More on Jody Allen Crowe ...

In Monday's edition of The Free Press, I wrote a story about Jody Allen Crowe, a longtime educator who has now devoted his life to raising awareness about the long-term neurological and developmental effects of prenatal exposure to alcohol.

Crowe's personal story is fascinating, much of which I did not include in the news article for space reasons.

He went to school in Grand Rapids and was in fifth grade when the nation's first school shooter, David Black, killed a school administrator.

That event haunted his life, eventually becoming a driving force behind Crowe's research into the links between Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders and school shooters. He published a book on the topic, "The Fatal Link," and in it, Crowe documents that Black fit the profile of a child exposed to alcohol while in the womb.

He was a school superintendent and principals at several Native American reservations in Minnesota and Idaho.

During that time (which Crowe said were also filled with innumerable positive moments), he was sucker-punched, assaulted, cursed at, spit on and forced to wrestle more than one weapon from students' hands. He witnessed 12-year-olds running street gangs and 12-year-olds giving birth. During those years, one teacher at one school estimated that 70 percent of all children on the reservation were affected by prenatal exposure to alcohol.

But Crowe's crusade has not come without personal cost. In his book, Crowe documents the litany of ways in which prenatal exposure to alcohol affected his own family, including his wife's exposure and his daughter's decision to drink while pregnant. He writes: "It pains me to see what alcohol has done that cannot be undone."