Ashley Boeglin says she remembers her last phone call with her husband, Mike, while he was sitting in the driver’s seat of his 1998 freightliner outside the doors of the ThyssenKrupp plant in Detroit on June 25, 2014, while waiting to deliver his cargo. metal coils. The next morning.
They spoke to almost their plan to be the first truck on the line to be unloaded when the steelworks opened the next morning.
“He was going to help a friend bring a load of pigs later that day to our hometown of Ferdinand, Indiana, and we talked about our new baby along the way and what we had to do to put everything in one position before he arrived.” Ashley told FreightWaves. “We plan to talk the next morning when I get home.”
That was the last time she spoke to her husband.
Unfortunately, the next morning, Mike’s body was discovered in the cockpit of his truck. His body burned beyond recognition. Detroit police later told him that Mike fired several times before his platform caught fire. Investigators suspected the robbery of the motive.
However, his wallet containing about $800 was later recovered, along with his backpack, from his burnt platform. All that was missing was Mike’s mobile phone, an old folding phone and the couple’s iPad.
Six years later, his murder is unsolved.
FreightWaves contacted the Detroit Police Department to find out if there were any new clues in the investigation into Mike’s murder.
While the sergeant. Nicole Kirkwood, a data officer with the Detroit Police Department, called and said she sent the request to investigators handling Mike’s case and had not returned phone calls or comments by email.
Ashley Boeglin, who paints as an assistant physical therapist and athletic trainer for Perry’s Central School District in Leopold, Indiana, said she remembered that she had a list to paint around 5:30 a.m. on June 26 when her brother-in-law, Mark Boeglin, called her scared, asking if she had Mike’s dental records.
“I asked him why the hell he would want Mike’s dental records, and he said Mike’s dispatcher called him and said the police had discovered Mike’s semi-grey in the steelworks, he’s burned and they don’t know where the driving force is. Array, ” he said. “I don’t know what Mark said next, only without delay I’ve been angry at him for implying that Mike might be hurt or dead. I didn’t think he was gone at the time.”
After hanging up the phone call with Mark, Ashley said he called his cell phone provider and asked for a track to be recorded on Mike’s phone.
“I told the company I didn’t care what it costs, but I looked for the location of their phone because it rings,” he says.
Her operator was able to locate the phone about three blocks from where her husband’s semitrailer was.
“The fact that the mobile phone didn’t go straight to voicemail told me that someone had taken their mobile phone and it was,” he said.
He said he forwarded the message to Detroit police investigating Mike’s case, and added the phone number that had been called from Mike’s phone phone number after investigators said he was dead.
“Even from the day Mike was killed, investigators never answered me,” he said.
He even visited the site where Mike murdered within 150 feet of the doors of the ThyssenKrupp metal plant, but stated that no one at the facility would talk to her while she was there.
After her death, Ashley said she was obsessed with all the “what if” that happened the day before Mike’s murder. And if the sender hadn’t spent two hours loading her husband’s trailer, what if there hadn’t been a lot of traffic that would cause him to miss his one-hour appointment schedule? And if you had been allowed to park inside the enclosed parking lot at the ThyssenKrupp plant in Detroit. And if you’d been allowed to bring a gun to protect yourself.
Mike Boeglin’s death highlighted the need for safer parking features for truck drivers, as the ThyssenKrupp plant had an internal no parking policy in its closed lot and was forced to park in what the police described as a high crime area.
His murder also prompted a petition calling for the “Mike Act,” a “right to transport” bill that would allow truckers to legally bring guns into their trucks. The effort failed.
Lawmakers have also introduced a law in the U.S. House and Senate that would allow the reciprocity of hidden port permits between certain states.
“I’ve been thinking about what’s going on many times – if I had a gun that morning, I’d still be alive today, but I’m not sure,” Ashley said. “While Mike had several rifles and was a perfect marksman, he never had a firearm. I don’t think I would have carried one even if it was legal in his truck, but I’m like that for the others.”
Ashley met Mike on Mother’s Day in 2005, when she was 19, after her first year of school at Evansville University in Evansville, Indiana.
She and Mike’s double sister, Michelle, were school friends. When Ashley stayed in southern Indiana this summer to work, she moved in with Mike and Michelle’s older sister Melanie.
“Mélanie woke me up at 5:30 in the morning and told me I had to get up and get in position to go to church because it’s Mother’s Day,” Ashley said. “I said, “My mom lives in Boise, Idaho, and doesn’t the church start later than that?”
“I say something like ‘no, we’re Catholics,'” he said.
After dressing, she was delivered and Mike stood in front of his Jeep.
“Mike said, “Oh, you can go to church, uh, well, welcome to the family, ” said Ashley.
A few days later, he showed up at his sister’s apartment when Mike discovered Melanie in the paintings and asked if she wanted to see what he was doing with the paintings.
“I didn’t need to be rude, so I said I was fine, put on my shoes and went out,” Ashley said.
A massive airflow device parked in front of your apartment complex to pulverize crops.
“We spent the next 8 hours in the taxi while he watered the farmers’ fields, he spoke and I was given to know him,” he says.
He later became owner-operator and bought his own truck.
The couple married in the fall of 2012.
On Valentine’s Day, a year after Mike’s death, Ashley said she had her wedding ring in the ashes of her burnt Freightliner.
“I just dug and moved the right amount of debris and found out,” he says. “It’s the ultimate vital and valuable gift I discovered in this shipwreck.”
Five months after Mike’s murder, Ashley gave birth to the couple’s first child, Mackenzie, who is now five years old and in kindergarten a few weeks ago.
Being a single mother of a newborn is exhausting, but Ashley said she kept moving because that’s what Mike would have wanted me to do.
“You have two features: you can let it consume you or be informed about how to do something with it,” he says. “I chose to continue, even in those difficult days, and check to locate the in life.
She admits it wasn’t easy.
“I can’t tell you how many times I collapsed and slid down the wall and screamed because the pain was so overwhelming to lose it and everything we had planned in our lives,” Ashley said. “Knowing that my daughter will never see her father and that he may never hold her and how she took her so violently without explanation of why it is so painful.
She said Mackenzie’s manners and facial features remind her of her deceased husband.
“She holds the fork in exactly the same way as he does and strokes her lips a little when she eats, almost like a cow, which Mike would do as a joke around me,” she says. “Putting your eyes blank and the expression on your face when you are very frustrated with something are precisely like hers. When he got angry, he would kick her foot and kick her in the fists and she would do exactly the same thing. It’s like watching a video. “
An image of Mike sits on Mackenzie’s bedside table. Ashley also stated that it is vital for MacKenzie to know that her father had not chosen not to be a component of her life.
“I know I’d be very proud of her for who she is and how much she cares about others,” Ashley said. “In this sense, he looks a lot like his father. It’s scary, honestly.”
Ashley is now engaged on a date with Mike’s older brother, Mark. The couple have a 6-month-old son named Alexander.
Together, they form a percentage of stories about Mike with Mackenzie.
“She knows that Mark is not her father, yet she has blossomed in this role,” Ashley said. “It takes a wonderful guy to intervene and Mark takes care of her and Mackenzie loves him.
Although school wasn’t Mike’s thing, she said he was incredibly wise and enjoyed running with his hands to build things.
She said he made his own biodiesel by collecting old kitchen oil from nearby restaurants that he combined and used to force his truck and the couple’s old Volkswagen Jetta.
He enjoyed driving his four-wheeled vehicle, making Jeeps and cultivating the land, he said. “I was willing to help a friend, I enjoyed growing up and was very excited to become a father,” Ashley said.
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