At today’s police briefing, we’ll hear about Howard Paul Allen.

Police Chief Doug Barthel and Minnehaha County State’s Attorney Aaron McGowan will be in attendance, we’re told.  

Chances are they’ve made an arrest in what has been the city’s only unsolved homicide since 1999. That year, 27-year-old Pamela Halverson’s body was found in the back of a Ford Tempo a few blocks from her home.

I’d assumed that Allen’s 2010 case was closed.

The Montana native was 52 years old when he was found stabbed to death inside his apartment on the 2400 block of South Marion Road in late 2010.

It was the 11^th homicide of the year, which was the most murderous in modern Sioux Falls history. Allen’s was one of seven that qualified as homicide for statistical purposes, three others were vehicular homicides and one was ruled justifiable homicide.

We never did learn much about Allen or the circumstances surrounding his death. We knew he was stabbed. We knew it happened early in the morning. We knew the cops thought the killer was someone Allen knew.

The next morning, I remember standing on the sidewalk near the house and talking to a city employee. The guy was holding a big hose that ran from the pool in Allen’s backyard to the street out front. He was watching the water spurt out intently. He told me his orders were to watch for something. I could only assume that “something” was a knife, perhaps tossed in the water by Allen’s killer, but the guy wouldn’t say that.

Allen’s landlord – his upstairs neighbor – didn’t want to talk to the media. He shooed us all away and chewed out the TV cameramen and women for standing too close to his house. The neighbors nearby didn’t know anything about Allen. One elderly woman wondered aloud if Allen was the quiet fellow she sometimes saw walking from to the Hy-Vee just down the road at 26^th Street and Marion.

What I was able to learn about Allen was that he had an alcohol problem. Our Argus archive showed that he’d been convicted of at least five DUIs since moving to Sioux Falls from Montana about 10 years ago.

He also had an ongoing dispute with a guy named Eric Richard Brim, against whom Allen once took out a protection order. Brim slashed Allen’s tires in 2006, the order said. Brim was later charged with stalking Allen. Allen was charged with domestic violence against Mr. Brim in 2006 and 2007. Both cases were dismissed.

None of that was particularly relevant to the story, and I never wrote it into a story. I didn’t have any proof that Allen and Brim had been in contact for quite a while. If I hear Brim’s name today, I’ll probably fall out of my chair.

Before learning about the Allen-Brim disputes, I wrote Allen’s fifth-offense DUI into a story about his death.

This upset a family member of Mr. Allen’s quite a bit. She called and chewed me out for including “the one thing you could find” about Allen and throwing it out for the public.

I told her that in murder stories, almost every detail about the victim ends up in the media eventually. There was no malice attached to the inclusion of the DUIs, I told her. I also said that once the killer was found, more embarrassing details could emerge. One of 2010’s murder victims was a meth dealer. Another one was beaten to death by the boyfriend of a young woman he was coming on to at a party – and by “coming on to,” I mean walking towards her with his pants and underwear off.

By the end of the conversation with Allen’s Montana kin, the woman told me she was glad to have spoken to me. She said she would rather know and accept that an onslaught of ugly details was forthcoming than to be upset every time she saw a new one.

And then nothing happened. Even with dirty details (let’s be honest, there might not be many or any), my guess is she’d want to see Allen’s killer brought to justice.

In any event, we’re about to know a lot more about the case by mid-morning.

So a friend of mine is $120 poorer today.

That’s because an SFPD officer on a traffic patrol caught her driving in a technically illegal but incredibly common manner last week at 74^th Street and Louise Avenue.

Specifically, she turned into the outside lane. The law says you’re supposed to turn into the inside lane.

She was pretty upset to get a ticket for a turn that dozens of people surely make every minute in our fair city. Especially on an empty road at 10 p.m. on a Thursday night.

Most people don’t get ticketed for that, she said. She’s right. Police commonly ignore that sort of thing, opting instead to take after speeders or drunk drivers.

