The founder of Auto Workers for Trump 2024 in Macomb County thanked President Trump and predicted auto plants will reopen over the next few years during a brief speech at the president’s “Liberation Day” at the White House.

Brian Pannebecker attended the event Wednesday in the Rose Garden along with many top federal officials and 20 Michigan UAW members. Pannebecker cited the group of auto workers, who responded with cheers, during his remarks after Trump invited him to the podium on stage.

“We support Donald Trump’s policies on tariffs 100%,” Pannebecker said, pointing to the group, which included Chris Vitale of St. Clair Shores. “In six months or a year, we’re going to begin seeing the benefits. I can’t wait to see what’s happening three-four years down the road.”

In asking him to come on stage, Trump said, “He’s been a fan of ours and he understands this business a lot better than the economists, a lot better than anybody.”

Pannebecker started his comments by noting he is from “north of Detroit, Macomb County, the home of the Reagan Democrats.”

“My first vote for president was for Ronald Reagan,” he said. “I thought that was going to be the best president ever in my lifetime. That was until Donald J. Trump came along.”

He described metro Detroit as a region of closed and idle auto plants.

“My entire life I have watched plant after plant after plant in Detroit and the Metro Detroit area close,” Pannebecke said. “There are now plants sitting idle, there are now plants under-utilized. Donald Trump’s policies are going to bring product back into these under-utilized plants. There’s going to be new investment, new plants built.”

After he left the stage, Trump said of Pannebecker, “He got it right from the beginning; he got it before almost anyone else, and they (referencing the auto union members in the audience) did, too.”

“You’re going to be happy very soon,” the president assured.

Pannebecker, a New Baltimore resident and Sterling Heights native, is a retired auto worker who spoke at a Trump rally last November and has organized many pro-Trump events in recent years.

Vitale is a St. Clair Shores city councilman and recently recent Stellantis employee who was one of the 20 UAW members invited to attend the ceremony

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Vitale said before the event Wednesday morning from Washington D.C.. “They were looking for some autoworkers to show support, and I was picked to be one of them.”

Vitale said he is a strong supporter of Trump’s plans to heighten tariffs and has campaigned for them in the past. Like Pannebecker, he said he believes in the long run they will benefit the United States.

“My feeling is that the rest of the world is in a panic over these because they’ve been doing them to us for the past 60 years,” he said. “I would say in a year from now a lot of them probably won’t even be in place because the idea is to get those foreign governments to take down their tariffs on American products, level the playing field, so to speak, which is something I’ve been advocating for since 2008. Not looking for special treatment, just looking for equal treatment.”

He called the part of the negative reaction to tariffs “hair lighting on fire … nothing more than drama” because most products from Canada and Mexico initially will be exempt as part of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement. He called those reactions “scare stories.”

He said the explanation to support the tariffs is complex.

“What Trump is doing is fundamentally the right move,” he said.

Vitale paid for his trip, he said.

Vitale, who said he remains a member of the UAW, said he tested prototype drivetrains the last 10 years of his career at the Tech Center in Auburn Hills, and prior to that worked at other facilities for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Chrysler.

He was elected to City Council in November 2011 and was last re-elected in November 2023.

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The accomplice in a notorious murder case will receive a court hearing in June for the possibility of a new trial mostly due to multiple issues that may have occurred at the first trial.

Robert Taylor, 32, who is serving a life-in-prison sentence for the 2009 abduction and slaying of Matthew Landry, is scheduled for an evidentiary hearing June 13 in front of Judge Diane Druzinski of Macomb Circuit Court in Mount Clemens.

Taylor won the hearing based on the claims by his appellate attorney that his trial attorney, the late Louis Zaidan, was not told about an October 2010 letter an assistant Macomb prosecutor sent to a Wayne County judge asking for leniency for a key witness, Fred Singleton, in a burglary case there, and were not told about a deal with another witness, Thaser Toma Sadur. Therefore, Zaidan would not have been able to try to impeach the witnesses, according to Druzinski’s three-page opinion issued Jan. 31.

In addition, Taylor’s attorney says he passed a polygraph that contradicted the testimony of those witnesses, Druzinski says.

Singleton, who was a drug addict at the time, was the last known person to see Landry alive and can place Taylor with his co-defendant, Ihab Maslamani, with Landry on the night of Landry’s murder in August 2009 in a drug house next to the abandoned home where Landry’s body was found.

“Mike” Sadur testified about incriminating statements Taylor allegedly made to him while both were incarcerated at the county jail, according to a court document.

Druzinski also cites the argument that the jury should have been given an instruction about an “addict informer’s testimony.” The instruction in part tells the jury, “You may consider evidence of the defendant’s words, acts, or omissions, along with all the other evidence, in deciding whether the defendant acted knowingly.”

The case drew widespread public attention while Landry was missing, and during the immediate aftermath of it and subsequent court proceedings, including two trials.

Taylor was convicted in December 2010 of first-degree murder, carjacking, kidnapping, two counts of conspiracy and felony firearm possession for the Aug. 9, 2009, slaying of Landry, 21, of Chesterfield Township, from a single gunshot fired by Masalamani, following a jury trial.

Masalmani (also spelled as Maslamani in documents), 33, was convicted three months earlier by a jury in a separate trial of those charges in addition to other charges for his three-day crime spree that also included a Harrison Township bank robbery and Roseville carjacking that followed Landry’s kidnapping and murder.

Both Masalmani and Taylor were juveniles, 16 and 17, at the time of the slaying but tried as adults. They are supposed to be sentenced for a third time in the case due to rulings related to the U.S. Supreme Court 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama to outlaw automatic life-without-parole sentences for juvenile murder convicts. The high court says judges must consider a variety of factors in determining whether to sentence a juvenile murder convict to life without parole or a term of years, which in Michigan is between 25 and 60 years. (The state Supreme Court issued a ruling in Taylor’s case in 2022).

Taylor and Masalmani were resentenced in 2015 to life without parole, following sentencings hearings that featured testimony and arguments.

But third sentences were ordered by higher courts. Appeals judges ruled in 2023 that Taylor could still be sentenced to life without parole if Druzinski provides sufficient explanation of “clear and convincing evidence” Taylor was actively involved in the slaying as an aider and abettor.

The judge is permitted to hold another sentencing hearing at which the facts of the incident, the defendants’ upbringings, their “incapacities of youth” and their chance at rehabilitation could be raised, according to the ruling.

Before Taylor was to be sentenced a third time, his attorney filed a relief-from-judgment legal motion related to the discovery of the new information regarding the two witnesses, polygraph and jury instruction. The third sentencing would be postponed or cancelled depending on the outcome of a second trial.

Meanwhile, Masalmani is still scheduled to be sentenced again in October.

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