WZZM

GRAND RAPIDS — Two teens pleaded guilty Monday to killing a Wyoming High School junior last winter at Lions Park, ensuring that they’ll each spend a minimum of 30 years in prison.

The two pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, but because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, have a chance of getting out of prison before they’re old men.

Attorneys for Quentin Schafer and Carlos Delgado are expected to argue for a term of less than life when a sentencing hearing gets underway in about three weeks.

The guilty pleas were entered Monday afternoon during a status conference before Kent County Circuit Court Judge George S. Buth.

Michael White, 16, a junior at Wyoming High School, was found beaten and stabbed the morning of March 19 at Lions Park on Dunbar Avenue SW. He left home 11 p.m. the night before and never came back.

A plea agreement worked out with the Kent County Prosecutor’s Office calls for a minimum term of between 30 and 40 years for Schafer and Delgado.

After planning to kill White for about a week, his teen assailants used a knife, brass knuckles and White’s own skateboard to attack him at Lions Park before changing out of their bloody clothes and calling it a night.

Those chilling details emerged during a May preliminary hearing for the accused killers.

“Just stop, just leave me, just leave me here to die,’’ a mortally wounded White told his younger assailants, a detective testified at the earlier hearing in Wyoming District Court.

Wyoming detective D.J. Verhage said Delgado admitted to the slaying after being grilled about blood-soaked jeans found in his room.

Detectives tracked down Delgado after cell phone data indicated he’d been in contact with White the night White died.

Schafer was also identified as a suspect based partly on Facebook posts, according to earlier testimony.

DNA from Delgado’s jeans, Schafer's black T-shirt and brass knuckles recovered at Lions Park tie the teens to the murder, detectives testified. The assailants fled with a designer belt taken from White’s waist, police said.

An autopsy revealed a puncture to White’s right lung, which alone could have been fatal. He also had a punctured kidney, fractures to his upper and lower jaw and a fractured skull.

Detectives found a broken knife, brass knuckles and White’s blood-covered skateboard near his body.

A man walking his dog found White’s body the following morning, March 19, in the park off Dunbar Avenue south of 36th Street SW.

Delgado and Schafer are being prosecuted under Michigan’s automatic waiver law, which allows prosecutors to charge 15 and 16-year-olds as adults for serious crimes, such as murder.

Mandatory life sentences are no longer a foregone conclusion for teens convicted of first-degree murder. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 struck down automatic life terms with no chance of parole for teenage killers.

Michigan law was updated in 2014, allowing judges to consider a term of between 25 and 60 years for young people convicted of first-degree murder. Judges still have the option to sentence teens to mandatory life without parole.