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NewsCut
Bob Collins

Audio: Mary Lucia doesn’t back down

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Mary Lucia and Bob Collins
Mary Lucia returns to The Current

It was a breath of fresh air on The Current this afternoon when Mary Lucia returned as afternoon host after a seven-month battle to shed a stalker.

"Where have you been?" she asked her listeners, figuring she'd turn the table.

Lucia left the station last spring after Patrick H. Kelly, 56, of Eden Prairie, was about to go to trial on charges of felony stalking and making terroristic threats.

But the case was delayed for months and then, after Kelly pleaded guilty, his sentencing was postponed multiple times. He's jailed pending a competency hearing in December.

Lucia said last week she can't talk about the case so when she returned to the airwaves this afternoon, she talked about friends instead.

"I tend to isolate a little bit when I'm on the down low," she said. "I'm not a big friend collector. But I'm lucky that I have a small group of friends. And it's always a question: do you let these people see the real darkness? And I think most people's instinct is to turn and run in the other direction as fast they can. But I'm so lucky. They've not run away from me, they've run to me. They get me."

She said for several months she's been thinking of what first song she would play. "Should it be something poignant and significant, or should I just throw everyone off my trail with something like Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back?"

She went with poignant and significant, dedicating it to "all of you out there who are struggling and all of my friends who didn't run from the darkness."

Update 5:03 p.m. - And the 4:20 returned, too.