What made this case different was that the unlucky woman in question made the offending left turn in what’s known as an “active complaint zone.”

What’s that, you say? An active complaint zone?

Yup. At any given moment in Sioux Falls, there are between 40 and 60 complaint zones being monitored more closely that other areas of town for traffic infractions.

As of last week, there were 45 complaint zones in the city, said Lt. Jerome Miller, the SFPD’s traffic boss. Such a designation begins when someone calls the PD to assail them with tales of drag racing, excessive speeding, stop-sign running and the like in their neighborhood.

The cops look into the claims a bit, and if there appears to be merit to the complaint, the area is added to the list.

In a complaint zone, patrol officers – even those who aren’t working traffic specifically – are meant to aggressively enforce moving violations great and small.

In the case of South Louise, Miller said, there have been numerous complaints about drag racing.

In Miller’s opinion, turning into the wrong lane is one many infractions his officers could stand to bust more often. Everyone thinks it isn’t a big deal, he said, until “somebody’s in the way” and their wide turn ends up causing a collision.

“Quite often the officers do not (write tickets for it), and it’s too bad,” he said.

He said he understands why my pal is upset with her ticket, but Miller gets fired up if you talk about “minor” moving violations. A person is more likely to be injured or killed in a car than they are anywhere else, he explains. Drivers don’t realize how dangerous the simple act of changing from one lane to another can be.

He has similar feelings about drivers who don’t buckle up.

“Yeah, it’s only a $20 ticket, but how many people have died because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt?” he asks.

My pal had one other strike against her: The cop who caught her was working a “saturation patrol.” He wrote that on the ticket. That means he was likely getting paid overtime out of a quarter-million dollar pot of federal grant money to be in the neighborhood looking for speeders, drunk drivers and other hazardous behaviors.

We reported on the grant when it came in a few months back. At the time, Police Chief Doug Barthel said his officers would “pretty much always” be on saturation patrol.

Be safe, people. Being unsafe – or doing something potentially unsafe - can get expensive.

A note for sex offenders: In a pinch, you can register your address as nowhere.

Like any other state, South Dakota has a sex offender registry. Everyone on it has to periodically tell the police where they live, and they can’t live within 500 feet of a designated “safe zone,” which in South Dakota means a school, park, church, pool or anywhere else kids are known to congregate.

If you don’t register, move without telling the cops or offer an address within 500 feet of a safe zone, you can go to prison.

Now, as you might imagine, it can be a bit difficult to find housing as a sex offender. Landlords of all stripes generally prefer renters who aren’t sex offenders. Hence, sex offenders often find themselves homeless.

Until 2010, that was a particular problem in Sioux Falls. The Union Gospel Mission, which is where you stay in Sioux Falls if it’s cold and you’re homeless, happens to be right next to a park.

That meant sex offenders who stayed there either a.) Got in trouble for registering an address within a safe zone, or b.) Got in trouble for failing to register their address out of fear they’d be in trouble for living within a safe zone.

The legislature approved an exception to the safe zone rule in 2010. Now homeless sex offenders – often guys who just got out of prison – are allowed to register the shelter’s address without fear of another trip to prison.

The legislature extended the exceptions again this year.

Interestingly, it’s not against the rules to register as “homeless.” This exception came into focus last week, when two registered sex offenders were arrested on murder and assault charges for allegedly beating another homeless man to death at a in-town campsite hidden in a mess of trees near 1100 North Cliff Avenue.

Eugene “Eddie” Martin and Clint Cottonwood were both registered as “homeless.” They are among 13 sex offenders on the South Dakota registry who list “homeless” as an address.

Nine of them live in Minnehaha County. Two live in Pennington County and one lives in Codington County.

So it is OK to register no address as an address. Police spokesman Sam Clemens sums things up this way:

“You can’t make somebody live somewhere.”

He pointed out that the rest of the rules still apply. As a sex offender, you can’t camp out within 500 feet of a safe zone. If you say you’re homeless then end up living at someone’s house, you can get in trouble.

