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Police search Holland home of mutilation suspect Chance’s parents

Posted at 7:04 PM, Dec 05, 2018
and last updated 2018-12-05 22:32:20-05

HOLLAND, Mich.  -- Police were seen searching a home in Holland on Wednesday belonging to the parents of Jared Chance, a man charged in Grand Rapids with mutilating a dead body.

Jared Chance

Chance is 29 and was living in Grand Rapids.

But a woman who says she's a longtime friend of the Chance family told FOX 17 at the scene Wednesday afternoon that the house in Holland - in the 100 block of 20th Avenue - belongs to his parents.  Online property records confirm someone with the same last name (Chance) lives at that location.

Jessica Thielbar tells FOX 17, "“I recall Jared being, like, a really wild person. Sometimes angry and violent, like he’s had fights with other students sometimes and he was a bully to the other people, like would pick on kids and stuff. Sometimes he’d be a decent person and then there’s days where’d he just didn’t seem like he had that great of an attitude I guess, so he wasn’t very nice.”

Holland Police cruisers and a Grand Rapids Police forensics unit were on the scene Wednesday night. GRPD Sergeant Cathy Williams told FOX 17 via email, "We are there on follow-up to an open and active investigation...".

Chance was arraigned Wednesday afternoon in Grand Rapids on one count of mutilation of a dead body and one count of concealing the death of an individual. That, after police found the remains Sunday of an unidentified woman in an apartment on Franklin Street in southeast Grand Rapids. Chance was taken into custody at that time. He was being charged as a four-time habitual offender.

Police are still awaiting for identification of the body through forensic testing, and have not connected the case to a missing Kalamazoo woman, Ashley Young, who had been in Grand Rapids at the time. 

FOX 17 interviewed Thielbar, the family friend of Jared Chance, in Holland on Wednesday afternoon. She didn't wish to provide her photo. But she said,

“My stomach instantly turned into knots. I guess its more of, I can see him as a violent person, yes, but can I see him like murdering somebody or whatever he’s in jail being accused of and stuff? No I don’t think he was that type of person. So seeing something like that, just made me really ill.

"It's hard it really is. Especially because its like, 'Oh, I used to sit next to this kid in the cafe or in class,' or you know and there for a while - like I said - we were friends."