UPDATE – PORTAGE MI (WKZO AM/FM) – A search for two missing Portage residents in the Gourdneck Lake preserve has turned up two bodies, but authorities say that they have not yet been identified.
One of the bodies is said to be a male, with work continuing to determine a positive ID on both.
Portage Public Safety director Nicholas Armold had stated Thursday that indications were the investigation would become a homicide probe.
The couple, Gary and Laura Johnson, disappeared late this week, and their 37 year old son Nicholas is considered a person-of-interest in the case.
The son was arrested Thursday on unrelated felony firearm charges, and authorities report that he may be a person-of-interest in a 2018 case involving a missing Gobles teenager.
PORTAGE, MI (WKZO AM/FM) – Investigators, along with Western Michigan University’s archeological team and the Kalamazoo crime lab, are searching an area of the Gourdneck State Game Area off Vanderbilt Avenue in Portage, just east of US-131 for the bodies of a Portage couple missing since February 3.
Portage Department of Public Safety Chief Nicholas Armold told WOOD-TV that police think they’ll find at least one of the bodies of Gary and Laura Johnson, who’ve been missing since last week.
Armold says investigators received information Thursday night which led them to search the wooded area.
In a news release, Arnold said when police went to the couple’s home on Romence Road in Portage this past Tuesday, they say they found “signs of violence.”
The couple’s 27-year-old son, Nicholas Johnson, has been arrested on unrelated weapons charges. Police are treating him as a person of interest in his parents’ disappearance.
He had been charged in 2019 for an assault at the home of his parents. The Portage couple reportedly had feared for their safety related to their son’s behavior and even obtained a personal protection order against him.