In other words, all the rules still apply.

Here’s a quandary for you: One of the Pennington guys, Ronald Coleman, has a registered address of “Homeless/Living in vehicle/Flying J Travel Plaza.”

Does that mean he’d be cited for failure to register if he were found sleeping in a different parking lot?

I didn’t see or hear everything at yesterday’s civil rights conference at the Washington Pavilion. No one did. There was just too much happening at once.

After the keynote speeches, which I tried to summarize with this story, there were four “breakout” sessions on disability rights, human trafficking, bullying and policing the community.

I bounced back and forth between sessions, but the disabilities talk from the Justice Department’s Eve Hill was the most eye-opening.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is only 22 years old, and Hill says the nation still isn’t ready to recognize the civil rights of the disabled. The right to equal access imbedded in the ADA extends further than I had imagined before I walked into the breakout session.

Hill and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division head, Tom Perez, both mentioned the case of a disabled student who wasn’t given the necessary accommodations to take the LSAT. That’s the kind of discrimination I think of when I think about the ADA, but it’s not all so explicit.

Hill referenced a lawsuit against Netflix for its failure to close caption the movies and TV shows on its streaming service. The government’s position on new technologies is similar to its position on new buildings: Anything done after the passage of the ADA needs to be designed with access for the disabled in mind.

The Netflix case is ongoing.

The FCC is involved in the regulation of new technology, too.

Hill’s team also went after Arizona State University over Kindle e-readers that had been used in college classrooms. The problem wasn’t that the books didn’t have an audio function, it was that the menus on the e-readers didn’t recognize voice commands.

That essentially meant visually-impaired students had accessible textbooks they couldn’t open.

Arizona settled.

Hill talked about the Fair Housing Act, too, pointing to a lawsuit against the University of Nebraska at Kearney. That case involves a student who suffers panic attacks and a dog named Butch who’s trained to calm her down.The University wouldn’t let her keep Butch in a school-owned apartment.

Another tidbit: New amusement park rides, pools and boat ramps are required to be handicap-accessible. Hill said the DOJ is working on settlements with private businesses to push that message.

Then there’s a case in Baltimore involving sober living houses. The city apparently forces such houses to get a special zoning permit and earn the approval of neighbors before opening their doors.

That’s discrimination, Hill said. A treatment center that deals with alcoholics or drug addicts ought to be subject to the same zoning requirements as any other residential facility for people with medical needs, in the government’s view.

Will the Internet be handicap-accessible zone in the near future? Will recovering alcoholics and drug addicts be accepted as protected class 20 years from now? Is the calming influence of a trained companion dog as important to the mentally ill as the eyes of a guide dog are to the blind?

Time will tell.

So yesterday I wrote this story, about child molester Kermit Myers, who now is going to prison for 80 years for child rape.

One of the most outrageous facts of this case - one that has appeared in media reports since Myers’ arrest last year - was that the now-convicted rapist blamed a 6-year-old victim for “seducing” him.

He said she pulled down his pants and initiated contact.

Not surprisingly, this fact came out again at sentencing. The judge felt Mr. Myers’ assertion was one that took “unheard-of nerve.”

So I included it in the story. Reporting what happens in court and why is a rather large part of my job, and Myers’ assertions played into the judge’s decision to give him he maximum sentence allowed under the plea agreement.

I felt also felt that detail spoke volumes about Myers’ character and the depth of predation involved in the case. I still do.

Not every reader appreciated that. One of them left me a message this morning expressing her displeasure with my coverage.

Here’s the message on my voicemail when I got to work this morning.

“I’m calling in regard to your article in today’s paper. Why would you write in your article that a 6-year-old girl pulled down the pants of a now-convicted child rapist. You alone have verbally raped this innocent little girl. Would you put in the details if this were your daughter? There is something sick about you.”

And that was it. No name, no number, no nothing.

