ProPublica

by Annie Waldman

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Just hours after ProPublica, in collaboration with The Wichita Eagle, revealed serious allegations of illegal kickbacks and alleged patient harm at a veterans hospital in Kansas, the state’s U.S. senators urged the Department of Veterans Affairs to contact impacted patients and say whether the involved doctors and medical device company have been held accountable. The U.S. congressman who represents the hospital’s district is also calling for answers.

In a letter sent on Thursday, “regarding the alarming reports of lapses in patient safety and improper use of taxpayer dollars,” the Republican senators, Jerry Moran and Dr. Roger Marshall, asked the VA for a “full timeline and accounting” of the agency’s knowledge of, and response to, the allegations, and to reach out to all veterans who had received care at the catheterization lab of Robert J. Dole Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Wichita between 2011 and 2018. During this period, according to a whistleblower lawsuit filed in 2017, representatives from Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device maker, treated health care workers to steakhouse dinners, Apple electronics and NASCAR tickets, and in turn, the company secured a lucrative contract with the veterans hospital.

Medtronic’s representatives also allegedly “groomed and trained” doctors at the hospital, who then deployed the company’s devices, even in cases when it was not medically necessary. The doctors in question were contract workers, paid hourly by the facility, according to the lawsuit, and thus were incentivized to do longer and more complex interventions, which would increase their payment.

In several of the procedures, the doctors deployed more than 15 devices at a time, deviating from best practices, according to an internal investigation. One used 33.

“I want to say the term ‘egregious’ was used,” former facility director Rick Ament testified last December in a deposition for the whistleblower suit.

These procedures were performed to treat blockages in the legs, a common medical condition that is also known as peripheral artery disease, which affects more than 6.5 million Americans over the age of 40. Each time a physician inserts a foreign device in a patient during one of these interventions, it carries a risk of complication, which can include clots or even require amputation.

An internal investigation at the Wichita hospital uncovered a number of clinical failings, including over-aggressive procedures and a disregard for best practices. It also found, according to an internal email, that amputations had increased sixfold during the time period in question. A VA spokesperson would not say whether those outcomes were linked to overuse of the devices and said that the agency’s review has found no “quality of care” issues yet. The review is expected to last several months. (Read the VA’s full statement in response to ProPublica’s story.)

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In 2018, the director of the Wichita facility shut down interventional radiology procedures at the hospital and shared the findings of his internal investigation with the VA’s Office of Inspector General. The next year, according to an investigation memo that was unearthed in the whistleblower suit, the OIG found that employees at the hospital “may have received improper gratuities, in the forms of paid lunches, dinners, etc., from sales representatives from Medtronic.”

Even though the VA has been aware of the allegations of kickbacks and excessive device use for about five years, the agency did not publicly acknowledge these findings outside of the lawsuit until ProPublica reached out. It is unclear if the VA has reached out to any patients who underwent these procedures during the time frame in question. ProPublica contacted more than half a dozen veteran community groups in the Wichita area, and none were aware of the allegations nor the internal investigation.

Following the publication of ProPublica’s story, U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, a Republican who serves the Wichita region, expressed concern and pushed for accountability within the VA. “The VA needs to get to [the] bottom of these serious allegations,” he said in an email. “Veterans in our community should reach out to my office here in Wichita with any issues they face.”

The Kansas senators urged the agency to inform impacted patients of the “steps VA has taken to assess the quality of the care they received there, and provide them with contact information for appropriate officials who can answer any questions or concerns they might have.”

Moran, the ranking member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and Marshall, a doctor who served seven years in the Army Reserve, are also demanding answers to the following questions:

• What steps did the VA take to “remove the contract employees in question from patient care duties, report them to appropriate authorities, hold them accountable for their malfeasance, and prevent them from practicing not just at the Dole VAMC but also at any other VA facilities or through VA’s community care networks”? (A VA spokesperson told ProPublica that neither it nor the hospital had taken formal action against the medical providers.)

• What steps did the VA take to “hold the contractor, Medtronic, accountable for the role they played in this incident”? (The VA found evidence that indicated the facility had purchased a large number of devices from Medtronic, which resulted in increased costs. The VA did not respond to ProPublica’s questions related to the reasons for the excessive purchase of devices, citing the ongoing whistleblower case and investigation by the OIG. The agency said that the Wichita facility no longer purchases Medtronic equipment and supplies for complex vascular procedures on lower extremities, but that it continues to purchase other types of the company’s products.Medtronic declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions, citing the ongoing litigation. “These allegations are false and Medtronic is defending against these claims in court,” said Boua Xiong, a spokesperson for the company. Medtronic did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment in response to the letter from the Kansas senators.)

• What steps did the VA take to “identify and prevent similar incidents from occurring elsewhere in the VA healthcare system”?

• What are the agency’s “plans to communicate with veterans in Kansas and across the country about this issue”?

Aside from more details on the agency’s investigation, the senators have also asked the VA to assure patients at Wichita’s veterans hospital that “their safety is VA’s paramount concern,” and to “inform those who are understandably questioning whether it is safe for them to continue seeking care there of their right to request care in the community.”

Gary Kunich, a VA spokesperson, said that the agency had received the letter and that it is “working on a prompt and complete response to Senator Moran and Senator Marshall.”

Do You Have Experience With Peripheral Artery Disease? Have You Had a Procedure on Your Leg? Tell Us About It.

by Kristen Doerer for ProPublica

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The earned income tax credit (EITC) put an average of $2,043 back in recipients’ hands and helped lift millions of children above the poverty line last year.

Thirty-one million people applied and received the credit last year, according to the IRS. But a fifth of taxpayers who are eligible for the credit still don’t claim it. Here’s what you should know about the earned income tax credit and eligibility.

What Is The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)?

