Woman pleads no contest in death of son who drowned at Lake Lansing

LANSING — A woman has pleaded no contest to a manslaughter charge in connection with a cold-weather kayak ride that led to the death of her 4-year-old son at Lake Lansing.

Claire Powers, 34, was charged with second-degree murder in January 2023, nearly a year after the boy fell from a kayak in an area of the lake off Shaw Street, just south of Lake Lansing Park South. Rescuers pulled her and her son from the water and took them to a hospital, where the boy was pronounced dead.

Powers pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter last week in Ingham County Circuit Court, with an agreement that her minimum sentence would fall in the range of 12 to 24 months, court records indicate.

A no-contest plea is not a formal admission of guilt but is treated as a conviction. Powers is set for sentencing Nov. 1 before Judge James Jamo. She remains free on bond.

According to court testimony, Powers placed her son in a kayak on the partially frozen lake on March 29, 2022 and pushed away from shore, even though she had to break ice with a paddle to do so. She told police her son was knocked into the water when the kayak hit a patch of ice.

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The boy was also not wearing a coat, according to testimony.

Powers told police she tried to pull her son back into the kayak, but his life vest slipped off, causing the small craft to overturn, a Meridian Township police detective testified. No life jacket was found anywhere in the vicinity, and a person who discovered the two people in the water did not see a life jacket on the boy, the detective testified.

“(The person) stated that she kept yelling to Claire to put the child on top of the kayak,” but thought the mother might have become hypothermic “because she was not making a lot of sense,” the detective testified.

Powers told police she had just moved into an apartment on Shaw Street the month before. She said she went down to its private dock and grabbed a kayak kept there for residents to use, the detective said.

The high temperature in Lansing that day was 44 degrees and the low was 17 degrees, according to the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids.

Powers was represented by the Ingham County Public Defender’s office, which did not respond to a message seeking comment on Thursday afternoon.

Contact Ken Palmer at kpalmer@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @KBPalm_lsj.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Woman pleads no contest in death of son who drowned at Lake Lansing