I’ve gotten messages like this before after writing about child molesters. I’m almost convinced there’s no way to write about it without offending some people.

Here’s the offending sentence. Maybe you agree with her. Maybe it would be better if we didn’t write about these cases at all …

“Johnson also pointed to Myers’ repeated claims that the 6-year-old pulled down his pants and initiated the sexual contact as evidence that he hadn’t taken responsibility for his behavior, a fact Lieberman referenced in making his sentence.”

Sometimes you’ve got to be forceful.

On Sunday, we ran this story about a hunting lodge that apparently violated a long list of wildlife rules on high-dollar duck hunts near Roslyn.

I had trouble getting in touch with the mostly out-of-state hunting guides who’d been indicted in the case.

I did talk to one of them, off the record, about what happened at Windy Hills lodge. The off-the-record guy told me that the lodge’s owner, Mike Bishop, was a friend of a friend.

He said he’d been called in to work at Windy Hills despite having never shot ducks before and that he didn’t know how strictly regulated the business of duck hunting is.

He said it didn’t take long for him to realize that something wasn’t right about the way his short-term employer was doing business. He basically said working at the lodge, seeing what he saw, was a “live and learn” experience.

The story seemed to check out based on what I already knew, but he didn’t want to be on the record saying any of those things.

I called numbers listed for Bishop a handful of times, but each was disconnected. I left messages for the others but got no callbacks.

Then I found Damien Rexrode. He’s a hunter from Pennsylvania with a web site promoting his guide business. The web site listed his cell phone number, so I called it.

Now, at this point, I assumed he knew he’d been indicted. I assumed he would understand why a South Dakota reporter would be calling him.

He didn’t. I’d later learn that he thought I was a telemarketer.

I called the number.

“Is Damien available,” I asked.

“Who’s asking?” a voice said.

“This is John Hult. I’m a reporter for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader writing a story about hunting in South Dakota …”

Click. He was gone.

I said something rude about Mr. Rexrode before I hung up on my end. I sometimes do that when people hang up on me.

I wasn’t quite ready to give up, though. I had a feeling that Mr. Rexrode was caught unawares by his Windy Hills experience, just like my off-the-record guy was.

So I logged onto Rexrode’s website once again and found his “contact us” box. I wasn’t sure if Rexrode would check the messages, but I had to give it a shot.

Here’s what I wrote:

“This message is for Damien. I’m writing a lengthy story about Windy Hills and Mike Bishop for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

Your name, age, location and the name of this business will appear in the article, which is set to appear online on Sunday. At that point, a link to the headline is likely to show up near the top of google searches for “Damien Rexrode” or “True Country Whitetails.”

A 14-page indictment will be posted online and downloadable, as well.

Please contact me or have your lawyer contact me at your earliest convenience if there are any details you believe readers ought to know about how you got to or what happened in Roslyn.”

I ended with my phone number.

Five minutes later, Mr. Rexrode called it. Turns out he didn’t even know he’d been indicted. He says he had no idea he’d broken the law. He’d never hunted waterfowl until he got to South Dakota.

He even asked me,

“Does this mean I could go to jail?”

He also heard me call him a “piece of  …” I explained that I thought he was a bad guy ducking my call, but it was a bit awkward. I was a bit (ok, really) rude.

Now, had Rexrode actually spoken with a lawyer before talking to me, he probably would have hung up on me, anyway - on his lawyer’s advice. Lawyers generally don’t want their clients discussing criminal cases with reporters.

Do I feel bad to have taken Rexrode off guard and asked him questions before he talked to his lawyers? Maybe a little.

Do I think things would have looked worse for him and everyone else in the indictment if his thread of the story hadn’t been there in Sunday’s paper? Absolutely.

You can’t always believe what a 10-year-old tells you.

Parents of 10-year-olds have known this for years. KSFY isn’t convinced.

At Monday’s police briefing, we were told about a second hand report of suspicious activity at John Harris Elementary in Sioux Falls.