Tax credits help reduce how much you owe or can help give you a refund. The earned income tax credit is meant to help working people with low or moderate incomes.

You can receive as much as $6,935 in tax credit, depending on your status. It’s for this reason that the EITC is one of the most popular tax credits, even if it’s one of the least understood.

Who Can Get the EITC?

• Individuals: If you’re filing taxes as a single filer without kids, you must have made $16,480 last year or less to claim the credit.
• Parents: If you have a kid or have taken a young family member into your home, you should see if you qualify for the EITC. See the table below to see income requirements.

How Do I Figure Out if I Qualify for the EITC?

The best way to figure out if you qualify for the EITC is to use the IRS’ EITC Assistant, an easy-to-use online guide that will ask you yes-or-no questions to determine if you’re eligible.

There are a few basic qualifications for the EITC:

• You must have been a U.S. citizen or legal resident all year.
• You must have resided in the U.S., including U.S. military bases, for more than half the year.
• You must have earned income from wages, a salary or a business.

To qualify for the EITC, you must not exceed the earned income limits. For the 2022 tax year, your adjusted gross income cannot be more than:

Earned Income Tax Credit Adjusted Income Caps

For the category that you’re in, this is the maximum you can make before exemptions and deductions to claim the credit.

Filing Status Zero children One child Two children Three or more children Single filer or head of household $16,480 $43,492 $49,399 $53,057 Married, filing jointly $22,610 $49,622 $55,529 $59,187

There are special qualifying rules for U.S. military members and clergy members.

Who is a qualifying child?

If you are claiming a child as part of the EITC, they must be a “qualifying child.” The full IRS guidelines on whether your child is a “qualifying child” are here, but let’s review the basics. Your child must:

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• Be your child (including adopted, step and foster children); sibling (including half and stepsiblings); or a descendant of your child or sibling, such as a grandchild, niece or nephew.
• Have been younger than 19 at the end of 2022 or younger than 24 if they’re a full-time student. They also must be younger than you. If they do not meet these age requirements, they must have been permanently disabled at any point in the year.
• Have lived with you in the United States for more than half the year.
• Have a valid Social Security number.

Will I Be Audited if I Claim the EITC?

As ProPublica has reported, people who claim the EITC are audited at a higher rate than those who do not claim it. While you are more likely to be audited if you claim the EITC, the audit rate was still less than 1% in 2019. In the 2021 fiscal year, 38% of audits were of filers who claimed the credit, according to the IRS’ Data Book. Here are some tips for what to do if you’re audited.

One reason for the high rate of audits is that people often claim the credit in error. But also, a decade of budget cuts at the IRS mean there are fewer people to review audit documents. It’s much more expensive for the IRS to audit wealthy taxpayers, and it claims it can’t do so without more funding. That may soon change. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress in August 2022, will provide the agency with $80 billion over the coming decade, allowing the IRS to increase its audits of the wealthiest Americans.

However, in fiscal year 2022, millionaires were audited at nearly the same rate as EITC recipients, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center.

When Will I Get My Tax Refund?

If you take the credit, by law, the IRS cannot issue your refund before mid-February 2023. However, the IRS says that taxpayers who claim the EITC can expect their refund around Feb. 28 if they’ve filed online, chosen to receive their refund by direct deposit and have no issues with their tax return.

You can always check the status of your return on the IRS’ Where’s My Refund page.

About this guide: ProPublica has reported on the IRS, the Free File program and other tax topics for years. ProPublica’s tax guide is not personalized tax advice. Speak to a tax professional about your specific tax situation.

Kristen Doerer is a reporter in Washington, D.C. Her writing has appeared in PBS NewsHour, The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other places. Follow her on Twitter at @k2doe.

by David Hammer, WWL-TV, and Richard A. Webster, Verite

This article was produced in partnership with Verite, WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, which was part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2022. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The state of Louisiana is dropping thousands of lawsuits against homeowners who received grants to elevate their homes after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 but used the money to make repairs instead.

Many of those homeowners said they had been told by representatives of Road Home, the grant program, that they could use the money for repairs, according to an investigation by The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, WWL-TV and ProPublica.

“It’s about damn time,” said attorney Shermin Khan, who represented more than 50 of the 3,500 people who were sued over elevation grants.

Despite what homeowners were told, grant agreements said the money — federal grants that were managed by the state — had to be used to raise homes. Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to recoup grants that hadn’t been spent properly, the state sued homeowners, seeking repayment of $103 million.

Many of those sued were older and poor. Several homeowners preemptively declared bankruptcy, according to their attorneys. Others failed to defend themselves in court, so the state placed liens on their properties.

Watch WWL-TV’s Report

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards announced that the lawsuits would be dropped as he joined federal and New Orleans leaders Thursday morning at a community center in the Lower Ninth Ward to mark the official end of the Road Home program, 17 years after it launched. It was the largest housing recovery effort in U.S. history.

Edwards acknowledged that the $30,000 grants were “insufficient in size to actually elevate people’s homes.” At the time, it typically cost at least three times as much to lift a house and put it onto raised footings.

“It’s been a miserable thing for the state of Louisiana to pursue these individuals because we knew the vast majority of them were never going to pay,” Edwards said.

Edwards said about 5,000 people were sued or could have been for being out of compliance with grant rules. That includes grants for repairs as well as for elevation.

First image: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge spoke at a meeting on Thursday in New Orleans. Second image: The meeting was held at a community center in the Lower Ninth Ward to mark the official end of the Road Home program. (Photos by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate)

Homeowners sued by the state were living a “nightmare,” HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said, worried they wouldn’t be able to pass their homes on to their children.

“I decided on my watch it was going to be over,” Fudge said. “The federal government is doing something that it has never done before for the people of Louisiana.”

