The funerals for the former Coppell students began about three years ago. The former star lacrosse player. The one-time basketball heroes. The used-to-be straight-A students. The bright, the handsome, the sweet. And each time a body was buried, each time a parent said farewell to a child, there was silence about what claimed them. There were, instead, only the tear-stained wails of too soon, too young.

Finally, Colleen Michaelis said what other Coppell parents would not: Their good kids, raised in a city Money magazine not long ago deemed one of the best U.S. cities in which to live, were dying of heroin overdoses. She knew because her son Tommy McClenahan, who played lacrosse, was among the young and the dead. His was "the typical path" of an opioid addict, Tommy's mother said Monday. He went from Hydrocodone — prescribed while he was in college after a wakeboarding accident — to OxyContin to the heroin that killed him Aug. 10 of last year at 24.

"Nobody was being forthright about what was going on," Michaelis told me. Her voice was as full of sadness and fury as when she addressed her boy's life and death on podcasts about opioid addiction last year. "When Tommy died, I said, 'I am going to speak to the elephant in the room, because here we are again in the same place, mourning the loss of a great kid.'"

But only last week, Michaelis discovered that her son and other young heroin users from Coppell likely shared something else in common: a place in northwest Dallas called Han Gil Hotel Town. The rundown motel became infamous in recent weeks after dozens of federal agents stormed and shuttered the place beneath a helicopter's search light.

There, along Dennis Road near Northaven Road, federal authorities allege cocaine and meth and heroin and other drugs were packaged and sold out of rooms that owners, who took generous cuts, had wired for sight and sound. There, the U.S. attorney says in court filings, women were trafficked and tortured in fortified trap rooms filled with assault rifles and handguns. There, Dallas police reports detail, armed guards protected rooms in which cartel members conducted business.

An attorney for Han Gil's owner, Amos Mun, has declined to comment. In a civil case in federal court, he issued a one-sentence general denial. In the criminal case, Mun has pleaded not guilty.

The city of Dallas sued the Han Gil in February of last year, alleging some 50 code violations. The case remains open with a trial set for June.

But Dallas authorities didn't shut down the Han Gil. Instead, the feds came in after a push and plea from the Coppell Police Department, which had tied a trio of heroin overdoses last summer to this awful place only a block from a Dallas ISD elementary.

"When we got over there, it didn't take investigators too long to find out this is way bigger than they could handle," Coppell Police Chief Danny Barton said this week.

"It was ..." He paused. "To say it was scary might be an understatement."

The detective working the case had once been assigned to a Drug Enforcement Administration task force. Barton told me the officer "picked up the phone and said, 'We need some help.'"

Tommy McClenahan, with his mother, Colleen Michaelis, died of a heroin overdose in August at the age of 24. (Courtesy Colleen Michaelis)

We have learned many horrible things about the Han Gil in recent weeks from court documents and still photos taken from videos made by Mun, who waived his right to a detention hearing and remains in custody until trial. Yet the sickening disclosures still keeping piling up.

I was told Monday that a woman's corpse found in January dumped in the woods of east Oak Cliff had been taken there from the Han Gil after she OD'd. By the time the body was found, it was so badly decomposed that police had used a sketch of her tattoos as a way to identify her. Authorities say almost a dozen are dead because of the Han Gil — some shot up with guns, some with needles. Witnesses say the wounded and dead were usually dumped off-site like trash.

To this ever-growing list of revelations, the Coppell connection is just another shocking thing with which we must now wrestle. Especially parents who lost their children to heroin sold at the motel.

Last week, Rick Calvert went to Coppell to tell teachers and parents and students about this horrible place in Dallas where people they knew went to get drugs and, sometimes, to die. Calvert is the lead assistant U.S. attorney criminally prosecuting Mun and almost a dozen alleged dealers.

"In my 26 years as a federal prosecutor," Calvert told the assembled, numbering about 4,000, "the Han Gil Hotel was one of the most dangerous places I had ever encountered."

Despite that, he said, the motel had become "the go-to place for young people in Coppell" and other suburban cities to buy drugs. The assembly was the first time Colleen Michaelis, physical education teacher at a Coppell elementary school, had heard the words "Han Gil."

"I've talked to a bunch of kids since the presentation who were my son's age, and they all knew about the hotel," she said Monday.

I asked her if Tommy had ever gone there. She said one of Tommy's friends told her he had, "at one point or another."

"It makes your stomach sick as a mom to think your son went to a place like that," she said.

1 / 2Vehicles parked in front of the Han Gil Hotel Town in the 11300 block of Dennis Road in Dallas on March 11(Daniel Carde. / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2A sign placed on a window near the front entrance at Han Gil Hotel Town on March 11, 2019. The sign was still there as of Monday night.(Daniel Carde / Staff Photographer)

Another Coppell mother said Monday she knew all about Han Gil because she'd gone there three times to rescue her child and had guns pulled on her twice. The woman's child told the feds in a February affidavit that "I personally knew 15 to 20 heroin users from in and around Coppell."

The mother — who asked not to be identified because her child is still cooperating with the investigation — said the first time she tried to get her child out of the Han Gil, a girl ran out the front "beaten and bleeding."

"We've lost a lot of children, and I don't want any other parent to go through this," the mother told me. The hotel, she said, "has ruined many, many lives."

One of those lives lost was Justin Bruckman, who was 21. His picture has troubled me for weeks, perhaps because he looks vaguely like my teenage son and many of his friends.

Justin Bruckman was 21 when he overdosed at Han Gil Hotel Town on June 24, 2018. (Courtesy Brian Goudy)

Justin's brother Brian Goudy said Justin went to the Han Gil to visit people living there, including a lifelong friend who is now cooperating with the feds. Brian, who is 10 years his brother's senior, said Justin didn't have the easiest childhood, but was always "very respectful, very grateful, soft-spoken with an infectious smile."

Justin, who was making fast-food money while working on a clothing line with Brian and another brother, overdosed at the Han Gil on June 24. Court records show that Mun and at least one other dealer wouldn't let his friends call 911, because they didn't want cops coming around. So they carried him out and drove him to the hospital, where he died. Goudy was initially told his brother died in his car in a park. Only later was he told the truth.

"Hardest thing I ever had to swallow," Goudy said.

Goudy drove past the Han Gil not long after his brother's death. He said he had been to Justin's grave and needed to see for himself what the place looked like, "to picture it in my head." He pulled onto Dennis and drove slowly, not stopping.

"It put a rock in my stomach," Goudy said when asked to describe what he saw that night. "I couldn't believe someone I loved died like that."

Goudy then went back to his brother's grave, where he sat all night and wept.