Report: Wall that Crushed Michigan Boy May Have Been Bad for Years

A police report on the crushing death of a student at Williamston High School says a gym wall that collapsed was wobbly years earlier.

Fourteen-year-old Gabriel Corbett died Oct. 26 when a concrete wall fell on him at the school in Williamston, 20 miles east of Lansing. He’d been doing pull-ups on the wall after basketball practice.

The Lansing State Journal reports a student wrote in a statement to police that the wall “had been bad” since 2008. The student, whose name was redacted from the report, says students “wobbled the wall as a joke” in recent years.

Williamston schools’ superintendent Narda Murphy says the district has no record of receiving information that the wall may have been unstable.

The newspaper obtained reports under the Freedom of Information Act.