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-La., said in an interview that the news outlets’ reporting was instrumental as he tried to convince Fudge to find a way to stop the collection efforts.

“A program that was designed to pull people out of the storm should not put them back into the storm,” Carter said. “Unfortunately, Road Home did that to many.”

Dropping the lawsuits will allow people to go on with their lives, he said. “This gives us an opportunity to at least remedy as best we can the mistakes that were made.”

The state will halt collection efforts related to all Road Home grants and drop any liens placed on homes through the litigation. But people who made partial or full payments will not be reimbursed, officials said.

“There’s only so much we can do,” Carter said. “There won’t be an opportunity for a refund if you’ve already paid back.”

The state paused collection efforts in May after the news outlets found that a law firm it hired had accelerated the pace of legal filings. By then the state had collected about $5 million from 425 families.

Homeowners Offered Grants, but No One Double-Checked Eligibility

After an initial delay, the elevation grant program was launched in 2008, when the state sent letters to 40,000 homeowners telling them they could get $30,000 each to raise their houses to reduce flooding in the future. About 32,000 homeowners participated.

Once the state Office of Community Development received an application, it sent the money to homeowners, according to testimony in one of the lawsuits by Jeff Haley. He helped administer the elevation grant program as an official with ICF Emergency Management Services, the contractor Louisiana hired to run Road Home, from 2006 to 2009.

But no one double-checked before the money went out that homeowners were eligible or that their homes needed to be elevated, said Haley, who is now with the state Division of Administration. The state simply “didn’t have time,” he said. There was pressure to “get the funds out into the community as fast as possible.”

To get $30,000 grants, homeowners signed agreements promising to elevate their homes to reduce the chance of flooding. The state changed the rules several times to expand what the money could be used for, but by then many homeowners couldn’t prove how they had spent the money. (Obtained by ProPublica, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate and WWL-TV)

The state told the news organizations that it aimed the elevation grants at people whose homes were in flood-prone areas and who had already received another Road Home grant. It was up to homeowners to determine how much they needed to raise their homes, officials said; if they learned they were already at the correct height, they should have returned the money.

But when homeowners informed Road Home representatives, sometimes in writing, that they didn’t plan to elevate their houses, some were verbally told that they could use the money for repairs, according to eight families and eight attorneys representing more than 200 homeowners.

Wallace and Kristy Styron received a $30,000 elevation grant even though their home in southwestern Louisiana’s Cameron Parish was already above the required height. After the state sued them, Wallace Styron testified that he repeatedly told a Road Home representative that he didn’t need to raise his home and even said he had submitted paperwork to prove it. But the person insisted he accept the grant, he said, telling him he could use it for repairs.

A Road Home document outlining the benefits Styron initially qualified for, dated Dec. 2, 2006, said he was not eligible for an elevation grant. Forms for two other homeowners reviewed by the news organizations said the same. Another three homeowners indicated on forms that they didn’t want the elevation money. Yet all those homeowners received grants, and all were subsequently sued for repayment.

After HUD flagged many grants for being spent improperly, the state changed the rules twice between 2013 and 2015 to allow spending on repairs and other expenses. But by then, so much time had passed that many homeowners couldn’t prove how they had used the money.

HUD considered those to be overpayments and would not close out the Road Home program until Louisiana returned the money. Though state officials told the news organizations in 2022 they didn’t want to sue their fellow citizens, they had been paying attorneys to do just that for about five years.

Days after the news outlets published their investigation, local elected officials and housing advocates called on the state to drop the lawsuits. Two weeks later, Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne announced he was ordering a pause to all collection efforts. He said the state had reached a settlement in a related lawsuit against ICF over how it managed Road Home, and that negotiations had begun with HUD to accept money from that settlement instead of homeowners.

ICF did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but spokesperson Lauren Dyke said in May the firm “worked within the policies put in place by the state.”

The state plans to use $12 million from the ICF settlement to pay off its debt to HUD, plus an anticipated $20.5 million appropriation by the state Legislature and $37 million in unused Road Home funds.

Cameron Parish attorney Jennifer Jones said the elevation lawsuits were a nightmare for her clients. She won four lawsuits in which homeowners testified that Road Home representatives told them they could use the grants to fix their homes, only to be sued later for doing so.

The majority of elevation grants were for properties in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color, as were the lawsuits that followed, according to an analysis by the news outlets.

The $30,000 the state sought from her clients “might as well be $1 million,” Jones said. “They just don’t have it.”

Gentilly homeowner Donna Hilliard was ecstatic to hear the judgment the state filed against her for her $30,000 elevation grant would go no further and the lien against her house would be canceled. She said she was intimidated into making two monthly installment payments of $250 by attorneys working for the state, but she decided to stand her ground after sharing her story with the news organizations.

Pat Forbes, executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development, which oversaw the Road Home program, said in May he has “no reason to believe” the state’s attorneys threatened anyone or insinuated the state would take their home.

Matthews at her home in New Orleans in April 2022 (Sophia Germer/The Times-Picayune | The Advocate)

Celeste Matthews, 68, received $30,000 to raise her Gert Town home and was later sued when she failed to do so. The same day she was featured in the news story detailing the lawsuits, the law firm representing the state notified her that it would pursue a default judgment against her, which could result in a lien on her property. Matthews was facing financial ruin.

Upon hearing the news that the state was dropping the lawsuits, Matthews said: “Thank you, Jesus, thank you. I am elated. Now I can relax.”

If you received a Road Home elevation grant and have already repaid the money, we'd like to hear from you. Contact Rich Webster at Verite.

Mark Ballard of The Times-Picayune | The Advocate contributed reporting.

by Jessica Priest and Perla Trevizo

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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.

It has become a mournful pattern. Following mass shootings, lawmakers in many states have taken stock of what happened and voted to approve gun control legislation to try to prevent additional bloodshed.

