FREELANCE WORK – NOT AFFILIATED WITH USA TODAY Avenues Recovery 2021

How the healing power of nature inspires resolve in recovery Marion Callahan Bucks County Courier Times / USA Today Network Bathed in the orange glow of the setting sun, Jose Ortiz-Nieves gazed at the horizon and then closed his eyes, taking in the cool mountain air from atop the observation deck of the Trexler Nature Preserve.  Under a sky ablaze in color, the 31-year-old felt free from his past anchored in addiction. A weight was lifted. The world from those heights, he said, was so much bigger than the Allentown neighborhood where he’d been running the […]

Perkasie community unites to help disabled man get to work, food pantry Marion Callahan Bucks County Courier Times/ USA Today Network For months since moving to Perkasie, John Gaskin focused on putting one foot in front of the other.  Walking to find a job.  Walking to lug groceries from the food pantry to his Perkasie apartment. Walking to fight the isolation of living in a new place, far from his mother and all things familiar.  Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Gaskin can’t drive. At night, it gets so dark, he needs the […]

Story and Video, by Marion Callahan, and photos by my talented colleague Michele Haddon. By Marion Callahan Under the weight of a soaked blanket, Megan Cohen inched her way, on foot, along a stretch of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, the rain beating against her frail body.       She wasn’t looking to be saved. “I was so broken. I was homeless at that point for quite a while and I wasn’t in the right state of mind at all,” said Cohen. “Tons of people drove right past me. I may have driven right past me.”     […]

As seen published in USA Today, The Bucks County Courier Times and The Intelligencer. Ernie Gross learned to find hope and humor in the darkest of places.       It was not an easy task for Gross, who from a very young age was known as “the boy who never laughed.”      When he did laugh as a child, banging pots and pans with his older brother David, his mother would scold him. “How can you laugh and enjoy yourself when you don’t know what’s happening with your father?” she would say. His […]

Walter Wallace Jr. was devoted to his family and his music. He’s not “the monster,” family says Bucks County Courier Times / USA Today Days after the fatal police shooting of his cousin Walter Wallace Jr., Anthony Fitzhugh said the family is “trying to get through the day, second by second,” haunted by questions that will never be answered. “Should I have called? Should we have tried to do it ourselves?” said Fitzhugh outside the family’s home inThursday, just a few feet from where his 27-year-old cousin was shot while suffering a mental […]