ProPublica

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This story details allegations of violence against Indigenous women and girls.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

KOTZEBUE, Alaska — On a subzero Monday morning in March 2020, police found another woman dead at the ex-mayor’s property.

Two years earlier, the body of 25-year-old Jennifer Kirk lay curled at the foot of a bed, a rifle on the floor, strangulation marks on her neck and a bullet hole beneath her chin. City police swiftly closed the case, declaring it a suicide.

Now police were back at the property, where the lifeless body of Susanna “Sue Sue” Norton, 30, was discovered in an adjacent house, beaten and strangled. An autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide.

Kirk and Norton, both Inupiaq, had each dated sons of the former borough mayor, and the sons had previously been convicted of beating each of them. One of the sons had admitted to strangling Kirk twice before. Another pleaded guilty to kicking Norton in the stomach when she was six months pregnant.

No one has ever been charged with a crime in connection to the deaths.

In a state where women are 2.5 times more likely than the national average to be killed by a man and Alaska Native women are especially at risk, elected leaders here have repeatedly pledged action. The Department of Justice declared a rural law enforcement emergency in Alaska following a 2019 report by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica on glaring lapses in local policing. Two years later, the governor created a state council on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons, and in 2022, new investigators were hired to solve cases like Norton’s.

Unexplained holes in the investigations into the deaths of Kirk and Norton call into question this commitment, a review by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found. More than that, the events leading up to the women’s deaths illustrate how police, prosecutors and judges here have regularly given pass after pass to people accused of domestic violence and strangulation.

Police records obtained by the newsrooms show that Kirk’s body revealed signs of strangulation. Her boyfriend, Anthony Richards, son of then-Mayor Clement Richards Sr., admitted to police that he had caused the marks on the day she died. After reviewing the records, former Kotzebue Police Chief Ed Ward said the 10 red flags that the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention instructs police to look for in cases of domestic violence killings all appeared to apply to the scene of Kirk’s death. (Ward did not work at the police department at the time of her death.)

Yet the Kotzebue Police Department closed the case after a single day of investigation, labeling it a suicide before receiving the final autopsy report.

In Norton’s case, police never told her family she had been strangled, family members said. Police didn’t ask the public to help catch the suspect, as they had the prior year when a fire department dog was killed in the same neighborhood. They never interviewed key witnesses and failed to obtain a search warrant, leaving evidence uncollected.

State troopers, who took over the investigation into Norton’s death in 2022, told her family they planned to travel to Kotzebue over the summer to investigate further. Norton’s family says that didn’t happen either. (A department spokesperson said on Oct. 27 that investigators had not yet visited Kotzebue for the case but planned to do so before the end of the year. He said the agency’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons unit is “taking investigative steps with the goal of finding the person responsible for Sue Sue’s tragic death and holding that person responsible for their actions through the criminal justice system.”)

Both Kirk and Norton had been victims of domestic violence at the hands of two of the Richards brothers. The Daily News and ProPublica found that state prosecutors repeatedly allowed the men to avoid felony domestic violence convictions for strangling or beating women, including Kirk and Norton. In those cases, the state offered the sons deals, allowing them to plead guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges such as “harassment” and receive slaps on the wrist, not prison sentences.

In one sexual assault case involving a different woman, state Superior Court Judge Paul Roetman granted Anthony Richards, the mayor’s youngest son, uncommonly low bail. Roetman explained his decision by saying he had worked with Anthony’s mother and knew his father held elected office.

“Fine Third Parties” Listen to state Superior Court Judge Paul Roetman describe Annette Richards and Clement Richards Sr. as “fine third parties”in a 2015 bail hearing for their son Anthony Richards, who was facing sexual assault charges. (Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica)

Roetman and two prosecutors, now a magistrate and judge, declined to comment through a court system spokesperson. “Judicial officers cannot and do not comment on their cases, in order to maintain the integrity of their decisions and to ensure that, for fairness reasons, their thinking is reflected solely in the official court record without extraneous commentary,” the spokesperson wrote.

In the center of Kotzebue, Norton’s adoptive mother, Susanna “Mama Sue” Norton, is waiting for answers from Alaska’s criminal justice system. She lives three doors down from the house where her daughter was found strangled to death.

“My family is not going to have peace until they know that they found someone that did this to her,” she said in an interview in 2020. Three years later, as another winter begins, the case grows colder by the day.

Susanna “Mama Sue” Norton says police never talked to her about her daughter’s homicide. (Emily Mesner/Anchorage Daily News) In this overview of Kotzebue, the two green houses in the center belong to Clement Richards Sr., while Mama Sue Norton lives in the brown house in the bottom right. Kotzebue City Hall and the police station are to the left of the intersection. (Emily Mesner/Anchorage Daily News) A History of Criminal Charges

Kotzebue lies just above the Arctic Circle on a frying-pan-shaped peninsula, nearer to Russia than to Anchorage. Clement Richards Sr. was born here in 1961, two years after Alaska became a state. The city sold itself back then as the Polar Bear Capital of the World, where small planes carrying trophy hunters from across the globe parked on the sea ice. (One of the largest polar bears ever recorded was hunted here in 1963.)

In the 1970s, geologists confirmed what a local bush pilot long suspected: The red-stained creeks that veined the tundra hinted at a massive mineral deposit. In the ’80s, Kotzebue and surrounding villages voted to create a new Northwest Arctic Borough government, with the second-largest zinc mine in the world funding public services such as search and rescue.

Meantime, Clement Richards Sr. and Annette Richards were busy growing their family. The couple had two sons, Amos and Clement Jr., and another on the way in May 1989 when Clement Sr. kicked Annette in the stomach, according to charges filed in Kotzebue state Superior Court. Clement Sr. had previously struck her, Annette wrote in an earlier restraining order request. This time she was eight months pregnant.

The charges say Annette was “bleeding profusely from her genital area.” The couple’s third son, Anthony, was born the next day.

Clement Richards Sr. is sworn in to the office of mayor of Kotzebue. He also served as mayor of the Northwest Arctic Borough. (Arctic Sounder)

Clement Sr. pleaded no contest to felony domestic violence assault and received a six-month jail sentence. The conviction wasn’t mentioned by his opponents or the media a decade later when he won a seat on the city council in 1999 or still later when he became the city’s vice mayor, then mayor. Annette began working in a local office for the Alaska State Troopers where her duties involved assisting state prosecutors, including one who later served as the judge in domestic violence cases against her sons.

The sons wrestled in high school, competed in fishing derbies and sometimes worked at the nearby zinc mine. Now 34, 37 and 39, all three have listed the former mayor’s property as their home address for most of their adult lives.

All three sons have been charged with assaulting women at the mayor’s property but dodged serious punishment.

The Daily News and ProPublica reviewed 31 criminal court cases involving the three sons, including more than 800 pages of charging documents, testimony, sentencing orders and protective order requests. In 12 of those cases, one of the sons was charged with committing domestic violence. The victims — six different women — included the sons’ relatives and current and ex-girlfriends, including Kirk and Norton. (The other criminal cases involved driving while intoxicated, indecent exposure and trespassing.)

Seven of these domestic violence cases were filed while Clement Sr. held political office, from 1999 to 2018. All told, the three sons have been charged with a combined 16 counts of domestic violence, including five felonies. Yet none of the charges against them resulted in a felony domestic violence conviction.

While the details in each case differ, seven of the domestic violence cases unfolded in familiar ways:

First, one of the girlfriends or a worried neighbor called the Kotzebue police. Officers arrived to find the victim with visible wounds such as bruises, markings on her neck or a bloody nose. The girlfriend told police one of the sons punched, kicked or strangled her.

She told police the attacks began when she tried to stop the son from drinking, attempted to leave the house or refused sex. In two cases, police noted the mayor or his wife refused to cooperate with the active investigation. The Kotzebue Police Department then arrested the son but usually labeled the attack as a low-level misdemeanor rather than felony assault.

Next, the son appeared before a local judge or magistrate who was sometimes a former state prosecutor who had worked alongside the ex-mayor’s wife. The judge or magistrate agreed to set bail for the son — once even acknowledging on the record that the bail was unusually low and telling the victim that the mayor and his wife would help keep the son out of trouble until the trial.

But the cases never made it to trial. They were settled at a change-of-plea hearing where prosecutors dropped any felony charges and the son promised to do better. Within a few months, maybe a year, the cycle would begin again.

In one 2013 case, a woman said Clement Richards Jr. punched her in the face and police filed a charge of domestic violence assault. Clement Jr. eventually pleaded guilty to harassment and received a suspended sentence, scrubbing his conviction from the public record. In a sexual assault case filed the following year against Anthony Richards, Roetman reduced Anthony’s bail from $7,500 to $2,500 over the protests of the victim, who said in a quaking voice that she feared running into Anthony in the town of 2,900.

“You Dodged a Bullet” Listen to Roetman, a judge, speak to Anthony Richards, who was facing sexual assault charges. “To say that you dodged a bullet is probably an understatement on this one,” Roetman said. (Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica)

“I know Mrs. Richards from when she used to work for the troopers,” Roetman said at Anthony’s bail hearing. “She has a lot of experience with these types of cases and knows what these are like.”

The Alaska Judicial Code of Conduct states that a judge “shall not allow family, social, political, or other relationships to influence the judge’s judicial conduct or judgment.” Roetman did not respond to questions about his remarks in court, his work relationship with Annette Richards or the cases he presided over involving her sons. A court system spokesperson provided the newsrooms with a statement saying “judicial officers cannot and do not comment on their cases.”

Although a Kotzebue grand jury indicted him on felony charges of sexual assault and attempted sexual assault, Anthony Richards eventually pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of indecent exposure in the 2014 case. The deal allowed him to avoid registering as a sex offender. (The prosecutor, Rachel Ahrens, is now a state superior court judge and declined to comment through a court system spokesperson.)

“To say that you dodged a bullet is probably an understatement on this one,” Roetman told him at the change-of-plea hearing.

Increasingly Dangerous Attacks

Clement Richards Sr. won election as Northwest Arctic Borough mayor in November 2015, campaigning on his experience leading the city and his bona fides as a born-and-raised son of Kotzebue. He became chief executive of a region the size of Indiana with a population of about 7,500. As climate change threatened the nearby village of Kivalina, the Northwest Arctic moved into the national spotlight.

“What’s happening here is America’s wake-up call,” then-President Barack Obama said after flying over the village and touring Kotzebue just before Richards was elected in 2015.

Clement Sr. had been in office just a month when Kirk showed up at the local hospital. She told police that Anthony had punched her five times.

Kirk grew up in the village of Buckland, 75 miles outside of Kotzebue. She and Anthony sometimes lived in one of two teal homes that Clement Sr. and Annette Richards own on a grassy lot, one block from the police department and City Hall. Officer Nate Lecours came to the property to investigate the beating.

Former Kotzebue mayor Clement Richards Sr. lives on this multi-home lot that his sons have also listed as their home address for much of their adult lives. (Emily Mesner/Anchorage Daily News)

“Upon arrival the Borough Mayor, Clement Richards, who appeared extremely intoxicated, answered the door and stated how can I help you a total of three times speaking over me then slammed the door in my face,” Lecours wrote in a Dec. 6, 2015, affidavit. (In a brief phone interview, Lecours said he remembered that encounter but no longer works for Kotzebue police and referred all questions to the department.)

A few days later, Magistrate Judge Stephan Brady reduced Anthony’s bail in this new assault case to just $100. (Brady no longer works for the state. He did not respond to phone messages or emails.)

As the years passed, the attacks grew more dangerous. On March 14, 2017, Kirk told police Anthony strangled her until her field of vision began to shrink and she nearly passed out.

That would have been enough, under a 2005 Alaska law, to charge him with a felony for nonfatal strangulation. Alaska was one of the first states to recognize that strangulation is often a precursor to homicide and increases suicide risk, according to the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.

The prosecutor, Ahrens, allowed Anthony to plead guilty to a single count of misdemeanor assault.

Despite the light punishment, Magistrate Judge Aaron Michels warned Anthony he could have killed Kirk that day.

“Strangulation is a very serious thing and it’s recognized that way by the Legislature, that’s why these types of cases can be charged as felonies,” Michels said at an October 2017 change-of-plea hearing. (He declined to comment through a court system spokesperson.)

“The result of strangulation — if it’s not stopped, if a person can’t breathe — is death,” the magistrate told Anthony Richards.

“You Are Getting Away From a Felony Conviction” In a hearing where Anthony Richards pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault as part of a deal to avoid felony charges, Magistrate Aaron Michels tells Richards that “the natural result of a punch or a kick or kind of your typical misdemeanor assault is a bruise or an injury, that sort of thing. The result of strangulation — if it’s not stopped, if a person can’t breathe — is death.” (Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica)

On May 23, 2018, Kirk and Anthony’s final argument began on the mayor’s property.

Alerted by a neighbor, two officers came to the house around 6 p.m. They found Anthony in the bedroom holding Jennifer Kirk’s body, according to police records, his hands and clothes coated in blood.

Anthony told police he had been watching TV with two children in the living room when he heard the pop of a gunshot and discovered Kirk dying on the floor. A .22-caliber rifle lay across her feet and a gunshot wound pierced the underside of her chin.

The police department’s investigator at the time, Thomas Milliette, measured the weapon.

“I noted the length of the rifle from the tip of the barrel to the tip of the trigger as being 27 1/8 inches long,” Milliette wrote in his report. Next he measured the length of Kirk’s arm: 26 3/18 inches. In interviews, members of Kirk’s family wondered how Kirk, who was 5 feet, 5 inches tall, could have shot herself with a long gun.

Robert Shem, a retired firearm expert for the state crime laboratory, said in an interview that such measurements can be useful in determining whether a death is indeed a suicide, but in this case, more information would be needed. (Shem was the forensic scientist who first established a link among the shooting victims of Alaska serial killer James Dale Ritchie in 2016.)

“Before I would write it off as a suicide myself,” he said, “I would probably try to locate somebody of the same size and build and use that rifle, or one similar to it, with the same length barrel and configuration, demonstrate that it’s completely unloaded and see if the person can lean over and potentially get their thumb in position to pull the trigger.”

Kirk’s father, Timothy Gavin, said Kirk gave no hints she might kill herself.

“We never seen that in her. No signs, nothing,” Gavin said. “So it’s hard to believe she did that to herself.”

Tim Gavin, Jennifer Kirk’s father, has questions about whether his daughter’s death was really suicide. (Emily Mesner/Anchorage Daily News)

Gavin knows something about policing and public service. A Buckland city councilmember and the former mayor, he served 11 years as a village police officer. He’s also no stranger to gunshot deaths. His stepfather shot and killed his mother, Kirk’s grandmother. (The stepfather was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison.)

Kirk’s mother, Dora Stalker, chatted with her daughter hours before the shooting and recalls that nothing seemed amiss. They even made plans. “She was trying to ask me to send diapers for her daughter,” Stalker said.

“We kind of had a plan to send each other some Native foods,” Stalker said. Kirk would trade her mother beluga muktuk in exchange for springtime smelt from Buckland.

Two days after Kirk’s death, the state medical examiner’s office phoned Kotzebue police and said her body “showed signs of strangulation,” according to the death investigation report compiled by police and obtained through a public records request.

In his first interviews with police, Anthony had not revealed that he and Kirk violently fought before she died. Once Milliette knew about the strangulation marks, Anthony admitted to causing the injuries to her neck. He said he acted in self-defense.

Anthony said Kirk slapped him and he “held her away by the neck and didn’t know how hard he was squeezing,” according to the police report. Anthony said Kirk continued to slap him so he pushed her to the ground, twice. He said he didn’t know if he knocked her unconscious.

Milliette closed the case after one day of investigation. He concluded his report with a note that the medical examiner’s office had called again and said Kirk’s death would be ruled a suicide, with the final autopsy findings to be sent to Kotzebue police when finished. Kirk’s mother, Stalker, said police never interviewed her or asked her what her daughter had said to her the day she died.

“They should have investigated a lot better, a lot more thorough before they said it was a suicide,” Stalker said. “It’s like they just rush and do whatever to get it over with.”

The Kotzebue Police Department did not answer certain questions about the death investigation, including any about what conclusions Milliette drew from the rifle measurements, referring questions to the former police chief. Milliette did not respond to interview requests. The Alaska Department of Law, which oversees state prosecutors, did not answer questions about why no charges were filed in the case.

“I would have prosecuted him for the strangulation before she died,” said Casey Gwinn, a former prosecutor and president of the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.

A Missing 10-Year-Old Girl

Kirk’s death never made the news. Three months passed and the city of Kotzebue, along with the rest of Alaska, became absorbed with the case of a missing child. In this time of crisis, everyone turned to Mayor Clement Richards Sr.

Hundreds of volunteers hunted for 10-year-old Ashley Johnson-Barr, who disappeared in September 2018 from a playground at the center of town. The Northwest Arctic Borough Assembly chambers, adorned with antlers and a scrimshaw walrus tusk, served as the nerve center for the search with Clement Sr. acting as spokesperson.

“We’re a small community where everyone knows everyone, so we’re trying as hard as we can to find her,” Clement Sr. told the Daily News at the time.

“I’m deeply concerned she hasn’t been found yet,” he said, explaining that as many as 50 people were looking for the child at any one time. Norton joined in, her family said, cooking her best-loved food, caribou stew with pilot bread crackers, to feed fellow searchers.

After eight days, a volunteer spotted Johnson-Barr’s body in a brushy hollow outside the city. Federal investigators and state troopers raced to Kotzebue to aid local police and soon arrested a 41-year-old man for her death by strangulation. To solve the case, law enforcement used cellphone location data, DNA evidence, search warrants, surveillance video and the advantage of the FBI, who first arrested the suspect on grounds of lying to a federal officer. The killer, Peter Wilson, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and first-degree sexual abuse of a minor and is serving life in prison.

The response shows how cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous people can be solved when they are immediately prioritized by local authorities and when state and federal agencies give assistance. The state declared an annual Ashley Johnson-Barr Day and hired a retired Kotzebue-area trooper, Alaska Native Anne Sears, as Alaska’s first full-time Missing and Murdered Indigenous People investigator.

Ashley Johnson-Barr’s aunt holds a photo of the murdered girl at a Missing and Murdered Indigenous People event in Kotzebue this year. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News)

The message: Alaska would no longer tolerate the rape and killing of Indigenous women and girls.

But as the mayor prepared to leave office, nothing appeared to change for his sons. On Nov. 17, 2018, two months after Johnson-Barr was found dead, Kotzebue police received yet another report of domestic violence.

This time the victim was Norton, who by then was six months pregnant. Police found her crying, her right eye swollen shut. She said she had tried to stop her boyfriend, Amos Richards, from drinking by pouring out his beer.

City police Sgt. Norman Hughes described the attack in a report: “Susanna said the defendant became angry and grabbed her by the hair and drug her around the house. Susanna said the defendant kicked her repeatedly in the head, face, stomach and back. Susanna showed me her forearms which were swollen and told me she was holding her arms up to protect her head when the defendant was kicking her.”

Hughes categorized the beating in a criminal complaint filed in state court as misdemeanor, fourth-degree assault, the least serious form of assault spelled out by state law. (Hughes did not respond to interview requests or written questions.)

According to medical records, Norton flew to Anchorage, where her baby was born two weeks later at the Providence Alaska Medical Center. Doctors noted she had suffered “premature rupture of membranes.” Her family said the trip to Anchorage was medically necessary and believe the premature birth was brought on by the attack.

The baby weighed 3.1 pounds. Norton named her Eden.

“She is a tough baby girl,” Norton posted that day to friends and family. “Please remember us in your prayers.”

Sue Sue Norton’s Facebook post announcing the birth of her daughter (Screenshot courtesy of Lesley Sundberg)

Doctors recommended the baby stay in Anchorage, even after leaving the hospital, because Eden had health problems unrelated to the premature birth and needed surgery to survive. Mama Sue Norton said the Office of Children’s Services became involved and planned to temporarily place Eden with a foster family so she could be closer to medical care.

Sue Sue sang to the baby in Inupiaq over FaceTime, said Lesley and Joel Sundberg, a foster family who housed Eden after she left the hospital and have since adopted her. Amos, for a time, frequently texted the foster parents to ask how Eden was feeling and discuss the upcoming adoption.

Up in Kotzebue, a new strangulation case captured the attention of City Hall and local police. Authorities did not hesitate to seek the public’s help.

“The Kotzebue Police Department suspects foul play and is pursuing all investigative leads,” said Milliette, the investigator who had closed Kirk’s case without an arrest the year before. By this time, he had become chief of police. Volunteers raised thousands of dollars in reward money and the story made statewide news for days. After police released a surveillance photo of the suspect, a tipster came forward and identified the killer, who pleaded guilty to a felony in Roetman’s courtroom.

The victim was a dog: the city fire department’s pet husky.

A Second Death

On Jan. 19, 2020, Norton changed her Facebook profile photo to display a red handprint across her closed mouth, the symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement.

Sue Sue Norton commemorated missing and murdered Indigenous women in her Facebook profile photo less than two months before she was killed. (Facebook)

A few days later, Amos Richards appeared in court to face charges for kicking Norton while she was six months pregnant. Once again the magistrate was Michels, who approved a deal that allowed Amos to plead guilty to a single count of “reckless endangerment.”

Despite the plea, Norton and Amos made plans to fly to Anchorage to finalize adoption paperwork.

“I cant tell if she has me or Amos’s eyes,” Norton wrote on Jan. 30, 2020, after seeing the latest picture of Eden at the hospital. She sent the Sundbergs a selfie of her and Amos, heads together, to show the baby.

Norton sent a photo of herself and Amos Richards to the couple who adopted their daughter, Eden. (Photo courtesy of Lesley Sundberg)

Like Kirk, Norton was a Leo. (Although born years apart, Kirk and Norton shared the same Aug. 21 birthday.) Norton had a habit of cracking her knuckles and dreamed of one day taking a Caribbean cruise. Her biggest fear, she once wrote, was losing her children.

Her mother remembers her, most of all, as a helper. The last time the whole Norton family gathered with Sue Sue, she sat on a square of cardboard on the tiled floor, separating the hide from the marbled meat of a freshly killed caribou.

Five days before Norton and Amos were to sign adoption papers, Amos stopped responding to texts from the adopting family.

The timeline of Norton’s last week alive is muddled by conflicting evidence. In a 2020 email to the Daily News and ProPublica, Kotzebue police estimated her date of death as March 5 or 6. But Norton’s sister, Vera Norton, said Sue Sue helped family prepare a caribou on March 7 or 8.

At 8:32 a.m. on March 9, police were called to the former mayor’s house, where they found Norton’s body, her head covered by a jacket.

Outside, the temperature fell to 13 below. Here above the Arctic Circle, graves must be carved into the icy soil and permafrost, and as Vera Norton was leaving home to look for a burial site, she saw police placing Amos into a patrol car.

Hughes later told Sundberg that police were unable to collect certain evidence. Asked to clarify by ProPublica and the Daily News, Kotzebue Police Chief Roger Rouse said in an email that Hughes had been referring to “the rejection of a search warrant from the judge in regard to some evidence.” The police chief would not say which judge he was referring to.

Amos skipped the funeral.

Mama Sue Norton said police never spoke to her about the case. She first learned the official cause of her daughter’s death was homicide when a death certificate arrived in the mail.

Norton is buried just outside Kotzebue. (Emily Mesner/Anchorage Daily News)

The certificate listed the cause of death as “asphyxiation due to obstruction of airways and compression of neck.” The autopsy also found that Norton had suffered “multiple blunt force injuries of head, neck and extremities.”

She’d been beaten. But it was the strangling that killed her.

“We’re Not Interested”

The homes on the Richards’ property are 440 feet from the Kotzebue Police Department lobby. City Hall is even closer. A dozen domed surveillance cameras circle the various government buildings, several within view of the former mayor’s house.

One day in June 2021, I knocked on the door of the main house, the first of three visits to the property where police found Kirk and Norton’s bodies. “What’s this about?” Clement Sr. asked.

Richards was no longer borough mayor at the time, having lost reelection in 2018. Norton’s family says the deaths on his property were common knowledge and gave voters pause. Other Kotzebue residents said the election was simply more competitive, with a new crop of respected candidates. When asked about the death of Norton, he said, “I have no comment,” and shut the door.

Clement Jr., the middle son, stood outside by a four-wheeler watching the exchange. He said he knew nothing about the case because he was in Anchorage with his father when Norton died. Asked how he thinks she died, Clement Jr. said he didn’t know, hasn’t thought about it and never asked.

Maybe she killed herself, he volunteered. “It’s a common thing in Alaska.”

In 2022, Sears, the state’s Murdered and Missing Indigenous People investigator, began looking into the case and met with Eden’s foster family to learn more. But Sears soon resigned, just five months into the new job. She declined an interview request.

The Daily News and ProPublica on June 14 of this year again attempted to interview Clement Sr. and his sons about the deaths. A man who answered the door at the back house refused to comment and closed the door.

“We’re not interested,” he said.

Last month, the newsrooms sent certified letters detailing the findings of this story to members of the Richards family; we didn’t hear back. The family also didn’t respond to letters, phone calls, texts and Facebook messages.

It’s all made for a long three years for Mama Sue, a devout Christian and a retired tribal doctor who practiced traditional medicine in Inupiaq villages. She suffered a stroke months after her daughter’s death and temporarily lost her ability to speak. On a recent weekday she sat in a formation of half-filled produce boxes, silently packing everything she owns as she prepared for her house to be demolished.