In Colorado, the Legislature passed universal background checks in 2013 after a shooter at an Aurora movie theater killed 12 people. After 58 people were shot dead during a 2017 concert in Las Vegas, the Nevada Legislature passed a red flag law that allows a judge to order that weapons be taken from people who are deemed a threat. And in Florida in 2018, then-Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill that raised the minimum age to buy a firearm to 21 after a teenager with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire at a Parkland high school, killing 17 people.

But not in Texas.

In the past six decades, the state has experienced at least 19 mass shootings that have killed a total of nearly 200 people and wounded more than 230 others. Yet state leaders have repeatedly batted away measures that would limit access to guns, opting instead to ease restrictions on publicly carrying them while making it harder for local governments to regulate them.

As the state Legislature convenes for the first time since the Uvalde school shooting last May, lawmakers have once again filed a slate of gun control bills. If history is an indicator, and top legislative leaders predict it will be, they are unlikely to pass.

An analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune of hundreds of bills filed in the Texas Legislature over nearly the past six decades found that at least two dozen measures would have prevented people from legally obtaining the weapons, including assault rifles and large-capacity magazines, used in seven of the state’s mass shootings.

At least five bills would have required that people seeking to obtain a gun undergo a background check. Such a check would have kept the man involved in a 2019 shooting spree in Midland and Odessa from legally purchasing the weapon because he had been deemed to have a mental illness.

Seven bills would have banned the sale or possession of the semi-automatic rifle that a shooter used to kill dozens of people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

And at least two bills would have raised the legal age to own or purchase an assault weapon from 18 to 21 years old, which would have made it illegal for the Uvalde shooter to buy the semi-automatic assault rifles.

A state House committee that investigated the Uvalde massacre found that the shooter had tried to get at least two people to buy a gun for him before he turned 18 but was unsuccessful. Immediately after his birthday, he purchased two AR-15-style rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, which he used to kill 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

“If that law had been 21, I guarantee you he would have continued to be frustrated and not be able to obtain that weapon,” said state Rep. Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso who served as vice chair of the House committee.

Gun violence in Texas was again in the news after one person was killed and three people were wounded Wednesday in a shooting at an El Paso mall. The shopping center abuts the Walmart where the 2019 massacre took place; the latest incident came just a week after the shooter in the earlier case pleaded guilty to hate crimes and weapons charges. Though the investigation into this week’s shooting is underway, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents El Paso, responded to a tweet of support sent by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott by calling on him to enact gun violence prevention legislation during the current legislative session.

A collection of reforms are necessary to help curb the number of mass shootings — and gun violence in general — across the nation, said Ari Freilich, state policy director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

“There is an enormous need for states to act, especially in states like Texas, where today someone with a really significant history of violence can purchase unlimited quantities of weapons of war without any kind of background check, where there’s no red flag law in place to give people close to them the tools to go into a court and help be a part of preventing violence, where young people can go out and purchase their own firearms years before they can buy their first beer,” Freilich said.

Abbott has repeatedly opposed legislation regulating guns. “There are thousands of laws on the books across the country that limit the owning or using of firearms, laws that have not stopped madmen from carrying out evil acts on innocent people,” Abbott said in a prerecorded speech to the National Rifle Association three days after the Uvalde shooting.

Since then, the governor has argued against legislation that would raise the age to purchase assault-style weapons in Texas, saying that a federal district court judge ruled last August that the Second Amendment prevents the state from barring 18- to 20-year-olds from carrying handguns. Texas is not appealing the ruling.

Eric Ruben, a law professor at Southern Methodist University, said that the widely held consensus in the appellate courts has been that restrictions on AR-15-style weapons are constitutional, as are age restrictions. Ruben said that a U.S. Supreme Court decision last June, which gave Americans a broad right to arm themselves in public, complicated the long held consensus. The ruling rejected a standard used by most lower courts that weighed whether the law advanced public safety and instead stated that governments should pass laws that are “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

“The appellate courts have yet to weigh in more broadly on the constitutionality of raising the age to purchase military-style semi-automatic weapons, as Florida did after Parkland, after that June decision,” he said.

Neither the governor nor Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick responded to requests for comment or detailed questions. A spokesperson for House Speaker Dade Phelan pointed reporters to previous statements in which he said he would vote against raising the minimum age to buy a firearm and that he didn’t think the House had the votes to pass such a bill.

Rhonda Hart, whose 14-year-old daughter was killed in a 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School, said she’s been frustrated by the repeated unwillingness of Texas lawmakers to consider meaningful gun legislation.

“We’ve tried everything with them, but they just don’t want to do it,” Hart said. “I’ve said it, and I hope to God that it never becomes true, but they’re not going to care about fixing gun violence until a member of the family or they themselves get impacted.”

Below are details of selected Texas mass shootings in which at least three people were killed, starting with the 1966 massacre of 16 people at the University of Texas at Austin. The news organizations reviewed more than 700 bills introduced in the state Legislature since 1965, along with legislative reports, news clips, press releases and databases compiled by nonprofits that track mass shootings, including The Violence Project and Mother Jones.

University of Texas Tower shooting in Austin

When: Aug. 1, 1966

Victims: 16 killed, 31 injured

People stand at a monument bearing the names of those killed in the Aug. 1, 1966, University of Texas Tower shooting that left 16 people dead, during a memorial in 2016. (Jon Herskovitz/Reuters)

Description: An engineering student and ex-Marine sharpshooter killed a receptionist and two tourists on his way to the observation deck of the tower at the center of the University of Texas campus in Austin. Once there, the 25-year-old used a collection of guns to kill and injure dozens until police killed him. Police later discovered that the shooter had killed his mother and wife the night before. He left a note at his home requesting an autopsy on himself to see why he committed the crime. “Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type,” he wrote.

