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Learning by doing: Credit union employees prepare for robberies with simulated stickups

Posted by Aaron - 26/09/11 at 04:09:42 pm

Employees of Jackson area credit unions figured the best way to prepare for a robbery was to get robbed.

With the help of the Jackson County Special Response Team, a few bad guys, some guns, smoke bombs and flash grenades, a fake credit union was held up three times in three hours.

Read the story here and watch a video of a robbery turned hostage situation.

Walking with Gail: A mother walks to visit son in jail

Posted by Aaron - 07/02/11 at 05:02:01 am

Following Gail, and on some Thursdays, walking right beside, was a trying experience. She’s no one we’re to feel sorry for — a husband in prison for dealing meth, a son in prison for waving a gun at someone. She’s an alcoholic who hasn’t quite gotten her life straightened out with a mentally handicapped son that needs constant care.

She beat cancer, was homeless and has sacrificed a lot for her sons. But she’s made plenty of mistakes, plenty of bad decisions, and cannot be absolved from responsibility for her her son’s life of crime. He’s basically a grade-A screw up.

Gail showed me, and I hoped to show readers, two things. Her story is one of the struggles mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters go through when a loved one is locked up. It’s a story we don’t often tell.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx certainly haunted me while writing this.

Once someone goes to jail or prison, they disappear, for most of us, resurfacing rarely for court or parole hearings. But for others, and for more than we probably care to recognize, those behind bars are still family, they are loved ones and burdens at the same time. Gail let me peek into that.

Her story is also one of a mother’s love for her sons. In the piece, I wrote this:

It is impossible to measure a mother’s love and devotion to her children, but consider this.

The walk from Gail’s Joy Avenue home to the Wesley Street jail is about 2 miles — 2 miles there and 2 miles back. Rarely accepting rides or taking the bus, she has made the trek about 20 times to see her son.

Gail Hammett, 55, walked 80 miles to talk to her son. Fifteen minutes, Gail said, is not enough.

“It’s just enough to make you cry. It hurts.”

Mothers, most likely, will always love their sons. But what does that mean? How does that hold up in extremes? Who could love a young man with eight felonies and headed back to prison for a fourth time? Gail answered those questions and showed the depths that love can reach.

No, I don’t think we have to feel sorry for Gail, but we need to know about Gail. We need to read and understand that this, this story, is a consequence of crime.

I met Gail in December a few weeks before Christmas. I had gone to the Wesley Street jail myself  to see a man about a horse. I wrote a story over the summer about a man who saved a horse from starvation. The horse is fine. The man is in jail. I went to check on both.

While waiting at the jail, I heard women around me talking about Gail. She was late that day. They worried about her. I kept my mouth shut, told no one I was journalist and listened. Gail finally showed.

She sat across from in the waiting area. She asked me who I was there to see. “A friend,” I said. I asked her. She told me about her son. I asked about her walking. She told me about that too, as if walking 2 miles in the winter to visit a son in jail was no big deal.

It hit me later that maybe there is a story with Gail. I tracked her down, found her apartment. Katie and I showed up a week later, knocked on her door and introduced ourselves. She recognized me from jail. I told her I was a journalist. She seemed flattered we wanted to do a story on her.

Keeping up with Gail was tough. She canceled on Katie and me a lot. I knew my best shot at finding her was around noon on Thursdays when she would leave her apartment to start walking. But even then, she would leave early, decide to take the bus or somehow, disappear.

I waited an hour for Gail the morning of her son’s sentencing. She never showed. About a half hour after the hearing, she called and left a message. She was hysterical. She begged us not to run the article. She asked us to leave her alone, to let her be.

A few hours later, I went looking for her. She wasn’t at her apartment. I called her. She answered, started crying, and asked what her son’s sentence was. I told her, and she hung up. I waited five minutes and called her back. She answered, still crying, and told me she was wandering around downtown near the homeless shelter. We arranged to meet there.

Gail was talking to her son on a cell phone when we met. She handed the phone to me. Her son thanked me and told me not to write anything bad about his mom. I said I thought what she was doing for him and his brother was amazing and handed the phone back to Gail.

The time on her son’s phone card ran out. For about about the last 30 seconds, Gail said “I love you” as many times as she could, probably for 10 seconds after the call disconnected. We talked for a bit. She told me to print whatever I wanted. She just needed someone to scream at that morning.

I was glad Gail let me tell her story. It needs to be told.

Enjoy.

Walking with Gail: A mother walks to visit her son in jail

Two miles. Fifteen minutes. Two miles.

For six months, this has been Gail Hammett’s weekly routine. Almost every Thursday, she walks nearly 2 miles from her Joy Avenue house to the Jackson County Jail on W. Wesley Street.

