Continued: Drunken driver killed North Shore veterinarian-author, charges say

The traffic collision that killed a well-known North Shore veterinarian was caused by a drunken driver who said she never saw the stop sign, according to charges in Pine County.

Ann Marie Brodman, 53, of Cambridge, Minn., was charged Thursday with criminal vehicular homicide stemming from the Aug. 10 accident at Hwy. 23 and County Road 13 in Brook Park.

She is also charged with criminal vehicular operation and drunken driving. She has not been jailed.

Killed was Mary Schlangen, 35, of Two Harbors, a small-animal veterinarian who practiced in Alexandria and then Duluth. She combined her professional work with other talents to write and illustrate "Zoe's Good-bye," a book to help children cope with a pet's death.

Schlangen, her husband, Mark, and their two children, Kaija, and Eli, were in the car that summer night. Mark, who was driving, was seriously injured, while their children were slightly hurt. The car ended up on its roof. Brodman was unhurt.

Mark Schlangen, a Two Harbors High School teacher and chief of the city's volunteer fire department, said Friday that he and his children are still "learning to live with a new reality" since the crash.

His wife's death, he said, "seemed like such a preventable thing; to have alcohol involved, that's a choice that could've been made differently."

According to the criminal complaint, Brodman, a real estate agent, at first denied to a state trooper on the scene that she had been drinking. However, a blood-alcohol test put her at 0.12 percent, well over the legal limit of 0.08 percent for operating a vehicle.

She told the trooper she had had two 8- to 12-ounce glasses of wine between about 6 and 8 that evening, an amount she characterized as "a little."

An Oklahoma University blood-alcohol calculator estimates that for a woman of Brodman's weight to reach .12, she would have had to drink at least 30 ounces of wine in two hours.

Asked whether she saw a stop sign at the intersection, Brodman said to the trooper: "Did I have a stop sign?"

Investigators who studied tire skid marks determined that Brodman, heading south on County Road 13, made no attempt to obey the stop sign. Schlangen's vehicle, heading west on Hwy. 23, left skid marks as its driver tried to avoid being hit.

The charges took many months longer than normal because state accident-reconstruction experts were backlogged from the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis nine days before this accident, said State Patrol Capt. Kent Matthews.

"If I'm the [Schlangen} family, I'm thinking I deserve as much services" as the bridge collapse victims, Matthews said, but state officials only had so many resources. Matthews said 60 days is an average amount of time for investigatory work to be done on this type of accident.

Inspiration for the book

Schlangen's "Zoe's Good-bye" website lays out how she wove her two worlds together to produce her first book.

She worked with sled dogs in Alexandria and became a fan of the sport of sled dog racing when her husband trained and raced a friend's team.

Shortly after volunteering with the famed John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon on the North Shore, she wrote and illustrated "Zoe's Good-bye," inspired in part by her involvement with sled dogs.

"I choke up every time I read it to my daughter," Mary Schlangen recalled during an interview about her book. Kaija, now 8, took the photo of Schlangen and one of their dogs that's on the back of the book jacket.

Schlangen wrote "Zoe's Good-bye" from her experiences, whether it was saying goodbye to her own pets or as a veterinarian helping other people's pets through their final days.

She was born in Southern California and moved to Stillwater as a child. She graduated from Hill-Murray High School, the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities.

She and her family moved to Two Harbors in 2002. She worked at the Grand Avenue Veterinary Clinic in Duluth and was preparing to open her own clinic in Two Harbors.

Paul Walsh • 612-6730-4482

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