Shooter background: About five months before the shooting, a campus psychiatrist wrote in his notes that the student said he was “thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people.” But the psychiatrist did not believe he intended to carry out the shooting, according to a United Press International story published around the 20-year anniversary of the mass shooting. The student also told the psychiatrist he had physically assaulted his wife. News coverage did not specify whether the alleged assaults were reported to the police. In 1964, he had been demoted in the Marines after being court-martialed for lending money at exorbitant rates, according to a report commissioned by the governor.

Weapons: A mix of rifles, including one semi-automatic, pistols and a shotgun.

How the weapons were acquired: The college student purchased guns and ammunition from three stores on the day of the shooting, according to the report commissioned by the governor.

What happened after: During a press conference, Gov. John Connally said that he did not believe requiring people to obtain a license to own a weapon would solve gun violence. He said that even if Texas had such a law, the shooter didn’t have anything in his background to preclude him from obtaining a license to own a gun. Connally, a Democrat, said he was concerned that those who commit crimes and later plead insanity were escaping punishment.

Starburst Lounge shooting in El Paso

When: Feb. 3, 1980

Victims: five killed, three injured

Description: A 21-year-old was drinking at an El Paso bar with his brother when he started to shoot at patrons. Several of them later wrestled the gun away from him and detained him until police arrived. Later that year, the shooter pleaded guilty to five counts of murder with a deadly weapon. He is serving life in prison.

Shooter background: A report from a psychologist who evaluated the shooter after the killings said that he had previously been arrested for minor offenses but did not specify what those offenses were, according to KXAN-TV. After the shooter pleaded guilty, his attorney presented evidence that he had a drinking problem to persuade the judge to reduce his sentence. But that did not happen.

Weapons: Semi-automatic rifle.

How the weapons were acquired: Unclear.

What happened after: Texas lawmakers meet once every two years unless the governor calls a special session. Gov. Bill Clements, a Republican, did not. When lawmakers returned to the Capitol in January 1981, they passed a bill, unrelated to the shooting, that allowed off-duty peace officers to carry their weapons in public.

First Baptist Church shooting in Daingerfield

When: June 22, 1980

Victims: five killed, 10 injured

Description: A former high school math teacher walked into First Baptist Church in Daingerfield, about 135 miles east of Dallas, and fatally shot five people the day before he was to stand trial for incest. The 45-year-old then shot himself in the head just outside the church, but survived. Some in the church thought he retaliated after parishioners, several of whom worked at the same school as the shooter, refused to serve as character witnesses for him in the incest trial, Texas Monthly later reported. The court heard a defense motion for a change of venue for the trial for the mass shooting in 1982. But the shooter killed himself in a county jail cell before the proceeding concluded.

Shooter background: About 14 years prior to the killings in Daingerfield, the man had fatally shot his father in the face. The investigating coroner ruled the shooting to be an accident. Then, the year before the church shooting, a grand jury indicted the man on a charge of incest with his daughter. His son told the district attorney prosecuting the incest case that he feared his father would kill him if he testified, according to Texas Monthly.

Weapons: Two pistols and two semi-automatic rifles, along with 240 rounds of ammunition.

How the weapons were acquired: Unclear. Federal law at the time prohibited someone from possessing a firearm if they had been indicted for a crime punishable by more than a year in prison, but a national instant background check system did not yet exist to prevent this shooter from buying one, Dru Stevenson, of the South Texas College of Law Houston, told ProPublica and the Tribune.

What happened after: Lawmakers did not pass measures related to the shooting when they were next in session in 1981.

Western Transportation Systems company shooting in Grand Prairie

When: Aug. 9, 1982

Victims: six killed, four injured

Description: A 46-year-old truck driver shot workers at warehouses operated by his former employer after a pay dispute. He fled the scene in a stolen 18-wheeler and was shot and killed by police after he crashed in the city of Grand Prairie, about 13 miles west of Dallas.

Shooter background: The shooter had no prior police record, according to local law enforcement officials at the time.

Weapons: Two handguns and a semi-automatic rifle.

How the weapons were acquired: Police told the press that the weapons were “over-the-counter types and not purchased illegally.”

What happened after: When the Legislature next convened in 1983, lawmakers passed a bill banning the sale of Teflon-coated bullets capable of piercing the Kevlar bulletproof vests worn by law enforcement. The bill was not related to the shooting.

College Station rampage

When: Oct. 11, 1983

Victims: six killed, no reported injuries

Description: A 24-year-old killed six people, including his brother-in-law and sister-in-law and a state trooper who pulled him over, in a rampage that extended 160 miles between College Station and Hempstead. State troopers arrested him at a roadblock in Wharton County, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He was sentenced to death in 1984 and executed in 1987.

Shooter background: Law enforcement told news organizations at the time that the shooter blamed his in-laws for his marital problems.

Weapons: Two pistols and a revolver.

How the weapons were acquired: The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found in 1986 that the shooter used a revolver he stole from the state trooper he killed and that he had purchased two pistols the day of the shooting. It’s unclear where or from whom he purchased them.

What happened after: Gov. Mark White, a Democrat, attended the funeral of the state trooper. He later told police officers during a meeting in Houston that he asked prosecutors across the state to speed up trials of people accused of violence against law enforcement officers, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. When the Legislature next met in 1985, lawmakers passed an unrelated bill that prohibited cities from adopting any regulations regarding firearm sales, ownership and transportation. Another bill that had the support of law enforcement would have made it a crime to carry not just handguns but also long guns into a bar; it did not pass in the Senate.

