Patrick Sullivan | Author
Anti Viral
March 7, 2020
Health officials in northern Michigan are gearing up for the arrival of COVID-19, a.k.a. coronavirus. We circled the region to find out what's happening, where — and what's next.
‘Prepared, not Panicked’
Many people never have to wo...
Read More >>
Portrait of an Alleged Small-town Pimp
Feb. 29, 2020
Warning to our readers: The story that follows contains graphic language and details of a sexual and violent nature.
At noon on a chilly Tuesday last February, a 36-year-old woman walked with a friend into the Benzie County Sheriff’s Office to complain that someone ...
Read More >>
The Gravel Pit Next Door?
Feb. 22, 2020
Little did Jim Brouwer know when he opened his mail one day last August that a legal notice he held in his hand would virtually take over his life in the coming months, sending him door to door to warn neighbors and to enlist others to join his cause.
When Brouwer and his wife, Ca...
Read More >>
Struggles of a Mom and Pop Pot-shop Owner
Feb. 15, 2020
Stephen Ezell has been in the legal pot business as long as than just about anyone in northern Michigan. He’s lived through the awkward, clumsy legalization of first medical and the recreational marijuana.
Ezell said that his business, Interlochen Alternative Health — a m...
Read More >>
'Receipts, Hair, Bullet Fragments & Rumors'
Feb. 8, 2020
There were eight elk killed in poaching cases in the Pigeon River State Forest this season. Five of those killings remain unsolved. Michigan Department of Natural Resources investigators want to catch those responsible for every last elk death, even if it takes years.
...
Read More >>
Go inside the 86th
Feb. 1, 2020
Michigan’s 105 district courts aren’t the state’s highest or farthest-reaching courts. They’re a starting point, where the accused go to face initial charges, a judge, and sometimes even a jury. District courts are charged with resolving their region’s le...
Read More >>
Jan. 25, 2020 The trial of Robert Jensen Schwander for the brutal murder of Carly Lewis in June 2011 was not about whether or not Schwander killed Lewis — he confessed to killing her early in the investigation. Rather, the trial was supposed to determine what kind of killing had occurred. Jan. 11, 2020 It was on a warm, sunny summer evening when the 13-year-old Cadillac student bought some cookies at one of the city’s Dollar Generals before heading home on his bicycle via a section of the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail, a 92-mile trail that runs from the southeast end of Cadillac&rs...
Read More >>
Jan. 11, 2020 A Benzie County distillery is offering a taste of Michigan’s Copper Country in a whiskey that’s based on a century-old recipe. Jan. 4, 2020 If you drive by the old white house on Mission Road in the village of Old Mission, on the Old Mission Peninsula, there isn’t anything about it that jumps out at you to reveal what a significant building it is. There is a historical marker, but other than that, it looks like another ...
Read More >>
Dec. 14, 2019 When a man passed a note through a Walgreens drive-thru saying that he’d rigged the store with a bomb and needed all the morphine and Ritalin the Grand Traverse store had, an alert pharmacy clerk and quick action by detectives soon led to all the evidence needed to identify a suspec...
Read More >>
Dec. 7, 2019 For weeks, in a shopping plaza near the southern limits of the village of Kalkaska, workers have been busy transforming a former Forest Area Federal Credit Union branch into a marijuana store. Nov. 30, 2019 The era of shipwrecks on the Great Lakes ended in 1975 with the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, according to Michigan historian and shipwreck hunter Ross Richardson. Improved weather forecasting and larger vessels have meant there haven’t been many significant wrecks since then. Nov. 23, 2019 Christopher Hindbaugh didn’t know what he was getting into when he took over as executive director of Addiction Treatment Services in 2009. The Traverse City-based nonprofit — which had been providing substance abuse services to the community for 30 years — was in deep f...
Read More >>
Nov. 16, 2019 People were caught off guard when Lake Michigan reached record highs in 1986, the last time lake levels were near the level they are today. That year, like this year, the lake crept onto highways, washed away beaches and trees, and tumbled homes from bluffs into the unpredictable inland s...
Read More >>
Nov. 9, 2019 Warning: Details in the following story might be disturbing to some readers. Oct. 26, 2019 It may be an off-year election, but contested mayoral elections in the region’s two largest cities are heating up. Elsewhere, voters will be asked to weigh in on whether to fund schools and how public money should be spent. Northern Express zeroed in on some of the most significant ...
Read More >>
Oct. 19, 2019 A failed 2012 experiment bore the nearly 50-year-old waste hauler — and environmentally conscious northerners — some unexpected fruit: a series of massive machines that can take in and tackle more recyclable materials than most any system in the nation. Northern Express fo...
Read More >>
Oct. 12, 2019 Located on 200 acres on a pond in the woods between Kalkaska and Mancelona, the Au Sable Institute still looks like the small summer boys camp it once was, since its founding in the 1950s. Oct. 5, 2019 Construction of FishPass, an experimental fish sorting lock system, along with the development of a park, a small amphitheater and kayak/canoe portages, represents the culmination of a decade-plus-long project to restore the Boardman River to something closer to its natural state.
A Punishment to Fit the Crime
Was it Racism?
Iron Fish's Copper Queen
Copper Queen, originally served in the saloons of Red Jacket — now Calumet — when the copper mining industry made the Kew...
Read More >>
Mirror of History
Committed in 2012. Solved in 2019.
Kalkaska: Marijuana Mecca
The Village of Kalkaska wants to be a mecca for marijuana, and as recreational mariju...
Read More >>
Welcome to the Golden Age of Shipwreck Hunting
A Decade on the Front Lines of the Opiate Epidemic
We’ve Been Here Before
Double Life
There was talk among a small group of inmates at the Grand Traverse County jail, talk of a monster who lived in town, one who would lure young men to his office after dark, offer them meth, an...
Read More >>
Time to Decide
Inside American Waste
Saving Our Sacred Earth
But it’s much more than a camp today. Throughout the school year, Au Sable hosts hu...
Read More >>
Is Traverse City Ready for FishPass?