Emails Show Police Chief, Prosecutors and PR Firm Coordinated Controversial ELPD Press Release

East Lansing’s police chief, city prosecutors and a communications team worked together to write a press release about two young Black men’s criminal charges that has since become the subject of a civil lawsuit filed in federal court.

The press release has raised questions in the city about if police intentionally withheld security footage that painted a different picture than other evidence released, and if including names in the press release violated police policy.

Emails obtained by East Lansing Info through Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests show that Brown quarterbacked the release that named Lonnie Smith, 21, and Mason Woods, 22, saying they were charged with misdemeanors related to fighting during Michigan State University’s welcome weekend in August. 

Surveillance footage later released by an attorney for the two men contradicted the police narrative in the press release and showed that Smith intervened to deescalate an altercation that featured some pushing and shouting before ELPD Officer Andrew Lyon deployed pepper spray on both men. Charges against Smith and Woods have been dropped, and the press release has been removed from the city’s website. 

The emails in ELi’s FOIA show that ELPD Police Chief Jen Brown took a leading role in crafting the press release, working with the two city prosecutors assigned to Woods and Smith’s cases, public relations consultants and East Lansing Communications Director Carrie Sampson. Others included in the email chain who play a lesser role in the communication include City Manager Robert Belleman and three other employees in the city attorney’s office. 

The communication about the press release starts with Brown reaching out to John Sellek, CEO of public relations firm Harbor Strategic on Sept. 12, two weeks before the release is published and three weeks after MSU’s welcome weekend. 

Brown wrote she’d like to start on a press release to include information about “the Dave’s Hot Chicken fight along with information on the very large brawl that occurred the same night.” It’s unclear what large brawl Brown is referring to, information about it was not included in the published press release. 

Over the next two weeks, Brown communicated with Sellek, another Harbor Strategic employee, city attorneys and Communications Director Carrie Sampson to produce the release. During this time, Brown sent information from Matthew Wayne and Heather Sumner, the city prosecutors who were pursuing charges against the men, to be plugged into the press release. 

The emails also show that Brown sent the communications team Smith and Woods’ names to be included in the press release, along with their birth dates and information about the misdemeanors they were charged with. 

A review of press releases published on the city’s website in 2025 shows there was only one other occasion ELPD published the name of someone charged with a crime pre-trial. That release named a man charged with manslaughter after a 20-year-old was killed in downtown East Lansing, a felony carrying up to 15 years in prison as opposed to the lesser misdemeanor charges Smith and Woods were accused of. 

Including Smith and Woods’ names in the release may have violated police policies. ELPD medial relations guidelines state that after arraignment, information included in a press release should be limited to “age, sex, city of residence of the suspect, the arraignment date, the arraigning authority’s name and title, list of charge(s), bond amount, plea(s) entered, preliminary examination date, and the name of the institution where the suspect is being held.” 

This is not the first time a pre-trial press release issued by ELPD has been heavily scrutinized. 

In 2020, ELPD published a press release stating officers had stopped a sexual assault and included the name and mugshot of the man accused. Later, video footage would exonerate the man and charges were dropped, but after several news outlets had run stories based on the press release. 

Aaron Stephens, who was East Lansing mayor at the time of the 2020 incident, criticized the press release that named Smith and Woods at the Oct. 14 City Council meeting. 

“After that happened, we put a policy in place that we wouldn’t name names on arrest releases where there weren’t extreme circumstances,” Stephens said. “Because there’s virtually no upside to doing it. But a really significant downside if we did and then it turned out that we were wrong. Based on the release that I saw earlier, that policy clearly has not continued.”

City officials have remained mostly silent about the pepper spray incident since the security footage surfaced, though council did recently vote to hire an outside attorney to review “actions, policies and procedures” of the city’s police department. Sampson said the city has no comment when reached about this story. 

PR consultants were given the wrong arrest report to pull information from. 

At one point in the email chain, the public relations consultants were given the name of an individual unrelated to the incident. 

The individual shares a last name with Smith’s mother, Nadia Sellers, a coincidence that apparently caused the mixup. 

During the month between the incident at Dave’s Hot Chicken and the city issuing the press release, Sellers had been speaking out at city meetings, condemning police actions and saying that there were people arrested during welcome weekend who were innocent. Before the press release was published, Sellers did not say publicly that her son was arrested. She later explained to ELi that she is well-known in the community and she was trying to protect her son’s reputation. 

While Sellers was not publicly sharing her relation to the incident, prosecutors were aware of the connection. 

“The confusion came because we recently received an email regarding the REDACTED case (which was up for pretrial today and involves a very similar situation–fighting in front of Dave’s Hot Chicken) and there was discussion regarding the belief that this case was the one involving Nadia Sellers, so we had originally thought that was the “Dave’s Hot Chicken” incident being referenced,” city prosecutor Heather Sumner wrote in a Sept. 25 email, one day before the press release was published. 

Legal ethics expert doesn’t take issue with prosecutors helping to write the press release. They do see problems with the release itself.

To better understand the ethics of prosecutors’ role in writing the release, ELi spoke with Justin Simard, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law and the director of the Kelley Institute for Ethics and the Legal Profession. 

Simard explained that it is not unethical for prosecutors to help write a press release about cases they are working on. However, a release should include a statement that makes it clear that people charged with crimes are innocent until proven guilty, a feature not present in the release naming Smith and Woods. 

“At least from my perspective, it looks like they’re saying that these two men were charged with crimes, and there’s not a statement about how they’re innocent until proven guilty,” Simard said. “That to me… looks, on face, like a violation of their duties under the Michigan rules of professional conduct.”

A key criticism of the release has been that police were in possession of the security camera footage showing a clearer account of what occurred than the body camera footage police posted with the press release. Simard said attorneys should have advised the police department to not go forward with the release if they knew footage from the security camera painted a different picture. 

“If they knew about that footage and only released the body-cam footage in some kind of effort to shade community perception, that would be clearly inappropriate,” he said.