She waits, is led up a staircase by a Jackson County Sheriff’s deputy and files into a narrow room. She holds a telephone to her ear and talks to her son — dressed in the orange jumpsuit and sitting behind Plexiglas — for 15 minutes.

She walks down the stairs, outside the jail and another 2 miles home.

“He’s my son,” she said. “I think that any mother would.”

She pauses.

“Maybe I’m not just any mother. I’m his mother.”

Gail Hammett, 55, walked to jail almost every week to visit her 27-year-old son, James Hammett. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 19 to 40 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to first-degree home invasion, felonious assault and two felony weapons violations, his fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth felony convictions. It will be his fourth trip to prison.

But Gail has not turned her back on her son. (read more)

Not important crime story told on Facebook

Posted by Aaron - 07/02/11 at 04:02:05 am

You could have easily missed this small step in a journalism revolution. About an hour after the Super Bowl ended, an entertaining call came over the scanner.

A disgruntled Steelers fan was taking some of his frustration out on neighborhood mailboxes and letting his neighbors know how he felt about the game.

I covered the incident, sitting in my chair and reporting what the scanner chirped (not recommended ever), on Facebook.

Yes, the tomorrow of journalism has dawned.

Thoughts on Jackson Police Officer James Bonneau almost a year later

Posted by Aaron - 29/01/11 at 11:01:07 pm

As I think back about the days immediately following the shooting, one conversation sticks with me. I didn’t have it. It wasn’t an interview I conducted, but one I overheard.

Jackson Police Officer James Bonneau was shot and killed just after midnight on March 9, 2009. About mid-afternoon that day, a woman called the newspaper and wanted to talk to a reporter about Officer Bonneau. Danielle Salisbury took the call.

The single mom lived in a not-so-nice part of the city and called the police frequently. Noises scared her, worried her. She kept an eye out for suspicious people and activity and called when she didn’t feel safe. Bonneau worked the night shift in her area and often came to her house.

She said he was always nice to her, re-assuring. He listened to her concerns, would check around the house and promise to drive-by during the night to watch. He would, she said. She saw his car.

He made her feel safe, she said. And now he was gone. She wanted to tell someone that.

I don’t know the exact conversation Danielle and the woman had. I don’t know her name. I don’t remember if she ended up in a story. I can’t know exactly why she called, but I can guess.

Many people after Bonneau was killed felt something. Few people knew him as a police officer and even fewer knew him as Jim. But many people felt something. I did. And many people did not know what or why.

I suspect she was hurting. She felt this inexplicable loss, a loss that perhaps her family, her neighbors, they wouldn’t understand. She didn’t know Bonneau, but his death hurt. She wanted to tell someone she hurt. She wanted to tell someone why, her story, how she knew him, how much she liked, appreciated and will miss him. She wanted to tell someone that she was not OK with his death.

I think a lot of us wanted to tell someone that.

She wanted someone to listen, someone to understand. She wanted to talk to someone. She picked up her phone and called the newspaper.

Round and round on ice

Posted by Aaron - 03/01/11 at 04:01:55 am

Forty seconds may not be enough ice kart racing action. Or it may be plenty.

Read the story here.

Dylan and Paul: Paralyzed with friends

Posted by Aaron - 15/10/10 at 08:10:14 pm

On Thursday night, Citizen Patriot photographer Katie Rausch and I drove out to Grass Lake to drop in on Paul and Dylan. Dylan’s house was completely dark; the whole family was at brother Seth’s junior varsity football game.

Paul had three friends over. They all sat around the bed in his room playing Magic: The Gathering, a role-playing card game. Paul played Magic a few times before his accident but did not take to it.

During therapy, Dylan and Paul play a lot of cards. One, they can; they both have some movement in the hands. Two, holding cards, dealing cards, shuffling cards, strengthens tiny muscles in their hands they both would love to have back.

Paul was bored one afternoon, reading a message board online and looking for a new hobby. Some people on the message board were talking about Magic. He decided to give it another shot.

Within a week, Paul had taught four of his friends the game. (By the way, the game, if you have never played is complicated. Paul has promised to teach me.) Thursday, Paul and three friends had alternating two-on-two matches underway. No one wanted to face Paul.

“It’s becoming the new craze in Grass Lake,” Paul’s father told me.

I am lucky to have met Paul and Dylan over the past months. Their accidents placed significant challenges in front of them and through our interviews, they have challenged me. The story was not easy and at times, frustrating, but it is one of the more enjoyable projects I have completed.

Enjoy.

Dylan Radabaugh and Paul Powell

Grass Lake teens injured in separate accidents forge friendship

They pulled pranks on friends and family who spent the night.

They staged wheelchair races through the courtyard and hospital halls.

And there was something about a bucket used as a helmet and a giant Michigan State University flag as a cape. Don’t ask.

