GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — A speeding stop on US-131 in the middle of the night turned into a foot chase, a struggle, and the seizure of a loaded Draco firearm with its serial number deliberately destroyed, Michigan State Police said. The passenger in the stopped car — an 18-year-old Grand Rapids man who, according to police, is already a convicted felon — was lodged at the Kent County Jail and now faces nine felony charges, according to state police reporting published on Wednesday, October 28, 2026.
Source: Michigan State Police Sixth District via X, reported by 97.9 WGRD (Townsquare Media)
State police have not publicly released the man's name in the reporting so far, and the nine charges have not been listed one by one. What troopers have described is a sequence that began as a routine traffic violation on one of West Michigan's busiest expressways and escalated within minutes — a sequence that, in the state police's own message afterwards, they held up as exactly the kind of stop that takes an untraceable gun off the street.
1:30 a.m. on US-131, near 32nd Avenue
Around 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 28, troopers from the Michigan State Police Grand Rapids Post pulled over a vehicle for speeding along US-131 near 32nd Avenue, on the south side of Grand Rapids in Kent County. US-131 is the main north–south expressway through the city, carrying commuter traffic by day and a steady flow of freight and through-traffic overnight.
What started as a simple traffic violation escalated fast when troopers began interviewing the passenger, police said. According to the state police account, the 18-year-old Grand Rapids man gave troopers a fake name, fought with them, and took off running on foot. Troopers chased him down and took him into custody after a brief struggle. The allegations — like all charges at this stage — are claims by police that will have to be proved in court.
The gun in the backpack
When officers searched the vehicle, they found a loaded Draco firearm tucked inside a backpack, police said. A Draco is a compact, AK-pattern pistol — a short, high-powered handgun format that police agencies across the United States say turns up frequently in seizures because it is easy to conceal and carries rifle-calibre firepower. In this case, troopers said, the weapon's serial number had been deliberately destroyed, making it untraceable: with no readable serial number, investigators cannot run the gun through the databases that would normally show where it was made, sold, reported stolen, or used before.
That detail matters legally as well as practically. Possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number, are each treated as serious offences in their own right, separate from anything that happened during the stop itself — which is one reason a single early-morning stop can produce a charge count as high as nine felonies, spanning the gun, the false name, the fight and the flight, as alleged by police.
“Getting illegal firearms out of the hands of convicted felons helps save lives. See something suspicious? Say something. Report it. Together, we can help keep our communities safe.” — Michigan State Police message published with the US-131 seizure report
Why US-131 stops matter for this readership
US-131, together with I-196 and I-96, is the expressway spine of West Michigan's second-largest metro area — and a working corridor for the region's trucking and warehouse economy, which employs many Punjabi diaspora drivers and owner-operators across western Michigan. Overnight stops on the corridor are a routine part of how state police interdict guns and drugs moving between Chicago, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and northern Michigan, and troopers of the Grand Rapids Post patrol exactly this stretch. For drivers who run US-131 at night, this incident is a reminder of what a speeding stop can uncover — and of how quickly a stop escalates when a passenger lies about his name and runs.
What happens next
The man remains lodged at the Kent County Jail, according to police, and his case now moves to the Kent County courts, where the nine felony charges alleged by state police will be formally read, bail and conditions considered, and the state required to prove both the stop and the search were lawful and that the gun in the backpack was his. His name, and the exact list of the nine charges, had not been published in the state police reporting available on Wednesday — this report will be read against the court record when those details are released.