Her family built the home by hand decades earlier. Now a new house is arriving on a barge, and soon Mama Sue will have indoor plumbing and running water for the first time. Builders will place the new home on the same lot, 230 feet from the house where her daughter was found strangled.

As of September, Kotzebue police had never interviewed Mama Sue about the homicide. Nor had they talked to Norton’s other relatives and potential witnesses. Nor did they ever talk to neighbors who live between Mama Sue and the former mayor’s house, who regularly visit with Amos and Anthony Richards.

The new Kotzebue police chief, Rouse, said he could not comment on Norton’s death because it remains an open investigation, although the case is now in the hands of Alaska State Troopers.

In 2021, Lesley Sundberg, who adopted Amos and Sue Sue’s child, filed a formal complaint with the state regulators against the Kotzebue Police Department, accusing the department of “dishonesty and untruthfulness.”

“One must wonder,” Sundberg wrote to the Alaska Police Standards Council in November 2021. “If there are unethical reasons why a Native Alaskan woman, mother of 3, daughter, niece, sister, aunt, and well-known community member’s murder, has been swept under the rug.” (The executive director for the council said in an email to the newsrooms that the agency “does not investigate complaints of this nature until the involved criminal investigation is completed by the law enforcement agency working on it, so that we do not interfere with the criminal investigation.”)

She never received an answer.

Correction

Nov. 11, 2023: This story originally misidentified Rachel Ahrens’ current position. She is a superior court judge, not a magistrate.

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

Leer en español.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

County officials in Wisconsin approved reforms this week meant to respond to a ProPublica report on the flawed investigation into the 2019 death of a Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm. They include an $8 million fund for farmworker housing and measures to improve access to government services for people who don’t speak English.

Advocates said the housing initiative appears to be the first of its kind in Wisconsin, a state that calls itself “America’s Dairyland” but that offers few protections for the undocumented immigrants whose labor many farms depend on.

Separately, the sheriff’s office in Dane County — which investigated the boy’s death — has drafted its first-ever written policy on how to respond to residents with limited English proficiency.

The changes come in response to a February report by ProPublica that detailed the flawed law enforcement investigation into the death of Jefferson Rodríguez, an 8-year-old boy who had lived in a barn above a milking parlor on the farm where his father worked about a half-hour north of Madison.

ProPublica found that another worker had accidentally run Jefferson over with a skid steer, a piece of machinery used to clear manure off barn floors. But the deputy who interviewed the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, mistakenly concluded that he had been the one operating the machine. This failure, we found, was due in large part to a language barrier. Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident, but Rodríguez was publicly blamed.

In a recent interview, Rodríguez said he was glad to learn that the story of what happened to his son has led to changes that could help other immigrants. “Perhaps if all of this had happened five or six years ago, my situation would have been entirely different,” he said. “It would be much better to be able to communicate with police without the fear of calling and them not understanding.”

José María Rodríguez Uriarte and his son Jefferson in Wisconsin. (Courtesy of José María Rodríguez Uriarte)

The measures were approved Monday as part of the county budget. Joe Parisi, the county executive, can still veto the budget but is not expected to do so.

After our story was published, several members of the board and other elected officials began calling for measures to ensure that people who don’t speak English can communicate accurately with sheriff’s deputies.

When Jefferson died, the sheriff’s office had no written policy on what deputies should do when they encountered people who spoke limited English or when they should call for an interpreter. As a general practice, the department encouraged patrol deputies to ask for help from bilingual colleagues or to use a phone- or video-based interpreter, Elise Schaffer, a department spokesperson, said in a statement.

The department doesn’t test language skills of employees, who instead self-report proficiency.

The deputy who interviewed Rodríguez identified herself as a proficient Spanish speaker. When we interviewed her, however, we discovered that the words she used in Spanish to question Rodríguez didn’t mean what she thought. Rodríguez told us that he never understood the deputy was trying to ask if he was driving the machine that killed his son.

Sheriff Kalvin Barrett declined interview requests. But at a county board meeting in September, he acknowledged “shortfalls in the services that we have and we want to make sure that we’re continuing to provide individuals with the help and the services that they need, especially if they don’t speak English.”

Barrett said the department will test employees on their ability to speak a second language and that it was looking for ways to provide “additional financial support” to those who demonstrate proficiency. According to a draft policy, the department will provide training to staff on how to find qualified interpreters and ensure key documents and forms are translated.

Schaffer said she did not know when the draft policy would be adopted.

Law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding, like Dane County, are required by the Civil Rights Act to ensure that their services are accessible to people who speak limited English. ProPublica found that sheriff’s departments across Wisconsin routinely encountered language barriers when responding to 911 calls from dairy farms. Over and over, records showed, officers who couldn’t communicate with Spanish-speaking workers relied on farm supervisors, other workers, Google Translate and even children to interpret for them.

The Board of Supervisors on Monday separately approved the creation of three full-time positions and one part-time role to improve services for people who don’t speak English. Among them: a coordinator to help departments implement language access plans and engage community members with limited English proficiency.

Dana Pellebon, a member of the Board of Supervisors who chairs the county’s Equal Opportunity Commission, said the issue of language accessibility got more attention than ever this year.

“Your article started this investigation into what it is that needed to happen,” she said. “I am deeply sorry and ashamed that it had to take the death of a child for us to be aware, and we’re going to work proactively to make sure these situations never occur again.”

ProPublica’s reporting also put a spotlight on dairy worker housing, which goes largely unregulated and uninspected by state and federal authorities.

Dane County is home to more than 170 dairy farms, according to state records. It’s unknown how many provide housing to workers, but a recent statewide study on immigrant dairy workers by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers found that close to three-quarters of surveyed workers lived in employer-provided housing, typically on the farm.

Our reporting found that Jefferson and his father had lived in a room above a milking parlor — the place where cows are milked day and night with loud, heavy machinery. (In court filings, the farm’s owners disputed that they lived there. ProPublica spoke with more than a half-dozen people, including Jefferson’s bunkmate, who confirmed that they and other workers lived above the parlor.)

“The issue of safe housing for folks working on farms and in rural parts of the county I don’t think had been front of mind to me until hearing more about, honestly, the death of Jefferson Rodríguez,” said Heidi Wegleitner, a member of the Board of Supervisors who was the lead sponsor and author of the farm worker housing initiative. “This is a gap that existed, I think, before your important reporting, but it really gave me a sense of urgency about doing something about it.”

Wegleitner, who is also a housing attorney, said the first goal of the new initiative will be to assess the existing housing supply and needs of farm workers. The county could then purchase land and build new housing.

Advocates say there is a significant need for affordable housing for undocumented immigrant dairy workers who are excluded from existing programs due to restrictions in federal funding.

“This has always been a challenge for us,” said José Martínez, the chief operating officer of the nonprofit United Migrant Opportunity Services, which operates several affordable housing projects for agricultural workers across Wisconsin.

None of UMOS’ housing developments are accessible to people who are undocumented.

Neither is the 32-unit apartment complex for low-income agricultural workers that opened last year in Darlington, in southwest Wisconsin. Several people involved with the project said it was intended, in part, to serve immigrant dairy workers in the area, but instead the units have been mostly rented out to other kinds of agricultural and food-processing workers, including immigrants with work permits.

There are other challenges. For more than a decade, Wisconsin has barred undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses, even though the state allows them to buy and register their vehicles. ProPublica reported earlier this year on how undocumented dairy workers are ticketed over and over for driving without a license. As a result, some workers prefer to live on the farms where they work so they can avoid having to drive.

Meanwhile, Rodríguez said he is glad somebody in Dane County is paying attention to the housing conditions immigrant workers encounter on dairy farms. It’s a subject he says comes up often when talking to friends who live and work in the area.

“The problem is you are just afraid that if you complain, there will be a negative reaction from the bosses,” he said. “That maybe they’ll tell you, ‘We don’t need you working here anymore.’ And so you just put up with the bad conditions.”

by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune

Update, Nov. 14, 2023: Scott Owen was charged on Nov. 13 with multiple felonies related to the allegations of two men who say he touched them inappropriately during therapy. If convicted, he faces a five-years-to-life prison term on each charge. His defense attorney did not respond to a request for comment. The Salt Lake Tribune is publishing ongoing coverage of the case.

This story details allegations of sexual assault.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Former Utah therapist Scott Owen was arrested Wednesday in connection with accusations that he sexually abused patients during sessions.

The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reported in August on a range of sex abuse allegations against Owen, who had built a reputation over his 20-year career as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He gave up his therapy license in 2018 after several patients complained to state licensers that he had touched them inappropriately. Some of the men who spoke to The Tribune said their bishop used church funds to pay for sessions where Owen allegedly also touched them inappropriately.

Owen, 64, was booked into the Utah County jail on suspicion of six counts of object rape and four counts of forcible sodomy. A Utah County judge has ordered that Owen remain in jail without the opportunity to post bail, finding that he could be a danger to the community and would likely flee if released.

Scott Owen (Obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica)

Owen had not been formally charged as of Friday morning. He has not responded to detailed lists of questions previously sent to him on two occasions regarding allegations that he touched his patients inappropriately. He co-founded Canyon Counseling in the late 1990s and continued to have an active role in the business until recently. The counseling center cut ties with him after sexual assault allegations became public before announcing in September that it was closing altogether.

In a probable cause statement released Wednesday, a Provo police officer wrote that the department had interviewed 12 former patients of Owen’s since August. Owen was arrested on allegations connected to two former patients, who both say Owen engaged in sexual contact with them during therapy sessions. That alleged touching included kissing, cuddling and Owen using his hand to touch their anuses. One man also alleges Owen performed oral sex on him.

Provo police allege in the statement that Owen used his position of trust as a therapist to coerce his patients into engaging in kissing, cuddling and sexual touching during therapy sessions. According to arrest records, many of the 12 former patients told officers that they began seeing Owen for treatment of “same-sex attraction.” The therapist told them their relationships with men were “broken” and that therapy could help them have “normal” relationships with men and eventually women, the men told police. From there, the patients allege, Owen would engage in touching that some say became increasingly sexual in nature.

Utah law says patients can’t consent to sexual acts with a health care professional if they believe the touching is part of a “medically or professionally appropriate diagnosis, counseling or treatment.”

Under a negotiated settlement with Utah’s licensing body, Owen was able to surrender his license without admitting to any inappropriate conduct, and the sexual nature of his patient’s allegations is not referenced in the documents he signed when he gave up his license.

Prior to the August publication of The Tribune and ProPublica article, Provo police said they had no record of anyone ever reporting Owen to law enforcement for alleged sexual misconduct.

Both state licensers and the local leaders in the LDS Church knew of inappropriate touching allegations against Owen as early as 2016, The Tribune and ProPublica reporting showed, but neither would say whether they ever reported Owen to the police. In Utah, with few exceptions, the state licensing division is not legally required to forward information to law enforcement.

The church said in response that it takes all matters of sexual misconduct seriously, and that in 2019 it confidentially annotated internal records to alert bishops that Owen’s conduct has threatened the well-being of other people or the church.

by Brandi Kellam and Louis Hansen, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A Virginia state representative has called for creating a legislative commission to examine public universities’ uprooting of Black neighborhoods following reports of the racial impacts of one local college’s expansion.

Delegate Delores McQuinn said in an interview that a commission is needed to research Black communities that were displaced by Virginia universities and to examine cases of families who say they were forced to sell their homes. Separate legislation sponsored by McQuinn in 2020 established a commission studying the impact of slavery and racial discrimination in Virginia, which is expected to issue a preliminary report in January.

McQuinn also urged colleges to explore potential redress for displaced families, such as free tuition. “Universities should take it upon themselves to revisit and address these inequities and injustice that occurred at monumental levels,” said McQuinn, a Democrat who represents part of the city of Richmond and adjoining counties. “Many universities have profited for years based on the injustice that prevented Black families from progressing financially.”

Along with McQuinn, other state legislators, a U.S. representative, and municipal and academic leaders said they were troubled by a recent series of articles by ProPublica and the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism. The series detailed how Virginia universities have dislodged Black families, sometimes through the use of eminent domain, to make room for dormitories, parking lots, laboratories and other facilities, thereby exacerbating the racial gap in home ownership and the loss of Black-owned land.

For example, the city of Newport News seized the core of a middle-class Black community in the early 1960s for the site of what is now Christopher Newport University. Although less expensive locations were available, the Shoe Lane neighborhood was close to an all-white country club and residents were planning to develop more housing for Black families. Newport News leaders decided to erase what they called the “Black spot,” according to former CNU President Anthony Santoro. The city paid homeowners 20% less than the property value set by an independent appraiser. After Black families began to resettle around the university, Christopher Newport expanded its boundaries and bought most of the remaining homes. The university used eminent domain as leverage to force at least one homeowner to sell in 2005. That year, the school’s governing board approved the tactic’s use for three other properties that Christopher Newport said it ultimately acquired without resorting to eminent domain.

In a September message to faculty and staff, Christopher Newport President Bill Kelly acknowledged that the university’s progress “has come at a human cost, and we must continue to learn about and understand our complicated history.” This “important chapter … is appropriately receiving renewed attention,” he added in an apparent reference to our Sept. 5 article.

The school has erected a plaque and an exhibit chronicling the 1960s seizure of the community. In response to ProPublica and VCIJ’s reporting, Kelly, a retired rear admiral who became CNU’s president this year, will lead a neighborhood walk next week with CNU faculty and students as well as state and city leaders and law enforcement officials, according to university spokesperson Jim Hanchett. Although one purpose of the walk is to explore the university’s history, the tour will bypass two of the streets most affected by CNU’s expansion into the former Black neighborhood. “The route was chosen because it was the safest option” in terms of traffic and sidewalk width, Hanchett said. “We are listening and learning … so that actions pursued by the university are thoughtful and effective.”

As part of its “listening and learning” campaign, the university hosted a panel discussion Wednesday at its fine arts center, where faculty members, local historians and clergy spoke to an overflow crowd about the significance of the campus’s location and the effects of expansion on the surrounding community. While acknowledging the event as a first step, associate professor Johnny Finn, chair of the sociology department, said that the university should go beyond symbolic actions and consider “very real and very material things that we can do,” such as paying reparations or offering scholarships to descendants of families who were pushed out of their homes.

“I hope that this is indeed a starting point and not an ending point,” Finn said.

Christopher Newport University (Christopher Tyree/Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO)

Several other universities in Virginia and elsewhere have sought to make amends for shattering minority communities. Part of the Lamberts Point neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia, was leveled in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was a predominantly Black neighborhood, to make room for what is now Old Dominion University’s main campus.

ODU officials said they have long recognized the need to improve relationships with their neighbors in Lamberts Point. In the past three decades, through community outreach and changes to admissions policies, students of color have increased from 21% to 54% of ODU’s enrollment. ODU has awarded $310,000 in scholarships to 137 students from Lamberts Point and nearby neighborhoods since 1999, according to university records. The school also has run free summer camps for Lamberts Point children since 1992 and offers seasonal jobs to high school students.

The University of Virginia also has acknowledged its role in displacing Black residents, appointing two executive commissions within the last decade to study its historical support for racist policies. The school’s president, Jim Ryan, set a goal of building up to 1,500 affordable homes and apartments by 2030 for Charlottesville residents on property owned by the university or its affiliates.

Some public and private universities outside Virginia are directing scholarships to residents of communities that were diminished by campus expansions. The bustling, largely Hispanic neighborhood of Auraria in Denver was chosen in the early 1970s as the site for a satellite campus of the University of Colorado. An urban renewal project razed all but 13 cottages and a grocery store, scattering 343 families. In the 1980s, the University of Colorado at Denver set up a Displaced Aurarian Scholarship program to eliminate fees and tuition for students from families who lived there between 1955 and 1973. Last year, the university expanded the program to include all future direct descendants of the displaced families. Overall, the school has handed out more than 600 Aurarian scholarships worth $3.4 million.

Nolbert Chavez, an administrator at the University of Colorado at Denver and former Colorado state lawmaker, said community lobbying helped secure an additional $2 million in scholarship funds from the state legislature in 2022. The Aurarian community’s struggle for recognition is similar to that of other Black and Hispanic neighborhoods displaced by universities across the country, he said.

“The thread is all the same — the communities were all traumatized,” Chavez said. “Until that is dealt with, these communities can’t move on.”

One such community is seeking financial reparations. About 50 families in Linnentown, a small Black neighborhood in Athens, Georgia, were displaced when their homes were acquired, mainly through eminent domain, and razed between 1962 and 1966 to clear space for University of Georgia dormitories. The financial losses caused by the seizures cost Black families $5 million in current dollars, including $4 million in underpayments and $1 million in foregone increases in property values, according to a study by University of Georgia researchers.

In 2021, commissioners in Athens-Clarke County, where the school is located, passed a resolution supporting redress for Linnentown families through economic development projects in underserved communities. Commissioners also earmarked $2.5 million to build affordable housing and a community center.

Linnentown families who say they were paid less than fair value for their properties have sought compensation from the university. But a university spokesperson said the Georgia Constitution prohibits the school from using state funds for voluntary payments to third parties.

“However, the university leads a wide range of successful initiatives and partnerships that contribute to UGA’s nearly $500 million economic impact on the Athens-Clarke County community,” spokesperson Greg Trevor said. The school dedicates 10 need-based scholarships to residents of the county, he said.

In an interview with VCIJ, Newport News Councilperson Tina Vick raised the possibility of reparations for families uprooted by the establishment and expansion of Christopher Newport University. Scholarships for their descendants aren’t adequate compensation, she said. “If somebody disrupted my whole family, business and wealth, free tuition would not be enough for me.” She said the council has informally discussed the ProPublica/VCIJ articles but hasn’t decided what, if anything, to do.

State Delegate Jeion Ward, a Christopher Newport graduate whose General Assembly district includes part of Newport News, said Virginia universities need to enhance their investments in Black communities through scholarships, affordable housing initiatives and development programs. The treatment of Black property owners by universities highlights “how the loss of generational wealth has been systemically sustained in our society,” she said.

“It’s crucial for both our community and the universities involved to acknowledge and respect the sacrifices of the Black property owners who were unjustly evicted from their homes and businesses,” said Ward, a Democrat.

Rep. Bobby Scott, who has represented Newport News in the U.S. House of Representatives for 30 years, said that the seizure of Shoe Lane was typical of “some of the practices and policies intended to make life more difficult for Black Americans” during the Jim Crow era. “It is neither shocking nor surprising that one of the only thriving middle class Black neighborhoods in Newport News was selected for this treatment,” he said.

Scott added that he supported the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill, which passed in 2021 and included a $1 billion pool to be used for reconnecting predominantly minority communities that have been intentionally divided by major highway construction. Public and private universities are eligible for the grants, which require local matching funds.

“We cannot undo all the harm that has been done, but we can do more to ensure current policies are implemented with equity,” said Scott.

McQuinn, the state delegate who called for a commission to explore the racial impact of university expansions, was reelected this week. She said she hopes that “these efforts will result in solution oriented steps towards addressing past inequities.”

Reach Brandi Kellam at brandi@brandikellam.com or brandi.kellam@vcij.org and Louis Hansen at louis.hansen@vcij.org.

by Logan Jaffe

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This month, in collaboration with The New Yorker, the ProPublica Films team published an animated documentary called “The Night Doctrine.” The film follows the investigative journey of reporter Lynzy Billing as she pieces together what happened to her own family members when they were murdered in Afghanistan 30 years ago. During her reporting, Billing began to learn of a series of other killings of Afghan civilians committed by the Zero Units, elite Afghan special forces groups backed by the U.S. That investigation, called “The Night Raids,” was published late last year.

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The accompanying film weaves together Billing’s personal story, the recent history of Afghanistan and the hauntingly recurrent nightly raids carried out by the Zero Units. I spoke with ProPublica visual journalist Mauricio Rodríguez Pons about the production of “The Night Doctrine,” which has so far been selected for screening by more than a dozen film festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival, HollyShorts, the New Hampshire Film Festival and BIAF, among others. It is an incredible feat of animated journalism, and I encourage you to watch the 16-minute piece on our site or on YouTube. Now, on to the discussion, which has been edited for clarity and length.

Watch “The Night Doctrine” How did the idea to create an animated short documentary based off of this investigation come to be?

In the beginning, our plan was to create a three-minute video explainer. But when we started to work at the beginning with video that Lynzy [Billing] and another photographer, Kern Hendricks, took in Afghanistan, we saw the potential to create the story around it. Then we decided, OK, let’s do a nine-minute animated video about a single raid through the perspectives of a family and a soldier. And as we kept working with Lynzy, and with Tracy [Weber, ProPublica managing editor], and with Almudena Toral, ProPublica’s executive producer and co-director of the film, we discovered that Lynzy’s story was really, really hard — and really connected with the families, the Zero Units and the story of Afghanistan itself. So we started asking questions: What if we created a film that connects the three stories into one while trying to explain what happened in Afghanistan?

Part of the style of the film is the idea that everything is connected. It’s like an infinite journey. We wanted to create a journey that never ends — mimicking Afghanistan’s cycle of violence, loss and no accountability.

The transitions really are some of the biggest elements in the film. It’s not necessarily cuts between scenes; it’s fluid, you sort of slide into one scene and then another.

A phrase that we wrote on a storyboard is “infinite nightmare,” and we asked ourselves how we can represent that. I came up with this idea of creating an infinite sequence that connects with each sequence, and the whole film is like a connection. It’s like you’re always navigating the stories and the journey. I mean, Lynzy’s journey and Afghanistan’s journey is at the end of the day the same, right?

How would you describe the film’s style and what informed your decision to animate in the way you did?

Of course, the night is kind of the main thing here. In the night, the darkness is important. We wanted to again create that infinite nightmare — and the mood, the colors, everything is connected with the night, the shadows, the blue color is also kind of like a nightmare. Everything was driven by that idea.

From the technical perspective, it’s hard to create differences in black.That’s why we wanted some light elements present like the candle at the beginning that the little kid has next to his bed, and the lanterns, and the lights of a car.

I know you mentioned that Lynzy is a photographer as well, and the film incorporates real video footage and photographs. How did you make that decision to include the source of real elements? And how did you want those elements to relate to the animation?

The security of our sources was important for us. And the access was impossible — especially after the Taliban took over Afghanistan again. We also really wanted to add some elements to communicate that this is a true story. And that’s why we decided to add real footage elements.

For example, the image that everybody saw when the United States left Afghanistan was that plane … so we wanted to use that to remind people: Remember this image? These are the stories that were around that image you saw. And at the end we show the main characters of the piece in their actual, modern environment. It’s to give some kind of truth; that this is a true story. It’s not just a fiction animated piece. We didn’t invent this.

What are your thoughts on how visuals and animation can fill in gaps of what isn’t officially recorded? And how did you think about that as you made the film?

I think the animation gives you the power not just to fill the gaps, but to fill the gaps creatively. That creativity, that freedom that the animation gives you, allows you to present not just the facts but also the sentiments that people felt. It’s something that not only animation can do, but it’s also kind of like its main role. Especially here in ProPublica, a place where we really care about facts, and with what happened and what didn’t happen, animation is a powerful tool to represent not just what happened with the families but to represent how the families felt and how Lynzy felt.

Were there any inspirations that you drew on while you were working on the piece?

The main inspiration for me came from a soundtrack that Milad Yousufi, the musician we worked with, shared with me. It was like a soundtrack of Afghan old movies and the instruments include the main instruments, the rabab and piano, we used in the film. It was really, really dark. And I played that all day for days. I don’t remember how many months; maybe eight months. I would work with that music on and kind of allowed myself to feel that darkness and the suffering of the story, of the Afghan people. I mean, how many families suffered there? For me, that’s the main thing. It's the main inspiration.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the film?

I hope viewers take away the story, and I hope they think about what the United States is doing in places like Afghanistan, and about accountability. Like Lynzy said in the film, it happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Vietnam, it happened in Iraq. That’s why I said at the beginning that this is a never-ending story. You just can’t imagine all the sad stories that are destroying families right now. I guess I just want people to consider the families that are affected. That’s the intention of the film. That’s what we wanted to represent. And I hope we can put another voice out there to try to make change.

by Nat Lash, ProPublica, and Janet Wilson, The Desert Sun

As the Colorado River snakes through the deserts of the Southwest United States, its water is diverted to cities, states, tribes and farmers along its course.

Agriculture has always been the largest use of the Colorado River, and California’s Imperial Irrigation District, established in 1911, has among the earliest claims and by far the largest claim to the river. The district — and by extension, the farmers it serves — has access to enormous amounts of cheap water from the shrinking river. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have upheld the farmers’ rights to the water.

The river’s reservoirs cratered last year, with Lake Mead falling to its lowest level since it was filled in 1937. As the federal government weighs paying more than half a billion dollars to the irrigation district and its farmers to use less water, The Desert Sun and ProPublica sought to find out who was using the water and what they did with it.

The district refused to tell us and denied public record requests, saying that identifying individual customers would create “uncertainty, fear and turmoil.” So we used satellite data, combined with records on who owns and farms each field in the valley, to estimate for the first time exactly who benefits from the vast supply of water, and how they use it.

Read the full story on ProPublica’s website.

by Janet Wilson, The Desert Sun, and Nat Lash, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with The Desert Sun.

Craig Elmore’s family history is the stuff of Westerns. His grandfather, John Elmore, a poor son of a Missouri preacher, arrived in California’s Imperial Valley in 1908 and dug ditches to deliver water to homesteaders.

Thanks to his marriage to a citrus magnate’s daughter, reputed good fortune as a gambler and business acumen, he amassed the Elmore Desert Ranch, part of roughly 12,000 acres that two branches of the family still farm.

