FLUSHING, MI - A man convicted for his part in one of the most notorious crimes in the history of Flushing has died in prison, 42 years after a cold-blooded triple homicide at a convenience story just outside Flushing County Park.
The Michigan Department of Corrections confirmed the Nov. 20 death of Ricky Newell, 68, who was convicted along with Michael Prast in the killing of a high school student and two store clerks during a botched armed robbery at the Flushing Sunshine Food Store on March 20, 1978.
A DOC spokesman said Newell, who died of natural causes, was most recently housed at the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility in Adrian and died at a Jackson area hospital.
Prast also died while incarcerated in 2019.
“I hope we don’t have to see their names - their rotten names - again,” said Mary Hale Mitchell, the daughter of Elizabeth Hale, one of the store clerks shot by Prast in a robbery that netted just $220.
“Do I hate them? No. I had to forgive them for my life to continue,” Hale Mitchell said. “You can’t focus on that (forever) or it will kill you.”
Prast admitted to investigators and told MLive-The Flint Journal in a 2013 interview that he shot high school student Robert L. Shepp Jr. and clerks Hale and Shirley Parvin.
He blamed Newell for having masterminded the store robbery and maintained throughout his life that his first shot was an accident, triggering a chaotic chain of events in which Newell brought the other victims to him to be executed.
“My only regret is I didn’t take Ricky” with the other shooting victims, Prast told The Journal before his death.
Hale Mitchell said she also believed Newell “just found the right guy (who would ) pull the trigger” for him during the robbery.
Newell had previously been convicted of armed robbery, according to state corrections records.
“He put Prast up to it, but it didn’t take much,” Hale Mitchell said.
Newell was arrested first and implicated Prast as the trigger man in the shootings.
Newell and Prast had met in prison before each was paroled in late 1977, according to Flint Journal files.
The brutality of the Sunshine killings was a shock in Flushing, a small town in which homicides are rare and where many still remember the case.
Former Genesee County Prosecutor Robert Leonard personally led the prosecution of Newell and Prast in 1978, securing life without parole convictions in separate trials for the first-degree murders.
Hale Mitchell, who was 17 and a high school senior when her mother was killed, said Elizabeth Hale was a loving and “happy person who made life fun.”
She worked at Sunshine and part-time as a school cook, becoming friends with many of the students she served. When family members claimed her belongings, they found a wallet in which she carried dozens of senior pictures from students at the school where she worked.
“I missed so much with her,” Hale Mitchell said. “She was my best friend.”
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