Dallas nightclub shooting

When: June 29, 1984

Victims: six killed, one injured

Description: Witnesses and police said a 39-year-old man argued with a woman after asking her to dance with him. He briefly left the nightclub, returning with a gun and opening fire. A jury sentenced him on Nov. 15, 1984, to six life terms in prison. He died in prison in 2017.

Shooter background: The shooter had been convicted of assault 13 times in Belgium, as well as being involuntarily hospitalized for mental health disorders, between 1960 and 1980, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Weapon: A semi-automatic pistol with a 14-round magazine.

How the weapon was acquired: Police said the shooter was able to legally purchase the gun at a pawn shop in 1983 because he was a legal resident. U.S. officials said he was granted legal resident status only because they had failed to uncover his history in Belgium. Firearm sellers were also not required to perform background checks at the time, and the National Instant Background Check System had not yet been established.

What happened after: In response to the shooting, lawmakers passed a bill in 1985 that made individuals eligible for the death penalty if they were convicted of committing multiple murders in one incident.

Luby’s shooting in Killeen

When: Oct. 16, 1991

Victims: 23 killed, at least 20 injured

Description: A man crashed his truck into a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, nearly 70 miles north of Austin, got out and began shooting patrons. After police responded and wounded him, the 35-year-old shooter retreated to a restroom, where he killed himself. Police said that the shooter appeared to be driven by an intense hostility toward women, given witnesses’ descriptions that he passed over men to shoot women and previous interactions reported by his female neighbors.

Shooter background: The shooter had several minor drug convictions, including one in El Paso for which he served six months of probation.

Weapons: Semi-automatic pistols.

How the weapons were acquired: The shooter legally bought both guns from a store in Nevada.

What lawmakers said: During the 1993 session, Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat, vetoed a measure to have Texans vote on whether to permit people to carry concealed handguns in public. Richards was against legalizing the carrying of weapons in public, saying, “I am an avid hunter and believe strongly in the rights of individuals to own guns. That is not the question here. The legislation will only increase the level of violence on our streets.” In 1994, Richards lost her bid for reelection. During an interview with Texas Monthly a decade later, her campaign manager said the loss was due, in part, to her veto.

Walter Rossler Co. massacre in Corpus Christi

When: April 3, 1995

Victims: five killed, no injuries reported

Description: The gunman killed five people at Walter Rossler Co., where he had previously been employed. The 28-year-old then killed himself. Police at the time said that officials at the company angered the gunman, who had quit his job in 1994, by providing a negative reference to a potential employer. The company had also sued the gunman to recover tuition that it had paid for him to attend a college class.

Shooter background: The shooter did not have a criminal background, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, which pointed only to two previous speeding tickets.

Weapons: A semi-automatic pistol and a revolver.

How the weapons were acquired: Police said the shooter legally purchased two handguns from a Corpus Christi gun dealer.

What happened after: On May 26,1995, Gov. George W. Bush, a Republican, signed into law a bill that allowed people 21 or older to receive a license from the Texas Department of Public Safety to carry concealed handguns in certain public places. Licensees had to complete 10 to 15 hours of training and pass an exam. They couldn’t carry concealed handguns into courthouses and schools. Businesses could also ban them from their property. The measure initially exempted people who were considered to be of “unsound mind,” but lawmakers later revised the law to allow people previously diagnosed with a mental health condition to receive a license if a doctor has cleared them. Bush could not be reached for comment.

Wedgwood Baptist Church shooting in Fort Worth

When: Sept. 15, 1999

Victims: seven killed, seven injured

Description: A 47-year-old man entered Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth and opened fire during a concert in which hundreds of teens were present; the shooter shouted obscenities and demeaned parishioners for their religious beliefs. He threw a pipe bomb before killing himself.

Shooter background: According to police, the man had no previous criminal record. A family member told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he had a mental illness; there was no record of him being treated at local or state psychiatric facilities.

Weapons: Two semi-automatic handguns and a homemade pipe bomb.

How the weapons were acquired: The shooter legally purchased the guns from a flea market in 1992, according to The Washington Post. A bill filed in 1991 would have made it a crime to sell firearms and ammunition at Texas flea markets.

What happened after: Speaking in Fort Worth a day after the shooting, Bush said, “If there are loopholes in the law, we ought to fix them.” Under a federal law, background checks are required for firearm sales. The law, however, applies to only licensed dealers, excluding private sellers and gun shows. When Texas lawmakers next met in 2001, Bush was president. Legislation restricting gun sales and possession failed that session. Bush could not be reached for comment.

Mi-T-Fine Car Wash shooting in Irving

When: March 20, 2000

Victims: five killed, one injured

Description: A former employee went to a car wash in Irving, about 14 miles northwest of Dallas, from which he’d been fired three days earlier. He demanded that a safe be opened and then shot his former co-workers. When police caught him the next day, the 28-year-old claimed the shooting was in response to a manager refusing to rehire him. He was convicted of capital murder in 2000 and executed in 2012.

Shooter background: After the shooting, the man confessed to having separately killed a woman who had been missing since 1999. He led police to her remains. Prior to that, at age 15, he had been convicted of assaulting his aunt with a hammer and sentenced to 18 months in a juvenile correctional facility. He had also been convicted in 1991 of three counts of burglary of a building, a felony, and sentenced to five, seven and eight years in prison. The sentences were to run concurrently. Texas Department of Criminal Justice records show he was paroled for those crimes on May 3, 1999.

Weapon: A pistol.

How the weapon was acquired: A friend gave him the gun. State law does not require background checks if guns are acquired privately.At least seven failed bills filed between 1975 and 1993 would have required a person to apply for a firearm transfer permit from either local or state police and go through a criminal background check. Had such a background check been conducted, the car wash employee would have been prohibited from acquiring a gun because of his burglary convictions.

