By Joe Friedrichs
GRAND MARAIS – A front-page story that ran in this newspaper last week (Oct. 31) about Levi Axtell, the Cook County resident charged with murdering a Grand Marais man in 2023, has drawn the ire of some community members.
It’s understandable.
The story touches on homicide, mental-health treatment, sex of fenders, prisons, institutions, and how those realities intersect with the residents of Cook County. These are unpleasant things to discuss. They’re not comfortable things to address. The very mention of these topics can understandably make someone feel uneasy.
The impetus for the Oct. 31 article did not appear from nowhere. The article followed a recent ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court that could require Cook County taxpayers to pay Axtell’s legal fees. That court opinion from Oct. 8 deter mined that counties are responsible for the legal fees of defendants who file petitions to force the state to place them in a treatment facility. An article in the Star Tribune was published that same day (Oct. 8) under the headline “Minnesota Supreme Court: Counties must pay legal fees of mentally ill defendants awaiting placement.” Why is this in the state’s largest newspaper? Be cause it’s news.
In talking with the publisher of this newspaper about the backlash both the newspaper and I were receiving after the article ran last week, I explained that my biggest regret with the story was that the aforementioned information wasn’t included until the tenth paragraph. It should have been in the first or second paragraph. That’s why this article was written, after all. It was done to bring local context to this statewide news.
I reached out to legal experts across Minnesota while I was reporting last week’s story. One explained that such a ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court was not in his wheel house. Others didn’t reply. I did hear from Peter Knapp, a professor of law with the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who is an expert on state Supreme Court opinions, but not until Oct. 29, the day after the deadline for my article.
Knapp wrote to me and said, “Mr. Friedrichs, I’m sorry I was away from e-mail when you wrote. I saw that you posted your story earlier to day, so I’m not sure if this response will be helpful or not, but here goes.
The Minnesota Commitment and Treatment Act, Minn. Stat. § 253B, provides that counsel be appoint ed (and paid) for patients in “any proceeding” under the chapter. In Swope, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the phrase “any proceeding” means exactly that— and not just proceedings that are specifically named in the chapter. That means, as Justice McKeig pointed out in her concurrence, that Scott County had to pay court-ap pointed counsel “a reasonable sum” for time in court and time spent pre paring in Mr. Swope’s mandamus petition proceeding.
I’m not familiar enough with Mr. Axtell’s case to give any kind of legal opinion on Cook County’s obligations in his case. I can say, as Justice McKeig points out in her concurrence, under the law as currently written, counties are responsible for the costs of legal representation in local commitment cases, and also responsible for legal costs in cases involving priority admission decisions. As the justice notes, those cases, like Mr. Swope’s, in volve decisions about statewide mental health services well outside any county’s control.”
I heard from a friend of mine in Cook County the day the print version of the article started showing up in people’s mailboxes. The friend said he was disappointed with my approach to the article. By email, he told me that it appeared to him that I was trying to expose/ condemn government funding for someone like Axtell for its expenses to the taxpayers. My friend said he has always advocated for funding for the mentally ill. I agreed that helping those who are mentally ill is important. We appeared to have that understanding, but our subsequent phone call was still challenging. I hope we’re able to remain friends. A friendship or relationship with a journalist can be difficult, even impossible sometimes. It’s basically our business to know what is going on and then share that with the com munity. That doesn’t work for some people.
I’ve had many conversations with other local journalists over the past decade-plus in Cook County. Rhon da Silence. Shawn Perich. Kalli Hawkins. Brian Larsen. Jay Andersen. Where and when do we draw the line when it comes to reporting on community members who break the law or do other things that would certainly make news in a bigger town? Each reporter had their own viewpoint on this. Some would be considered passive, or perhaps more forgiving. Others felt “news is news” and we can’t play favorites, even when it makes buying groceries or filling up the gas tank uncomfortable around town for a stretch of time, or perhaps for ever. There’s no formula for these types of news judgments. It’s not spelled out for small-town reporters in the AP Stylebook.
The late Rhonda Silence is the best reporter I have ever worked with. She once told me that you know you did a good job when everyone was mad at you, as opposed to just one side of an issue or the other. Rhonda knew that journalists on our picturesque North Shore are just as prone to getting verbally beaten up in comment sections or Facebook pages as any reporter working the cops and courts beat in the Twin Cities. It’s part of the job, sometimes.
The Axtell family is well-known in Cook County. They work here. They live here. They go to church here. They raised a family here. And now one of their children is in the news. The murder that happened in Grand Marais in 2023 is one of the biggest stories to happen here in the past 10 years, right alongside the murder at Bluefin Bay years before, the shoot ing at the courthouse, and the fire at Lutsen Resort in 2024. None of these topics is pleasant to discuss. They’re all very challenging realities for this community. Media out side of Cook County have reported on all of these stories, and will continue to do so when it comes to the Lutsen fire and the situation involving Levi Axtell. Local media will too, hopefully.
Indeed, local media have a responsibility to cover important local events. That’s the point.