The narrative was pretty fantastic. As in, too fantastic to be taken at face value.

Apparently, on Sunday, a 10-year-old girl told a relative that she and seven or eight other kids were at the playground Saturday afternoon when a 50-year-old man pulled up in a black car and looked at them. There was a 30-year-old woman in the car, too, she said.

The scary pair left for a while when they saw a teacher come out of the school, but they came back a half hour later, this time in a white car. At this point, the kids ran inside the school and hid in the bathroom. The man and woman followed them into the school but not into the bathroom.

They came back a third time, police spokesman Sam Clemens told us, this time coming out of the car to offer them lemonade. On a fourth visit, they just watched the kids.

KSFY ran a full account of the tale, complete with comments from a concerned parent who “had not heard about that.”

Probably because the kid made it up.

The school resource officer has since spoken to the other kids who were on the playground Saturday, Clemens said at today’s briefing.

All of them said the story was bogus. There was a white car with two teenagers in it, they said. The white car was driving around the parking lot in a fashion that suggested someone inside was learning to drive.

The 10-year-old who told her relatives about the imaginary kidnappers told the SRO she made up the story because the white car made her nervous, and she didn’t think she’d be taken seriously without the gory details.

Could be. Could be she just wanted to be on television.

Because they reported the first story, KSFY had to post this today.

It’s not hard to see why KSFY’s Jake Iverson bit on the story. Last month, television stations (and yeah, even the Argus Leader) had a feeding frenzy over “suspicious person” reports. Most of the reports didn’t match up. There were old people, young people, people in trucks, vans and cars, etc, etc.

At that time, I was of the opinion that some of the later reports came in simply because the earlier reports had made it to television and convinced children to “be more vigilant.”

A cynic might call that cop-speak for “be suspicious of everyone” or “report absolutely everything.”

I can see why kids would be scared. If I were a kid and I watched TV, I’d be scared. I don’t think any of us want police to start brushing aside reports of suspicious activity, either.

For whatever reason, the reports slowed to a trickle then stopped.

Why that happened, I can’t say. I do know this: No one was hurt, no one was kidnapped and no one was arrested during the media-assisted outbreak of stranger danger.

Here’s something else I know: There was a murder trial in Sioux Falls during the week those reports took over the local media cycle, and I was the only one in the courtroom.

Now, I know the stranger stories pulled more eyeballs day to day than the Vind Strozier trial did. Strozier stabbed a guy named Rodney Iron Hawk to death in the parking lot of the DeLux Motel after a drunken exchange of words. It wasn’t a high-profile case involving pillars of the community that a huge mass of readers could relate to. And Vind lost at trial, which was the expected outcome.

Even so, the case matters. At least a little. Iron Hawk’s family will never see him again. Strozier will be in prison for the rest of his life. Seemed worth a word or two to me.

Today – especially today - I can’t help but wonder how many of the stranger danger stories eating up so working hours for so many Sioux Falls reporters during the week of the trial were just made up or trumped up by frightened youngsters.  

January 27^th wasn’t a good day for Kim Rankin Brown.

Mr. Brown picked up his third DUI in 10 years just after 7 p.m. that day, which would ultimately result in a felony indictment.

Police spokesman Sam Clemens says a driver sharing the road with Brown watched his Jeep swerve multiple times, hit a snow bank and keep driving. The witness called 911 and followed the Jeep, which eventually parked in front of a house on Mable Avenue.

When the officer arrived, the 50-year-old Sioux Falls man was being helped into the house by a sober woman.  Brown was not pleased to see them. The police report says he refused to take a breath test, took a swing at the officer and had to be forced to give a blood sample at the jail, Clemens said.

Here’s an actual line from the police report:

“(Brown) said he was going to tell Obama, the governor and the mayor that all the officers involved were racist.”

That’s the part of Brown’s day readers might find (sad and) amusing.

Here’s the other part, which is not amusing at all: Jan. 27 was the day police got a tip that Brown might have molested his girlfriend’s 8-year-old daughter.