All that land in the blazing-hot southeastern corner of California came with a huge bonanza: water from the Colorado River. In 2022, the present-day Elmores consumed an estimated 22.5 billion gallons, according to a Desert Sun and ProPublica analysis of satellite data combined with business and agricultural records. That’s almost as much as the entire city of Scottsdale, Arizona, is allotted.

That puts the Elmores in exclusive company. They are one of 20 extended families who receive fully one-seventh of the river’s flow through its lower half — a whopping 1,186,200 acre-feet, or about 386.5 billion gallons, the analysis showed.

The Colorado River system, which supplies 35 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, nearly collapsed last year. Even after a wet winter, it is dwindling due to overuse and climate change. But no matter how low its reservoirs sink, the historic claims of these families and all of Imperial County place them first in line — ahead of every state and major city — for whatever water remains.

How a handful of families and a rural irrigation district came to control so much of the West’s most valuable river is a story of geography and good timing, intermarrying and shrewd strategy, and a rich but sometimes ugly past when racist laws and wartime policies excluded farmers of color. Together, they winnowed the greatest access to these 20 clans, who today use more of the river than all of Wyoming, New Mexico or Nevada. A vast, laser-leveled green quilt of crops covers this naturally bone-dry valley, all of it grown with Colorado River water.

The water is held “in trust” by the Imperial Irrigation District and two smaller agencies, meaning they are legally required to deliver the water to any county landowner for use on their property.

But many farmers here see the river water as virtually their private property, though nearly all acknowledge it can’t be sold apart from their land.

“It’s not a public resource,” says Rachel Magos, executive director of the Imperial County Farm Bureau. “It’s called prior perfected rights.”

That phrase, “prior perfected rights,” is shorthand for legal decisions spanning 100 years, including three by the U.S. Supreme Court, that have perpetuated those rights since early would-be developers staked claims for the Imperial Valley that amounted to the river’s entire flow.

Blood ties, and the ceaseless buying of lands from less successful farmers or descendants who want a “windfall,” have concentrated thousands of farm fields and the water that comes with them into an ever-smaller number of hands, says county tax assessor Robert Menvielle.

Menvielle, a third-generation resident, and his extended family own about 1,700 acres that they largely lease to farmers, some of whom he’s known his entire life. “You’ve got this small group of families, and … they’ve all intermarried, and it’s almost like a feudal-type system, where we’re combining our little kingdoms,” he says.

Those fiefdoms exclude most of Imperial’s 180,000 residents. Agricultural operations — which in addition to historic farming families include universities, the Mormon Church, outside speculators and a Middle Eastern hay company — get 97% of the irrigation district’s river water, while every town, strip mall and other business combined get 3%. And the county ranks among the poorest in California, with a 2021 per capita income of $19,005. The U.S. per capita income that year was $70,480.

Irrigation district spokesperson Robert Schettler didn’t dispute the Desert Sun and ProPublica analysis showing who uses the valley’s water and what they do with it. But he said in a statement that despite distributing half of its water to 20 extended families, the district “provides equitable water delivery service to all,” including small landowners, towns and businesses.

The disparities in wealth and water disturbed Benny Andrés Jr. when he was growing up in Imperial County, and he became a historian partly to study their origins.

“How is it that a region conducive to year-round farming, with half a million acres of rich soil, plentiful and subsidized water … has bred widespread poverty and unhealthiness?” Andrés, now an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, asks in his book, “Power and Control in the Imperial Valley.” His research shows that outside speculators and absentee landlords also amassed huge amounts of land and water while people of color were systematically excluded, condemning most to eventual poverty.

Growers say that without agriculture, unemployment and poverty here would be even worse.

Meanwhile, outside threats to the area’s outsized water supply are looming. As federal officials force hard choices to keep the river afloat, states and cities facing water cuts are eyeing the Imperial Valley. The big farmers and their irrigation district say they know they’ve got a target on their backs.

Jay Famiglietti, an Arizona State University hydrologist who studies global water supplies, says large-scale farming in southwestern deserts like the Imperial Valley is “not sustainable, it just can’t go on.” Ultimately, production may need to shift to wetter regions.

Elmore and other farmers say that could devastate year-round food supplies in the U.S. — you can’t grow leafy greens and alfalfa in the Midwest in February. But they are striving to use far less water and to devise new ways to profit from an ancient flow.

Just Add Water

A canal carries water through Elmore Desert Ranch. (Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Elmore’s grandfather arrived a year after the Southern Pacific Railroad forced the then-raging Colorado River to resume its normal course to Mexico, ending two years of flooding in the valley. For eons, the river was a wild, unpredictable force that shaped this landscape. At times, it flowed west and north into a huge trough between emerging mountain ranges. Here, the ancient river deposited millions of tons of mineral-rich soil.

In the mid-1800s, physician O.M. Wozencraft, a would-be land developer, realized that if the river could be diverted into its ancient path, the silty top coat of what was then known as “the Valley of Death” could be farmed. He persuaded California to deed him most of present-day Imperial County, but he couldn’t convince Congress to pay for a canal to carry river water to his land. A congressman called the scheme a “fantastic folly of an old man.”

But the lure of that water was irresistible. From 1895 through 1899, according to M.J. Dowd’s book, “The First 40 Years,” dreamers, schemers and agents for land barons posted notices on the river’s western bank, invoking California law protecting downstream mining claims, and filed them with the county recorder. “Each of these appropriations was for a flow of 10,000 cubic feet per second of the water of the Colorado River,” writes Dowd.

Collectively, they claimed the river’s entire flow and then some, Andres says. “They wanted it all, they didn’t want Arizona or anybody else to get a drop.”

But he and other experts note such claims had to be actively worked on, by seeking investors, building infrastructure and eventually providing water for “beneficial uses.”

By 1901, the California Development Co. had acquired rights to as much water as it could use. That year, Colorado River water was diverted via the first canal to what had been grandly christened the Imperial Valley, and by 1910, thousands of small farmers had arrived. The following year, the Imperial Irrigation District was formed, and a few years later, it bought out the private company and its rights.

Restless young men from India, Japan, Europe and the eastern U.S. arrived in the next 30 years. Many quickly went belly up and sold to more successful neighbors, like ancestors of the Elmores, Abattis, Strahms, Saikhons, Taylors, Morgans, Schaffners, Grizzles, Brandts, LaBrucheries, Rueggers and Osterkamps, all among the top 20 families using Imperial water today.

No Limits

The rose-colored vision of hardy pioneers “settling” the “virgin West” — after driving Native Americans from their ancestral lands — was enshrined in the federal Homestead Act of 1862 and Reclamation Act of 1902. Farmers were permitted to occupy and irrigate a maximum of 160 acres of free land and make it their own.

However, Imperial County landowners and complaisant U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials ignored that limit, allowing rapid consolidation of land, says Andrés, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the county’s early years. Thousands of formerly small holdings were now “farm units” absorbed by growing spreads like the Elmores’, a cotton syndicate, and hundreds of absentee landlords, he found. A 1924 report estimated 85% of Imperial landlords lived on the California coast or out of state.

Many farmers in the county were not white: By 1922, there were 2,200 Japanese immigrants farming 28,000 acres, and 495 people from India farmed 36,000 acres. Japanese growers, some of whom had worked on Hawaiian pineapple plantations, were often highly skilled and successful across California. Similarly, immigrants from the Punjab region of India knew how to coax vegetables from the valley’s often claylike soil in triple-digit heat. Some owned land; others farmed absentee owners’ holdings.

Japanese workers pick strawberries on an Imperial Valley farm. (Leo G. Hetzel/Hetzel Collection via Imperial County Historical Society/Pioneers’ Museum) A group portrait of Japanese members of the Imperial Valley Fencing Club in 1932. (Leo G. Hetzel/Hetzel Collection via Imperial County Historical Society/Pioneers’ Museum)

These migrants regularly endured racism. Landowners, county officials and even farmers of differing nationalities ranked migrants — Japanese, Indians, Filipinos, Mexicans and eventually Black southerners — in terms that would be familiar to white eugenicists. They classified them by their farming knowledge, ability to do backbreaking labor in searing heat and “reliability,” which meant they were unlikely to walk off the job or to demand higher wages or better living conditions.

“Like immigrants always, these groups were more desperate to succeed, so they were willing to work harder,” Andrés says.

White groups statewide decried the success of people of color. State Alien Land Laws banned Asians from owning land or leasing it long term. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the second ban, but it was rarely prosecuted in Imperial. Still, it was not easy. Japanese families built wooden “mobile” shacks that they could carry from one set of fields to another after leases ended or if they were forcibly evacuated.

The exclusionary law drove out people of color who worked as merchants, too, and “began to depopulate the countryside,” said Andres. Many large landowners also ceased using full-time workers who lived nearby and hired contractors to bring in cheap, temporary labor from across the border.

Elmore says his grandfather operated differently than many during that era, building a school that all children from the surrounding remote area could attend. Elmore still lives in Imperial County, has about 50 full-time employees, and pays their health and life insurance benefits.

Today, instead of a vibrant local workforce, thousands of day laborers line up as early as 1 a.m. at the Mexicali-Calexico border, waiting for hours to be bused to fields, then back again. Meanwhile, Imperial had the highest unemployment rate in California in September, 19.7%, compared with 4.4% statewide.

Imperial Valley United

When the Great Depression hit, a flood of Dust Bowl “Okies” and other poor white and southern Black migrants arrived, upending the “whites first” racial caste system.

A migrant farm worker from Mexico outside his home on the edge of a pea field in the Imperial Valley in 1937. (Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress) A Dust Bowl refugee living in temporary housing in Imperial County in 1937. (Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress)

A few years later, during World War II, anti-Asian sentiment reached a fever pitch. FBI agents forced more than 100 Japanese community leaders from their homes in February 1942, including a Buddhist priest and a Christian minister. Then on two nights in May of that year, the entire Japanese population of Imperial County — hundreds of successful farmers, merchants, religious leaders and their families — was removed from their homes to be forcibly relocated to the Poston incarceration camp in Arizona. Some of the valley’s first farmers were among those imprisoned.

Their parcels, like land owned by detained Japanese farmers across the state, were likely acquired by neighbors and investors at foreclosure sales. Elmore says his grandfather and father had Japanese farmer friends who were forcibly removed. “That shouldn’t have happened,” he says. He’s not sure who acquired the local Japanese families’ land. “I know we didn’t.”

Near the end of the war, a huge anti-Japanese rally was held on the Brawley high school football field. A resolution was adopted petitioning the president, Congress and governor of California and protesting the return of any Japanese people to the Imperial Valley. Speakers at the rally condemned local churches for trying to aid their former neighbors.

There were financial motives behind the xenophobia. Powerful white shippers and growers organized the event, telling the local chamber of commerce that two people from the Poston camp “had appeared in town, announcing their intention to return to Brawley.” About 2,500 more former Imperial Valley residents of Japanese ancestry were due to be released.

A broad coalition of community groups dubbed “Imperial Valley United” vowed to permanently exclude Japanese people from the valley. Today, one Japanese-American farmer is listed on the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association roster, and it’s not clear if he used any water last year.

“Prior Perfected”

Imperial officials lobbied for years for massive federal infrastructure to “tame” the Colorado and diminish the impact of drought and flooding. Growing southwestern cities wanted a steady water and power supply, too. It took until 1935 to complete what was then the world’s largest dam, in Boulder Canyon, Arizona.

In exchange for Hoover Dam, California and six other states signed a “Law of the River” compact. It divided the Colorado into upper and lower basins and set maximum amounts that each could take annually.

The Imperial Irrigation District had to agree for the first time to cap its river allocation. On paper, the era of no limits was over. But in practice, the agency would for decades order as much free river water as its farmers wanted.

There were challenges to their dominance.

As Phoenix and other cities in the Southwest grew exponentially, Arizona challenged California’s historic claim to the Colorado River. Arizona lost, but in 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that California would keep 4.4 million acre-feet, Arizona would be entitled to 2.8 million acre-feet and Nevada would get 300,000 acre-feet. Imperial County came out on top, with a legal claim to three-quarters of California’s share.

An idealistic New York doctor named Ben Yellen, who had built a practice in Brawley caring for low-income residents and farmworkers, also wrote “yellow sheets,” denouncing Imperial landowners’ long-standing violation of the 160-acre homesteading limit and the irrigation district’s delivery of massive amounts of river water to them in violation of the 1902 Reclamation Act. He successfully intervened in a case challenging the water district, and California’s highest court eventually ruled the 160-acre irrigation limit had been illegally ignored.

But Elmore’s father and other major farmers fought back. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the farmers could keep their large tracts and all the river water being delivered to them. The court ruled that the Imperial Irrigation District held “prior perfected” rights acquired from private irrigation companies under state law, neither of which had imposed limits on how much acreage could be irrigated. A framed copy of the decision hangs on Elmore’s ranch office wall.

U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston that year slipped language into a bill supposedly designed to reform the Bureau of Reclamation that permanently exempted Imperial County farmers from the 160-acre limit.

The number of farmers continued to shrink. From the 1960s to the 1990s, hundreds of smaller Imperial County farmers — largely descendants of Filipino migrants and other people of color — were decimated. U.S. Department of Agriculture research led to sturdier tomatoes that could be transported long distances, including from Mexico, which slashed demand for tastier but more perishable tomatoes grown by more than 500 Filipino farmers in and around Niland, in the valley. The North American Free Trade Agreement sent even more farming across the border, wiping out more small Imperial operations.

Sending Water to Cities

It was the Elmores who first cost their fellow growers some water. In 1982, Craig Elmore’s dad sued neighboring farmers and the irrigation district. The Elmores’ land sat at a lower elevation than nearly every other farmer’s fields, and they alleged that aging canals and overwatering by some had caused costly flooding on their fields.

The courts found that the irrigation district and its farmers were wasting water. The settlement agreement forced the district to partner with the urban Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies 19 million residents in coastal counties. In exchange for a cut of Imperial’s water, Metropolitan Water District funded the lining of the earthen All-American Canal and miles of side ditches.

As cities and suburbs drew millions more residents, Imperial’s power continued to erode. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s Interior secretary, Gale Norton, threatened to take some of Imperial’s water for cities; a year later, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein bluntly warned Imperial Irrigation District officials that if they didn’t agree to transfer 300,000 acre-feet per year to suburban San Diego and the Coachella Valley, the U.S. Interior secretary might strip away their “senior” water rights. It would be the largest transfer of agricultural water to an urban area in the nation’s history, and the irrigation district would be paid handsomely by urban customers.

Antonio Ramos of El Centro, California, holds up a gallon-size bottle, representing Imperial County’s water, during a 2002 meeting on a proposal to transfer water from Imperial Valley farms to San Diego County. (Kevin Marty/Imperial Valley Press via AP)

A thin majority of the district’s board approved the deal. Most farmers have now accepted that they, like everyone else, have a limit on how much water they can use. But with urban areas wielding far more political power, some are not sure there will be farming here in another century.

“We Adapt”

Ralph Strahm, who with his brother and nephews used an estimated 81,000 acre-feet of water last year, the second-highest amount in the district, thinks people’s need for drinking water may win out over the need for food in most politicians’ minds.

He and other prominent growers are willing to seasonally fallow some fields for two months during the summer, if they’re paid to do so and keep their “senior” river rights. The federal government is weighing whether to award Imperial Irrigation District and local growers more than $600 million not to farm certain fields.

Andrés, the historian, says that approach is what led to most of the county’s impoverishment. He has his own vision for the valley’s future: The irrigation district and farmers should sell less-productive or unused land and pay out of their own pockets to ensure they use water efficiently. Public funds and training should instead support the diverse group of small farmers, he says.

But Elmore says hefty public subsidies and possible private investments are needed for farmers to grow crops more efficiently, then be paid to possibly transfer the conserved water elsewhere or leave it in the river’s massive reservoirs.

A tractor works a field at the Elmore Desert Ranch in 2019. (Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Elmore’s son is the southwest region farm manager for Water Asset Management, a Wall Street investment firm whose mission is to tap into a potential trillion-dollar water transfer market. Elmore has spoken at WAM’s annual meetings, and like another top vegetable farmer, Jack Vessey, now leases and farms acreage that WAM has bought in the valley.

Elmore is building support in the irrigation-district for funding a $4.4 million pilot reservoir on his land, which could ultimately hold water for farming or for sale. The private sale of water outside the valley is currently prohibited, but that could change if public funding for conservation dries up.

However it shakes out, the Elmores and Imperial’s other dynasties will likely continue profiting from the Colorado River.

“I’m optimistic,” Elmore says in a throaty rumble. “Every time there’s a change, we adapt. If there’s one thing the Imperial farmer has learned how to do in these harsh conditions, it’s to adapt.”

Elmore, 66, says he’s thinking about who will benefit long term: “My grandson is 6 years old. I’d like to see him go into farming.”

Mark Olalde contributed reporting.

Janet Wilson’s reporting was supported by funding from Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Correction

Nov. 10, 2023: The story originally misidentified where Jay Famiglietti works. He is at Arizona State University, not the University of Arizona.

by Robert Faturechi and Ellis Simani

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It was the kind of endorsement most companies dream of. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, the legendary investor known as the Oracle of Omaha, repeatedly sang the praises of Wells Fargo in an interview with Fortune. The bank, Buffett said, “has come closer” to an effective business model “than any other big bank by some margin.” He detailed the ways in which Wells Fargo was more valuable than it seemed and compared its chair to Walmart founder Sam Walton.

The interview was published on April 20, 2009. Banks were still reeling from the financial crisis, stock markets were turbulent, and Buffett was the kindly white-haired billionaire who had assured Wall Street, the U.S. government and the public that America would be just fine. It was Buffett who had proposed the idea that turned into the $250 billion federal bailout that had propped up America’s banks (including Wells Fargo).

Berkshire was already one of Wells Fargo’s largest shareholders, and Buffett was so influential that, Fortune noted, he had “caused a 20%-plus jump in Wells shares” the previous month “simply by expressing confidence in the bank on TV.” After the Fortune interview appeared, a similar pattern ensued: Buffett’s comments rippled across financial media, eagerly lapped up by the legion of investing fans who followed his every move. By April 24, Wells Fargo shares had jumped 13%.

That day, Buffett privately sold off $20 million worth of Wells Fargo shares in his personal account.

It has long been known that Buffett keeps a personal stock portfolio, separate from his company’s holdings. But what’s inside of it has always been a closely guarded secret. Buffett’s hand-picked biographer, Alice Schroeder, told ProPublica that he gave her access to nearly everyone and everything in his life — except his personal investing records.

Over the years, Buffett has been unequivocal about one aspect of his personal portfolio: He has repeatedly said he steers clear of trading stocks that his company is trading. “I can’t be buying what Berkshire is buying,” he has said. Doing so, he stated on another occasion, would pose a “conflict” of interest. If he buys a stock before Berkshire does, for example, he could be enjoying a better stock price than his shareholders, since a big stock purchase by Berkshire will tend to increase prices.

But roughly two decades of Buffett’s personal trades were included in a leak of IRS data obtained by ProPublica. Those records show that the nation’s best known and most respected investor has sometimes said one thing in public and done another in private.

On at least three occasions, Buffett has traded stocks in his personal account in the same quarter or the quarter before Berkshire bought or sold shares of the same companies, doing so before the conglomerate’s moves were disclosed to the public.

These trades may violate Berkshire’s ethics policies, authored by Buffett himself, which require “all actual and anticipated securities transactions of Berkshire” be publicly disclosed before Berkshire employees can trade the stocks personally.

Warren Buffett answers questions during the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in 2021. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Overall, Buffett’s records show he reported at least $466 million in personal stock sales between 2000 and 2019. That’s a relatively modest sum for a person reported to be worth more than $100 billion (and indeed the records reveal vastly more trades in government and corporate bonds than in stocks). But the records include only securities he sold, not those he bought and held, so the portfolio is likely larger than ProPublica could see.

The trading records offer an unprecedented window into how America’s most iconic investor manages his personal portfolio. Buffett did not respond to detailed written questions about his personal trades.

Buffett has in the past described the process of finding a stock for his personal account in amorous terms: “It’s like finding a new girl to me.” But, at a Berkshire shareholder meeting in 2016, he waved away speculative questions about his personal trading by saying that the vast majority of his money is in shares of Berkshire, not his personal account, and that he planned to donate almost all of his billions in wealth to charity anyway.

In February 2012, Buffett was asked on CNBC why, despite his praise of JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire did not invest in the bank. “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Buffett responded. “I own some shares of JPMorgan.” He explained that because Berkshire didn’t own any shares of the giant bank, “it’s one that I can buy without having any possible problems about conflict.”

The question came up a second time at a Berkshire shareholder meeting that year, and Buffett gave almost the same answer. He said he preferred Wells Fargo, but Berkshire was “buying Wells Fargo stock and that takes me out of the business of buying Wells Fargo,” so he bought shares of Chase for his personal account because it was his second choice.

“That’s one of the problems I have,” he said. “I can’t be buying what Berkshire is buying and I’ve got some money around and therefore I go into my second choices or into tiny little companies.”

Only a year earlier, the issue of personal trading had given rise to a rare scandal for Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett’s heir apparent at the time, David Sokol, resigned under a cloud after making personal stock trades, which Berkshire ultimately determined had violated its insider trading policy. Berkshire is a sprawling conglomerate, with $300 billion in 2022 revenues, that wholly owns some businesses and has stakes in a number of publicly traded companies. Sokol, who denied his trades were improper, had purchased shares of a chemicals company that Berkshire acquired soon after.

“Sokol episode could dent Berkshire reputation,” read one headline. “Say it ain’t so, Warren,” read another.

In the wake of such articles, Buffett defended his company’s personal trading policies and the firm’s controls to ensure those rules were followed. “I don’t think you’ll find that the problem is in the rules. The problem is in people breaking the rules,” he said. “People break rules...the job is to find them.”

He distinguished between an employee long holding a stock that Berkshire then invests in, which he defended, and making a move in a stock about the same time Berkshire did, as was the case with Sokol. Buffett was asked if there were other instances of anyone at Berkshire trading in a way that might create even the perception of potential frontrunning — the practice of investment managers trading stock with the knowledge that their employers were planning to trade the same security. “I’ve never seen it,” Buffett said. “I have no evidence of it.”

Ultimately, the Sokol episode left no permanent blemish on Buffett, whose reputation for probity is as stellar as his reputation for investing acumen. Indeed, Buffett has had a credibility no other investor could match — a homespun billionaire, with plain-spoken aphorisms and a handshake you could trust.

Buffett’s reputation in the public mind blossomed in the early 1990s after he was chosen to clean up a mess at Salomon Brothers. In the wake of the investment bank’s involvement in rigging auctions for treasury securities, Buffett was called to testify before Congress. With the cameras rolling, he assured lawmakers that ethical lapses would not be tolerated under his watch. “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding,” he testified. “Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”

Ever since, Buffett has spoken out harshly against anyone who would trade reputation for profit, repeating the adage that no one should do anything in private they don’t want to see on the front page of a newspaper.

The remarkable returns he delivered for Berkshire investors gave him his golden aura, but he also cultivated the image of a selfless and ethical billionaire. He pledged the vast majority of his wealth to charity. And he has called for higher tax rates for the wealthy, earning plaudits from President Barack Obama and others, even though the kinds of reforms he pushed would have largely left his fortune untouched.

In October 2012, Buffett made another noteworthy personal trade. Over several days, he sold $35 million worth of Johnson & Johnson shares. At that point, Berkshire had effectively revealed that it, too, had sold Johnson & Johnson shares.

Berkshire did this in the normal manner. It did not issue a press release announcing its plans to sell the shares. Instead, it filed a report (as many investment managers are required to do) listing its holdings as of the end of the quarter. The public could then compare the holdings in that filing to the holdings in the previous quarter. In that way, ardent Berkshire followers could determine that the company had sold shares at some point — no date is specified — during the quarter.

That filing did not disclose what was to come: namely, that Berkshire would sell millions more shares in the two quarters that followed. That seems to put Buffett’s personal sale at odds with Berkshire’s policy. That document states that if an employee is “aware that Berkshire has taken or altered a position in a public company’s securities or that Berkshire is actively considering such action, trading in any securities of such public company” is “expressly prohibited prior to the public disclosure by Berkshire of its actions.” The policy categorized awareness of Berkshire’s trades as “material nonpublic information,” a necessary component of an insider-trading claim.

In this instance, Buffett’s sale of Johnson & Johnson avoided a small dip in the days that followed. But over the ensuing months, the shares climbed significantly.

In another instance, in August 2009, Buffett appeared to move, in his personal portfolio, in the opposite direction of Berkshire’s portfolio. He sold $25 million of Walmart stock in his personal account, even as Berkshire almost doubled its stake (which had previously held steady for 15 quarters) during the same quarter. It’s unclear which transaction came first, but no matter the order of events, it raises the question of why Buffett made one choice for his own portfolio and the opposite choice for Berkshire’s investors. And if he knew Berkshire had or was considering making a move, and still traded, Buffett again risked violating his own insider trading policy.

The result of Buffett’s moves was anticlimactic: Walmart’s stock didn't move much in the weeks that followed this trade, but then months later rose some with the market. There’s no sign, in ProPublica’s data, that he sold Walmart shares again.

by Maya Miller, with additional reporting by Ash Ngu

If you want to request your own claim file, head to our “Claim File Helper.” If you have trouble getting your claim file back, let us know what happened at claimfile@propublica.org.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Just outside public view, the American health insurance industry’s algorithms, employees and executives process tens of millions of claims for people seeking medical care.

