DETROIT (AP) A judge has approved a $13 million settlement in a lawsuit over an unannounced active shooter drill at a Michigan psychiatric hospital for children, an event that terrified kids and staff and caused them to scramble for cover, text family and urgently call 911.

Someone at the front desk declared through a speaker system that two armed men were inside the state-run Hawthorn Center in suburban Detroit and that shots were fired, attorney Robin Wagner said.

It wasn't true, but the message on Dec. 21, 2022, set off a frenzy.

It was horrifying, Wagner said Tuesday.

Everyone went into, Oh my God. This is the worst day of my life, she said. People were hiding under their desks. They were barricading the doors, trying to figure out how to protect the children.

Fifty children at the hospital each will receive roughly $60,000. Among staff, 90 people will receive an average of more than $50,000, depending on their score on a trauma exam, Wagner said. Two dozen others will get smaller amounts.

The state recognized that this was really a bad decision and harmed a lot of people, she said of the drill.

Police apparently didn't know anything about a drill. Dozens of officers responding to 911 calls showed up at Hawthorn Center with body armor and high-powered weapons, anticipating the worst.

Two people who were told to pose as shooters were captured, Wagner said. They were not armed.

Court of Claims Judge James Redford approved the settlement on Oct. 4, records show. More than $3 million will go to attorneys in the case.

The state Department of Health and Human Services felt it was in the best interest of all involved parties to settle this matter, spokesperson Lynn Sutfin said Tuesday.

We regret that our patients, staff and community were negatively affected by the unfortunate incident in December 2022, she said.

Wagner said the drill was organized by the Hawthorn Center's safety director, who still works for the state. The hospital was subsequently closed for reasons unrelated to what happened.

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DETROIT (AP) U.S. authorities charged five Chinese nationals with lying and trying to cover their tracks, more than a year after they were confronted in the dark near a remote Michigan military site where thousands of people had gathered for summer drills.

The five, who were University of Michigan students at the time, were not charged for what happened at Camp Grayling in August 2023. Rather they are accused of misleading investigators about the trip and conspiring to clear their phones of photos, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.

The FBI noted in the Tuesday court filing that there have been instances of college students from China taking photos of vital defense sites in the United States.

There was nothing in the court file revealing whether the five men were in custody. Emails seeking comment from the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office were not immediately returned Wednesday.

In summer 2023, the five were confronted after midnight near a lake by a sergeant major with the Utah National Guard. One said, We are media, before they collected their belongings and agreed to leave the area, the FBI said.

The FBI learned that the men had booked a room at a nearby motel a week before they were spotted outside Camp Grayling, 200 miles (321.8 kilometers) north of Detroit.

Four months later, one of the men was interviewed by border officers at the Detroit airport before traveling to South Korea and China. He told investigators that he and others had taken a trip to northern Michigan to see shooting stars, the FBI said.

A check of his external hard drive revealed two images of military vehicles taken on the same night of the encounter with the National Guard officer, the FBI said.

The other four men were interviewed last March after arriving in Chicago on a flight from Iceland. They acknowledged being in northern Michigan in August 2023, but they said it was to see a meteor shower, the FBI said.

They mentioned the National Guard officer but referred to him only as the soldier, a camper or nice guy, according to the criminal complaint.

The men last December communicated on WeChat about clearing photos from their cameras and phones, investigators said.

The FBI said all five men graduated last spring from the University of Michigan. They were part of a joint program between the university and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China.

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DETROIT (AP) A Michigan prisoner has persuaded a judge to throw out his burglary conviction, overcoming long odds by serving as his own lawyer in an appeal of a case that rested solely on his DNA being found on a soda bottle in a beauty shop.

Gregory Tucker, 65, argued that the DNA wasn't sufficient on its own to convict him in the 2016 break-in near Detroit, citing U.S. Supreme Court rulings about evidence.

U.S. District Judge David Lawson agreed that the case against Tucker was thin.

Any inference that (Tucker) must have deposited his DNA on the bottle during the course of the burglary was pure speculation unsupported by any positive proof in the record, Lawson wrote in the Aug. 1 ruling.

Anne Yantus, a lawyer who spent 30 years at the State Appellate Defender Office and who isn't connected to the case, said what Tucker managed to do isn't easy.

I'm just impressed that this is a man who had enough confidence in himself and his legal skills to represent himself with a habeas claim, said Yantus, referring to habeas corpus, the Latin term for a last-ditch appeal that lands in federal court long after a conviction.

The petitioner tries to argue that a guilty verdict violated various protections spelled out in federal law. Success is extremely rare.

Tucker was accused of breaking into a beauty shop in Ferndale in 2016. Supplies worth $10,000 were stolen, along with a television, a computer and a wall clock.

Tucker was charged after his DNA was found on a Coke bottle at the crime scene. Authorities couldn't match other DNA on the bottle to anyone.

Speaking from prison, Tucker told The Associated Press that he was overwhelmed by Lawson's ruling. He said he has no idea why a bottle with his DNA ended up there.

A pop bottle has monetary value, Tucker said, referring to Michigan's 10-cent deposit law. You can leave a bottle on the east side and it can end up on the west side that same day.

His victory hasn't meant he's been freed. Tucker is still serving time for a different conviction and can't leave prison until the parole board wants to release him.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, aren't giving up. The Michigan attorney general's office said it plans to appeal the decision overturning Tucker's burglary conviction.