That report, which would result in a first-degree rape indictment, came about six hours before his Jeep hit the snow bank.

That allegation in the court paperwork is that the victim fell asleep in her mother’s bed one night last August, and Brown stumbled into the room and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

The girl said Brown later got up and demanded oral sex from her mother, who’d fallen asleep in the girl’s bed.

Now, Brown has been convicted in the past 10 years of obstructing an officer and aggravated assault, and he’s obviously got the DUIs on his record, but he’s never been convicted of anything that would land him on South Dakota’s sex offender registry.

I don’t know if alcohol was involved in every criminal incident on his record, but it’s clear that drinking tends to get Brown in trouble. That’s not really the point, though.

The sad truth Brown’s bad day makes me think about is the stunning frequency with which crimes of sexual violence and alcohol use/abuse appear simultaneously.

This isn’t any sort of revelation, of course. For examples in Sioux Falls, look here, here or here.

The other takeaway is this: If it turns out that Mr. Brown’s drunken behavior a.) actually happened as it’s alleged, b.) was an isolated attack on the youngster, it shows just how nasty and serious these things can be.

I’ve heard plenty of scenarios while covering cases involving rape, sexual contact and the like. Anyone convicted of a sex crime in South Dakota is given a psycho-sexual evaluation to determine how dangerous they are or could be, and defense lawyers spend a lot of time during sentence hearings using the results to talk about how their clients came to be where they are.

Some sex offenders and spend their days fighting the urge to molest children, look at child pornography or attack the objects of their desire. Some drink in order to prepare themselves for criminal behavior they wouldn’t otherwise have the guts for. The worst don’t try to fight they urge, they only try not to get caught (defense lawyers tend to gloss over a result like that).

On the other end of the spectrum are those who get drunk and act on disturbing impulses make terrible decisions with tragic and long-lasting consequences.

Victims don’t suffer less because their attacker was a drunk, as opposed to a diagnosed sexual deviant. And the damage from a drunken sexual assault, unlike property damage caused by a drunken driver, can take a lifetime to repair.

Smoke It Up tobacco is still kicking.

They don’t sell “herbal incense” or “potpourri” any more, but the shop on Burnside still sells tobacco, pipes, papers and a hodgepodge of other smoke-related whatnot.

People who read what I wrote for the March 18 paper probably didn’t get that impression.

My mistake.

Thanks to a week away from the office, I didn’t figure this out until yesterday.

We ran a story hereon how difficult it is to ban synthetic drugs, which Smoke It Up sold until recently, advertising them as “not for human consumption.”

Here’s what I wrote:

“Co-owner Corey Morrison left town. Police confiscated loads of product from his partner before the law passed, he said, and the business no longer was worth the hassle.”

I wrote that because Morrison, a Texas native, told me as much a few days after the state issued its emergency ban on a long list of synthetics.

I remember pacing back and forth in my living room (that’s how I’d do all my interviews if I could help it), talking on my cell phone with Morrison and having an exchange like this:

Me: “So what are you going to do now? Close up shop and leave town?”
Morrison: “Pretty much.”

That’s how I recalled the exchange on the day I wrote the offending sentence, anyway. Morrison also told me he was going to open a shop in Connecticut.

Because that conversation was one of about a dozen I had that day on the same topic and my notes from the (mostly) off-the-record conversation were spotty, I admit that the words might have been different.

Whatever they were, I didn’t think twice about writing “Corey Morrison closed up shop and left town.”

I should have. The co-owner of the Smoke It Up store on Minnesota Avenue called last Thursday to explain that the company is still very much in business.

Matt Leiss – the guy whose product was confiscated – says Morrison did go to Connecticut to open a store that sells potpourri. He just didn’t stay.  

The Minnesota Avenue store doesn’t do much (if any) business without potpourri on the shelves. But Leiss’ store on Burnside Avenue is still open, as well, albeit bringing in about a third as much cash as it did when potpourri was on the shelf.

