Every year, police make thousands of drunk driving arrests on Oakland County roadways. But rather than send many of these men and women off to pay penance inside the walls of Oakland County Jail, Clarkston’s 52-2 District Court is taking part in a growing nationwide trend.
In this two-part series, The Clarkston News takes an inside look at Sobriety Court and the remarkable life changes made by two local men.

Steve K

Steve Koss hasn’t read the journal his daughter wrote while he made a slow, uncertain recovery from alcohol poisoning in 2003.
Nor did he read the letters his family penned four months earlier as they planned an intervention.
It was a last-ditch, desperate attempt to make him hear the words they’d been saying for years: We love you. Please, please, please stop drinking.
But the message got lost in the alcohol, and nothing anyone could say would make him dump his bottle of Old Crowe down the nearest drain. Not then, anyway.
‘Sometimes when my friends are over, you are so drunk that you don’t call me by my name,? wrote Koss? then 14-year-old son, Stephen in the intervention letter to his father. ‘You call me Mike. Then my friends make jokes about your drinking and tease me that my dad does not know my name.?
The family hired a professional facilitator for the intervention’everyone chipped in toward the $1,800 fee’and wrote letters from the heart, as instructed.
Stephen’s letter begins with memories of a father who helped build a space shuttle for one school project, and a lighthouse for another; a father who brought home pizzas for Stephen and his friends during the school year, and created fun family memories each summer at the lake.
But as Stephen’s emotional whirlwind of tiny, careful print marches across line after line for two long pages, it becomes clear he feels his family is in serious trouble.
‘Other times my friends will be over and out of the clear blue you explode at me over nothing,? he writes. ‘It is embarrassing. It’s not just yelling, it’s like an explosion of rage. Your eyes look different and you scare me. My friends feel uncomfortable and later tell jokes about my drunk dad, and it sucks’When you are drunk, I am scared of you. I feel inferior and worthless.?
Finally, Stephen makes his plea.
‘I love you Dad and I just want you to stop drinking. I want you to be a normal dad. I do not think you know anything about me and I hope you will want to when you have stopped drinking’I need a Dad.?
With several college degrees under his belt and a long career managing commercial accounts for Ryder Transportation, Steve Koss was, by all accounts, a successful businessman.
But business often meant lining up golf outings and other entertainment to show clients a good time. The food was plentiful and the booze flowed.
And alcohol played an increasingly important role on weekends, when it was time to relax and unwind in front of the television.
‘I’d pour myself a little bourbon and coke and settle in to watch the game,? Koss said. ‘And I always drank the same thing: Old Crow. Jack Daniels when I had to, but Old Crow was the same thing for half the price.?
Eventually he left Ryder and moved to another company, then another, where he was hired to start a truck rental and leasing program.
But once the new program was up and running, the boss decided Koss? job was perfect for his son-in-law.
So he left another job feeling down on his luck and sorry for himself. The sorrier he felt, it seemed, the more he drank and the worse things got.
Before he knew it, his second wife wanted a divorce and his daughter wouldn’t speak to him.
Both were tired of his tantrums, tired of the name-calling and the abusive drunken language he spewed around.
‘I wasn’t a violent drunk,? he said, meaning he didn’t physically assault those he was supposed to love most. ‘I just liked my booze.?
It was a habit he learned early in life.
As second oldest in a family of nine, Koss watched his mother sneak a drink whenever she could’his father always had a supply in the house for company, he said. It was the polite thing to so.
In 1971-72, Koss served as a helicopter test pilot and an aircraft recovery officer in Vietnam.
He and his comrades, he said, would drink all night and fly all day.
‘There was a saying,? he remembered. ‘Twenty-four hours from bottle to throttle. Not.?
When he came home and moved to Michigan in 1976, he said, drinking-and-driving was socially acceptable, and people made a common practice of having a few beers behind the wheel during a long trip.
When police decided a driver appeared too drunk to continue on, the intoxicated person was merely loaded into the back of a cruiser and transported home.
But years passed, people died on the highways, laws changed, and Koss? family began to worry’really worry’about him.
So they set up the intervention.
There were no cars in the driveway, he remembers, but when he entered the front door, allegedly to visit with his sister, he saw brothers and brothers-in-law, sisters, his former wife and 14-year-old Stephen.
‘Everyone was sitting around with a chair for me right in the center,? he said. ‘They were going to tell me what a nice guy I was when I wasn’t drinking. They all wrote letters, planned the meeting. I was (furious).?
Koss didn’t think he had a problem. He didn’t hear a word anyone said.
‘I was doing a slow burn,? he said, remembering the fury and disbelief boiling inside. He was having none of it.
‘They threw me out,? he said, ‘and I went to the bar.?
Four months later, in July 2003, Koss got alcohol poisoning and his first DUI’driving under the influence’during the same drunken binge, and was rushed to the hospital after an alcohol-induced seizure nearly killed him in Genesee County Jail.
He doesn’t remember it, but family members later told him he insisted sprinkler heads on the ceiling were spaceships, and that he used the nurse call button to order ? a perfect Manhattan. And make it quick.?
After that, he stayed sober 14 months.
But he started drinking again in September 2004.
Just over a year later, in November 2005, Koss was returning to his Independence Township apartment near Clintonville and Maybee Road when the lights flashed behind him, again.
A second DUI was serious trouble, and came with the likelihood of time in Oakland County Jail.
But when he stood before Judge Kelley Kostin of the 52-2 District Court, Koss was give a choice: jail, or Sobriety Court.
The decision he made would change his life.