What happened after: During the legislative session that followed in 2001, lawmakers filed four bills that would have required background checks for purchases at gun shows. Each failed. Then, in 2003, state lawmakers passed a measure that stripped cities of the authority to ban people with concealed handgun licenses from taking their weapons into government facilities. By 2004, a federal law banning assault weapons had expired. The following year, a Texas lawmaker proposed legislation to ban the sale and possession of assault weapons. It did not pass.

Sash Assembly of God shooting in Sash

When: Aug. 28, 2005

Victims: four killed, no injuries reported

Description: A man who lived across the street from Sash Assembly of God, about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, began arguing with the pastor and four others outside the church. He shot and killed the pastor and another man in the town. He also fatally shot two women who were driving by the church. The 54-year-old later killed himself after a standoff with police.

Shooter background: Prior to the shooting, a couple who lived next to the church said they called the police several times to report the man for shouting obscenities at them and firing a gun, but police never arrested him because he stayed on his property, according to the Associated Press.

Weapons: A revolver and a semi-automatic pistol. Police also found a shotgun, a rifle and ammunition in his house.

How the weapons were acquired: Unclear.

What happened after: At least three unrelated gun control bills failed to pass during the following legislative session. One would have required background checks for purchases at gun shows. Another would have criminalized the sale or purchase of more than one handgun to the same person in a 30-day period. A third would have directed court clerks to send information to the Texas Department of Public Safety about people who were judged to have a mental impairment or who had been committed to a mental institution; lawmakers later passed a similar bill in 2009.

Fort Hood shooting in Killeen

When: Nov. 5, 2009

Victims: 13 killed, 32 injured

Parishioners at Greater Vision Community Church in Killeen, Texas, cry during the altar call on Nov. 8, 2009, as a pastor offers prayers for those killed in the shooting at the Fort Hood Army post three days earlier. (Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)

Description: A 39-year-old psychiatrist at Fort Hood carried out what is believed to be the largest mass shooting at a U.S. military installation. The 30-minute rampage ended when police shot him in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. The shooter was convicted and sentenced to death in 2013 but remains in military prison, according to an Army spokesperson.

Shooter background: Before he was stationed at Fort Hood, the shooter had been a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Supervisors there repeatedly warned him that he was doing substandard work, and intelligence analysts began tracking his emails with at least one suspected Islamist militant in December 2008, according to NPR.

Weapons: A semi-automatic pistol with a 20- to 30-round magazine and a laser sight. He also carried a revolver.

How the weapons were acquired: He legally bought the pistol at a Killeen gun store after passing a background check. At least one bill that had been filed in 1993 but failed to pass would have classified the gun as a prohibited assault weapon because it had a 20- to 30-round magazine.

What happened after: Gov. Rick Perry, who was running for reelection at the time of the shooting, issued a statement saying, “We are deeply saddened by today’s events, but resolve to continue supporting our troops and protecting our citizens.” He did not offer specific actions he would take. Perry did not respond to requests for comment.

During the following legislative session in 2011, a measure that would have made it illegal to sell an assault weapon to someone under 21 also failed to pass. Texas did not experience another mass shooting until 2014, but in 2013 state lawmakers passed legislation allowing school district employees with licenses to carry firearms to serve as “school protectors” in response to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. These employees, known as school marshals, would have to undergo 80 hours of training and a psychological exam before they would be allowed to carry guns on campus. Each gun would have to be kept in a locked safe and could only be accessed when there was an active shooter, according to a legislative analysis of the bill.

Fort Hood shooting in Killeen

When: April 2, 2014

Victims: three killed, 12 injured

Description: An Army specialist fired at fellow soldiers in a building on the post. He continued firing while driving away from the scene. The 34-year-old later killed himself when a military police officer confronted him in a parking lot.

Shooter background: An Army investigation concluded there were no clear warning signs that the shooter had violent tendencies, nor did there appear to be a single event or stressor that led to the shooting. Military officials, however, noted in their report that the day of the shooting he had been having issues with the paperwork to get time off and had gotten into an argument with someone at the battalion headquarters. The shooter’s grandfather and mother also had died months earlier. He was also thousands of dollars in debt and was being treated for behavioral health conditions, including depression and anxiety, the Army Times reported.

Weapon: A semi-automatic handgun.

How the weapon was acquired: He legally purchased the gun at the same store that sold the gun used in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, according to Reuters.

What happened after: During a press conference, Perry declined to take a stance on whether soldiers should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on military installations. “We’ll learn lessons about what occurred here and minimize the chances of this ever happening again,” he said. Perry did not respond to requests for comment.

In the following legislative session in 2015, lawmakers allowed people licensed to carry concealed handguns to do so on college campuses. At the same time, at least four bills that would have required background checks for purchases at gun shows or between private individuals did not make it to the floor of either chamber. Other bills that failed to pass during the session would have banned magazines that accept 20 or more bullets and established red flag laws that would have created a process by which a judge who determined that a person posed a danger to themselves and others could order the seizure of their firearms for up to a year.

Attack on police in Dallas

When: July 7, 2016

Victims: five killed, 11 injured

Description: A 25-year-old former soldier targeted white law enforcement officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas. After an hours-long standoff, police detonated a bomb that killed him.

Shooter background: The soldier was sent home from Afghanistan in 2014 after his commanders found he had sexually harassed a fellow soldier. Despite this, The Dallas Morning News reported, the Army released him from active duty with an “honorable” discharge, which means he left in good standing.

Weapons: An AK-style rifle and semi-automatic handguns.

How weapons were acquired: Investigators said he legally purchased the weapons online or at a gun show, according to The Wall Street Journal. At least eight bills that were filed in Texas between 1989 and 2005 would have prohibited the sale or possession of the AK-style rifle the gunman bought, classifying it as an assault weapon.

