Randall Alan Grinwis’s sentencing closed a murder case, but Donna Hyma’s relatives said it also marked the collapse of a relationship they had accepted for years.
GRAND HAVEN, Mich. — When Randall Alan Grinwis was sentenced for killing Donna Hyma, the punishment was measured in prison years, but Hyma’s family described the damage in a different way: as a betrayal by a man they had known, trusted and welcomed for much of her adult life.
Grinwis, 59, received 32 1/2 to 90 years in prison after an Ottawa County jury convicted him of second-degree murder and larceny in Hyma’s death. But the sentencing hearing was shaped as much by victim-impact statements as by the formal judgment. Hyma’s daughter and other relatives told the court that the case was not only about a fatal argument inside a Zeeland Township home on Jan. 1, 2024. It was also about the shattering of a long relationship that had appeared, at least from the outside, to be part of the family’s normal life.
Lisa Vanderyacht, Hyma’s daughter, delivered the line that most sharply captured that loss. “I trusted him with her life, and now I have to live with that for the rest of mine,” she told the court. She said she lost two people on the day her mother died: Hyma herself and “the man I thought I knew for 20 years.” In a few sentences, she reframed the case away from the defendant’s claim that he “snapped” and toward the family’s experience of the killing. The woman at the center of the case was not just a name in charging papers. Relatives remembered Hyma as funny, social and loved by people around her. One local account said she “truly knew how to have a good time,” an image far removed from the final moments prosecutors described at trial.
That contrast hung over the courtroom because the homicide itself was starkly domestic. Prosecutors said Hyma, 63, died after an argument about living arrangements in the home she shared with Grinwis in the Ottogan Mobile Home Estates on Patti Place. The couple had been together for roughly 18 to 20 years, depending on the account cited in court coverage, and family members testified that they drank heavily and argued often. Hyma’s daughter said her mother was not someone who would back down from a dispute. On Jan. 1, 2024, prosecutors said, the argument ended when Grinwis used his forearm to press on Hyma’s neck while she sat on a couch. He later admitted the killing in recorded statements, saying he did not know what made him lose control. A later autopsy ruled Hyma’s death a homicide caused by asphyxiation.
The family’s comments at sentencing also collided with the evidence of what happened next. Rather than staying with Hyma or calling for immediate help, prosecutors said, Grinwis left with $1,800 belonging to Hyma’s brother, money that was supposed to be stored in a lockbox. He drove away, called in a welfare check only after time had passed, discarded his phone and made his way through Indiana and Chicago before flying to Las Vegas. There, after the money ran out, he confessed. Prosecutors used that sequence to argue that the killing was followed by choice after choice. One prosecutor told the court, “This was not a snap,” and said Grinwis had about 40 seconds to reconsider during the attack itself. The family heard that argument not as abstract law, but as a rejection of the excuse they had already decided they would not accept.
Judge Karen Miedema’s remarks fit that same frame. She called the case “a very sad situation” and told Grinwis that the incident “could have been totally avoidable.” The judge said he had options and instead chose “a very drastic and very evil option.” Her sentence came after a February trial in which jurors heard multiple confessions, detective testimony and the medical findings. They convicted Grinwis of second-degree murder and larceny in less than two hours. By the time of sentencing, Grinwis had little to say. He declined to make a statement before the judge imposed the prison term. The silence left the hearing’s emotional weight almost entirely with Hyma’s family.
What emerged from the hearing was a fuller portrait of the human stakes than a verdict form can carry on its own. The family was not speaking to prove guilt; that stage had passed. Instead, they were fixing Hyma in the public record as someone more than a victim and explaining why the man at defense table represented a second kind of loss. In their telling, trust had been built over years and destroyed in one night. That is why the killing still read, even at sentencing, as a shock inside an old relationship rather than violence between strangers.
The prison sentence settled the criminal case’s immediate outcome, but the hearing made clear what remains unresolved for Hyma’s relatives: the permanent fact of her death and the harder truth that the person convicted of causing it had once been part of the family’s life.
Author note: Last updated April 19, 2026.