Sometimes, as ProPublica has reported, insurers base decisions on what’s good for the company’s bottom line rather than what’s good for the patient’s health. Sometimes, insurers make mistakes. In one case we learned about, a company denied a child’s treatment because it based its judgment on adult guidelines instead of pediatric ones. In another, an internal reviewer misread what type of surgery the patient sought and denied coverage based on that error.

At first, these patients had no idea why they were denied treatment. But in each instance, insurance employees left a paper trail — in notes, emails or recordings of phone calls — explaining what happened. Patients and advocates used what they found in those records to craft appeals and ultimately receive the care they needed.

Federal law and regulations require insurers to hand over exactly this sort of information in response to a written request. And they have to do it fast: Most people who get insurance through an employer should get the records, called claim files, within 30 days.

There’s just one catch: Some insurers aren’t turning files over like they’re supposed to. We followed ProPublica readers through the process with five different insurers. Several companies only shared documents with patients after we reached out.

Our team discovered how useful claim files can be after a patient shared internal notes and calculations that a health insurer had made about his case. But few health insurers advertise this service or offer clear instructions for getting these records. To help fill that gap, we published a guide explaining how to submit a claim file request. We also shared resources with health care providers and patient advocates nationwide, including request letter templates.

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More than 120 people have told us that they have since requested or intend to request their claim files. Though a handful say they received information that helped them understand why their health insurer denied coverage, many more have been running into challenges. They’ve told us about insurers blowing past deadlines, wrongly requiring subpoenas and — in several cases — misinterpreting their request entirely.

We shared a summary of these examples with Tim Hauser, a deputy assistant secretary with the Department of Labor. His office oversees claim file laws that cover more than 131 million people. He said insurers who fail to provide records are breaking the law. “The claimant really needs to be able to see what the relevant evidence is so that they can respond to it,” he said.

We brought our findings to five insurance companies. We presented them with details about the requests patients had made and how the company had responded, and we asked for an explanation of what happened in each case.

All of the insurers acknowledged that the patients were entitled to the material they’d asked for. Four began sending the files after our inquiry. Two, spokespeople told us, are updating policies to handle future requests. Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield spokesperson Michael Bowman said the company needed to better train staff on the rules “to close any gaps to prevent this from occurring in the future.” Cigna spokesperson Justine Sessions admitted that patients do not need a subpoena to access their records, contrary to what the insurer had told a member. She said the company would update its “policies and communications to reflect that for future requests. We regret that we did not make these updates sooner and apologize for any frustration or confusion this has caused our customers.”

By crowdsourcing people’s experiences, we identified some patterns in health insurers’ behavior. Here are some of the most common issues people encountered — and what to watch out for if you submit your own request:

Insurers Asking for Unnecessary Subpoenas or Court Orders

Cigna and Anthem told members that they would need to obtain a court order or subpoena to access their claim file records.

“This is completely unheard of,” said Wells Wilkinson, a senior attorney with the nonprofit legal group Public Health Advocates who regularly files these requests. “It also sounds completely illegal. The consumer has the right to any information used by the health plan in the context of the denial.”

On July 12, Lisa Kays, a Maryland resident, asked Cigna for phone call records related to its decision to deny coverage for her 4-year-old son’s speech therapy. “We couldn’t afford to just give up,” Kays said.

In September, Cigna sent her a letter saying she would need to submit a subpoena to get any transcripts or recordings.

After ProPublica inquired, the company sent Kays partial transcripts of the calls. It also reimbursed her for some of the previously denied coverage. She is still waiting for the recordings.

We asked Anthem about a similar case. On July 19, a call center agent told Pamela Tsigdinos she would need a subpoena to receive her claim file records. Tsigdinos had submitted the request 50 days earlier.

Bowman, the Anthem spokesperson, told us the response was an error and apologized. The company compiled the claim file and sent it to Tsigdinos.

Insurers Confusing Claim File Requests With Appeals

At least five people told ProPublica that, after submitting a request for a claim file, their health insurer mistook the request for an appeal.

We brought three cases to UnitedHealthcare. S.J. Farris requested her claim file from the company on May 10. Five days later, she received a response stating that her request for an appeal had been received. Farris sent a clarifying letter but was met with a call from an appeals agent based in Ireland. “I asked her to send the claim files,” Farris said. “She had no idea what I was talking about.”

After ProPublica sent the company questions, Farris received a call from UnitedHealth in October. They told her that the insurer was working on her claim file and that she should expect it soon. In a statement to ProPublica, UnitedHealth spokesperson Maria Gordon Shydlo said: “We take our responsibility to provide members access to their records seriously and have processes in place to comply with the law. We are sorry for any inconvenience.”

After Beth Tolley sent Anthem a claim file request on behalf of her granddaughter, she received a letter from the health insurer stating, “We’ve received a request from Beth Tolley for an appeal.” This left Tolley confused since, in its last communication, Anthem had said all avenues of appeal with its office had been exhausted.

In early October, Anthem sent the Tolley family a check for the amount it had initially declined to cover. Bowman told ProPublica that the company would be sending the records soon.

Insurers Blowing Past the 30-Day Deadline

For most people who get insurance through their employers, insurers are required to send claim files back within 30 days, according to federal law.

Twelve of the people whose requests ProPublica followed did not receive their records within that time frame even though they had these types of plans. Five of those had been waiting for responses from their insurers for more than 70 days before ProPublica contacted the companies with questions.

Isabella Gonzalez submitted a claim file request via certified mail on Aug. 8. When she called Aetna to get an update, a representative told her they did not see it in the system and advised her to upload it onto the insurer’s online portal, which she did. She called back a few days later. A different customer service employee told her Aetna would respond in 45 days.

Alex Kepnes, the executive director of communications for Aetna, said the company at first did not recognize what Gonzalez was asking for and therefore did not respond to it.

Kepnes declined to respond to follow-up questions about why staff failed to correctly identify the request and whether the company would be taking action to ensure this does not happen again.

Other companies that failed to follow the 30-day timeline include UnitedHealth, Anthem and Cigna.

“It’s really important that these responses be timely,” said Hauser, the Department of Labor official. “If that’s not happening, it’s really contrary to the regulation.”

If you are facing a health insurance denial and want to get your claim file, check out ProPublica’s “Claim File Helper.”

If your health insurer blocks your access to a claim file, you can contact the agency that regulates your health insurance company. Find out more using our free tool. If you’d like to tell our team about your experience, you can email us at claimfile@propublica.org.

by Ash Ngu and Maya Miller

A claim file is a collection of the information your insurer used to decide whether it would pay for your medical treatment or services. Most people in the U.S. facing a denial have the right to request their claim file from their insurer. It can include internal correspondence, recordings of phone calls, case notes, medical records and other relevant information.

Information in your claim file can be critical when appealing denials. Some patients told us they received case notes showing that their insurer’s decision was the outcome of cost-cutting programs. Others have gotten denials overturned by obtaining recordings of phone calls where company staff introduced errors into their cases.

If you’ve gotten a denial and want to see your insurance company’s records, check out ProPublica’s “Claim File Helper” tool to file a request yourself.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In late December, a teenage boy with a broken arm was left to suffer alone in his cell at a youth lockup in rural southern Illinois. Staff were aware he’d been seriously injured; he told them he was in pain and asked to see a doctor. Two hours passed before staff took him to the hospital, during which they cooked and served dinner and took a group of kids for recreation, he claimed.

Almost everything had gone wrong that day, at a place where things went wrong a lot. Four months earlier, a state audit had called the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center in rural Benton a “facility in crisis” because it was routinely keeping kids locked up for upwards of 24 hours at a time, a “significant violation” of state standards. It had failed to offer them much in the way of mental health or educational services, the audit said. An overwhelmed and undertrained staff routinely called on the sheriff’s department to help keep the youth in line, even for seemingly minor behavioral disruptions, according to additional law enforcement records obtained by Capitol News Illinois.

All of that was evident on this particular day, when the residents were told they’d get a rare treat, an hour or so inside the facility’s gymnasium.

But once in the gym, the boy got into a shouting match with another youth and staff ordered him back to his room. Devastated to lose his rare gym time, he refused to go. Deputies from the sheriff's office across the street rushed in — several men who were much bigger than the teen, according to sworn statements that several youth provided for a federal lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois filed against the detention center this summer.

The lawsuit alleges widespread failures, namely that the detention center had violated youths’ constitutional rights by subjecting them to excessive forms of restraint and seclusion while denying them adequate education and mental health services. The children who are confined there are “uniquely vulnerable, many having already suffered harrowing abuse and trauma” — and instead of caring for them, the lawsuit claims, the facility subjected them to “inhumane conditions” known to cause lasting harm.

Melissa Morgan, chief judge of the 2nd Judicial Circuit Court of Illinois, whose office is ultimately charged with running the facility, did not return phone calls seeking comment, though an assistant confirmed she had received the messages. In a court filing last week, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who is representing the chief judge and other senior facility staff sued in federal court, denied the allegations of poor care leveled against the facility. The attorney general’s office declined further comment. In a separate filing on Monday, Franklin County, which was also named in the lawsuit, denied the allegations as well.

Youth at the facility said in signed statements taken under oath that the deputies took the boy to the ground, breaking his arm in the process, a claim that is backed up by law enforcement records obtained by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica.

In a sworn statement entered as evidence by the ACLU in a federal suit against the Franklin County detention center, a youth relates how sheriff’s deputies broke his arm. (Obtained by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica. Highlighting by ProPublica.)

“The officer asked me about my arm and I said ‘You know it’s broken. You heard it snap,’” the youth who was injured, identified only by his initials, A.B., said in his signed statement. A.B. is not a plaintiff in the suit, though his statement was included as evidence of the poor conditions alleged by the ACLU. The ACLU is seeking class-action status for the case, and that request is pending before a federal judge.

A month after the incident, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice returned to the detention center to see whether the “facility in crisis” had corrected any of the deficiencies cited in the August audit. It had made “some improvements” but “several” deficiencies remained and new ones were identified, the auditor wrote in a report on the visit. He also made note of the broken arm, saying that he could find no proof that anyone at the facility had conducted a review to determine whether staff or the deputies had acted appropriately. Franklin County Sheriff Kyle Bacon, who was among the law enforcement officers who restrained the youth that day, defended his department’s actions but said he could not speak to whether the facility had conducted an internal review because the sheriff’s office is not involved in its administration. Nearly a year later, a spokesperson for IDJJ said the detention center has yet to provide one.

A new analysis by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica suggests those failures were not unusual. A review of hundreds of pages of state audits, law enforcement records, a federal lawsuit, and reports by oversight and advocacy bodies point to troubling conditions inside many of the state’s 16 juvenile detention centers, which operate much like adult jails, detaining court-involved youth with open cases when a judge determines they are at risk of fleeing or reoffending. The facilities combined can house upwards of 1,200 youth as young as age 10, though they are rarely at capacity.

The records show that youth have been Tased, pepper sprayed and roughed up by staff and law enforcement officers; forced into isolation for days at a time; denied access to their psychotropic medications and mental health treatment; and received little or no schooling, despite state and federal laws mandating that the youth receive educational services while incarcerated. Nearly two-thirds of those who are detained are Black teens.

Poor conditions in juvenile lockups across the country have recently made headlines, bringing renewed calls for reform. What makes Illinois different from many of its state peers is that no independent agency licenses or certifies the youth detention centers. Even in some states that have been heavily scrutinized for problematic conditions inside their youth facilities, such as Louisiana, Tennessee, Michigan and Pennsylvania, a licensing process is in place that allows for sanctions up to closure.

Under state law, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice sets standards for county detention facilities that hold youth in custody and conducts audits of them. While the department has repeatedly cited several centers for failing to meet its standards, under state law, IDJJ cannot mandate corrective action plans, issue fines or shut down detention centers found in repeated violation of the rules. Instead, the IDJJ reports are sent back to the county detention facilities’ staff and to the chief judges of each judicial circuit, under whose authority they operate. Neither the staff nor the judges are obligated to respond.

IDJJ shares oversight of the youth detention centers with the Illinois Supreme Court. The high court’s administrative arm implemented its own set of standards for facilities in 2022 and started conducting reviews later that year. In its initial review of the detention centers, the court found that about a third did not meet its standards, and action plans were developed with them to address deficiencies. Christopher Bonjean, a spokesperson for the Illinois Supreme Court, declined to provide the full reviews or any of the ongoing progress reports for facilities requiring action plans, saying that only its initial summary reports are made public. The judicial branch is not subject to the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

Juvenile justice experts and advocates for incarcerated youth in Illinois say the weak oversight of these facilities needs the attention of lawmakers and policy experts.

And it’s the latest example the news organizations have revealed about the failures of Illinois officials to put an end to the poor treatment of vulnerable populations held in facilities, even when problems are well documented.

Capitol News Illinois spoke with six experts in the field of juvenile justice and youth development who said facilities that detain children should have robust oversight structures. This spring, Equip for Equality, Illinois’ federally designated legal aid organization for people with disabilities, called on policymakers to reform the oversight system “given the longstanding, serious and pervasive problems” inside facilities statewide.

I don’t want nursing homes operated without oversight. So to think we don’t have any kind of oversight and quality improvement for kids that are in custody in a facility, I don’t understand.

—Hunter Hurst, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice

“Would you want nursing homes operated without any oversight? I don’t want nursing homes operated without oversight. So to think we don’t have any kind of oversight and quality improvement for kids that are in custody in a facility, I don’t understand,” said Hunter Hurst, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, the research arm of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

IDJJ Director Heidi Mueller said in an interview that she agrees that the agency is limited in what it can do if a county’s chief judge can’t or won’t enforce compliance.

“I think a lot of folks would say that that oversight mechanism isn’t what you would call best practice,” Mueller said. Only the Illinois General Assembly has the authority to change the oversight structure, she said. Mueller stopped short of making a call for lawmakers to do so, saying that’s not her role as an agency leader.

Widespread Problems

Oversight entities have identified numerous problems in facilities across the state. In a March report, Equip for Equality found widespread problems at Chicago’s youth lockup — the state’s largest — including that it had utilized “unjust and excessive use of physical restraints and seclusion, often as punishment, with a wanton disregard of state law.”

In a letter addressed to Equip for Equality, Leonard Dixon, superintendent of the Chicago facility, rebutted the findings, saying that the youth facility follows state and federal laws and that the advocacy group’s claims about unlawful restraints were “unsupported” and that physical restraints are “never used as punishment.” Dixon noted to the news organizations in a statement that recent state audits found the facility to be in compliance with restraint standards.

Concerns about excessive use of force extended beyond Chicago. In April, a youth at the Mary Davis Home in Galesburg, in central Illinois, told an IDJJ auditor of a troubling physical restraint from the day before. After watching a video of the incident, the inspector was so alarmed that he reported it to the state’s child abuse hotline, although ultimately the Department of Children and Family Services did not designate this as a case of abuse or neglect. No other governmental body is charged with reviewing whether administrative policies were properly followed in specific situations. The IDJJ audit noted that one of the staff members involved had not received the training the facility utilizes to teach staff proper restraint techniques.

Wendi Steck, superintendent of the Mary Davis Home, said the employee involved in the restraint incident no longer works there, but she declined to say whether his departure was related to this incident. “Any incidents of abuse of our clients are not tolerated and are dealt with swiftly,” she said. “All staff are trained in Handle with Care restraint and cannot be involved in any restraints until successfully trained.”

Perhaps nowhere are concerns as extensive as those documented at the 32-bed youth lockup in Benton, the only one that IDJJ labeled “in crisis.” The facility is the state’s southernmost detention center and houses youth from across 26 counties — the lower quarter of the state.

Among IDJJ’s findings in its August 2022 audit: Youth were confined to their rooms for upwards of 24 hours for behavioral infractions, though state standards limit the use of seclusion to four hours and allow it only if youths are at risk of harming themselves or others. In fact, because the facility was so short-staffed that IDJJ described the issue as “critical and unsustainable,” youth were kept in their rooms for most of their days there, even if they had not acted out. The facility has a gym and outdoor recreation area, but youth had not utilized either area for two years. The facility had no process for assessing youth to determine if they were at risk of sexual assault or of sexually assaulting a peer, a requirement of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. Mental health services were “minimal” and “there was an obvious lack of training” among the staff.

Staff at the Benton facility told the IDJJ auditor that at one time, it had utilized the Crisis Prevention Institute to train staff on how to try to calm situations before they escalate and how to properly use physical restraints if it can’t be avoided. But a supervisor acknowledged to the IDJJ inspector that such training had not been conducted in several years and that some newer employees may have never received it. “This poses a high risk for potential liability for the county,” IDJJ wrote in the audit.

Joseph A. Cervantez, the state’s attorney in Jackson County, one of the counties from which youth go to the Benton facility, said he was so alarmed when he read the report that he immediately stopped sending youth there. Without better services, he said, “I might as well just keep them out on the street.”

When IDJJ followed up in January, it found that many problems had not been corrected in the intervening five months. It also criticized the facility’s handling of the broken arm incident. Detention center staff told the auditor that its video system was faulty and didn’t record what happened. A senior official told the auditors that an internal review had been conducted but could produce no written record of it. While the standards do not stipulate the use of video cameras inside the facilities, any use of restraint or seclusion requires a full written report.

Bacon, the sheriff, said his office conducted an internal review consisting of a conversation between him and the chief deputy about what had transpired. “I was present and I was familiar with what was happening and the actions that we took, and there were no issues with those actions,” he said.

While IDJJ’s reports cited extensive problems, claims made by five youth who provided statements for evidence as part of the ACLU’s lawsuit, filed in July, suggested even more dire conditions. The youth said they were locked inside “very small concrete boxes” covered in black mold and that they were forced to eat their meals alone in their cells next to their toilets and sleep on wet mattresses because the windows leaked. One youth said he was experiencing a mental health crisis and cut his arm with a broken colored pencil. “Instead of getting me any mental health treatment, they just gave me a paper towel to clean up the blood,” he said.

The presence of law enforcement officers inside the facility is common, several of them said. “The crazy thing is the police don’t even just come in for fights or big things, they come in just when a kid doesn’t want to move and they do things that the staff should be doing,” said another youth.

Law enforcement records obtained by Capitol News Illinois showed that staff called on sheriff’s deputies 21 times between September 2021 and August 2023. Some of the calls were for seemingly minor incidents. For instance, on Aug. 1, staff requested backup because a youth had “stuffed snacks down his pants and won’t give them back.”

Part of a call log showing reasons why staff of the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center called sheriff’s deputies to the facility. (Obtained by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica)

In some cases, the arrival of deputies resulted in more aggressive restraint techniques than are typical for — or allowed in — juvenile detention centers. In October 2022, detention center staff called for backup because a different youth had refused to return to his cell. When the deputies tried to force him back to his room, the youth assumed a fighting position, the responding deputy wrote in a report, so the deputy fired his Taser.

Staff in juvenile lockups are not allowed to use stun guns on youth, according to IDJJ.

Bacon said he believes the staff call on the sheriff’s deputies because of their ability to utilize tools, such as stun guns, that the facility staff cannot.

He said that he and his staff are trained in deescalation techniques and use force only when necessary. “There are youth that can cause harm to you,” Bacon said. “And we want to use the least amount of force necessary, but at the same time we have to protect ourselves from being injured as well as the youth. That’s not our intention to hurt anyone.” He also said that as he understands the law, his office is not bound by IDJJ standards, even when officers are responding to an incident inside a facility that is under those rules.

In a statement, IDJJ said it does not consider calling for outside law enforcement alone to be a violation of any standards, though “the standards would apply to how force, if any, is used.”

The agency said it had not been aware of the stun gun incident until they were alerted to it when they returned for an audit in late September. That audit is not complete and has not yet been made public.

Oversight Breakdown

Two years ago, IDJJ updated its standards for the operation of juvenile detention centers, incorporating language that emphasizes youths’ education and mental health and stresses appropriate use of restraint and seclusion. Its reports, available online, became more robust. But while they have helped bring problems to light, said Rachel Shapiro, a managing attorney with Equip for Equality, her agency is still identifying some “horrific” conditions that never appear in IDJJ audits.

And although it can document problems it has identified, IDJJ’s authority to ensure they are fixed is limited.

The law does allow the state agency to petition a court to order a facility into compliance if it hasn’t fixed deficiencies within six months of receiving notice from IDJJ. But IDJJ said the agency is “not aware of any instances'' of agency staff initiating such a process, in part because it would have to petition the very courts that run them.

The Illinois Supreme Court is also limited in what it can do. Its standards say that the court “shall” withhold 10% of the salary reimbursements it provides to any facility that remains out of compliance 90 days after receiving notice, and another 10% monthly thereafter. But it has not financially sanctioned any facilities.

Instead, Bonjean said, a special unit within the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts is closely monitoring any facilities that are still working through their corrective action plans.

A spokesperson for the state Supreme Court said that the Franklin County facility is making improvements but is not in compliance with its standards. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

The court spokesperson declined to provide the news organizations with the court’s full review of the Benton facility, its action plans or its progress reports. He confirmed that it remains out of compliance 14 months after the review but said that it is “making progress.” The county has approved funds for needed repairs and improvements to the facility, he said, but they will “take some time.” Reducing funding, he said, “could be problematic and could hinder the progress we are trying to achieve.”

John Albright, IDJJ’s chief of performance and innovation, who conducts the audits for the agency, said he also tries to work closely with facility staff to help them understand the standards and how to meet them.

“Some facilities have been working very hard to make changes, and others maybe not as much,” he said.

When the oversight entities don’t compel action, the only option remaining for those who feel they were harmed by the system is a lawsuit, advocates say. Kevin Fee, an attorney with the ACLU of Illinois, said his organization is concerned about conditions across facilities. But those found in Benton were “far and away” the most troubling, he said.

“The Franklin County reports were pretty scathing, and we would have expected more action in response to those reports,” Fee said of the IDJJ audits. “But we didn’t see any, which is why we felt the need to bring the lawsuit.”

Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director of the John Howard Association of Illinois, an independent watchdog organization, agreed that even with the improved standards, there are still shortcomings with “system transparency and concerns about the treatment and conditions youth experience while in detention.”

The weak enforcement mechanisms are “a real deficiency in the state of Illinois,” she said. “We have work to do so that we’re not just inspecting these facilities and reporting on the issues. There has to be some way of holding the detention centers accountable and responsible for the treatment of youth in their custody short of litigation.”

Southern Illinois University journalism students Sarah Alli-Brown, Grayson Bittner, Carolyn Dickte, Jared Harris, Brandon Jones, Jamilah Lewis and Ethan Neir contributed research.

by Talia Buford

ProPublica’s Emerging Reporters Program, now in its ninth year, provides support and mentorships to college students who are pursuing careers in investigative journalism and need additional training and financial support to help advance their goals.

Participants receive a $9,000 stipend, a trip to the annual NICAR investigative journalism conference, occasional training and presentations by speakers. They’ll also be paired one-on-one with ProPublica journalists who can help counsel them on stories, build their connections in the industry and expose them to the varied paths for careers in investigative journalism. Past Emerging Reporters have gone on to work at The New York Times, The Atlantic, The City, Capital B and other outlets.

Our goal is to encourage the next generation of journalists who seek to shine a light on abuses of power and produce stories of moral force that provoke change. In choosing the class, we look for students who demonstrate an early dedication to journalism as a career, through internships, work at local news outlets or work at campus publications. And where those opportunities — which are often unpaid — aren’t accessible, we look for other ways the student has shown an eagerness and drive to learn the craft.

The 2023-24 academic year’s class of outstanding student journalists are from Massachusetts, Virginia, Georgia, Kansas and Washington. They represent a range of collegiate journeys, and their desire to pursue ambitious, important stories inspired us. Through their work, the students have already shown not only their dedication to the craft, but a yearning to tell stories that have impact.

Some have always wanted to be journalists, while others found their calling through campus media.

They’ve set their sights on covering issues around gender, immigration and indigenous communities, or on using data to make journalism more accessible. Some are already freelancing for local outlets on pressing community issues, while others are working for print and broadcast student media organizations.

Meet our 2023 class:

Shradha Dinesh is a senior studying data science and political journalism at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Dinesh is the co-director of DisinfoLab, an undergraduate-run research lab; an associate data editor at The Flat Hat student newspaper; and a campus reporting fellow with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She previously worked at the Pew Research Center as a data journalism intern, and her interests include incorporating data in policy and accountability reporting.

Cassandra Dumay is a junior at Boston University majoring in journalism and minoring in Spanish and political science. She is the politics editor at BU’s student radio station, WTBU, and the president of her university’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Dumay has reported on her home state of Massachusetts for GBH, Boston’s local NPR station, and the Boston Globe. She previously received fellowships from Investigative Reporters and Editors’ National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting and the National Association of Black Journalists. Dumay is interested in data journalism and audio broadcasting.

Alyssa Noriega is a junior studying journalism and mass communications at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. She is an anchor for “Good Morning Indian Country,” a student-led Indigenous news show and participates in the Planet Forward Indigenous Correspondents Program with a project focused on Native storytelling in journalism.

Arielle Robinson is a senior at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University majoring in international affairs with a minor in gender and women’s studies. She freelances for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Cobb County Courier, where she has reported on issues ranging from race to housing to local government. Robinson previously interned for CNN, helping to edit, research and fact-check digital news and scripts for domestic and international news. She’s passionate about issues affecting women and girls and hopes to center them in her investigative work.

Jacquelyn Jimenez Romero is a senior at the University of Washington, where she is majoring in journalism and public interest communication and law, societies and justice. She is minoring in diversity and environmental studies. The daughter of immigrants from Mexico, Jimenez Romero is passionate about writing human-interest stories that focus on uplifting underrepresented communities. She has worked as the diversity beat writer for the university’s The Daily newspaper and has written for Capitol Hill Seattle and International Examiner.

by T. Christian Miller

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In August 2018, Robert Salim and eight of his friends and relatives flew to the steamy heat of New York City to watch the U.S. Open.