Leiss doesn’t want to get back into the potpourri business in any form, and I can understand why. Police pulled him over on Nov. 30 last year and asked to search his car. Believing that the $20,000 worth of potpourri in his trunk was technically legal, he said “go ahead.” He told me today he even helped the officer open his trunk, which is where he began keeping his product after several burglaries at Smoke It Up.

The officer confiscated the stuff anyway, and Leiss never got it back. He was never charged with selling intoxicants, either.

It was taken as part of an investigation that didn’t pan out, he says.  

Sellers in Utah and Illinois probably have similar stories, and Police Chief Doug Barthel has floated the idea of compliance checks. Not a shock that Leiss isn’t excited to get back in the business.

The stuff is still out there, though, and people are still ignoring the “advice” of the retailers who tell them not to smoke it.

On Monday, a Sioux Falls woman was involved in what looks like a synthetic-drug related car wreck. Last night, there was some fear that she’d died.

It’s still unclear how large a role the herbal incense played in the “under the influence” part of her DUI charge, but it will be interesting to find out.

Jim Cooper was indicted for a third DUI last week.

That doesn’t mean much to you, but it means something to me.

Cooper was one of the 61 people charged with DUI profiled for this series on drunk driving in Minnehaha County. I followed the cases of each person who appeared in court on the last week of January 2011 through the first week of December as a way to bring readers closer to the most common and costly criminal charge in the county and the state.

Cooper was on my list, charged with his second-offense in 10 years.

I liked Jim a lot, in large part he didn’t mind talking to me. Plenty of the 61 people didn’t want to talk to me about their DUI at all - shocking, I know. A handful spit out some rote explanation and tried to get off the phone as quickly as possible. Almost none were happy about the call.

Cooper, by comparison, wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. He happily offered up the kind of insights and opinions plenty of people charged with a crime have but don’t share with reporters.

Among other things, Cooper said the 24/7 program was a “joke,” that he planned to play nice while he was in trouble but start drinking again once his case was cleared  and that South Dakota’s legislature was arrogant for trying to legislate sobriety.

Most memorably, perhaps, Mr. Cooper told me that South Dakota’s strict rules on DUIs set it apart from the other states he’d lived in, most of which apparently saw drunk driving as a far less serious offense. He said he was “done” drinking and driving, because “frankly, South Dakota ain’t f**king around.”

I haven’t talked to him since seeing his name on the court calendar last week. I called the clerk of courts yesterday to make sure the new charge was a DUI, but that’s as far as I’ve gone.

He might call anyway. He called my office phone twice on the week the DUI project ran and stayed positive despite the fact that one of the stories had him violating 24/7 just hours after telling me the program was a joke.

Cooper is the second of the 61 I’ve seen charged with a felony DUI since the series ran. The other, Michael Wrage of Dell Rapids, also was very open about the issues he’d been dealing with when we spoke last fall about his second DUI.

I ran into him in January after his arraignment on his DUI 3. I introduced myself (we’d only spoken on the phone before that) and asked what had happened. Things in his life had gotten worse, he said. All the struggles in his private life – ones I promised not to put in the paper – had gotten worse since he’d last spoken.

He got drunk and drove again over the stress, he said. He wasn’t out to have a good time on either of the nights he got his second and third DUIs.

I sincerely hope I don’t see the names or faces of any others from the group of 61 during my daily visits to the courthouse this year. I’ve been sober for more than five years now, and I drove drunk more times than I care to remember during the years I played chicken with my alcohol problem. I never learned to control myself, regardless of how badly I wanted to be someone who could.

I’d rather see the people I wrote about last year at the grocery store. Or on the bike trail. Or at least in the back seat of a cab on a Friday night. But given the persistent nature of addiction and alcohol’s tendency to encourage poor decisions, my sincere hope is unlikely to become reality. With 61 people, a few more are bound to find trouble again.