A Michigan mother said she was afraid of her troubled son months before he wrecked her BMW in a 100 mph crash that killed an 18-year-old star swimmer.
Kiernan Tague, 17, is charged with the second-degree murder of his friend Flynn MacKrell after losing control of his mother’s BMW in Grosse Pointe on the night of Nov. 17, 2023.
Investigators have since revealed that Kiernan was no stranger to police, having had at least 22 contacts with authorities since 2018, the report said. Detroit Free Press.
Police visited Kiernan’s home several times after his mother, Elizabeth Puleo-Tague, a campus minister at a Jesuit high school, reported he was out of control and “breaking things around the house.”
Kiernan’s most recent contact with police prior to the fatal crash occurred on August 30, 2023, when Elizabeth called police “because Kiernan was yelling and throwing objects inside the house because her mother refused to get her an American Express Gold card.”
Kiernan Tague, 17, is charged with second-degree murder of his friend and neighbor Flynn MacKrell after he lost control of his mother’s BMW in Grosse Pointe last year.
Elizabeth Puleo-Tague is accused of failing to take reasonable steps to prevent her son from harming others after noticing his speeding, as evidenced by several texts
In 2020, police responded to a call from the mother after she claimed her son “had just assaulted her and fled the area,” troopers wrote.
The report goes on to explain how the incident occurred: when Kiernan was picked up from his friend’s house and became angry with his mother.
“While in the front seat, Kiernan turned around and began hitting her mother (who was in the back seat) and even bit her on the hand,” an officer wrote.
Kiernan, in turn, was arrested for domestic violence and briefly held at the Wayne County Juvenile Hall.
In November of last year, days before the accident, another fight broke out between the two, this time at home, during which Kiernan broke a table after her mother refused to let her use one of her two cars.
Kiernan’s passenger was Flynn MacKrell, an 18-year-old college student and standout swimmer whose death was ruled a homicide. His parents, Thad MacKrell and Anne Vanker, are trying to use the messages to show how the suspect’s mother was partially responsible.
Kiernan was going over 100 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone when he crashed his mother’s new BMW X3 M on November 17, 2023.
“I just asked you to take your car… but you refused. Now I’m late and we have a broken table,” Kiernan wrote on Nov. 3, 2023, according to the report obtained by Free Press.
Citing the “extensive” text messages between the two collected during this effort, a Grosse Pointe city investigator wrote: “There was a lot of conversation about Kiernan taking/using her mother’s credit card without permission, being out during overnight hours without permission, and about Kiernan’s extensive reckless driving habits.”
The investigator added: ‘The messages between the two suggest that Kiernan’s mother has little to no control over him.
‘Kiernan regularly drove recklessly and took/used her mother’s credit cards without permission, despite her mother’s repeated orders not to do so.’
But the mother and son also appeared to have a cordial relationship at times: In one exchange in October 2023, Elizabeth asked her son, then 16, to buy her wine.
The message read: “Would you bring me a bottle of wine? Please!”, to which Kiernan replied: “Of course.”
A week later, just days before the fatal crash that killed Flynn, Kiernan’s mother sent her a screenshot of a website detailing the penalties for having a fake ID.
Flynn’s parents, Anne Vanker and Thad Mackrell, say the exchanges between Elizabeth and Kiernan demonstrate criminal liability on the part of the mother.
Police are investigating Elizabeth after text messages surfaced showing she was aware of her son’s speeding habit, which she had intimate knowledge of through a GPS app called Life360.
Flynn’s parents told the Free Press that Elizabeth should face criminal charges, and her devastated mother, Anne, said: “It’s like I handed her an AR-15.”
Among the text messages, Elizabeth wrote to Kiernan on September 14, 2023, two months before the accident: ‘Slow down right now!’
This came after the then 16-year-old was caught travelling at 123mph in the family’s Audi coupe.
“I have screenshots of you… going 123mph… Scares me to the bone,” said another.
Kiernan Tague, the driver who survived the catastrophic high-speed crash, has had at least 22 documented contacts with police since 2018
Elizabeth, the campus minister at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School, bought herself a new BMW weeks after sending those texts and then gave her son access to it, even though it could reach speeds of 177 mph. Stock image of a BMW X3 M seen above
Tague’s home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, is shown above.
Flynn’s parents, Anne Vanker and Thad Mackrell, are seeking to use the messages to show how Elizabeth failed to take reasonable steps to prevent her son from harming others.
They wrote in a letter to local prosecutors: ‘(Kiernan) was speeding over and over again, and Mom knew it.’
Not only that, but Elizabeth, the campus minister at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School, bought herself a new BMW weeks after sending those text messages and proceeded to give her son access to it, even though it could reach speeds of 177 mph.
Vanker and her husband are now using the mother-son exchanges as evidence that Elizabeth knew for months that her son was driving recklessly, but did nothing about it.
Speaking to the Free Press, he mentioned that Elizabeth also owns a 2015 Subaru Forrester, but continued to allow her son to drive the much more powerful Audi and then the BMW even after warning him about what he was doing.
Elizabeth is the Campus Minister at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School.
But buying the BMW and leaving the keys for him to take freely was the worst offense, he said, comparing the prospect to handing the unruly teen a loaded assault rifle.
“I was sitting on a time bomb,” Vanker told the newspaper, eight months after her son’s death.
“She knows he’s out of control, but she basically gets him a gun; it’s like she handed him an AR-15.”
DailyMail.com has contacted the University of Detroit Jesuit High School for comment on this story.
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