Dylan Radabaugh and Paul Powell tell only a few of the stories from their time together in a shared room on the sixth floor of C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. If asked about others, the two Grass Lake Township teenagers look at each other and smile mischievously.

“We ran the place for quite a while,” Paul said.

Separate accidents in June paralyzed Dylan, 16, and Paul, 17. Dylan was in a car crash June 6 at Bohne and Kalmbach roads in Grass Lake Township. Paul hit his head on the bottom of a pool June 17 in Napoleon Township.

Related story: Doctors say prognosis for recovery is low for both teens

Neither can move much below their chests, including legs and abdominals. They do not have control of their hands and fingers. But above the neck, the boys are just that, boys, albeit slightly quirky boys, ones with bold personalities.

But that has nothing to do with the accidents.

“I’m still me,” Dylan said.

A story about pumpkins

Posted by Aaron - 04/10/10 at 03:10:21 am

I had a plan set before I went to cover the Fall Harvest Festival at Jackson’s Ella Sharp Park.

[Read resulting story here]

Talk to kids about pumpkins. Kids love pumpkins.

So Sunday, I did just that.

There were a few University of Michigan themed squashes and a few Michigan State ones. Next week is the big game. When one Wolverine fan figured out I would probably be rooting for the Spartans, he not only refused to be in the newspaper but also threatened to break my video camera. He is 7.

Smiley faces were big this year. There were a few scary ones. One girl painted a monkey face on her pumpkin. Others went with bats, cats, ghosts, and a mummy dripping blood. The mummy dripping blood girl, who is 5, was way too into zombies. But she will probably be well prepared for the impending zombie apocalypse.

The best pumpkin, though, hands down, no doubt winner, was one by a little 4-year-old girl. Among the shapes and squiggles of any 4-year-old creation, there was a face — two eyes, a dot for a nose and a big smile.

She was shy and would not tell me who she painted on her pumpkin. Her mother, however, told me it was Justin Bieber, pop-star, heart-throb, Twitter sensation, and her husband.

When I asked the 4-year-old if it was Justin Bieber on her pumpkin, she smiled just a little before covering her face with her paint stained hands.

Anyway, some of the braver souls told me about their pumpkins on video. Enjoy!

Pumpkins at Fall Harvest Fest

Chittock Avenue: Stories from a street with a reputation

Posted by Aaron - 23/08/10 at 02:08:39 am

For about a month, photographer Jake May and I walked up and down two blocks on Chittock Avenue, a street in Jackson with a growing bad reputation and site of the July 6 fatal shooting of Benjamin Willard. We wanted to find out what else happens on that street.

Life on Chittock: Plenty of eyes watch Chittock Avenue, and there is plenty to watch.

Plenty of eyes watch Chittock Avenue, and there is plenty to watch.

Morning to night, children play on its sidewalks, occasionally spilling into the street. Adults gather on porches; neighbors join. Cars speed up and down the hill between Rockwell Avenue and Morrell Street.

The 900 and 1000 blocks of the street are alive, teeming with activity, some neighborly, some not.

It is the latter — the consistent calls to police, loud disputes between families and neighbors, suspicious activity on the street and alley, and a murder last month — that has gained Chittock a reputation it might not deserve.

“I think there is a stigma,” said Juan Almaguer Jr.

When Jake and I started, people thought we were 1) from the cable company, 2) police, 3) case workers from the Department of Human Services. Once we assured people we were none of those things but journalists, all but a few welcomed us onto their porches and shared their stories. Now I cannot drive down the street without someone flagging me down just to chat.

Jake had his camera. I brought with me the paper’s Marantz digital recorder. In addition to the story, we produced three audio slideshows capturing life on Chittock.

Life on Chittock Street: Troy Bednar

Life on Chittock Street: Bruce Edwards

Life on Chittock Street: Wanda Jordan

One final note: Wanda Jordan grew up 3 miles from me in Ada, Michigan. Small world.

Elections concerns … which might not be real

Posted by Aaron - 06/08/10 at 08:08:41 pm

I voted on Tuesday and did a pretty good job of it.

While I won’t disclose who I voted for, I will say that no one I picked won. I’m like the political kiss of death. Sorry.

But I did get confused. After successfully navigating the ballot (it’s a primary so you can’t cross the center line and vote for both parties LAME), I couldn’t navigate my way out of the polling place. I walked right out the entrance and didn’t know until I saw the big signs — “Enter Only,” and “Exit Only” — in the parking lot.

Concerned, I did what anyone would do and wrote an email to the local reporter covering the elections.

Dear Holly, (she covered the elections)

After voting today, I accidentally exited the polling place through the entrance door. It wasn’t until after I was outside that I saw the big signs that said “Enter Only” and “Exit Only.” There were no signs inside, and I was very confused.