The group — most of them lawyers who were old tennis buddies from college — gathered every few years to attend the championship. They raced from court to court to catch as many matches as possible. They hung out at bars, splurged on high-priced meals and caught up on each others’ lives.

But that year, Salim had trouble walking the half-mile from the subway station to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows without stopping two or three times to rest. Back in his hotel room, he was coughing badly, his phlegm speckled with spots of blood. Although he had kept fit for a 67-year-old, he felt ragged.

Salim, whose friends call him Skeeter, flew home to Houston, where he saw his family doctor. After dozens of tests and visits to specialists, he received his diagnosis: stage 4 throat cancer. A tumor almost an inch long was growing under the back of his tongue, lodged like a rock. It had spread to his lymph nodes. Dr. Clifton Fuller, his oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, called it “massive oral disease.”

Still, Fuller told Salim that his type of throat cancer would respond well to a treatment known as proton therapy, which focuses a tight beam of radiation on a tumor. So Fuller’s staff quickly sought approval from Salim’s health insurer, marking its fax “URGENT REQUEST”: “Please treat this request as expedited based on the patient’s diagnosis which is considered life threatening.”

The answer arrived two days later. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana would not pay for proton therapy; the costly procedure was appropriate only after doctors had previously tried other methods for irradiating the head and neck. “This treatment is not medically necessary for you,” the rejection letter read.

Fuller told Salim that he might have to use a cheaper form of radiation that is less precise. Normally outgoing and optimistic, Salim felt his chest tighten as Fuller described the possible side effects of that other type of treatment. Because there were many critical organs near Salim’s tumor, the damage could be severe, causing loss of hearing, diminished sense of taste and smell, and brain impairment, like memory loss.

At that point, Salim seemed in danger of joining millions of other Americans denied payment for medical treatment. These patients often settle for outdated, riskier procedures or simply forgo care.

But Salim was no ordinary patient. He was, in fact, an aggressive litigator who had been named one of the 100 best trial lawyers in America. In a long career working from Natchitoches, Louisiana, a tiny city in the Creole heartland, he had helped extract settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars from massive corporations that had harmed consumers with unsafe products, including pelvic mesh and the pain reliever Vioxx.

Salim decided to do what few people can afford to do. He paid MD Anderson $95,862.95 for his proton therapy and readied for a battle with Blue Cross, the biggest insurance company in Louisiana. As always, Skeeter Salim was determined to win.

It would be Goliath vs. Goliath.

First image: Salim in the private jet he uses to commute between his home in Houston, Texas, and his office in Natchitoches. Second image: Awards on display in Salim’s office. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

“It’s not about the money for me. I’ve been blessed and we have an extremely lucrative practice,” said Salim, a broad-set man quick with jokes. “But I would like to see other people that are not in the same situation not get run over by these people. There’s no telling how many billions the insurers made by denying claims on a bogus basis.”

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

In his decades as a plaintiff’s lawyer, Salim had relied upon consumer protection laws and billion-dollar judgments to make companies fix their bad practices. But now he stood on different terrain, facing a 1970s-era federal law that deprived patients of tools to fight, let alone change, abuses by the insurance industry.

And interviews, court documents and previously confidential emails and records from Blue Cross, its contractors and MD Anderson would expose the inner workings of a large insurer and an unnerving truth: To overcome a system tilted heavily in favor of the insurance industry, you need money, a dogged doctor and a friend with unusual skills.

“Arbitrary and Capricious”

Salim was angry. For years, he had paid Blue Cross more than $100,000 in annual premiums to cover himself, the employees of his law firm and their family members.

In mid-October 2018, he scrawled a note on a legal pad: “Blue Cross’ denial is arbitrary and capricious and will lead to irreversible harm to my physical being.”

A note Salim wrote complaining about Blue Cross’ denial of payment for his medical care (Courtesy of Robert Salim)

And so Salim began his unusual journey to appeal an insurance company rejection. Few patients ever do so. One study of Obamacare health plans purchased on healthcare.gov found that less than 1% of people tried to overturn claim denials.

When a patient files an appeal, insurance company doctors are supposed to take a fresh look to reconsider the denial, relying on medical guidelines, their own clinical experience, scientific studies and the recommendations of professional societies.

But the insurance industry doctors who shot down Salim’s appeal did little to consult outside sources, a ProPublica review found. They cut and pasted guidelines created by a company called AIM Specialty Health: “The requested proton beam therapy is not medically necessary for this patient,” one rejection letter read.

Many insurers won’t pay for certain specialized or expensive treatments unless a patient gets approval in advance. Blue Cross and other health plans often farm out those reviews to companies like AIM. The insurance industry maintains such companies keep health care costs down and help patients by rejecting unnecessary and unproven treatments. Critics say the companies unfairly deny claims, noting that they market themselves to insurers by promising to slash costs.

In Salim’s case, AIM made decisions using its own guidelines, which it said at the time were based on medical studies and the recommendations of professional medical associations. AIM’s parent company, Anthem, renamed itself Elevance Health in 2022, and subsequently changed AIM’s name to Carelon Medical Benefits Management. In a statement, Elevance said that Carelon “uses evidence-based clinical guidelines to assess requests.”

At Blue Cross, Salim’s appeal started with a review by one of its own doctors, an ear, nose and throat specialist. He affirmed the denial using language taken directly from AIM’s guidelines.

The insurer then routed Salim’s request to an outside company called AllMed that it had hired to render expert opinions. A day later, AllMed’s doctor, a radiation oncologist, affirmed the decision to deny payment for Salim’s care. He, too, copied AIM’s guidelines in explaining his reasons. AllMed did not return requests for comment.

Not willing to give up, Fuller, Salim’s doctor, took a step physicians rarely do: He asked Blue Cross to have an independent medical review board unaffiliated with the insurer or AIM examine Salim’s claim. Louisiana’s Department of Insurance randomly selected the review company, Medical Review Institute of America.

Fuller didn’t skimp on evidence. He sent the company a 225-page request containing Salim’s medical records, MD Anderson’s evaluation and outside studies supporting the use of proton therapy.

The next day, the Medical Review Institute denied the claim. Its doctor, a radiation oncologist, not only quoted AIM’s guidelines, but also cited four studies that raised questions about the evidence for proton therapy. The Medical Review Institute did not return requests for comment.

In 19 days, five different people at four different companies had reviewed Salim’s case. Each had denied his request for treatment. Each had cited AIM’s guidelines. The appeal process was over.

Before the review was complete, Salim had decided to pay out of pocket for the proton beam therapy. “If there’s a tumor in there, and it’s growing, why are we waiting so long to do something?” he asked Fuller.

Over more than two and half months that fall and winter, Salim visited MD Anderson multiple times a week. At each radiation session, he strapped on a custom mask that covered his entire face. Nurses locked him into arm and leg restraints. Then he had to hold still for 45 minutes while the proton therapy machine thrummed around him.

In the background, he sometimes heard the nurses playing the 1977 Kansas song, “Dust in the Wind.”

“What a terrible song to play,” he thought.

On Dec. 24, he endured two sessions in a day to finish up. He had completed his treatments — a Christmas present to himself. But he wasn’t done fighting.

A Useful Friendship

A few months after recovering, Salim decided to sue Blue Cross to force them to pay.

There was one problem. Salim held a type of insurance governed by a relatively obscure federal statute: the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The Department of Labor is charged with enforcing the law, known as ERISA.

The 1974 law is vague and lacks teeth. Court rulings interpreting this law have often tilted in favor of insurers. For instance, insurance companies have broad authority to decide what to cover and what to deny. And the law does not allow for punitive damages, which are designed to punish a company for abuse or fraud by eating into its profits.

Instead, patients who win ERISA cases get money to cover their treatment and the expense of hiring a lawyer. Nothing more.

Such cases do not, in other words, bring in the big dollars like those Salim had won in large personal injury lawsuits. Few attorneys in the country handle ERISA complaints. Salim said he talked with some of them. All told him his case was unwinnable.

But Salim had a secret weapon: his childhood buddy Ronald Corkern.

Salim grew up a few blocks away from Corkern in Natchitoches (pronounced “nack-a-tish”), a northwestern Louisiana town founded in 1714 and set high on the banks of Cane River Lake. Shops with wrought-iron balconies and columned galleries line the city’s red brick main road. Well-preserved slave plantations ring the outskirts.

The city is known for two things: “Steel Magnolias,” a 1989 movie about female friendships, was filmed there. And singer-songwriter Jim Croce and his entourage were killed when their plane struck a pecan tree near the end of the runway at the local airport.

Ronald Corkern at Salim’s office (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

Salim and Corkern left for different law schools, but both returned to practice in their hometown. They often found themselves on opposite sides of the courtroom, facing off in more than 100 trials, sometimes pulling pranks on one another.

Affable and deeply engaged in the civic issues of his hometown, Corkern had spent much of his life as a lawyer defending auto insurers. He had never before argued an ERISA case. But for his friend, he was willing to try.

“I got trapped into handling this case,” Corkern joked. At the end of February 2019, he sued Blue Cross. He started in state court, but Blue Cross quickly got it bumped to federal court in Alexandria, Louisiana, where ERISA law would apply.

Over the next several years, lawyers for Blue Cross argued that under the law, insurers had the ultimate authority to determine what to cover, and Blue Cross had decided that proton therapy wasn’t medically necessary in this case. Salim’s lawsuit, they contended, should be dismissed.

But prior court rulings had carved out an exception: If Corkern could prove that Blue Cross had committed an “abuse of discretion” — for instance, if it had blatantly ignored or twisted evidence supporting the therapy — the judge could force the insurer to pay Salim for his treatment.

A nine-page letter written by Fuller, Salim’s doctor, argued that very thing, criticizing the guidelines that AIM and Blue Cross had relied upon to deny payment.

AIM had cited 48 research studies to support its rejection of proton therapy. Fuller found only a few that pertained to head and neck cancer. One of those was out of date: It cited guidelines by a professional society of radiation oncologists that had subsequently been updated to support proton therapy for head and neck cancers.

And Fuller noted that AIM had “glaringly omitted” information from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of cancer treatment centers that included MD Anderson. In May 2017, the network issued guidelines that said the therapy was under investigation and noted that studies had indicated its potential in reducing radiation doses to critical nearby organs for some cancers. While proton therapy may have similar efficacy as other kinds of radiation treatment at eliminating cancer, studies have shown it generally has fewer side effects in treating sensitive regions of the body — a surgeon’s scalpel versus a steak knife.

Fuller’s touché: 17 academic studies (including some he co-authored) that supported the use of proton beam therapy. Several found significant decreases in radiation exposure and fewer side effects.

The therapy “minimizes toxicity for Mr. Salim, resulting in a more rapid recovery from the treatment of his cancer and less cost to him and you (as his insurer),” wrote Fuller, who declined to comment for this story.

Fuller’s letter played a big role in the case. A federal magistrate, Judge Joseph H.L. Perez-Montes, cited it 16 times in his 19-page opinion. Fuller showed that most of the evidence used by Blue Cross was “either outdated or did not pertain to the treatment of head and neck cancer,” Perez-Montes wrote. Blue Cross, he said, had “abused its discretion.”

A federal judge reviewed Perez-Montes decision and ordered Blue Cross to pay Salim for his proton therapy treatment.

Blue Cross appealed that ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The company argued that the lower court had erred in accepting Fuller’s analysis over the insurer’s own experts. On May 3, 2023 — more than four years after Corkern filed the suit — a panel of judges ruled for Salim.

It is unclear why Blue Cross fought so hard to avoid paying Salim. In its appeal, the insurer told the court that the case involved an “important issue” regarding the interpretation of benefits under the ERISA law. It is unknown how much Blue Cross spent on the case. Corkern charged his friend the bargain price of $36,185.

Corkern, left, and Salim. The two friends are still fighting Blue Cross over payments for health care and attorney’s fees. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica) An Unsettled Bill

The treatment worked. Salim has been cancer-free for almost five years, and he suffered few long-term side effects. His Creole accent now has a slight rasp to it. If his next checkup turns up no signs of a tumor, his doctors will consider him cured.

This year, he joined his friends for the U.S. Open again. And he’s found a new Goliath, joining other attorneys in a suit against the country’s largest pharmacy benefit managers — intermediaries in the buying and selling of medicines who have been accused of artificially inflating prices.

The Blue Cross lawsuit was the last one that Corkern ever filed. He spends most of his time these days conducting mediations between aggrieved parties.

The case itself remains open. The judges ruled that Blue Cross must pay for Salim’s treatment. But they did not say how much.

Salim is expecting the full $95,862.95 he paid. However, court records show that Blue Cross has said it only needs to pay Salim the discounted rate it had negotiated with MD Anderson at the time of his radiation treatment: $35,170.47. That’s what Blue Cross would have paid if its doctors had said yes in the first place.

A decision is expected later this year.

While not setting a precedent, the case may help persuade insurers and other courts that proton therapy is medically necessary in certain cases, legal experts said.

“They were wrong. Proton radiation is not experimental. It’s a wonderful tool,” Salim said. “If I played even a small part, it was a very successful lawsuit.”

Do You Have Insights Into Dental and Health Insurance Denials? Help Us Report on the System.

by Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica, and Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico, photography by Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica

This article was produced in partnership with Searchlight New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches and Searchlight’s free newsletter to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Last year, 63 kids in New Mexico turned 18 and aged out of foster care. It’s a fraught time; after spending their lives in a system that micromanages their every move, the teens are thrust into adulthood, left to fend for themselves while struggling with the aftereffects of a childhood often spent cycling among foster homes. Some thrive. Many do not.

Roughly 30% of foster youth end up homeless after aging out of foster care, national studies show. An estimated 1 in 4 end up incarcerated.

The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department has made efforts to reverse those grim statistics. Notably, CYFD launched its Fostering Connections program in 2020 for youth who age out of the foster system. It offers some assistance with housing, food and behavioral health care.

That’s often not enough, advocates say. Children in foster care experience high levels of trauma and high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions. Adding to their struggles, CYFD has been housing foster children in inappropriate and sometimes unsafe settings, where they can’t get the stability and psychiatric care they need. A 2022 investigation by Searchlight New Mexico and ProPublica found that some of CYFD’s highest-needs kids spent years going back and forth between psychiatric hospitals and youth homeless shelters. (CYFD leadership has previously acknowledged that kids should not be staying in shelters, but that sometimes they “have to make very difficult decisions under extraordinary circumstances.”)

Finding a place to live, getting work, buying a car and navigating the world can be overwhelming for any teen — but it’s even more so for teens who haven’t had supportive families and don’t have an adult in their life who can help.

Even teens who sign up for Fostering Connections can fall through the cracks. It can take months before they start receiving aid through the program, leaving them in limbo at one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives. According to their attorneys, teens can be so traumatized by their time in foster care that they refuse any offer of assistance from the agency after they’ve aged out. They’re determined to leave the state’s orbit completely.

Here are the stories of two young women who aged out last year. Although their stories are different in many ways, one difference in particular stands out: In the months after leaving foster care, one had the consistent support of a caring adult. The other didn’t.

Birdie

Roberta Gonzales, who goes by Birdie, was 10 years old when she and her younger brother were taken out of their aunt’s home in Albuquerque and placed in foster care. Her brother was adopted; Gonzales has not seen him since. But CYFD never found her a stable home.

Instead, she spent the rest of her childhood in residential treatment centers, first in San Marcos, Texas, and then at Desert Hills, one of several mental health facilities in New Mexico that have shut down in the last five years amid allegations of abuse, lawsuits and pressure from state regulators.

By 2019, with fewer residential treatment centers at its disposal, CYFD was increasingly relying on youth homeless shelters to house high-risk kids, including some who were suicidal. Once there, many teens routinely experienced mental health crises or ran away. When no shelters were available, CYFD would house some of them in its Albuquerque office building.

Gonzales was one of these teens. The cots and bean bag chairs at the CYFD office were too uncomfortable to sleep on, she recalled. “I usually just slept on the floor.”

Gonzales turned 18 last year and, after a stint in Las Cruces, moved back to Albuquerque.

One of her favorite things to do was attend services at places like Calvary Church, which hosts community events like an annual Fourth of July fireworks show, or Sagebrush Church, both in Albuquerque. She said she liked the pastors and the music.

Gonzales attends a service at Sagebrush Church in northwest Albuquerque.

As a former foster youth, Gonzales was entitled to housing assistance from CYFD. The agency helped her start the paperwork when she was 17, but as her 18th birthday came and went, she was unclear how the system worked and still had no idea what help she would get or when. Her former caseworker called to check on her periodically, she said. But she never seemed to get the help she needed.

“I got kicked out [of foster care] on my birthday and now I’m homeless,” she said. “CYFD just left me to do this on my own.”

When asked for comment, a CYFD spokesperson said that “Fostering Connections benefits are generally seamless.” It might take time for some youth to receive benefits after they turn 18, but “CYFD staff does assist with the paperwork and resources,” the spokesperson said.

After Gonzales aged out, an uncle gave her a little money to pay for food, clothes and shelter. The money went fast. Within weeks, she was broke. She lived briefly with a cousin before moving into a Christian adult homeless shelter.

But she found the shelter’s tight quarters and strict rules too stifling and soon decided to leave. She spent much of her time at the Alvarado Transportation Center bus stop downtown, sometimes riding the bus around town to pass the time.

While waiting to catch a bus, Gonzales notices a man lying on the sidewalk. Thinking he might have overdosed, she reaches out to touch him and realizes he is scarcely breathing. She calls 911 and then sees the man has resumed breathing more normally. Her bus arrives moments later, and she hops on with her new friend.

For a brief period, Gonzales’ uncle paid for a room in a motel so she could have a safe place to sleep for a few nights. The room — complete with a clean bed, pillows and private bathroom — was like heaven, she said.

Later that week, Gonzales went to Calvary Church, where a volunteer offered to pray with her and another woman joined in. Gonzales had told pastors at both Calvary and Sagebrush churches that she was homeless and living on the street. One pastor prayed with her and signed her up for a baptism.

A volunteer at Calvary Church leads a prayer.

Before going to Calvary Church, Gonzales had met a group of people who offered to take her to the Savers thrift shop so she could get some new things to wear. Someone had stolen her belongings, so she was ecstatic about the shopping trip. She eagerly tried on her new clothes in the Calvary Church parking lot and carried the Savers bag with her for days, with all her possessions inside.

After trying on clothes, she had no plan for where to sleep or what to do for food — that night or in the days ahead. She looked for somewhere to sleep after midnight. She found a ledge in front of her favorite bus stop.

But when a security guard spotted her and told her to leave, she walked across the street and settled on the sidewalk.

The following afternoon, Gonzales started to have difficulty breathing and began to feel very hot. After she called 911, paramedics met her under an overpass.

She was taken to the University of New Mexico Hospital and wheeled to a room. “It feels like I’m dying,” she told doctors.

Gonzales had previously been to the UNM Hospital, for various issues, and some of the nurses knew her by name.

Being at the hospital wasn’t so bad, she said — it was a comfortable place to sleep for the night, and she could charge her phone.

“Any changes to your address?” doctors asked her while preparing a nebulizer to stabilize her breathing. “I have no address,” she replied.

She stayed at the hospital for several days while the staff monitored her lungs. Doctors later diagnosed her with Castleman disease, a rare disorder that affects the lymph nodes.

More than a year has passed since then. When contacted this fall, Gonzales said she’d reconnected with her mother and talks to her regularly. She said a CYFD Fostering Connections worker has been in touch with her and checks in periodically over the phone. Although CYFD provides job assistance for youth who age out, it hadn’t helped her find a job, she said, so “I’ve been looking myself.” The agency hadn’t helped her find housing either, she added. She did find a place to live, briefly. But it didn’t last.

“I’m homeless again,” she said in September. Until she can find stable housing and a job, she’s living at a homeless shelter in Albuquerque.

It doesn’t always happen this way. With the right support, youth can thrive after foster care.

Nevaeh

Nevaeh Sanchez was 15 when CYFD investigators determined she needed to be taken into foster care. She and her younger brother had been living with their father in a run-down house in Española that didn’t have running water.

When a caseworker arrived to pick her up, she and her brother were driven not to a foster home, but to a youth homeless shelter in Taos, where they lived alongside other kids with nowhere to go.

CYFD told Sanchez and her brother they would be in the shelter for just a few days while the state found them a relative to stay with, or until the agency’s investigation was complete and they could return home. But the days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months. “We didn’t even know we were in the [foster] system until two months in,” Sanchez said.

Three months after her arrival in Taos, shelter staff kicked her out after finding marijuana in her room. CYFD moved her to a homeless shelter in Santa Fe. Then the agency moved her to another shelter in Albuquerque, then to another. And another. Between shelter stays, she would sleep in CYFD’s Albuquerque office building.

“It’s all just a waiting game” until they can find you a bed, which was inevitably at a shelter, Sanchez said. Kids say this “shelter shuffle,” as it’s known, makes them feel like the system has given up on them.

Last year, with the help of her mentor, Sanchez found a rental with a bedroom of her own.

Many of the teens Sanchez lived with in the shelters had nobody to support them and found themselves thrust into adulthood alone after aging out of foster care. But in this respect, Sanchez was lucky.

When she was taken into the system, a judge assigned Lori Woodcock to be her court-appointed special advocate, or CASA — a volunteer trained to support children in foster care.

CASAs have a critical role: They gather information about a child’s foster care case, recommend services and advocate for the child’s best interest in court proceedings. The help they’re allowed to provide, however, is mostly limited to issues related to the court case.

Sanchez needed help with real-world issues — finding a job, getting to work, finding a place to live.

“As a CASA I couldn’t drive her to appointments or job interviews, or any of the things she actually needed help with,” Woodcock said.

So Woodcock quit her role as a CASA volunteer, opting instead to work independently as a mentor to Sanchez. Working outside the foster care system, she was able to give Sanchez the help she needed to get on her feet.

Lori Woodcock helps Sanchez with paperwork to buy a car.

The Fostering Connections program offers some services for teens when they turn 18 to ease the transition out of foster care. But Sanchez said she didn’t get any help at the time of her birthday.

Sanchez had spent nearly all her time in foster care living in the shelter system, where the staff monitored the children 24/7. She always shared a room with other kids and needed permission to use her phone, go for a walk or even close a door.

But when she turned 18, with the help of Woodcock, she found a rental with a room of her own.

“I’ve never had a chance to live” before now, she said. “I’ve been surviving.”

“People don’t understand how lucky they are that they get to sleep in their own bed,” Sanchez says. “It’s crazy, I’m like, I can close my own door, I can be in my room all day, I can be on my own phone.”

In May 2021, Sanchez applied for a job as a cashier at the Frontier, a popular restaurant across the street from the University of New Mexico campus. She held the job for two and a half years — even earning three raises for good performance.

“She’s thriving,” Woodcock said.

Another huge step was getting her own cellphone.

During her time in foster care, Sanchez’s phone use had been regimented. Most shelters prohibit phones entirely because of liabilities and safety protocols.

Last summer, she bought a phone with her own money.

“You weren’t allowed anything near the internet, near a computer, near a phone or anything, unless it was completely authorized,” Sanchez says.

But there was an even bigger milestone to tackle: getting a car. With a vehicle of her own, she wouldn’t need to rely on others to get to work or to appointments in a city as sprawling as Albuquerque.

She had already gotten her driver’s license. But Sanchez had no savings. It was nearly impossible to find a used car that she could afford.

Then Woodcock saw a 2001 Dodge Neon for sale. She purchased the car outright for Sanchez, who reimbursed her over the following months.

It was a momentous step.

Woodcock works with Sanchez to navigate the paperwork for her car. “It still doesn’t feel real,” Sanchez said later that day. “I don’t have to be scared anymore. I don’t have to depend on other people.”

She’s now paid back the entire cost of the car — $3,000.

“She’s my role model,” Sanchez said of Woodcock. “I’m very glad that that woman found potential in me and helps me with my life. She sets me up for the right path.”

“Having even one single caring adult in a young person’s life can absolutely mean the difference between success and failure after leaving foster care,” said Annie Rasquin, executive director of CASA First, the office where Woodcock worked before leaving to help Sanchez.

The gaps in the CASA system have always been a problem, Rasquin said. Inspired in part by the success of Woodcock’s work with Sanchez, CASA First established a mentorship program this year. It trains volunteers to give extra support to foster teens who need it.

The small responsibilities adults have to manage — like changing a first flat tire — feel like big accomplishments, Sanchez says.

In October, Sanchez started focusing on her GED full time. In the coming years, she said she hopes to start a business as a cosmetologist or tattoo artist. Her Fostering Connections worker has helped her in making plans for the future, she said.

In the past, “I had nothing — 100% no control over my life,” she said. “I’m finally getting up for the first time.”

Sanchez in the yard of the home where she rented a room last year

How This Story Was Reported

Photojournalist Kitra Cahana set out in the summer of 2022 to document what happened when foster kids turned 18 and “aged out” of the child welfare system. The reporting was part of a project she did with Searchlight staff writer Ed Williams and ProPublica about New Mexico’s treatment of teenagers in foster care. Cahana spent five days shadowing and photographing Gonzales over the course of a week, including a stay at a motel until the early hours of the morning; she spent an additional five days with Sanchez over the course of several weeks. On other occasions, she met with the women to chat, grab some food, talk about their experiences and discuss the extent to which they felt comfortable sharing their stories with the public. Williams followed up with Gonzales and Sanchez this fall to find out how they’ve been faring. The women granted full access to both Cahana and Williams. They said they wanted the public to understand what foster teens go through.

by Agnel Philip

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As far as state and federal officials are concerned, the drinking water in Smithwick, Texas, is perfectly safe.

