned to not getting a second chance at life beyond prison walls.
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Despite earlier testimony from Dr. Daniel Keating — a professor of psychology, psychiatry, and pediatrics at the University of Michigan and an expert in adolescent brain development — that an adolescent brain is not fully developed until age 25, Commire said that is no excuse for what he did to Salogar.
“I don’t believe it explains it away, but I also believe it was a contributing factor,” he said. “Because also not every kid that grows up like I grew up kills people, especially like Rita.”