Will my vote still count? I hope so.

I think the confusing signs are a ploy by Obama or those Tea Party people to take away my right to vote for my favorite American Idol singer.

Signed,
Concerned/confused voter

She wrote me back.

Dear Concerned Voter,

According to city Clerk Lynn Fessel, your vote will still count despite the mishap. Signs were posted to prevent congestion at poll entrance and exits and were intended to smooth the flow of pedestrian traffic at precincts, given the tremendous voter turnout that is expected in this important election.

You are welcome to vote for your favorite American Idol contestant in the write-in portion on the ballot. However it is likely that person does not live in the applicable state House, Senate or Congressional district, so they could not take office (or become the next American Idol, which has a completely different voting structure).

Thinking all that was pretty funny, I came up with a few more, but didn’t send these to Holly. She was pretty busy with the real election stuff.

Dear Holly,

I was surprised to walk into my polling place and not have Simon, Randy and Paula (OK, Ellen, but I don’t listen to a word she says, love ya Paula) tell me what they thought of the candidates. How am I supposed to vote for the best one?

Signed,

♥♥

P.S. I couldn’t find numbers to text my vote to anywhere on the ballot. WTF?

Dear Holly,

I went to the polls wearing my Barack Obama T-shirt, the one with the really cool red, white and blue themed photo of him, the famous one. However, I did not see Obama’s name on the ballot. Voting for him is so much fun. Why can’t I vote for him every year?

Signed,

First time voter in 2008

Dear Holly,

I don’t see politics (or anything really) as a matter of black and white, so I brought a box of crayons to the polls today. I filled the bubbles next to the candidates’ names using a color code, like black for “I don’t like you,” and pink for “I really like you” and all the colors in between for “I kind of like you.” Around some bubbles I drew a heart or star to show that I really like them. For some candidates I took out my scissors and cut their names right off the ballot. We won’t go into why.

This way, I feel my true vote was cast. Will it count?

Signed,

Local elementary school art teacher

Dear Holly,
I voted today, and like I do every year, I voted for myself. Yup, I wrote myself in for every race on the ballot. And like every year, I except to finish with just one vote in each race (except for the county commission. Dave, I owe you, thanks for the vote.) And like every year, I expect to be shunned by the local paper. I spent $3 on my campaign (don’t worry about it Dave, the beer was on me), and it didn’t even buy me an article, photo or phone call. I expect, once again, that my name will not be included in tomorrow’s election results.
You call this democracy?
Signed,
The guy who also writes lots of letters to the editor

Enjoy.

PDFs of my heroin series in the Jackson Citizen Patriot

Posted by Aaron - 29/07/10 at 03:07:15 am

Maybe you are a print junkie like me. The internet is great, but some things look so good in print.

Like my series on heroin’s resurgence in Jackson County in the Jackson Citizen Patriot.

Below are pdfs of the pages. Click each link to download.

PS If you are my parents, don’t bother with the pdfs. I sent you copies. Love ya mom and dad!

Part 1: Addictive drug that can shatter lives ‘is back strong in Jackson’, July 25, 2010. (A1 pdf | A3 pdf)

Forced to choose between milk and heroin, Joe Pritchard called his dealer…

Once confined to dope houses and dens, slithering in the seedy underbelly of American cities in the 1970s, heroin is now a drug abused by all ages, all incomes and all over.

“And it is back strong in Jackson County,” Undersheriff Tom Finco said.

Part Two: ‘IT’S PURE EVIL’: Heroin kills. It strains families and destroys lives, July 26, 2010. (A1 pdf | A4 pdf)

Forced to choose between milk and heroin, Joe Pritchard called his dealer…

Once confined to dope houses and dens, slithering in the seedy underbelly of American cities in the 1970s, heroin is now a drug abused by all ages, all incomes and all over.

“And it is back strong in Jackson County,” Undersheriff Tom Finco said.

Part Three: Heroin addicts face physical and mental challenges when battling addictive drug, July 28, 2010. (A1 pdf | A4 pdf)

It is the toughest thing they will ever do.

Inside a Victorian house, set among the summer cottages and lakeside homes of northern Michigan’s sleepy town of Petoskey, almost 40 men wage war on addiction.

Among them is a 60-year-old with a lifetime habit of drinking; an 18-year-old with a drug habit that took hold fast and strong; and Joe Pritchard, a 39-year-old father of three from Jackson trying to rid his body and mind of the need for heroin.

“It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of pain,” said Pritchard, who was sent to Harbor Hall through the Jackson County Drug Recovery Court program.

Beating heroin is not a option. Addicts struggle internally, knowing they will square off with the disease for the rest of their lives. Police chase the drug, its users and its dealers.

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