Over the past two decades, the utility that provides water to much of the community has had little trouble complying with the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is intended to assure Americans that their tap water is clean. Yet, at least once a year since 2019, the Smithwick Mills water system, which serves about 200 residents in the area, has reported high levels of the synthetic chemical 1,2,3-trichloropropane, according to data provided by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that collects water testing results from states.

The chemical, a cleaning and degreasing solvent that is also a byproduct from manufacturing pesticides, is commonly referred to as TCP. It has been labeled as a likely carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency for more than a decade. There have been few active sources of TCP since the 1990s, but its legacy lives on because it breaks down slowly in the environment.

How it got into the Smithwick Mills water supply is a bit of a mystery. There are some farms in the area, but it’s unclear whether they have used pesticides containing the chemical, and there are no known industrial sources nearby.

The TCP levels in the Smithwick Mills system are alarming to those who study water contamination. As with many chemicals, there’s limited information on TCP’s long-term effect on humans. But research involving animals shows evidence that it increases cancer risks at lower concentrations than many other known or likely carcinogens, including arsenic. Because of this, in 2017, California state regulators set a maximum allowable level for TCP in water of 5 parts per trillion. Water quality tests from the Smithwick Mills utility have revealed an average TCP level of 410 parts per trillion over the past four years — more than 80 times what would be allowed in California.

But the utility hasn’t taken any action. It doesn’t have to. The chemical isn’t regulated in drinking water by the EPA or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which means neither agency has ever set a maximum allowable level of TCP. It’s not clear why Smithwick Mills was even monitoring for the chemical, though state officials said many utilities receive results for TCP as part of routine lab tests for a variety of chemicals that get reported to state regulators.

Residents said they received no notices about the high levels, which weren’t shared in the town’s annual consumer confidence reports from 2019 to 2021, the first three years TCP was recorded in its water. TCP test results appeared in the 2022 report, which the water utility sent to residents after a ProPublica reporter reached out to the company earlier this year.

Jerri Paul, who has lived in Smithwick for three years, said she’s disappointed in the lack of communication from the water system and regulators. She has little hope that Texas officials will act on their own, because the state government has generally been reluctant to expand environmental regulation.

“I just don’t see them doing something above and beyond what the feds do,” said Paul, who is a member of the Smithwick Mill Estates property owners association board. The community is made up mostly of working-class people and retirees, many of whom don’t have the resources to buy bottled water, she noted. “We’re really dependent on the federal government doing something and saying that this is a contaminant that is not acceptable.”

A representative from Corix Utilities, which operates the Smithwick Mills water system, said in a statement that the company’s review of the tests didn’t show a danger to the community’s residents and that the system is in compliance with drinking water standards.

TCP has been found in far more drinking water than just in this small Texas town. When the EPA last conducted nationwide testing about a decade ago, the chemical was detected in the water of 6 million people (though, at the time, not in Smithwick). Four million of those people were served by systems with average concentrations above California’s standard.

TCP is one of more than a dozen unregulated contaminants that have been found in the country’s drinking water. During the past decade, regulators have identified at least one of these substances at levels that could impact human health in the tap water of 61 million people, according to a ProPublica analysis of EPA data. Nearly 16 million of these people were exposed to potentially dangerous levels of possible or likely carcinogens, including TCP. And over the past 25 years, the agency has identified more than a hundred other water contaminants, including industrial and agricultural chemicals and microorganisms, that may present risks to humans. The potential health effects of these substances include developmental delays, reproductive issues and cancer.

During the Past Decade, the EPA Found Unregulated Contaminants at Potentially Unsafe Levels in the Tap Water of 61 Million People Note: Potentially unsafe levels refer to the systems where the average sample result was higher than the EPA’s health-based “reference concentrations.” The population figures represent those served by publicly regulated community water systems. The EPA does not regulate water quality for private well users. Source: ProPublica analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data (Jason Kao/ProPublica)

Experts and activists say this demonstrates fundamental shortcomings in the country’s approach to environmental threats. The Safe Drinking Water Act, designed to protect the nation’s water quality, requires an extensive, multistep process before adopting new standards. Critics say the EPA has struggled to move contaminants that have been on its radar for a decade or more through this process in a timely fashion.

The EPA’s inaction on these chemicals “just illustrates how broken the system is,” said Erik D. Olson, a lawyer who worked at the EPA during the Reagan administration and is now senior strategic director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. “The law really is incredibly cumbersome and difficult, and there’s just a lack of political will to regulate a lot of these things.”

An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that while the agency views TCP as a potential contaminant of concern, it hasn’t collected enough data on it. Before regulating a new contaminant, the agency must show that doing so will provide meaningful health benefits based on the law’s criteria.

“EPA must make regulatory determinations based on the best available data and peer reviewed science,” the spokesperson said in a written statement. The agency did not make officials available for interviews.

Action Is Rare

In 1974, soon after expanding regulations for surface water pollution through the Clean Water Act, Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act, directing the EPA to protect the nation’s tap water. But within a decade, many lawmakers felt the legislation hadn’t done enough. In 1986, Congress passed amendments to the law that directed the agency to regulate more than 80 additional contaminants, including bacteria, viruses and chemicals such as cyanide and PCBs, within five years; the EPA would have to add another 25 contaminants every three years after that.

The agency struggled to comply with the mandates and missed deadlines for setting standards. Many small water utilities and some states said that the EPA’s rulemaking process didn’t prioritize contaminants with the greatest health risks. So, in 1996, following this pushback, Congress amended the law again with the stated goal of basing the agency’s rulemaking process on “sound science.”

The amendments created a much more complex, multistep process for regulation proposals. The EPA would need to demonstrate not only that a contaminant was a danger to human health, but that it was found widely enough in drinking water to warrant regulation. The agency also had to show that the benefits of regulating the contaminant would outweigh the costs — a tricky calculation that requires the agency to weigh the known tangible price associated with treatment and cleanup versus often uncertain projections about the health impacts of newly studied substances.

“The activities of Federal agencies would not, as some have said, grind to a halt,” Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona assured Americans in a New York Times op-ed in 1995 as the amendments were being debated.

Since then, the EPA has reviewed data on more than 35 unregulated contaminants, including sodium and the explosive RDX, through the primary process laid out in the 1996 amendments. None have yet been regulated.

In the vast majority of those cases, the agency decided there wasn’t enough evidence that the benefits of regulating a contaminant outweighed the costs. In one case — the chemical perchlorate — the agency initially decided in 2011 that it would set a maximum level, before reneging. (A federal appeals court recently ordered the agency to go through with its rulemaking process and set a standard for this chemical.)

The EPA has developed other regulations since 1996, including mandated treatment techniques and revisions to existing standards, the agency said in its statement to ProPublica. It also followed specific directives Congress made through the amendments to set limits for a handful of new contaminants using the law’s required cost-benefit analysis.

Steve Via, director of federal relations at the American Water Works Association, which represents utilities, said the agency is right to carefully consider costs before adopting new standards. Unnecessary regulations, he said, add a burden on systems that could lead to significant rate increases for customers.

“We need to protect public health, but we need to focus available resources,” he said, noting that the EPA was justified in not regulating some contaminants that weren’t widespread. “The best way to make that call is through a benefit-cost analysis.”

One family of chemicals has caused such an outcry that the streak could end soon. The EPA proposed this year to regulate a small group of perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also dubbed “forever chemicals.” The substances, which by some estimates number in the thousands and which got their nickname because they may may persist for centuries in the environment, were used in firefighting foam on military bases and nonstick materials like frying pans. They first garnered mainstream attention in the 2000s when residents in Parkersburg, West Virginia, sued DuPont, alleging the company knew that the chemicals it used at its Teflon plant there were toxic and had still exposed workers, livestock and locals to them. The company settled the lawsuit, which was portrayed in the 2019 film “Dark Waters.”

Studies have shown that prolonged exposure to PFAS in water may lead to cancer, decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, immune system suppression and other adverse health effects.

The agency first gathered data on the prevalence of six PFAS chemicals from 2013 to 2016, during the same time it was testing for TCP. It found at least one PFAS chemical in the water of 17 million people, according to an analysis of EPA data.

It turns out that was a vast underestimate, in large part because the tests used at the time weren’t sensitive enough to detect PFAS at very low concentrations. Follow-up testing has uncovered additional contamination: A 2020 study based on data from all 50 states estimated that the chemicals were likely present in the water of more than 200 million people.

Amid this heightened scrutiny, the Biden administration committed to take action, leading the EPA to announce in March that it would limit six chemicals from the PFAS family. For those who have been pushing for stricter drinking water standards, the proposal has provided some hope that the agency will act on other tap water threats, though this situation was unique because of the public scrutiny around the chemicals in recent years.

Waiting for Action

Of the more than 60 other “contaminants of concern” the EPA has identified, about 20, including TCP, are possible or likely carcinogens, and nearly 30 may have reproductive and developmental impacts.

For many of those contaminants, however, there is still uncertainty about the exact human health impacts. Scientists can’t do randomized controlled experiments on humans — the gold standard used to establish cause and effect — because it is unethical to expose people to substances that might cause serious health issues. Instead, human health data typically comes from observational studies, in which researchers recruit volunteers and follow their health outcomes over time. But these are expensive, difficult to conduct and come with their own uncertainties because they are not perfectly controlled experiments.

As an alternative, researchers often turn to controlled studies conducted on rodents or other animals to project what the effect might be in humans. In the case of TCP, researchers identified a link between the chemical and cancer in mice and rats in the 1990s, but to date no large-scale studies have investigated its effect in humans.

“A lot of times people who are not trained formally as scientists or researchers hear those uncertainties up front and say, ‘Oh well, this isn’t good enough, we need to wait,’” Sydney Evans, senior science analyst at EWG, said of findings on the health effects of TCP. “One of the issues with the way that contaminants and chemicals are regulated, especially drinking water contaminants, is that it takes entirely too long. And in the meantime, so many people are being exposed, just because we can’t be 100% certain.”

There is also limited information on the contaminants’ prevalence. The EPA has collected national drinking water data on less than half of its list of contaminants, and it can only monitor for 30 of them every five years. Some advocates for increased drinking water regulation say this limit, which was part of the 1996 amendments, makes it hard for the EPA to stay on top of emerging threats.

Not every small water system is required to participate in each testing round, and even among those that do, the data collected may not be useful to regulators. For example, during the monitoring period for TCP, the lab tests the EPA directed utilities to use couldn’t detect the chemical at low levels, similar to the testing sensitivity issue the agency faced in monitoring for PFAS. In 2022, the agency demurred on taking action on TCP, in part because it had no data on how widespread the chemical was at these lower levels. The agency declined to comment on why it didn’t use more sensitive tests that were available.

As with PFAS, follow-up testing by states and local utilities have found more people exposed to TCP than was initially documented, according to the Environmental Working Group data. ProPublica’s analysis of the data shows that since the EPA stopped its monitoring, TCP has been found in water systems serving an additional 6 million people, though many states recorded few or no tests during that time period. While many of these detections were in California, which requires testing, Texas documented TCP contamination in water from Smithwick Mills and dozens of other utilities.

Additional Testing Has Found More People Exposed to TCP Than Initially Documented Source: ProPublica analysis of Environmental Protection Agency and Environmental Working Group data (Jason Kao/ProPublica)

Alan Roberson, executive director at the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators, said the EPA should make a greater effort to provide final determinations on these contaminants of concern, including decisions to take them off its candidate list. There are three chemicals, for example, that have been on the list since 1996 without any final determination, according to the ProPublica review.

“They need a process for having a more manageable list and then doing the research to move it forward,” Roberson said. “Let’s make sure we have the stuff we need to make decisions, either up or down, on a regular basis.”

Leadership Void

In the absence of direction from the federal government, some states have acted on their own. In 2018, New Jersey joined Hawaii and California in regulating TCP. The limits vary widely, however. Hawaii’s TCP standard, which was enacted in the 1980s and revised 20 years ago, allows up to 600 parts per trillion in water.

Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the division of drinking water with California’s State Water Resources Control Board, said the state’s laws allow it to be more aggressive in targeting health risks in drinking water. Unlike the EPA, which has to determine that the benefit of a drinking water standard outweighs the cost, California regulators are directed by state law to set a maximum level as low as possible, so long as most water systems can afford to implement the treatment.

“That is why I like our system better than the federal government’s,” he said. “It can be incredibly hard to calculate the benefit of the health outcome.”

If Smithwick Mills had been in California, the water utility would have had to drastically reduce the levels of TCP in its water to comply with the state’s standard, either by installing treatment technology to remove the chemical or changing its water supply. At minimum, residents would have been notified of the contamination levels. But since the system is in Texas, the chemical’s presence went largely unnoticed until now. State officials said they have no plans to regulate TCP.

Paul, the Smithwick resident, said what’s most unsettling is that no one seems to know how TCP entered the community’s water supply. For years, Paul drank only bottled water because she didn’t like the taste of what came from the tap. But after learning about her town’s TCP test results, she stopped giving her dog water from the tap, and now uses bottled water even to make bird feed and water her plants. She uses tap water only for cleaning and bathing.

“I don’t trust it for anything else,” she said.

How We Measured Drinking Water Contamination

To determine the scope of drinking water contamination from unregulated substances, ProPublica analyzed water quality test data compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency and Environmental Working Group.

The EPA data, which came from the agency’s two most recent Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule periods, showed that during the past decade 61 million people were exposed to dozens of unregulated contaminants in their drinking water at potentially harmful levels. During the UCMR periods, which occur every five years, the EPA directs water systems to test for up to 30 contaminants. If a contaminant is detected at levels that exceed a certain threshold, known as the minimum reporting level, the utility must report the concentration found. The EPA also provides health-based “reference concentrations” for many contaminants. Using the results from the past two completed periods (2013-2016 and 2018-2021), we calculated average concentrations for each contaminant for every community water system in the dataset (treating nondetections as zeroes) and tallied the population served by systems with average concentrations higher than the reference concentration. For the majority the only contaminant found was chlorate, which is a disinfectant byproduct. Water from systems serving nearly 16 million people contained possible or likely carcinogens, though that figure doesn’t include PFAS chemicals since the EPA hadn’t yet determined that they were possibly carcinogenic at the time of testing.

The EPA data has some significant limitations. First, while every system serving more than 10,000 people must participate in UCMR testing, smaller systems are not required to. Instead, the Safe Drinking Water Act requires the agency to collect test results from a “representative sample” of small systems. Further, the tests cover a limited snapshot in time. Because the contaminants aren’t regulated, there is no requirement for systems or states to keep testing past the monitoring period.

To find the other communities affected by some of these contaminants, we used EWG’s Tap Water Database. Researchers with the environmental advocacy organization obtain the data from places that continue to test for unregulated contaminants beyond the end of monitoring periods. EWG checks the data against public sources to ensure that the samples in its database represent those taken after the water is treated.

The organization shared test results for some of the most widespread contaminants found during the EPA’s monitoring rounds, including 1,2,3-trichloropropane and PFAS. The data is complete for all states through 2019. The organization has released more recent data where available.

By comparing the water systems where additional testing has found 1,2,3-trichloropropane contamination to the EPA’s original monitoring results, we determined the chemical was found in the water of an additional 6 million people.

Clarification, Nov. 6, 2023: The figures in the second graphic have been expanded to include the tenths decimal place so it’s more clear why the two sides are different sizes.

Maya Miller and Max Blau contributed reporting.

by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capital & Main. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued an order Wednesday that allows the city to use residential hotel rooms — which by law are intended to be used as permanent housing for some of the city’s poorest residents — to temporarily shelter homeless people.

The order goes against the goals of a 2008 city law, which sought to preserve nearly 19,000 mostly bare-bones residential hotel rooms as stable housing for low-income, disabled and elderly Angelenos, who were increasingly being displaced by the development of condos and tourist hotels. If residential hotel owners want to convert their buildings into other uses, they must either replace the housing units or pay an equivalent fee to the city.

The mayor’s order comes nearly four months after a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found that at least 21 hotels were renting rooms to tourists and advertising on travel booking websites in apparent violation of the law. In response, the mayor’s office ordered the city’s Housing Department to investigate and account for the lapse in enforcement. Housing officials have issued citations to the owners of 17 of the hotels, ordering them to restore their rooms to residential use. All but one of the owners have appealed the order.

The order is designed to open additional rooms for the mayor’s Inside Safe initiative and other programs until their participants can be placed in permanent housing. Since the mayor declared a homelessness emergency on her first day in office in December, Inside Safe has cleared some 29 street encampments and moved more than 1,600 people into temporary shelter in more than 40 hotels and motels.

The new directive, which is in effect until the emergency ends, would significantly expand the city’s short-term shelter options, as there are roughly 300 buildings designated as residential hotels across the city. Any vacant residential hotel unit could be used to provide temporary housing under an agreement with the city.

“This executive directive continues work to help bring unhoused Angelenos inside as quickly as possible so they don’t die on our streets,” Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl wrote in a statement.

But Barbara Schultz, the director of housing justice at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, called the order “incredibly shortsighted” and “a huge step backwards.”

“Los Angeles is short tens of thousands of permanent units,” Schultz said. “As it is, we can’t move people from interim units into permanent units because of the shortfall. So how does removing permanent units help?”

Schultz said the mayor’s order could violate a 2006 lawsuit settlement that predates the residential hotel law and requires more than 65 downtown hotels to remain residential.

As of Oct. 13, Matt Szabo, the city’s chief administrative officer, reported that just 190 of 1,682 Inside Safe participants had found a permanent place to live.

Similar debates about who should get priority for limited housing and the best ways to address homelessness are playing out in large cities across the country.

Ray Patel, who heads the North East Los Angeles Hotel Owners Association, said the mayor’s order could be a “win-win” for the city and hotel owners, adding that housing Inside Safe participants would be a good option for hotels without amenities that would attract tourists. “We’ve always been a proponent of the market dictating how hotels rent,” he said.

Many residential hotel owners stand to earn more than they could from monthly rents as rates under Inside Safe have frequently exceeded $100 a night.

The city appears to be rethinking its enforcement of the residential hotel law. Under the order, the city would not deem residential hotels in violation if they rent out rooms to the city. This week, the Housing Department postponed at least two appeal hearings involving residential hotels that were offering rooms to tourists because the hotel had applied to participate in Inside Safe.

The mayor’s order also requires the Housing Department to “conduct a comprehensive review of all residential hotels” within 30 days, so that city officials can consider updates to the residential hotel ordinance.

Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed reporting.

by Anat Rubin, Illustrations by James Lee Chiahan, special to ProPublica

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Prologue

Two years into his 25-year sentence for attempted aggravated rape, Nathan Brown could tell the man sitting across from him — a jailhouse lawyer improbably named Lawyer Winfield — was not going to help him get out of prison. It was astounding to Brown that he was pinning his hopes on a fellow inmate who had an eighth grade education and whose formal legal training amounted to a prison paralegal course. “But he knew more than I did,” Brown said.

Brown laid out for Winfield the details of his case. In the summer of 1997, a woman was assaulted in the courtyard of the apartment complex in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where Brown was living with his mother. The woman, who was white, fended off the attacker with her high-heeled shoe until he fled on a bicycle. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, a security guard suggested they question Brown — one of the few Black tenants in the complex.

Brown, 23 at the time, was in his pajamas, rocking his baby daughter to sleep. The deputies put him in handcuffs and brought him to the victim. When she couldn’t identify him, the officers allowed her to get close enough to smell him. She had told them her attacker had a foul body odor. Brown, she would later testify, smelled like soap; he must have showered immediately after, she speculated. In a trial that lasted one day, the jury found him guilty. After his appeal was rejected, he no longer had a right to an attorney provided by the state.

Winfield began translating Brown’s grievances into a legal petition. He argued that Brown’s lawyer had provided ineffective counsel: He had overlooked the most basic defense strategies, failing to challenge the discrepancies in the victim’s story and to insist on DNA testing. The two of them worked on the petition for months, so Brown was surprised when the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal delivered a rejection just a week later. The denial — a single sentence that didn’t address any of Brown’s claims — bore the names of three judges. But something didn’t feel right. How could they return the ruling so quickly? Why was it so vague?

The answer to those questions would come years later, in the suicide note of a high-level court employee who disclosed that the judges of the 5th Circuit had decided, in secret, to ignore the petitions of prisoners who could not afford an attorney. It was a shocking revelation. In a state where police and prosecutorial misconduct frequently make national headlines and a stream of exonerations has revealed a criminal justice system still functioning in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, a group of white judges had decided that the claims of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inmates — most of them Black — were not worth taking the time to read.

Among those petitions was Brown’s claim that a DNA test would have proven his innocence.

Part One A Death at the Courthouse

On a warm Monday morning in May 2007, as the secretaries and clerks began filing through the glass doors of the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal, staff director Jerrold Peterson was inside his office with a 9 mm Beretta pistol. A letter he had written to the court’s eight judges was making its way to the chambers of Chief Judge Edward Dufresne Jr. Versions of that letter were en route to the Judiciary Commission, the panel responsible for investigating allegations of judicial misconduct, and to the Times-Picayune, the state’s most influential paper.

Peterson hoped the letter would unleash a massive scandal — one that he had helped perpetuate for more than a decade. Fifty-five years old, Peterson had long been a fixture at the courthouse, and he reminded the judges that he had kept their secrets, clearing contempt charges against their friends and fixing traffic tickets whenever they asked. But he focused his rage on one secret in particular: their handling of appeals sent to the court by prisoners who claimed they’d been unjustly convicted.

If you or someone you know needs help:

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

Louisiana requires that a panel of three judges review all such petitions — known as pro se petitions, a Latin phrase that means “for oneself.” But Peterson wrote that the judges had instructed him to ignore the law and dispose of the appeals on his own. Dufresne, he explained, signed off on the documents “without so much as a glance.”

The implications were staggering. Over 12 years, the 5th Circuit, which is responsible for reviewing challenges from trial courts in four parishes, had disregarded at least 5,000 pro se petitions from Louisiana prisoners, according to the court’s records. The inmates ranged from people convicted of murder to nonviolent offenders sent away for life. Many had limited education and struggled to present their arguments in the language of the courts. If Peterson’s accusations were true, none of the judges had ever laid eyes on their claims.

Peterson, who was known to keep his door open, didn’t answer the business services manager when she came by to tell him that Dufresne wanted to see him. The chief judge instructed her to have the head of security unlock the door. As he slid in his passkey, the sound of a gunshot echoed through the building.

A police detective arrived at the courthouse and found Peterson at his desk, slumped to one side, the Beretta still clutched in his right hand. The rest of the office, the detective wrote in his incident report, “seemed to be void of any further evidence.” When the officer searched the room a second time “for a final attempt to locate a possible suicide note,” Dufresne joined him. The chief judge didn’t mention that he had already read Peterson’s suicide letter. The detective, though, sensed something was amiss. In his report, he noted that Dufresne “appeared to be evasive.”

The 5th Circuit courthouse sits on the edge of downtown Gretna, a sleepy New Orleans suburb of 17,000 that serves as the government seat for Jefferson Parish. A tight bend in the Mississippi River separates Gretna from New Orleans, but politically and socially, the two are much further apart. Connecting the cities are twin bridges that became notorious after Hurricane Katrina when thousands of New Orleans residents tried to evacuate over the span but were forced back by a line of Gretna police officers. For many Black people in Louisiana, the moment encapsulated the hostility of the suburb, an area shaped by white families who had fled school desegregation half a century earlier.

On the Gretna side of the bridge, the road becomes the Harry Lee Expressway, named for a sheriff of the parish who was elected in 1979 and returned to office six times on a platform of aggressive policing. Lee once proudly announced that he had ordered his deputies to stop any “young blacks” they might find driving at night in a white neighborhood. “There’s a pretty good chance they’re up to no good,” he explained. During Lee’s tenure, the voters of Jefferson Parish sent David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to the Louisiana House of Representatives for a term.

Dufresne’s ancestors were among the area’s early settlers. His father, a plantation owner known as Big Eddie, built a white-columned brick home at the edge of his sugarcane fields in the neighboring parish of St. Charles. Dufresne, known as “Little Eddie,” launched his first campaign — a successful run for clerk of court — while he was still in law school. After he won a seat on the court, a local publication called him “the Thomas Jefferson of St. Charles government” and asked, “Can Eddie Dufresne, Jr. go cold turkey on politics now that he’s a judge?” The answer was no. By the time he was elected to the newly formed 5th Circuit Court in 1982, he had become a power broker like his father, weighing in on disputes and promoting politicians he favored. Each spring, he hosted a lavish crawfish boil on the riverfront that drew sheriffs, businesspeople, judges and public officials.

Long before he became chief judge in 2001, Dufresne dominated the 5th Circuit. On most weekdays, he would arrive at the courthouse in the passenger seat of one of his Cadillacs, driven by his longtime secretary, who would pick him up at the plantation house. Yet he was perceived by many as a “real salt-of-the-earth kind of guy,” as one lawyer put it. He earned the loyalty of staff by keeping work hours short — he would often leave at 2 p.m. — and wages high. “Dufresne ran a court for the benefit of the judges,” another lawyer told me.

During a monthly meeting of the 5th Circuit’s judges in 1994, he proposed changing how the court handled criminal pro se petitions, also known as writs. The minutes note the proposal but only in passing; it’s sandwiched between a lengthy debate over plans to upgrade the court’s computer system and a discussion about renting a new office copier. Dufresne’s plan is described in two sentences: A three-judge panel would no longer rule on the petitions unless they were “special or unusual”; instead, Dufresne would oversee them himself.

