News Photo by Julie Riddle In a downtown Alpena alley on Friday, Brendan Maroney, pastor at Shoreline Wesleyan Church in Alpena, describes several Alpena neighborhoods known for drug crime.

ALPENA — Pastor Brendan Maroney said he’s grown frightened for his children’s safety because of the changes he sees in the community.

Maroney said he’s been physically assaulted in his work at Alpena’s Shoreline Wesleyan Church, helping people fight drug addiction. The city harbors more danger than most people realize, most of it connected to drugs, he said.

“The nervousness of violence is there at all times,” Maroney said. “I’m scared for Alpena.”

Statistics might justify that fear.

A year after zero murder investigations across Alpena, Presque Isle, Montmorency, and Alcona counties, Alpena County police in 2020 investigated two murder-suicides. Police currently have open investigations into two suspicious deaths, finding the bodies of Brynn Bills, 17, and Abby Hill, 31, less than a month apart this fall in Alpena Township.

If police determine someone murdered Bills and Hill, that would make four murder investigations in a 12-month span, something Northeast Michigan hasn’t seen since 2010, when police investigated five murders.

“We don’t have a rash of random violence going on up here,” insisted 1st Lt. John Grimshaw, commander of the Michigan State Police-Alpena Post. “We don’t. We have some specific incidents that have occured up here that are all involving the same people.”

But Northeast Michigan assaults have increased by 37% in 2019 and 2020 over the two previous years, according to police data. And some link that fact to a growing drug problem in Northeast Michigan: On a per-capita basis, Alpena County’s 2019 drug-related arrests vastly exceeded the statewide rate, according to state data.

Police have not linked any of the six deaths in 2020 and 2021 to drugs, though two men connected to the women who died this year have a history of drug-related arrests.

And Northeast Michigan is still safer than elsewhere in the state. On a per-capita basis, the rate of violent crime here is less than half the statewide rate.

Still, the violence Northeast Michiganders often associate with large cities downstate is only a short car or bus trip away and climbing north in the shape of drugs and guns, said Detective Lt. Stuart Sharp, commander of the Huron Undercover Narcotics Team, speaking generally and not specifically about any of the recent cases.

“We’re not going to be immune from it,” Sharp said.

Traffickers bring methamphetamine into Northeast Michigan in increasingly large quantities. The drug often leads to paranoia-borne violence or criminal behavior and can be linked to weapons, Sharp said.

In September, a Montmorency County felon was caught with 51 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Two men now face federal charges for allegedly stealing nearly 50 firearms from an Alpena gun shop in November 2020.

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Local groups in recent years have created wellness response teams, pushed for sober-living houses, trained recovery coaches, and explored other avenues to fight addiction.

Stopping violence starts with such efforts, Grimshaw said.

“That’s how it all rolls together,” he said.

Maroney, the pastor, recently moved to a new Alpena neighborhood, but, when he lived downtown, he said, he wouldn’t let his younger daughters walk down the block, fearing someone would take them.

At night, he watched people addicted to methamphetamine appear on downtown streets, their faces ravaged by the drug and by days with no sleep.

Delusional meth addicts have attacked him as he tried to counsel them, convinced he was a police officer. He has to lock his church door, afraid of a surprise visit from someone driven to violence by the drug.

“It’s here,” Maroney said. “It’s growing. And it’s going to explode if we don’t help.”