MLive investigative reporter Gus Burns doesn’t just stick with a story. Rather, the story seems to stick with him. That has been on display the past week as he has reported the case of Kevin Graves. Authorities positively identified human remains found near Rothbury as the man who disappeared during the Electric Forest music event in July 2018. I asked Burns about the story this week, and he shared an audio file with me of the conversation he had with the missing man’s father. “OK, I’m getting emotional,” Burns said. “I’m a little teary-eyed thinking about talking to him.” Good reporters have good sources. But Burns has always gone a step beyond that. He stays in touch long after a story has stopped being in the news. I described that phenomenon to you in a column in 2022, when I explained how he spent a decade tracking down what happened to a teenage girl found dead in Detroit and then left unidentified in the morgue for years. In the Graves case, Burns also never gave up. He stayed close the Graves family since he was first assigned the story six years ago. He worked a story then on a theory that Kevin Graves had been spirited away by a religious group called Twelve Tribes. Nothing came of that, other than the family gained confidence in Burns and his dedication to and interest in the story. “I think they saw what I wrote and felt like I was being accurate and fair,” Burns said. “I’d been to Electric Forest before, I’d heard of Twelve Tribes, I’d seen their bus. I was personally curious about that, too.” Burns’ approach to stories like this is a commitment that is equal parts professional journalist and personally empathetic. The disappearance went unsolved for several agonizing years. In that span, Burns would occasionally check in on the Graves family. “I would see what news they had … a lot of times they were unfounded tips they were hearing, things like that.” Then in 2023 came an interaction that Burns said led the family “to have a lot of faith in me.” The family, frustrated that police were saying there was no crime to investigate, put up a billboard near Rothbury asking for public help in locating Kevin Graves. Burns talked to the family and learned they were not able to get police records because they were told the case was under investigation. “I told the family, ‘That doesn’t seem right – they should give you the records since this isn’t a crime. They can’t hide behind an ongoing criminal investigation.'” More to help the family than to report a story, Burns filed Freedom of Information Act requests with Michigan State Police and the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office for information related to the investigation. He was rejected but appealed directly to Sheriff Michael Bouchard and eventually received documents, albeit heavily redacted. “I sent (Bouchard) a direct message, and I said, ‘I have communication with the family. They deserve this information. It’s not a crime.’” If anything, the documents added to the mystery: Interviews with subjects who’d been to the festival, including Graves’ girlfriend, exposed inconsistent timelines and narratives. But that didn’t change the family’s appreciation for Burns’ commitment to helping get answers. That bond led to Gary Graves calling Burns shortly on New Year’s Day to tell him the remains had been positively identified as his son. That call, which Burns played for me, captured both sorrow and appreciation for Burns’ efforts. “They’re sweet people and they’ve been kind to me, and we’ve developed a rapport along the way,” Burns said. “It’s been a 6-and-a-half-year ordeal for them. My goal was to put the whole story together and tell people who Kevin really was but, really, it’s more about what a family goes through when there’s a missing person, and how it affects them.” The Kevin Graves story is not over: Investigators are working with the remains to try to determine a cause of death. There are likely going to be more updates and maybe, just maybe, something conclusive at some point. But one thing is certain: The Graves family won’t forget Gus Burns, and he won’t forget them. “Once you get to know somebody and then have an emotional connection to them, it becomes a two-pronged reason. You’re doing this not just for your job but because you are emotionally connected.” # # # | 