“Administratively, it got somewhat cumbersome to have to select three-judge panels for every writ, because you’d get hundreds of them,” said Bryan Pedeaux, who was Dufresne’s longtime law clerk. “So Dufresne said, ‘Let’s see if we can somehow streamline the situation.’”

At the time, the 5th Circuit had the lowest caseload — and the lowest number of pro se petitions — of the state’s five appellate courts. In the year preceding the meeting, it reported 235 criminal pro se petitions, fewer than one-tenth of the statewide total. The 4th Circuit, which includes New Orleans, reported 1,031.

Dufresne’s proposal was in keeping with his judicial views, former staff members told me. He believed that people convicted of crimes were almost certainly guilty and that any issue they raised on appeal was an attempt to avoid paying for their actions. He almost never reversed a decision of the lower criminal courts. “There was a total prejudice against all people charged and convicted of crimes,” said a former law clerk. “They never planned to give any of these people any relief anyway, so what difference does it make?”

The minutes give no hint of why the judges believed they could circumvent the state’s law. Although Peterson attended the meeting, his future role in drafting rulings on the court’s behalf is not mentioned. Still, it was clear Dufresne was offering to substantially reduce the judges’ caseloads: At the time of that meeting, more than 75% of the court’s post-conviction petitions came from prisoners without an attorney. The change went into effect immediately.

ProPublica made multiple attempts to contact each of the three 5th Circuit judges who presided during the relevant years and are still alive. ProPublica also asked for comment from the 5th Circuit courthouse. None responded.

Entrusted with overseeing the new protocol, Peterson developed a system to dispense with the prisoners’ applications speedily. He drew up 15 rulings for his assistant to cut and paste; they were typically no longer than one or two sentences and ambiguous enough to fit a wide range of claims. A couple of the rulings were labeled “grants” but did little more than allow prisoners access to their trial transcripts.

Sixty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment guarantees all criminal defendants the right to an attorney. But in most states, including Louisiana, that right ends after an appeal of the initial conviction. Every subsequent appeal is part of the post-conviction process, an area of law that even experienced lawyers find challenging.

Judges often view pro se appeals skeptically because they are filed by people who are not only untrained in the law but sometimes barely literate. Even liberal courts struggle with the high volume of petitions that lack merit. They are frequently assigned to clerks, who tend to recommend that judges dismiss them on technical grounds to avoid having to unravel what they see as frivolous or poorly made arguments. Still, the post-conviction process is essentially the only avenue prisoners have to introduce new evidence of their innocence or to persuade the court a defense attorney didn’t do their job.

There is overwhelming evidence that state courts routinely send innocent men and women to prison. Researchers estimate that at least 1% of those serving time for violent offenses have been wrongfully convicted — roughly 7,000 inmates in state prisons alone — though they believe that number is much higher. Louisiana law says that people sentenced to death are entitled to court-appointed lawyers for all of their appeals. Subjected to such scrutiny, an astounding number of the state’s prosecutions have fallen apart. Since 1976, 82% of Louisiana’s death sentences have been overturned by appeals judges after defense attorneys exposed serious violations that occurred at trial. Most sentences were reduced to life; some prisoners were exonerated.

That statistic underscores a fundamental inequity. The people sentenced to lengthy or life sentences were arrested by the same police forces, prosecuted by the same district attorneys, represented by the same public defenders and convicted in the same courts as those on death row, but they are on their own. When they file a pro se petition asking Louisiana’s appellate courts to reconsider their cases, they are at a significant disadvantage. Those petitioning the 5th Circuit after that meeting in 1994 had no chance at all.

To create the appearance of a proper review, former staffers said Dufresne formed a “pro se committee,” which included three judges who agreed to lend their names to Peterson’s rulings. Whenever a judge on the committee retired, Dufresne appointed someone new. The nature of the pro se committee was an open secret at the courthouse. “I knew what they were doing, and I knew it was unconstitutional,” said one former clerk. “Everyone knew about it.”

In Louisiana, courts charge prisoners a fee for petitions — generally $50. Those costs are usually paid by parishes in which the defendants are convicted. By 1999, the 5th Circuit was charging $300. The money, paid by taxpayers, flowed into the 5th Circuit’s discretionary fund. In a period when the state’s criminal justice system was close to financial collapse, with some public defenders representing as many as 400 people at a time, records show that the 5th Circuit collected at least $1.7 million for the pro se petitions its judges did not read. Former 5th Circuit employees told me the judges spent the money on office furnishings, travel allowances — even for retired judges — and other perks the state didn’t cover. When asked about the fund’s expenditures, the 5th Circuit said it keeps financial records for only three years and could not provide an accounting.

The pro se petitions made up only a small part of Peterson’s responsibilities. His primary task was to oversee the court’s central staff, a group of lawyers who reviewed criminal petitions filed by attorneys and wrote recommendations for the judges. He also spearheaded the court’s lobbying of the state legislature and oversaw the construction of the new court building. “He loved that job more than anything in the world,” a former colleague told me.

Although Peterson often put in long days, he advised his staff to spend more time with their families. Those who knew him well said his devotion to his work seemed to rise and fall in proportion to what was occurring in his personal life, which was in a perpetual state of flux. Former colleagues said he was unhappy in his marriage and had several affairs with staff members. At times his home mail was delivered to the office, and some of his co-workers suspected he might sleep there on occasion. Putting his children through parochial school was a financial strain. One of his daughters had died in her teens, and a brother had killed himself. A devout Catholic, Peterson had a hard time reconciling his faith with his troubled marriage and bouts of depression.

Peterson was born into a family of river pilots responsible for guiding ships through the lower Mississippi. It’s one of the most lucrative jobs in the state, with pay frequently exceeding $700,000 a year. Peterson’s grandfather, father and brother all held the job, and two of his sons now do. Peterson took a different path. After he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, he attended law school at Tulane University and took a job at a firm in New Orleans. He joined the 5th Circuit at age 37; his time with the court was interrupted only by his military service — as a reserve Marine colonel, he served in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

After years of overseeing the scheme, Peterson sought out Karla Baker, who had worked at the court years earlier and with whom he had been romantically involved. Baker was much younger than Peterson, and their relationship had continued after she left the 5th Circuit and took a job as a defense attorney at a prominent New Orleans firm. Peterson told her he wanted someone else to know what the judges had asked him to do, and he gave her a copy of his list of denials and the minutes from the 1994 meeting. He asked her not to do anything unless she heard from him.

On Saturday, May 19, 2007, two days before his suicide, Peterson received a call from Dufresne, summoning him to the courthouse. When he arrived, Dufresne and two judges were waiting in the conference room, and it quickly became clear they were there to fire him. They had evidence that Peterson had tried to improperly sway a case — that he had directed his staff to write a memo advising the judges to rule in favor of a defendant. Peterson rarely, if ever, recommended relief, even in cases filed by attorneys. But this happened to be a case Baker was defending, and Peterson had intervened.

Some law clerks had reported what they viewed as Peterson’s misconduct to the judges. Dufresne wanted to let it go, but a new judge on the court insisted they launch an investigation, which also revealed that Peterson was having a relationship with one of his subordinates. It had become too much to ignore. After more than a decade of denying the appeals of defendants, he was being fired for trying to aid one.

Peterson was blindsided. He had assumed he had a level of job security commensurate with the amount of dirty work he had done for the court. “Jerry thought he was one of them,” a former colleague told me. “He thought he was unfireable because he knew all the court’s secrets.” Now, some of the same judges who had asked him to break the law were dismissing him for what struck him as comparatively small-scale misconduct.

After the meeting, he sat down and began to write a letter to the judges. “Not one criminal writ application filed by an inmate pro se has been reviewed by a judge on the court,” he wrote. “Who’s integrity is really in question when you have conveniently ignored your duty to review pro se criminal writ applications so you can reduce your workload, present a false picture of the court’s work, and charge large sums for work you haven’t done?”

On the morning of his suicide, Baker said, she received an email from Peterson: “He said by the time he was finished it will be Gretnagate.” But he underestimated the determination of the state’s legal establishment to protect its own.

The Times-Picayune ran a short piece on the suicide a few days later. It described Peterson as a well-liked, reliable employee. A staff member told the paper that Peterson’s problems were personal ones: “As far as anyone knows it has nothing to do with anything here at the court.” The article made no mention of the letter Peterson had sent to the paper.

The Judiciary Commission initiated an investigation into the 5th Circuit. A person familiar with the inquiry told me it focused on Dufresne, but it never became public and never had any consequences. Its findings were sealed and sent to a storage facility that was already filled with the records of other misconduct investigations that are not subject to the state’s public records law.

None of the judges involved in the episode was disciplined. A few months after Peterson’s suicide, the 5th Circuit quietly adopted a new policy for handling pro se petitions: A panel of three randomly selected judges would now review them, as Louisiana law required. No one, however, alerted the men and women whose petitions the court had improperly rejected and who were in prisons across the state.

Part Two Hundreds of Petitions

Karla Baker wanted no part of the mess Peterson had left behind. But she had loved him, despite their complicated relationship, and felt partly responsible for his unraveling. She knew that Peterson had gotten into trouble because he had tried to influence the judges in her case. Although she never asked for him to intervene, she said, she worried her own legal career could be in jeopardy.

More than 16 years after Peterson’s suicide, Baker is still hesitant to talk about what happened, and unsure of how to cast herself in the story. Raised in Louisiana, she graduated from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and began her career as a staff attorney for the state Supreme Court. When she joined the 5th Circuit as a law clerk in 2002, she was taken with Peterson’s intelligence and kindness. He never spoke down to her, she said, despite her lack of experience. He seemed to know everything about the courthouse, and he was always willing to help. As they became closer, she came to see a dark side. He was deeply unhappy, haunted. “He lived on the edge,” Baker said, but felt powerless to change his own circumstances.

Peterson could have taken his documents to the Innocence Project or another nonprofit dedicated to fighting the injustices of the Louisiana criminal justice system, but those were not his people. So, he had left it to Baker, who had never seen herself as an activist, to bring the scandal to light.

Baker anguished about the matter for months. She was engaged to someone by then and was embarrassed about having had a relationship with a married man. She wanted to put the episode behind her. She said she decided to send an anonymous complaint to the Judiciary Commission, laying out some details of the 5th Circuit’s pro se arrangement. She didn’t know about Peterson’s suicide letter or that he had sent the commission a copy. She waited for something to happen, but nothing did, even after she sent the commission a second letter, this time identifying herself as the one who sent the initial complaint.

Finally, Baker took the documents that Peterson had given her and drove to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Roughly 130 miles north of New Orleans, the maximum-security prison sits on a former plantation that covered 18,000 acres and is named for the African country from which many of its enslaved people were taken. That year it housed some 5,200 inmates, most of whom were expected to die at the prison hospice.

Angola was once considered the most violent prison in the United States. Brutal assaults and murders among the inmates were common, and the guards were known for sanctioning a system of inmate rape and sexual slavery. After decades of federal intervention and grudging reforms, the prison has largely shed that reputation. Vocational programs, recreational clubs and a Southern Baptist Bible college that has ordained hundreds of inmates have been credited with reducing the violence. Angola also established one of the best prison law libraries in the United States, a sanctuary of sorts where jailhouse lawyers help other prisoners challenge their convictions and sentences.

After passing through security, Baker asked to see Ted Addison, a former client who could no longer afford her services but with whom she had kept in touch. Addison was halfway through a 20-year sentence for armed robbery. For years he had been petitioning the courts on his own, insisting he had been unfairly convicted.

Baker handed Addison a sheaf of documents, which included the list of canned denials Peterson had developed and the minutes to the 1994 meeting. Addison was stunned. Like many other prisoners, he had spent years trying to get the 5th Circuit to grant him a new hearing. He had filed six pro se petitions, and each had come back almost immediately with a brief rejection.

Addison took the documents to the prison law library. Here, amid the rows of concrete cubicles, they were both a revelation and a confirmation of what the jailhouse lawyers had long suspected. For years inmates had noticed an unusual pattern in denials coming from the 5th Circuit: They would arrive just days after the petitions were filed, a process that usually took months at the state’s other appellate courts, and the perfunctory language never varied, with only the names and dates changing from case to case. Now it all made sense.

The jailhouse lawyers set about alerting the prisoners who had petitioned the 5th Circuit during the relevant years. They believed Peterson’s accusations could revive their cases. Addison felt they were organizing “a movement.” He sent copies of Peterson’s documents to inmate lawyers at the state’s other prisons and introduced Baker to Kerry Myers, editor of Angola’s award-winning prison magazine, The Angolite. Myers had been convicted of killing his wife in 1984 and was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. He had filed five unsuccessful pro se petitions with the 5th Circuit. “I actually had a lot of hope,” Myers told me. “I said, ‘This thing is going to blow up.’”

With Baker representing them, Addison and Myers filed a joint petition to the Louisiana Supreme Court, demanding an investigation into Peterson’s allegations and new hearings for all of the prisoners whose appeals had been ignored. Within three months, the court received 299 petitions from men and women across the Louisiana prison system, most of them drafted from a form that Baker had provided.

Baker also prodded the Times-Picayune to cover the story. The newspaper’s first article, which focused on the prisoners petitioning the state Supreme Court, quoted the suicide note Peterson had sent the paper more than a year earlier. Baker, who hadn’t known about the letter, filed a public records request to obtain a copy from the Gretna police. The Angolite ran a story as well, calling the 5th Circuit’s pro se system a “simple and lucrative process for disposing of the dispossessed.”

The independent review the inmates were asking for presented a threat to the 5th Circuit. If it showed that judgments were unjust, the appeals court could be exposed to civil lawsuits. If the reviews revealed a wrongful conviction, Dufresne and the other judges could face serious discipline, especially since the state’s laws against judicial misconduct take into account the harm the injustice has caused.

The probability that at least some of the 299 petitions had merit was high. More than 90% of the prisoners came from Jefferson Parish, where prosecutors were known for striking Black men and women from jury pools in felony trials at a rate more than three times as often as their white counterparts. Because the state had long allowed “split jury” convictions requiring only 10 of the 12 jurors to agree, many of the Black defendants whose petitions Peterson rejected were convicted by what amounted to an all-white jury.

The Jefferson Parish district attorney had also made aggressive use of the state’s “Habitual Offender” law, which can turn a two-year sentence into life without parole; almost all of the cases involved Black defendants. Many of the prisoners asking for a review had been sentenced under the law and were serving life sentences for nonviolent offenses like drug possession and “purse snatching.”

Some of the judges who had sent these men and women to prison had gained notoriety a few years before Peterson’s suicide, when an FBI corruption sting revealed they had accepted cash bribes and campaign contributions in exchange for allowing a bail bonds company to dictate the amounts defendants were required to post. The scandal sent two judges to prison and unseated a third.

More than 85% of defendants in the state are considered indigent, meaning they qualify for a public defender when they are prosecuted. Louisiana’s public defender system is widely considered one of the worst in the country. It relies primarily on traffic fines and court fees — an unpredictable source of revenue that has never come close to meeting the need. Offices across the state struggle with caseloads so large that they have no choice but to put defendants on long waitlists, leaving them in jail until an attorney becomes available. Some attorneys have so little time to prepare, they meet their clients for the first time on the day of trial.

The Louisiana Supreme Court did not grant the 299 petitioners an independent review of Peterson’s rulings. Instead, it adopted a plan proposed by Dufresne and the other 5th Circuit judges: Rather than saddle another court, the 5th Circuit offered to reconsider the cases itself. “We are guided in this request by a desire to avoid imposing financial or other burdens on other judges in this state,” the 5th Circuit judges wrote. In October 2008, the Louisiana Supreme Court remanded the 299 petitions to the 5th Circuit. (It did the same with another 155 that came later.) As part of the agreement, the 5th Circuit judges whose names had appeared on the Peterson rulings would not be involved in the “reconsideration” of the cases. New three-judge panels would decide whether the rulings, which their colleagues had never read, were nonetheless fair.

With new documents Baker had obtained through public records requests, including Peterson’s suicide letter and the Gretna police report raising questions about Dufresne’s behavior, Addison and Myers challenged the Supreme Court’s decision. The documents, they wrote, “show that all of the judges of the Fifth Circuit … have an apparent or actual conflict of interest in this matter.”

The Louisiana Supreme Court saw it otherwise, stating that it would not be appropriate to task the other appellate courts with the additional work or to spend $200,000 of the public’s money to pay for retired judges to review the cases. Justice Catherine “Kitty” Kimball wrote that the court could not base its decision on the allegations of a depressed court clerk and an “unsubstantiated” police report about his suicide. “While this may be the fodder of news reports and movies,” she wrote, “it is not, in my view, proper evidence for judicial action.”

While the Judiciary Commission inquiry was going nowhere, the state bar launched its own misconduct investigation — into Baker. The 5th Circuit judges had alerted the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board that Peterson had intervened on her behalf. The following year, she left the defense firm and went into practice for herself, representing drug offenders and pursuing damages in personal injury cases. The bar association kept the case against Baker open for almost a decade before sending her a letter saying it found no evidence of wrongdoing and was dropping the investigation.

It took the 5th Circuit three years to review the pro se petitions of 454 prisoners. The Times-Picayune and other local news outlets had by then dropped the story, so no one was paying attention when the judges found that, aside from a dozen procedural mistakes, Peterson’s cut-and-paste denials had been correct. In one case after another, they wrote, “there was no error in the prior rulings of this court.” The court had investigated itself and found it had done nothing wrong.

Myers’ life sentence was commuted in 2013. Addison served out the remainder of his sentence and was released in 2016.

As for the 5th Circuit judges, they prospered in the years after Peterson’s suicide. Some were picked to serve on the state Supreme Court; others enjoyed successful political careers. Dufresne remained the court’s chief judge until he collapsed in the office of one of his businesses on December 7, 2010. His obituary in the Times-Picayune didn’t mention the pro se scheme. In St. Charles Parish, there’s a Judge Edward Dufresne Parkway, a Dufresne Loop and an Edward Dufresne Community Center, where a life-size bronze statue stands. He is wearing a suit with a lobster pin on his lapel and one of Lady Justice on his tie.

Part Three The Last Case

That might have been the end of the story but for an unusual confluence of events that landed a former federal law clerk with an extraordinary resumé in a prison bunk bed next to the last inmate still fighting the 5th Circuit’s sham denials.

On January 2, 2019, Haller Jackson IV walked into Angola to serve out the remainder of a sentence for soliciting sex from a minor. He was 37 years old, 6-foot-4 and weighed 200 pounds, but he carried himself like a man who was doing his best to appear smaller. His right eye was blood red, a reminder of a beating he’d received a few weeks earlier at another prison.

Jackson had begun his sentence in Angola four years earlier. When his legal advocacy on behalf of fellow inmates called attention to, among other things, the prison’s inadequate health care, he was transferred to Dixon Correctional Institute, some 35 miles away. After he was assaulted, Jackson said, his lawyer secured his return to Angola, as long as he promised to refrain from embarrassing the authorities.

Jackson was relieved to be able to resume his work as an inmate lawyer. He had a year and a half left on his sentence, and he wanted to make the most of it. As a registered sex offender, he likely would never be allowed to practice law. While he settled in that first day, a man in the adjacent bunk bed introduced himself. His name was Louie M. Schexnayder Jr., but in Angola everybody called him Schex.

Schexnayder was convicted of murder in 1995. He’d petitioned the 5th Circuit 11 times during the period of Peterson’s blanket denials, raising questions about the competency of his defense attorney and the testimony of a witness who later recanted. After the judges at the 5th Circuit affirmed Peterson’s rulings, Schexnayder hired a lawyer to help him petition the federal courts.

Standing in Schexnayder’s way — and in the way of all the 5th Circuit petitioners who tried to take their cases to federal court — was the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a federal law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, at the height of his efforts to portray himself as a tough-on-crime Democrat. The law, known by its unwieldy initials as AEDPA, has made it all but impossible for federal judges to overturn criminal rulings by state courts.

AEDPA was supposed to help deter domestic terrorism and expedite delays in carrying out capital punishment, but it did neither. The time between sentencing and execution is almost twice as long today as it was 27 years ago, and by most measures domestic terrorism has increased. But the law has significantly undermined habeas corpus, the constitutional safeguard that gives prisoners the right to challenge their incarceration.

One of the act’s toughest restrictions, and the one keeping the Louisiana prisoners from taking their cases to federal court, requires federal judges to defer to state court rulings in all but the narrowest of circumstances. Federal judges can’t step in just because a state court proceeding or ruling violated a prisoner’s rights. They can reverse the state ruling only if it was so wrong that not a single “reasonable jurist” would agree with it. Before AEDPA, federal judges provided a critical safeguard. Unlike state judges, most of whom face reelection and can be loath to reverse convictions for fear of appearing “soft on crime,” they are appointed for life and are theoretically free from political pressure.

Since AEDPA was enacted, state convictions based on the fabricated testimony of jailhouse informants or obtained by prosecutors suppressing or falsifying evidence are routinely upheld. Even in cases in which trial judges adopted the prosecution’s brief as their ruling, typos and all, federal judges have declined to step in. Those who do have been repeatedly slapped down by the Supreme Court in opinions that further narrowed the grounds for federal review. If the better-known 1994 crime bill was intended to lock more people up, AEDPA effectively threw away the key.

While some federal judges have tried to push back against AEDPA’s restrictions, those in Louisiana have applied them with zeal. In case after case, Louisiana’s federal courts have signaled to state court judges that virtually no violation of a prisoner’s constitutional rights is so egregious as to warrant review. Dufresne’s pro se scheme was no exception. When Schexnayder asked a federal district court for a new hearing in light of Peterson’s revelations, the judge cited AEDPA in denying his request, and the federal appellate court affirmed. But on that day in January 2019, when Jackson climbed into the top bunk in the prison dormitory he shared with 85 other men, Schexnayder thought finally he might get the help he needed.

Angola has produced some formidable jailhouse lawyers, but Jackson was unlike any of them. The son of a prominent family in Shreveport, he had studied law at Tulane, graduating first in his class with the highest grade-point average in the school’s history. While also pursuing a doctorate in epidemiology, he served as editor-in-chief of the law review and shattered the school’s record for the number of awards and honors earned by an individual student. The lives of most Angola prisoners were marked by extreme poverty; Jackson had grown up in extraordinary privilege. If he hadn’t been gay, he believes he might have been a frat boy, practicing at the family law firm and going to the Shreveport Club for dinner, just as generations of Haller Jacksons before him had done. Instead, he distanced himself from that lineage. After graduating from law school, he landed several prestigious federal clerkships and focused his efforts on prisoner rights and habeas cases.

But it all came crashing down in 2014, when he was arrested in New Orleans after arranging online with an undercover agent to pay for sex with a 10-year-old boy. By his own account, he had become addicted to alcohol and dependent on methamphetamines. It was a spectacular downfall, and it made headlines in legal publications. Jackson pleaded guilty and asked to be sent to Angola. This was an unusual request. The prison still evokes fear and is generally reserved for people sentenced to more than 40 years. His lawyers were against it, but he insisted. “It’s my drag queen approach to life,” he said. “If you’re going to send me to prison, well, send me to Angola.”

It was also a way for Jackson to derive meaning from the wreckage. Angola is where Louisiana’s injustices intersect most dramatically, and Jackson knew his rare expertise in post-conviction law would be valuable. He had always understood that pro se petitioners got short shrift, but in Angola he was shocked to see how many of the prisoners’ claims had merit and how few managed to receive any attention from the courts.

Shortly after he arrived, Jackson met an inmate convicted of stealing a carpenter’s level. He had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole under the state’s repeat offender law; his previous crimes included stealing a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and writing two bad checks to Home Depot. The man, Jackson wrote in a petition arguing the sentence was illegal, will die in prison over a “tool with a little bubble in it, worth less than $10.” It was denied. Jackson petitioned the court on behalf of a man who had found evidence of his innocence in a police report the prosecutor had withheld at trial. His request for a new hearing was rejected. As was a filing on behalf of a severely disabled man who was still in prison months after he should have been released, and another for a man who claimed he had lost his vision because of the prison’s neglect.

Almost all of Jackson’s filings speak not just to the particulars of a specific case but to the devastation wrought by the entire Louisiana criminal justice apparatus. The state has more people serving life without parole than Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi combined. In a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court for a man serving a life sentence for possession of cocaine, Jackson protested “this destruction of another black family — perhaps a tiny tragedy in the civil rights Chernobyl that has been Louisiana’s war on drugs.” There was no evidence linking the man to the ounce of cocaine found at a relative’s home, he wrote. “And yet here he sits still, sentenced to life without parole on the banks of the Mississippi,” he continued. “As seen from the heavens, the scene on these banks has changed little since 1820.” The petition was denied.

By the time Jackson met Schexnayder, his writing had progressed “from disappointed but fundamentally-confident-in-justice liberal to just this side of burn-the-house-down nutter,” he told me. The indignation he felt over the 5th Circuit’s pro se cases was not because of the court’s obvious indifference to the inmates; this he had come to expect. “It’s that the judges got caught saying they don’t care,” he said. “The poor already knew this and have known it viscerally all their lives — from the way every arm of the state has ever treated them.” But here was a case in which they had irrefutable proof, and still there was no outrage on their behalf. “It was crickets,” he said. “They got caught so, so red-handed, and the response of all the other courts has been a collective shrug.”

