A judge in Milwaukee brought a 13-year quest for justice by a grieving father to a close on Thursday, accepting a plea deal for two men charged criminally for their role in the killing of his teenaged son.
Robert W. Beringer and Jesse R. Cole pleaded guilty to felony murder under a deferred prosecution agreement that allows them to avoid jail time yet publicly stand accountable for their actions leading to the 2012 death of Corey Stingley. The men helped restrain the 16-year-old inside a convenience store after an attempted shoplifting incident involving $12 worth of alcohol.
“What happened to Corey Stingley should have never happened. His death was unnecessary, brutal and devastating,” Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne told the judge in a letter filed with the court.
Both of Stingley’s parents spoke directly to the judge in an hourlong hearing in a courtroom filled with family members, community activists, spiritual leaders and some of the teen’s former classmates.
“Corey was my baby. A mother is not supposed to bury her child,” Alicia Stingley told the judge. She spoke of the grace of forgiveness, and after the hearing she hugged Beringer. The Stingleys’ surviving son, Cameron, shook both men’s hands.
The agreement requires Cole and Beringer to make a one-time $500 donation each to a charitable organization of the Stingley family’s choosing in honor of Corey. After six months, if the two men comply with the terms and do not commit any crimes, the prosecution will dismiss the case, according to documents filed with the court.
ProPublica, in a 2023 story, reexamined the incident, the legal presumptions, the background of the men and Stingley’s father’s relentless legal campaign to bring the men into court. The three men previously had defended their actions as justified and necessary to deal with an emergency as they held Stingley while waiting for police to arrive.
Ozanne, who was appointed in 2022 to review the case, recommended the agreement after the two men and the Stingley family engaged in an extensive restorative justice process, in which they sat face to face, under the supervision of a retired judge, and shared their thoughts and feelings. Ozanne said in the letter that the process “appears to have been healing for all involved.”
From the bench, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Laura Crivello said she found the agreement to be fair and just and commended the work of all the parties to come to a resolution.
“Maybe this is the spark that makes other people see similarities in each other and not differences,” she said. “Maybe this is the spark that makes them think about restorative justice and how do we come together. And maybe this is part of the spark that decreases the violence in our community and leads us to finding the paths to have those circles to sit down and have the dialogue and to have that conversation. So maybe there’s some good that comes out of it.”
Craig Stingley, Corey’s father, said during the hearing that his 13-year struggle “has turned into triumph.”
Earlier, the Stingley family filed a statement with the court affirming its support for the agreement and the restorative justice process.
“We sought not vengeance, but acknowledgement — of Corey’s life, his humanity, and the depth of our loss,” it states. “We believe this agreement honors Corey’s memory and offers a model of how people can come together, even after profound harm, to seek understanding and healing.”
The family remembered Stingley as a “vibrant, loving son, brother, and friend” and found that the restorative dialogues brought “truth, understanding, and a measure of healing that the traditional court process could not.”
Jonathan LaVoy, Cole’s attorney, told reporters after the hearing: “This has been a long 13 years. He’s been under investigation with multiple reviews over that time. I think everyone is just so happy that this day has come, that there’s been some finality to this whole situation.”
In a joint written statement provided to the court, Beringer and Cole said they came to recognize “the profound ripple effects” of the incident and their connection to Stingley’s death. They expressed sorrow that Stingley’s “time on this earth ended far too soon.”
The proceeding followed years of work by Craig Stingley to force the justice system to view his son as a crime victim whose life was unlawfully cut short by Beringer, Cole and another store patron, Mario Laumann, who died in 2022.
Prosecutors at the time declined to charge anyone, saying the men did not intend to kill Corey Stingley when they tackled him and pinned him to the floor of VJ’s Food Mart, in West Allis, Wisconsin. They were detaining him for police after the youth attempted to steal bottles of Smirnoff Ice. In surveillance video, Laumann can be seen holding Stingley in a chokehold while the other two men aided in restraining him. A witness told police Laumann was “squeezing the hell” out of the teenager.
The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office found that Stingley died of a brain injury due to asphyxiation after a “violent struggle with multiple individuals.” It ruled the death a homicide.
Under Wisconsin law, the charge of felony murder is brought in cases in which someone dies during the commission of another alleged crime — in this case false imprisonment.
Ozanne wrote to the court that his analysis found that “there is no doubt Cole, Beringer and Laumann caused Corey Stingley’s death.”
All three men, he wrote, restrained Stingley “intentionally and without his consent” and without legal authority to “arrest” him. “Simply put, Corey, a teenager, was tackled and restrained to the ground by three grown men because they suspected him of shoplifting,” Ozanne wrote. “They killed him while piled on top of his body awaiting the police.”
But he noted that there is no evidence that Beringer or Cole knew that Stingley was in medical distress during the incident. He described their hold on him as “rudimentary detention techniques.”
It was Laumann, Ozanne concluded, who “strangled Corey Stingley to death.” Ozanne wrote that surveillance video shows Laumann’s arm for several minutes across Stingley’s neck “as he fades out of consciousness.”
If Laumann were still alive, Ozanne said in court, prosecutors likely would have been seeking a lengthy prison term for him.
Stingley died the same year as Trayvon Martin, a Black Florida teen shot to death by a neighborhood volunteer watchman, who was acquitted in 2013. Martin’s case drew national attention and led to the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Stingley’s death after being restrained by three white men did not garner widespread notice outside Wisconsin.
Over the years, Craig Stingley unsuccessfully advocated for the men to face charges. Two prosecutors reviewed the case, but nothing came of it.
He then discovered an obscure “John Doe” statute, dating back to Wisconsin’s territorial days, that allows a private citizen to ask a judge to consider whether a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom when a district attorney can’t or won’t do so.
Stingley filed such a petition in late 2020. That led to the appointment of Ozanne as a special prosecutor to review the matter yet again. In 2024, Ozanne informed the Stingley family that his office had found evidence of a crime but that a guilty verdict was not assured for the remaining two men.
That set in motion an effort to achieve healing and accountability through a restorative justice process. Restorative justice programs bring together survivors and offenders for conversations, led by trained facilitators, to work toward understanding and healing and how best to make amends. Last year, Stingley and members of his family met on separate occasions with both Cole and Beringer through the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, part of the law school at Milwaukee’s Marquette University.
The discussions led to the deferred prosecution agreement.
In an interview, Anthony Neff, a longtime friend of Craig Stingley’s, recalled seeing Corey Stingley in a hospital bed, attached to tubes and a ventilator in his final days. Corey Stingley had been a running back on his high school football team. Everyone in the program showed up for the funeral, Neff said.
“Coaches. The ball boys. The cheerleaders. I mean, they’re all standing in solidarity with Craig and the family,” he said.
In the years since, he and other golfing buddies of Craig Stingley’s have provided emotional support in his quest. Neff called it “a lesson in civics, a master lesson in civics.”