Mike T

Mike Teaney was in the grocery store when he ran into an old friend and announced his news.
‘I’ve had four children with three different women,? Teaney told his friend. ‘Just in the last three months.?
A woman standing behind him gasped, and for a moment Teaney wondered if he was about to be slapped.
‘And you’re proud of that?? she asked.
Teaney realized his joke didn’t sound quite so funny to a casual bystander, so he turned to the woman and began to explain: He and his wife Tracey were adopting Nina, now 3, and Bryan, 2 from Guatemala when Tracy became pregnant with twins.
What he didn’t tell the woman, though, was how he almost lost Nina and Bryan long before they arrived in the U.S. last winter, and how he almost lost Tracey and the twins’she seriously considered walking out on him’before Brody and Connor were even born.
Teaney, 46, and his wife Tracey, 44, hadn’t planned on having children when they got married seven years ago. But something changed; something seemed to be missing, so they decided to look into adoption.?
They searched first for a child in Russia, but six weeks into the process the country cut off all outside adoptions. Then they looked at the Ukraine, but U.S. adoptions were eventually halted for political reasons.
Nina was 13 months old when the adoption agency found her in Guatemala. Not far off they found Bryan, who was just 10 weeks old at the time.
Then Tracey discovered she was pregnant with twins.
‘We had to ask ourselves,? said Teaney, ‘do we still take the kids??
It wasn’t a difficult question to answer: Yes. Of course.
‘We’d fallen in love with them by then,? he said.
Teaney, 46, and his wife Tracey, 44, hadn’t planned on having children when they got married seven years ago. But something changed; something seemed to be missing, so they decided to look into adoption.?
Teaney moved to Detroit from New York in the mid-1980s. During that time, he said, the three-martini lunch was still a common practice in business, especially in his field of banking and financial.
‘When we’d recruit someone to come and work for us, we’d take them out to wine and dine them,? he said.
It was the easy way, he said, for a company to decide whether the potential hire would schmooze it up with clients and thus enhance business. The criteria, Teaney recalled, involved a couple of easy questions.
?’Is he fun, can he entertain clients, or is he just kind of dull??
‘My father was a strict disciplinarian,? he said. ‘Anything less than perfection was failure.?
When Teaney played baseball, for example, and he’d connect in five-of-six at-bats, his father was always standing at the ready to tell his son why the sixth trip to the plate was a flop.
Four As and a B-plus on the report card? Same thing.
‘What’s with the B-plus?? his father wanted to know.
As Teaney grew into adulthood, he embraced his father’s philosophy and working in a competitive job where success is defined by rising to the top with a fat bottom line made it even more difficult.?
‘The farther you climb on the corporate ladder,? he said, ‘the more you are forced to face your imperfections.?
Anything less than coming out on top of anything he did, Teaney said, was unacceptable.? ‘I have no doubt, now, that when I drank I drank to escape the pain of being imperfect,? he said. ‘It was only for a little while, but at least I had that time when I didn’t have to think about my imperfection.?
But even after his first DUI, Teaney told himself he didn’t have a drinking problem.
‘You start rationalizing everything,? he said. ‘Like why it’s OK to stop for a drink on the way home, and why it’s OK to stay for one more, and why it won’t matter if you get home at 8 o’clock instead of seven.??
But Teaney didn’t define himself as a stereotypical alcoholic, because he didn’t drink alone. It was a social thing, time spent with clients during the day, or after work with friends.
‘Before you know it you’re coming through the front door at 11 o’clock,? he said. ‘Your wife’s mad, you forgot something she asked you to do.?
It was December 2005 when Teaney headed home after a friend dropped him at the Independence Township Park and Ride near I-75 and Sashabaw Road. He’d had too much too drink, he knew it, and he already had one DUI.
But nothing came of the first DUI; he hadn’t even lost his license, and he stopped drinking for a year afterward, no problem.
Besides, it was only a five-mile drive home. What was the big deal?
As he headed north on Sashabaw Road, Teaney looked in his rearview mirror and there, behind him, flashed the lights of an Oakland County Sheriff’s patrol car.
Suddenly he remembered what the big deal was.
Tracey, he thought. The kids.
Teaney was asked to step out of the car, and the deputies administered sobriety tests and asked him to blow into a Breathalyzer. ‘They arrested him, hauled him off to jail and, in his head the entire time, one thought kept going around and around and around.
‘I blew it.?
When he didn’t come home that night, Tracey didn’t know whether she should be worried, angry or both.
‘At first I thought he was dead or having an affair,? she said. ‘But then, when I found out’shock, devastation, disappointment’everything you can think of. You don’t get over something like this in a day.?
To make matters worse, Tracey said, her mother was dying in a nursing home during the same period of time.
I didn’t know if my husband was going to kill himself, or be in jail or what,? she said. ‘If I hadn’t had God, I wouldn’t have known what to do.?
?’I almost robbed my wife of her husband and the chance to have children,? Teaney said. ‘I was a selfish brat.?
When Teaney stood before Judge Dana Fortinberry of the 52-2 District Court, he was give a choice: Jail, or Sobriety Court.
The decision he made would change his life.