Schexnayder, who had a criminal record so long that he would almost certainly have landed in prison for life much sooner had he been Black, could hardly be seen as the face of Louisiana’s criminal justice failures. But of all the 5th Circuit petitioners, Schexnayder was the one who had somehow managed to keep his case alive. Jackson knew that a victory for him could open the door for the others. He began working on a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing the 5th Circuit’s reconsideration of Peterson’s denials did little more than allow the judges to “whitewash the scandal.”

“Why would the Louisiana 5th Circuit think it could get away with such appalling misconduct?” Jackson wrote. “To this there is an easy, if disturbing, answer: Because it has. And now, the lower federal courts are deferring to that court’s decisions in the affected cases, many involving a sentence to life without parole.”

Jackson realized the case was unlikely to get any attention unless he could line up some outside help. AEDPA had been a particular target of one of his mentors, Alex Kozinski, a federal judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for whom Jackson had clerked. Frequently mentioned as a candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court, Kozinski had been one of the country’s most prominent judges, a Reagan appointee known for his cutting and iconoclastic opinions. In a 2015 law review article, he wrote that AEDPA was “a cruel, unjust and unnecessary law that effectively removes federal judges as safeguards against miscarriages of justice.” He called for its repeal.

But like Jackson’s, Kozinski’s career had come to an abrupt end. In 2017, amid multiple accusations of sexual harassment, he left the bench. Within the legal world, especially around issues of criminal justice, however, his opinion still commanded respect, even among some of his accusers. Jackson knew that his involvement could draw attention to Schexnayder’s petition. He called the former judge at his home in California. Kozinski thought the 5th Circuit’s conduct — and the federal courts’ unwillingness to wade into it — might provide a valuable test for AEDPA. The law requires deference to the work of state court judges, but what if those judges hadn’t done the work? Kozinski asked the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to submit a brief in support of Schexnayder’s petition and recruited another former clerk to write it.

In April 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court asked the state of Louisiana to submit a response to Schexnayder’s claims, signaling that someone on the court was interested in considering the case. The justices were initially scheduled to vote in April on whether to grant a full hearing, but they postponed that decision nine times over the next eight months. The delays gave Jackson hope. Maybe one of the justices was working to drum up enough votes to give the case a chance or preparing a powerful dissent from the court’s refusal to hear it.

Instead, on Dec. 9, 2019, the court unanimously rejected the case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a short opinion, citing technical issues with Schexnayder’s original petition to the Louisiana federal court as her reason for agreeing with her colleagues’ decision. She ended with what seemed like an encouraging note to the prisoners, saying the 5th Circuit’s reconsideration of Peterson’s rulings brings up “serious due process concerns.”

“I expect that lower federal courts will examine the issue of what deference is due to these decisions when it is properly raised,” she wrote.

But the federal courts will not get that chance. The 454 prisoners whose denials the 5th Circuit “reconsidered” have exhausted their appeals and can no longer ask federal judges to weigh in on the 5th Circuit’s conduct. In refusing to hear Schexnayder’s case, the Supreme Court has prevented the episode from being raised in federal court again.

When Jackson found out that Schexnayder’s petition had been rejected, he struggled to articulate his reaction. After a long silence, he said, “Well, they got away with it.”

Since they petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court, some of the 454 inmates have died in prison. Others have been released after serving their time or have had their sentences reduced as a result of recent criminal justice reforms. But at least 170, including Schexnayder, are still incarcerated. They continue to petition the appellate courts, trying to show new evidence of their innocence or to argue that their sentences should be reduced.

After the Schexnayder episode, Jackson set his sights on the modest goal of filing as many petitions as he could before his release. “I’m going to make them tell me they’re OK with all these crazy cases,” he said. When he walked out the prison gates in June 2020, he smuggled several office boxes containing case files he had secretly copied — documents he would use to help the men he was leaving behind. In the months that followed, Jackson found lawyers to represent dozens of prisoners and worked with legal nonprofits to reduce the sentences of more than 100 people. Among them are several men whose pro se petitions the 5th Circuit had ignored.

Epilogue

In the years that Peterson was rejecting pro se petitions, the 5th Circuit denied claims that ended in at least five exonerations. Four of these men were freed only after the New Orleans Innocence Project agreed to represent them. Nathan Brown was one of them. He had appealed to the organization early in his incarceration, and lawyers there had discovered that the victim’s dress had been preserved as evidence and could be tested for DNA.

Hurricane Katrina put a stop to everything, though, and for a long time Brown heard nothing. While he waited, the 5th Circuit reviewed Peterson’s denial and concluded that the failure of Brown’s attorney to introduce DNA evidence was “within the scope of trial strategy” and did not constitute inadequate counsel.

Then, on his 39th birthday, Brown received a letter from the national Innocence Project, saying it would take his case. Brown’s new lawyers compelled the Jefferson Parish district attorney to send the dress for DNA testing, and the analysis identified another man — a convicted felon — as the attacker. In 2014, after 16 years, 10 months and 18 days, Brown was exonerated.

It’s been nine years since Brown was released, and he’s still trying to find stable ground. He has struggled with addiction and depression. He cycles through phones. He has lost his Social Security card so many times the federal government will no longer replace it. The dreams he had for himself when he was in prison — that he would go to college, that he would help his daughter to rise above the poverty that had plagued his own childhood — have slipped so far out of his reach he can hardly allow himself to believe in them. Still, he knows how exceptional his case is.

“They have a lot of guys in prison that are filing claims,” he told me. “They’re not all saying, ‘I didn’t do this.’ They’re just saying, ‘The way you sentenced me is wrong. The crime doesn’t warrant all this time you gave me.’ But they can’t come home, because once they get you, they got you, and the courts — they’re not listening. They don’t see you.”

How We Reported This Story

For this story, ProPublica reviewed thousands of pages of documents, examined the cases of more than 450 prisoners, and interviewed several dozen people, many of whom had never before spoken publicly about these events.

Richard A. Webster contributed reporting. Art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker. Development by Jason Kao.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WPLN/Nashville Public Radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

This story contains some graphic descriptions of gun violence.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments next week in a pivotal firearms case that could have profound implications for how police and courts deal with domestic violence.

The question: Should people who are placed under domestic violence protection orders also lose access to their guns?

For many victim advocates, the answer is obvious. Women are five times more likely to be killed in a domestic violence incident when the abuser has access to a gun. Advocates argue that the gun restrictions tied to such orders are among the most powerful tools for domestic violence victims and that without them, more people will die.

For gun rights groups and their most ardent supporters, that is beside the point. They contend that people subject to protection orders haven’t been convicted of a crime and that taking their firearms away violates the Second Amendment. If the government can disarm them, they ask, who could the government disarm next?

Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit sided with gun rights supporters, invalidating a federal law passed by Congress in 1994 that bars people under domestic violence orders from having firearms.

If the Supreme Court upholds that decision and rules that gun restrictions tied to restraining orders are unconstitutional, states would have fewer options to stop domestic abusers from possessing, and using, guns. And in conservative states, the aggressive rollback of gun control laws means that it is already easier for people to get guns to begin with.

This year, WPLN and ProPublica have been reporting on the issue at the heart of the Supreme Court case: the difficulty of separating domestic abusers from their guns. The court’s ruling could have immense ramifications in Tennessee, where weak enforcement of gun laws has allowed firearms to slip through the cracks with deadly consequences. According to our reporting, nearly 40% of the victims shot in domestic violence homicides in Nashville since 2007 were killed by people legally barred from having guns.

Over the past decade, the state has also made it easier for more people to get guns and carry them in more places. And a special legislative session in August — called in the wake of the March shooting at the Covenant School, where three children and three staff members were killed — failed to yield any gun reform.

The Supreme Court’s decision could also inform rulings on other laws barring people with felonies and drug addictions from having guns as well as red flag laws designed to prevent shootings by temporarily removing guns from people who’ve shown signs they might hurt themselves or others.

Such laws were central to this summer’s legislative session in Tennessee and have gained renewed attention following last week’s shooting rampage in Maine. Those laws are designed similarly to the gun dispossession requirements under domestic violence orders, using a civil court process to prevent threatened violence from escalating.

The Supreme Court case involves a Texas man named Zackey Rahimi, who was issued a restraining order after his ex-girlfriend reported that he assaulted her and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone. According to police, he was then involved in five separate shooting incidents over a two-month period. Police found two guns during a search of his home, and he was indicted for violating the federal prohibition on gun possession for those under protection orders.

Rahimi moved to dismiss the indictment, but the district judge ruled against him. Rahimi then pleaded guilty. The 5th Circuit originally affirmed the district court decision. But after the Supreme Court ruling last year that gun laws should be reviewed against the nation’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation,” the 5th Circuit issued a new opinion, this time agreeing with Rahimi that the firearms ban violated the Second Amendment and that domestic abusers couldn’t be singled out as a group.

“Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms?” 5th Circuit Judge Cory Wilson wrote for the court. “Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”

But research has shown that domestic abusers are a particularly dangerous group of people, and they are even more so with guns. One study by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund found that domestic dispute calls are “the most dangerous circumstance” for police to respond to, leading to more officer deaths than any other type of call. In addition, more than two-thirds of mass shootings involve domestic violence or are committed by someone with a history of it.

“Domestic violence homicides that involve guns are more likely to have additional victims than other types of homicide that involve guns,” said April Zeoli, a professor who researches gun policy and public health at the University of Michigan.

The consequences can be devastating.

In one case in northeastern Tennessee in 2013, a 12-year-old girl called 911 and told dispatchers that her father had shot her. According to the police report, when officers arrived, they found her lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. Her 11-year-old brother was lying in his bed. Officers peeled back the blankets and found two bullet wounds to his stomach. Their mother, Bridget Hughes, was found dead in the bedroom down the hall, her body pressed against the door as if to keep the shooter out.

And finally, the police found her husband, Herbert Clyde Hughes. According to police reports, he had killed his whole family, gotten into bed and then turned the gun on himself.

Weak Interventions for Domestic Abusers

One reason that victim advocates have pushed hard for gun dispossession to be included in protection orders is that alternatives for controlling domestic abuse are not always successful. Criminal prosecution can take a long time and require a high burden of proof for victims to overcome the sentiment that domestic violence is a proverbial “he said, she said.”

Domestic violence protection orders can also be difficult and sometimes even dangerous to get.

States have different policies and procedures for getting orders of protection, but in Tennessee the process goes something like this: If someone is being threatened or abused, they can fill out paperwork describing the abuse and request a protection order from the court. If facing immediate danger, they can also ask for a temporary protection order that lasts a few weeks until a hearing can be called.

A full protection order is issued only after a court hearing, where both the accuser and accused go in front of a judge. The statute dictates those hearings should be held within 15 days of notification, but they can sometimes be delayed. In the meantime, the decision to seek legal help can ratchet up tensions, leaving victims vulnerable.

The delays, paperwork and fear of facing their abusers in court can all be deterrents for victims trying to secure protection orders. If they do go through the process, their requests are not always granted. In Nashville, more than 1,900 petitions for protection orders were filed in the first half of 2023, according to Davidson County court records. Only about 550 were granted during that period.

Caption: An excerpt of Temptress Peebles’ July 2019 temporary order of protection against her ex-boyfriend. (Obtained by WPLN)

Temptress Peebles tried to get a protection order in Nashville three times in the months before her death in 2019. She told a court that her ex-boyfriend had pointed a gun at her and threatened to kill her. But Davidson County court records show that she was never able to secure a protection order after she missed a court date and became difficult to reach. In her final petition for an order, she wrote that she was terrified that her ex-boyfriend was going to kill her.

A week later, police say, he did, in front of her 8-year-old daughter.

Peebles’ ex-boyfriend has not yet entered a plea, and his lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“There is a myth out there that it is very easy to get a protective order, that judges are just handing out protective orders like candy to trick-or-treaters,” said Natalie Nanasi, director of the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “And that's absolutely not the case.”

Even when women do get protection orders, they aren’t always enforced. Michaela Carter, also from Nashville, got one in 2021 after reporting that her husband had repeatedly hit her in the face with a whiskey bottle. When he got out of jail months later, called her repeatedly and was seen near a relative’s apartment with a gun, she called 911. But the police told her there was little they could do and left.

KiAndrea Jones holds a photo of her sister, Michaela Carter, outside her home in Antioch, Tennessee. Carter, 24, was killed by her estranged husband despite having a protection order against him following a history of domestic abuse. (William DeShazer for ProPublica)

Ten minutes later, according to police and 911 records, she was shot to death by her estranged husband.

He hasn’t entered a plea in the case, and his lawyer didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.

In light of such cases, criminal prosecutors and victim advocates say people subject to restraining orders not only need to be barred from having guns, but that more needs to be done to ensure they relinquish them and can’t get new firearms.

Medical and public health experts found that state laws requiring people subject to domestic violence restraining orders to turn over their firearms were associated with a 14% lower rate of intimate partner gun homicides than states without such laws.

The civil orders, they say, can protect victims while the criminal trial process unfolds. Many victims and witnesses fear retaliation, and gun restrictions can help them feel safe enough to testify against abusers.

From 2007 to 2021, more than 20,000 orders of protection were signed in Nashville’s civil courts. Yet WPLN and ProPublica’s analysis found only three cases where there was a protection order in effect and the violence escalated to a fatal shooting.

Julia Weber, who has worked for decades on domestic violence and firearms policy, including at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, likens gun dispossession to seatbelts — it’s widely accepted that seatbelts save lives, even though requiring them may limit individual freedom.

“Similarly, we need to limit some people’s freedom because other people’s freedom is impacted,” she said. “If we care more about someone’s ability to have access to firearms than we care about my ability to be free from firearm violence, we have a problem.”

In a state like Tennessee, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision depends on how sweeping it turns out to be. The justices could rule against Rahimi, and the system would continue functioning as it does now. Or the court could rule similarly to the 5th Circuit, which deemed the federal ban unconstitutional but did not address state order-of-protection laws like those that exist in nearly all 50 states, including Texas and Tennessee. That could leave those laws intact for now.

Weber said the most dangerous outcome would be if the Supreme Court rules that gun restrictions tied to protection orders more broadly violate the Second Amendment.

“It could upend all of the 50 states’ laws around what restraining orders can provide,” she said. "Not every state has state-level prohibitions, but it could tie the hands of the legislatures in the future if they were to consider any kind of prohibition."

If Rahimi wins, it could bolster the efforts of gun lobbying groups to further weaken gun laws in states like Tennessee, pushing for what they call “real constitutional carry” — with no restrictions on who can carry firearms and where they can carry them.

And the state will have few interventions that will work better than taking away alleged abusers’ guns. The most likely outcome, Weber said: “Lives will be lost.”

by ProPublica

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“The Night Doctrine,” ProPublica’s first animated documentary, traces the story of Lynzy Billing, a young British journalist of Afghan-Pakistani origins, who returns to Afghanistan to find out who killed her family 30 years earlier, only to stumble upon a secretive U.S.-backed program killing hundreds of civilians.

Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

Amid the chaos of war, Billing undertakes a dangerous quest to uncover the truth about the Zero Units, squads of Afghan commandos funded, trained and directed by the CIA to go after threats to the United States. As Billing tracks the deadly night raids conducted by one of the units, she learns the stunning hidden cost of the program: The raids were often getting it wrong, killing scores of people with no connection to the Taliban or any other terrorist group.

Driven to compile an accounting of the dead, Billing crisscrosses the country to meet with the survivors of the raids, some of whom were wrongly targeted and suffered life-altering losses, and others who’d lost family members and had nowhere to turn for answers. She persuades Afghan commandos to speak candidly about their role in killing their countrymen. Interweaving the stories of survivors and soldiers with her own, “The Night Doctrine” is a powerful and thought-provoking short that sheds light on the impact of the CIA’s failed tactic of war and the need for accountability and justice.

The 16-minute film, directed by ProPublica’s Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Almudena Toral and animated by Rodríguez Pons, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. It has since been featured at a dozen film festivals around the world.

The documentary, presented in partnership with The New Yorker, is a companion piece to Billing’s reporting in “The Night Raids,” a gripping and powerful investigation published in 2022. Billing is a producer of the film, which is scored by Afghan composer Milad Yousufi.

by Jeremy Schwartz and Dan Keemahill

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Update, Nov. 8, 2023: On Nov. 7, Midland school district voters approved a $1.4 billion bond proposal by a 56% to 44% vote, rejecting arguments against the measure from a nonprofit led by associates of billionaire oilman Tim Dunn.

Allies of influential Texas billionaire Tim Dunn are pushing ahead in Austin with efforts to create a private-school voucher system that could weaken public schools across the state. Meanwhile, Dunn’s associates in his hometown of Midland are working to defeat a local school bond proposal that his district says it desperately needs.

Dunn, an evangelical Christian, is best known for a mostly successful two-decade effort to push the Texas GOP ever further to the right. His political action committees have spent millions to elect pro-voucher candidates and derail Republicans who oppose them. Defend Texas Liberty, the influential PAC he funds with other West Texas oil barons, has come under fire after The Texas Tribune revealed that the PAC’s president had hosted infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes for an October meeting and that the organization has connections to other white nationalists.

Less known are Dunn’s efforts to shape politics in his hometown of Midland, which will come to a head next week. On Tuesday, residents in the Midland Independent School District will vote on a $1.4 billion bond, the largest in its history, after rejecting a smaller measure four years ago. A dark-money organization whose leaders have ties to Dunn’s Midland oil and gas company, as well as to a prominent conservative public policy organization where Dunn serves as vice chairman, have become among the loudest voices against the bond.

On Sept. 21, less than two months before the Midland bond election, three Midland residents with deep connections to Dunn and his associated public policy organization registered a “social welfare” nonprofit called Move Midland.

The nonprofit is headed by Rachel Walker, a public affairs manager for Dunn’s oil and gas company, CrownQuest Operating LLC, according to public records. A second member, Ernest Angelo, is a former Midland mayor and board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that Dunn has helped lead for more than two decades. The third member of the nonprofit’s board is Elizabeth Moore, a former West Texas development officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Within weeks, the nascent nonprofit had a website, campaign signs and a social media presence as its directors appeared on local radio shows and in community debates to oppose the bond. In the local newspaper, another former mayor urged residents to visit Move Midland’s website for insights about the election. That former mayor, Mike Canon, had run for the Texas Senate in 2018 to unseat Kel Seliger, a prominent Republican who opposed vouchers. Another PAC funded by Dunn, Empower Texans, provided the bulk of his war chest, nearly $350,000, in a losing effort.

Move Midland and its directors have not called attention to their relationship to Dunn and his entities in public appearances. Biographies of the three directors on the nonprofit’s website make no mention of Dunn, CrownQuest or the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn serves as vice chair of the board.

Walker and other members of the group did not respond to voice messages, emails, Facebook messages or requests made through the Move Midland website.

Dunn likewise did not respond to specific questions regarding the Midland bond and the role of his various entities. Defend Texas Liberty has condemned Fuentes’ “incendiary” views and replaced its president, but has not provided any details about its association with the white nationalist. Dunn has reportedly called the PAC’s meeting with Fuentes a “serious blunder.”

During a debate hosted by the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Walker said that the group is “more than just me. There is a group of informed and involved Midlanders involved in this organization. And we have every right to speak on this issue, because we are taxpaying citizens, just as the rest of the involved and informed community does.”

Walker has said that the group would be open to a scaled-down version of the bond in the future, but that should come when “our taxpayers feel like they have trust in the system, and right now, they just have an overwhelming distrust of how MISD is spending their tax dollars,” she told Marfa Public Radio.

Because Move Midland was formed as a nonprofit and not a political action committee, it is not required to disclose the sources of its funding. Organizations that engage in campaign activity but don’t disclose where their money comes from are typically considered “dark money” entities. A small number of states, including New York and Connecticut, require disclosure of donors who contribute to 501(c)(4) nonprofits that engage in lobbying or make political contributions.

The IRS allows such nonprofits to shield the identities of donors as long as political activity doesn’t constitute the group’s primary activity, though it rarely takes action against nonprofits that violate its rules.

According to its website, Move Midland is “dedicated to making Midland better” and plans to tackle various community issues. The bond election represents the group’s “current area of focus.”

Bond supporters, including a large chunk of the Midland energy sector, say it is crucial to relieving overcrowding and modernizing outdated facilities.

Supporters also have raised questions about the timing of Move Midland’s creation and expressed frustration that its donors are shielded from public view, unlike funders of traditional PACs.

“It seems disingenuous and also unfair and very odd that you would not disclose who’s behind it when as a PAC, they would have to,” said Josh Ham, a volunteer with the pro-bond PAC Energize Midland Schools.

Texas Ethics Commission records show the Energize Midland PAC has received more than $530,000 in contributions, most of it coming from Midland energy companies, which hail the election as an opportunity to cultivate a more robust labor force.

That far outstrips the $10,252 raised by Midlanders for Excellence in Education, a local PAC that opposes the bond. According to campaign finance reports, Midlanders for Excellence in Education has used much of that money to pay for signs and radio advertising.

Walker, the Move Midland leader, reported spending $33,432 to oppose the bond, including payments for direct mailings, text messages and yard signs. Texas law requires nonprofits that engage in independent campaign activity to disclose campaign-related expenditures to the state, but like the federal government, it does not require such groups to disclose the source of their funding. It is unclear if Dunn has given money directly to the group.

Ham said that he does not know who is funding Move Midland, but that its sudden appearance after two years of bond planning makes him question the motivation behind the effort. “To have someone just come along overnight and pop up with just a couple of talking points and with no real support is disappointing,” he said.

Dunn has not been quiet about his concerns over the bond. In an Oct. 15 commentary in the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Dunn accused bond supporters of not being forthcoming with voters about the bond’s tax impact. The district says the bond won’t raise tax rates because the new rates adopted in September were set lower than the previous year’s and included the bond’s impact. Dunn argued that the bond will soak up the $18 million in statewide property tax relief recently approved by the Legislature and that tax rates would be even lower if not for the bond.

While Dunn’s oil companies operate in multiple states, they control mineral properties that, combined, owed more than $1.3 million in estimated property taxes to the school district for 2023.

Dunn called claims that the bond won’t result in a tax rate increase “somewhere between materially misleading and factually false.”

In fact, Dunn noted, the actual ballot language Midlanders will find when they go to the polls will include the clause, “This is a property tax increase.”

Public policy organizations connected with Dunn played a central role in ensuring that the phrase is attached to every single school bond ballot measure in the state, regardless of the bond measure’s actual impact on local taxes.

The phrase, tucked into a 308-page bill in 2019, didn’t make headlines at the time, but those six words have since had an outsize impact on school bond passage rates. According to Dax Gonzalez, director of governmental relations at the Texas Association of School Boards, the phrase is at least partly responsible for the decline in school bond passage rates in subsequent years.

From 2000 to May 2019, about 75% of all school bond proposals passed, according to data from the state’s Bond Review Board. That passage rate has dipped to 64% since November 2019, which bond supporters have attributed to the new ballot language and pandemic-related worries. In elections this past May, that number rebounded to 78%.

“I really do believe that the sole purpose of that language is to decrease the amount of bonds that pass,” said Gonzalez.

Earlier this year, Dunn-backed entities marshaled opposition to attempts favored by public education supporters to give districts more flexibility in the required ballot language in cases where bonds don’t result in tax rate increases. None of the bills made it out of committee.

Dunn has weighed in on local Midland politics before. In 2019, Dunn cast doubts on the Midland school district’s $569 million bond proposal in an op-ed in the local newspaper in which he wondered whether school district officials were “sufficiently committed” to improving the quality of students’ education.

Although officials initially announced the bond had passed on election night, the bond proposal ultimately lost by 26 votes after Midland County election workers discovered a box of unopened ballots weeks after the election.

A few months later, Dunn threw his support behind a sales tax increase for the Midland County Hospital District, explaining in a newspaper column that “high property taxes violate a founding principle of America: private property ownership.”

Sales taxes, Dunn argued, “are the only broad-based, transparent and optional forms of taxation.”

The sales tax increase passed handily in July 2020.

A shift from property taxes to sales taxes at the state level has long been a goal of the various public policy organizations associated with Dunn. According to Texas Comptroller estimates analyzed by the Tribune, sales tax increases cost poor Texans more than wealthier ones, making it a regressive tax.

For some bond supporters, Dunn’s opposition to the current bond proposal is a reflection of his embrace of vouchers for private schools.

“Having a vested interest in a private school, while politically funding an agenda that includes private school vouchers, appears to present a pretty clear conflict of interest for Tim Dunn,” said Reagan Hignojos, a former Midland school board candidate and bond supporter. “These private schools would not be held accountable or be transparent by the same standards of public schools.”

Dunn is the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a “Classical Education from a Biblical Worldview,” according to its website. The school explains that through this lens, “human civilization is rightly understood to have begun in the garden with Adam and Eve.” The school believes in interpreting the Bible in its literal sense, which it takes to mean that marriage can only be between a man and woman and that there are only two genders.

Dunn’s school is currently unaccredited, however, according to data provided by the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission. Under legislation proposed by Texas lawmakers, including several state senators who have received campaign funding from Dunn and his associated PACs, private schools would need accreditation to be eligible for taxpayer dollars.

Dunn has not weighed in on whether his school would pursue voucher payments, and in 2014 he explained the lack of accreditation, writing that the requirements “deal mainly with processes and credentials rather than focusing on an excellent academic and student life opportunity.”

The school did not respond to questions about any potential accreditation or voucher plans.

According to its 2021 IRS filing, the most recent available, the school had $10.4 million in total assets and revenue of $6.3 million, a 66% percent increase compared to what it earned in 2020.

Dunn and his family own five million-dollar homes on land adjacent to Midland Classical Academy, where property taxes go to Midland ISD.