Patrick Sullivan

Features Patrick Sullivan

The group of young friends decided to spend one day in February trying to mix up a batch of homemade methamphetamine.

Four of them -- Sierra Marie Clark, 19, Leland Allan MacQuarrie Jr., 21, and siblings Michael Wayne Bousquette, 22 and Michele Lynn Bousquette, 20 -- failed in their first attempt to brew some one-pot meth.

Features Patrick Sullivan Pills are ground up, batteries are stripped of metal, lighter fluid is thrown in. Everything is put into a plastic bottle and shaken up into a reddish slurry. When the bottle is opened the concoction may stink of rotten eggs. At the end, if it works, you get a little bit of powder that can be smoked on a piece of tin foil.

Features Patrick Sullivan

A couple of volunteers are looking for more volunteers to help get veterans in need of medical treatment to their destinations.

In January, the Grand Traverse Area Disabled American Veterans (DAV) Chapter 38 took over a program that provides vets free transportation to Veterans Administration hospitals in Saginaw, Ann Arbor and Detroit.

Features Patrick Sullivan

Blue and orange-clad Pugsley Correctional Facility inmates were once a rare sight inside the circuit courtroom in Traverse City. Defense attorney Paul Jarboe, who started practicing law in 1982 and who handles retained cases and is on the court’s roster for indigent defendants, said over the years he rarely saw the inmates in court.

Features Patrick Sullivan Just outside of Boyne City, early last century, stood a formidable square building, home to 100 or so wayward boys. Some of them were orphans. Some came from families that got too large, or lost a father to drink or death. Some came to Boyne City because of trouble they’d gotten into on the streets.

Features Patrick Sullivan Wexford County Circuit Court Judge William Fagerman agreed with Williams that Gee could be considered a primary caregiver, even though he was not a registered caregiver, who was able to hand out reasonable amounts of medical marijuana to patients under the law.

Features Patrick Sullivan The U-M study has prompted a call from insurance and medical groups to reestablish the state’s helmet law, but proponents of the repeal argue it’s too early to draw any conclusions about the data and note that last year’s remarkably long period of warm weather led to more motorcycles on the roads.

Features Patrick Sullivan

After 17 years as a sales rep for a California engineered wood products company, Andy Gale and his wife Cindy took a year off, hopped in an RV and toured the country. In Southern California he missed the seasons. In Northern Michigan, he found them, and he and his wife fell in love with Traverse City and decided to settle here.

In 2008, he decided to look for a green career. He decided he wanted to start a nonprofit that would encourage recycling and donate proceeds from the sale of collected material to charity.

Features Patrick Sullivan The older one is taking vocational training and doing well. He is making all of his therapy sessions and when he meets with his probation officer, he brings proof that he’s completed his required drug and alcohol testing and has been to the AA meetings he’s supposed to attend.

Features Patrick Sullivan

After something unthinkable happened in a restroom during a service at Immanuel Baptist Church in January, one of the church-goers had something urgent to say to his pastor. Steven William Richard, 28, had just locked a six-year-old boy (who was attending church with his grandfather) in a toilet stall and molested him, and now he wanted to make things right, at least as far as he could see it.

Features Patrick Sullivan Harwell, of Reed City, is charged with criminal conspiracy for allegedly certifying medical marijuana patients without a “bona fide doctor-patient relationship” and with putting false information in medical records. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

Features Patrick Sullivan

Residents of Mayfield Township near Kingsley got creative a few years ago when they learned of a proposal to inject liquid industrial waste into a disposal well located in a field near the corner of of M-37 and M-113.

The township enacted an ordinance to require a special use permit for the disposal of industrial waste and amid public opposition, the owner of the well, Team Solutions of Kalkaska, backed off plans to dispose liquid waste from the shuttered Glen’s Landfill at the site.

Features Patrick Sullivan Ten months after Keno was installed in the bar at VFW Cherryland Post 2780 in April, 2010, an audit discovered that $26,000 in gambling revenue was missing. The person who conducted that audit, Richard Thibeau, was then just a rank-and-file member, but he had an accounting degree and almost two decades of criminal investigation experience in the Army...

Features Patrick Sullivan It was a hare-brained plan, and it failed in almost every way it could, except that no one got shot or killed.

There were six involved, and five went to the trailer that night, Feb. 28, 2012, a rundown, dingy-looking thing on a dead-end street across from a cemetery in the village of Wellston in Manistee County.

The plan was to rob the place to get a backpack that belonged to the woman. She was a medical marijuana patient, and they figured there was pot and cash in the bag.

Features Patrick Sullivan Detroit News columnist Neal Rubin will be in Traverse City, March 5, to host the next National Writers Series event, an evening with Buzz Bissinger, a bestselling author whose book, “Friday Night Lights” was turned into a movie and an NBC television series. Although Bissinger takes the spotlight next month, we wanted to shine it on Rubin and find out more about this great columnist from the Detroit News.