Take a look back at 2012

At the end of each year, we take a look back at some of the top stories and highlight them using quotes and photos.

Today’s edition will focus on quotes that evoked drama, humor, passion or curiosity. Wednesday’s edition will feature photos.

• “I feel pretty confident in the fact that she isn’t in that area anymore. What I believe at this point is that someone took her somewhere. Who that is, I don’t even want to guess.”

~ Mechelle Carey, whose 31-year old sister, Crystal Morrison, disappeared in August on International Drive in Concord. Concord police, the Cabarrus County Sheriff’s Office and a Charlotte Fire Department dive team on Nov. 29 searched a rock quarry lake after getting a tip a body was in Concord near N.C. 49 and Old Charlotte Road..

• “This certainly is an exciting time. I’ve been with the (Department of Transportation) for 26 years, and it’s been a long time since we’ve had this much construction going on in a concentrated area all at one time.”

~ Barry Moose, division engineer for NCDOT Division 10, which covers Cabarrus County, during a news conference Jan. 9 at Lane Construction Corp.’s Concord office. NCDOT will finish the Interstate 485 loop, widen Interstate 85 in Cabarrus and build three interchanges that are firsts for North Carolina. The I-85 widening is scheduled to be finished in November and the loop in December 2014.

• “A lot of people describe our police department as ‘cute’ and that’s not exactly what you want to portray.”

~ Kannapolis Police Chief James Chavis. The Kannapolis Police Department moved its headquarters into a repurposed funeral home in 1989. All seven Kannapolis City Council members in November voted to finance a new city hall and a state-of-the-art police headquarters that will house the department’s 81 officers and 24 staff, who serve 44,000 people throughout a 36-square-mile area.

• “I broke to the left, to run behind my house, and Patti kept pulling the trigger. I just heard the gun clicking at that point and saw her start to get up. She aimed the gun toward my mom and I ran toward her and tackled her.”

~ Christopher Allman in February was the first in Cabarrus County to receive The Air Force Gold Valor Award, the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program’s highest honors. The former cadet at Mount Pleasant High School wrestled a gun from a family friend, who shot his younger brother. His brother survived.

•  “This is unreal. It’s the worst thing we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

~ David Goforth in April, after fielding an unusually high volume of phone calls from residents who wanted help dealing with cankerworms. The longtime horticulture agent with the N.C. Cooperative Extension’s Cabarrus County Center said 2012 was the worst year in a generation for the pests.

• “If you had asked me 10 years ago, when I moved back here, could (Cabarrus County’s local food movement) get to where it is today, I would have said, ‘Doubtful.’ But here it has happened….”

~ Aaron Newton, coordinator of the county’s Local Food Systems Program. The 37-year-old Concord native also is known as the “food dude.”

• “We hope to become a real cultural hub. Hopefully, this will be a thriving community that also will contribute to the community at large. It’s an arts district. That’s how I see it. We don’t want people to see it as highbrow, because it’s a very down-to-earth, family-centric community.”

~ Concord artist Sarah Mann, community liaison for the newly opened ClearWater Artist Studios, a renovated 38,000-square-foot building with 10 studios and a 2,200-square-foot gallery. The future site plan calls for a café, a community market and green space to host community events.

• “We saw a tenfold difference between broccoli that were grown in the same location, at the same time, under the same conditions. And that lets us know we could make progress in this. Our long-term goal is to provide a uniform broccoli that has all of the health benefits we know broccoli has.”

~ Applied molecular geneticist Allan Brown, who is conducting broccoli-breeding trials for N.C. State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute on the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis.

• “I don’t think anyone else a year-and-a-half ago was aware this might be coming and was asking what they could do to be part of it. Now, everyone understands it’s coming and it’s once in a lifetime opportunity.”

~ Kristin Siemon, who filmed Concord event planner Stacie Jacobs for a documentary about the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Jacobs contracted nearly 20 area businesses to help deliver 12 breakfasts, seven lunches and 10 cocktail parties for hundreds delegates from Florida, Kentucky, Texas and Virginia.

• “I think the overall message from each of our communities and the county as a whole… is that our communities have weathered the storm,”

~ John Cox, CEO of Cabarrus Economic Development and the Cabarrus Regional Chamber of Commerce for 12 years, at the chamber’s annual State of the Region Summit in November.

• “I tell people, ‘Just because we don’t wake up on the news Saturday morning with three or four people shot here, like in Charlotte, doesn’t mean we don’t have a gang problem.’ Those guys do their stuff there and a lot of them come and lay their heads here.”

~ Sgt. Bernie Loos, who heads Cabarrus County’s Gang Intelligence Unit, about the presence of gangs locally. His unit tracks 250 Cabarrus residents who are verified as, or affiliated with, gang members.

• “There is a prevailing wisdom right now that America is lagging behind. You see the news stories. We have engineer postings and tech postings and science postings for jobs that we can’t come up with American workers for, because we don’t produce those types of graduates.”

~ Jason Van Heukelum, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for Cabarrus County School, endorsing the state’s curriculum overhaul that started this year.

• “Rider Transit works for a lot of people in our community – be it for access to work, shopping, medical care and school. However, we are always receiving requests from passengers for us to expand to new areas that we don’t already cover, as well as to run later and run more often on each route.”

~ Rider Transit Manager L.J. Weslowski. The state-of-the-art Rider Transit Center opened in 2010, serving a near-record-breaking number of passengers in 2011. The Concord and Kannapolis bus system has planned about $5 million in future upgrades, including replacing eight of its 10 buses with hybrid electric models and adding Sunday bus service.

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• “This was the first time we’ve posted anything that has gone sort of viral. It generated a lot of interest for us.”

~ Pat Verner, communications director for the Arts Council, after videos taken during a show featuring Jim Avett, who was joined on stage by his sons Scott and Seth of the Avett Brothers, were posted on YouTube in April.