What happened after: In response to the shooting, state lawmakers passed the Police Protection Act in 2017, making assaulting a police officer a second-degree felony punishable up to 99 years or life in prison. They also set aside $25 million for law enforcement agencies to buy bulletproof vests and body armor.

Separately, lawmakers expanded the school marshal program to private schools and increased the number of marshals from one per 400 students to one per 200 students.

Measures that didn’t pass included requiring background checks in person-to-person online firearm sales and red flag laws.

Sutherland Springs church shooting

When: Nov. 5, 2017

Victims: 26 killed, 22 injured

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott attends a candlelight vigil on Nov. 5, 2017 for those killed at Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church earlier that day. (Robert Jerstad for The Texas Tribune)

Description: A 26-year-old man fired more than 450 rounds inside the church that his wife’s family attended in the town of Sutherland Springs, about 30 miles east of San Antonio. He was chased and wounded by a nearby resident and later killed himself.

Shooter background: In 2012, the shooter, who served in the Air Force, had escaped a mental health facility in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. He had been admitted to the facility after bringing firearms onto an Air Force base and threatening commanders, according to a police report obtained by The Dallas Morning News. In 2013, he was convicted by the military of two charges of domestic assault against his wife and son, which led to his dismissal. In 2014, he was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty in Colorado’s El Paso County. The charge was dismissed in 2016 after the shooter completed probation.

Weapon: An AR-style semi-automatic rifle with a 30-round magazine. Law enforcement also found two handguns in his car.

How the weapon was acquired: Illegally. The shooter purchased the rifle more than a year before the rampage, at a sporting goods chain store in San Antonio. He lied about his out-of-state address and criminal conviction on the application. The conviction should have prevented him from buying the firearm, but the Air Force failed to report the domestic violence case to the federal background database.

What happened after: When lawmakers met in 2019, they passed a bill that clarified people licensed to carry concealed handguns could carry them in places of worship unless those places explicitly banned the practice. Another bill that would have required people to surrender their firearms if they were convicted of a crime involving family violence, had a felony conviction or had a protective order against them was left pending in a committee.

Santa Fe High School shooting

When: May 18, 2018

Victims: 10 killed, 13 injured

Description: A 17-year-old student at Santa Fe High School, about 35 miles south of Houston, entered the campus before 8 a.m. and shot a school resource officer and more than a dozen other students and teachers. He surrendered about a half-hour later. Abbott told reporters the student had written in his journal that he wanted to carry out the shooting and then kill himself. A judge found the shooter incompetent to stand trial in 2019 and committed him to a state psychiatric hospital, where he currently resides.

Shooter background: The student didn’t have a criminal history. His father told The Wall Street Journal that he believed the bullying his son endured in school led to the shooting.

Weapons: A shotgun and a revolver.

How the weapons were acquired: The shooter took his father’s legally owned guns from their home. Texas’ safe storage law allows prosecutors to go after parents for failing to secure their firearms from children 16 years old and younger, but the shooter’s family was not liable because he was 17 years old. Some of the victims’ families argued in a lawsuit that he must have illegally acquired the ammunition because he was not at least 18 years old. They reached a settlement this month with the company, Lucky Gunner, that sold ammunition to the shooter. As part of the settlement, the company agreed to verify the age of customers buying ammunition going forward.

What happened after: After the shooting, Patrick called on parents to safely secure their guns. “Your children should not be able, or anyone else, to get your legally owned guns,” he said. “This is one big step we can take.” Abbott told the press he could support legislation that required people to report to law enforcement if their guns had been lost or stolen, hired more school counselors and shortened the time that a court has to report someone’s mental health determination to law enforcement for use in the National Instant Background Check System. Such a determination should prevent a person from legally purchasing weapons. The governor issued a statement encouraging lawmakers to consider adopting red flag laws but emphasized the need for due process. No such measures passed during the 2019 legislative session. Lawmakers instead increased the number of people allowed to serve as school marshals from one per 200 students to one per 100 students. Supporters said the increase could dissuade potential school shooters. Lawmakers also bolstered school emergency plans to include the establishment of threat-assessment teams and drills to better prepare teachers and students for emergencies. The Legislature also appropriated nearly $339 million in school safety funding.

El Paso Walmart shooting

When: Aug. 3, 2019

Victims: 23 killed, 26 injured

Description: A 21-year-old man drove more than 650 miles to El Paso from a Dallas suburb, where he lived. He arrived at a Walmart at about 10:30 a.m. and fired at families fundraising outside the store. He then went inside, shooting indiscriminately at employees and customers. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a hate-filled 2,300-word manifesto online that had white nationalist and anti-immigrant themes, speaking of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” On Feb. 8, he pleaded guilty in federal court to hate crimes and weapons charges. He will be sentenced in June.

Shooter background: The shooter didn’t appear to have a criminal history. He’d “been diagnosed with severe, lifelong neurological and mental disabilities” and was treated with antipsychotic medication after the massacre in El Paso, his attorneys wrote in a court filing. Weeks before the shooting, his mother had called the police to say she was worried about her son owning an AK-style rifle given his age, maturity level and lack of experience handling such a firearm, CNN reported.

Weapon: An AK-style rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition.

How the weapon was acquired: El Paso police said the shooter legally bought the weapon online from Romania and picked it up at a gun dealer near his home in Allen, Texas. At least eight state bills filed between 1989 and 2014 would have banned the rifle as an assault weapon and prohibited selling or possessing large-capacity magazines with more than 20 rounds.

What happened after: The mass shooting happened a few months after the legislative session in 2019 concluded, and the next regular session was not until 2021. Abbott held meetings to discuss possible legislative solutions to prevent another massacre but did not call a special session. The governor formed the Domestic Terrorism Task Force and directed the Department of Public Safety to, among other things, increase the number of special agents investigating criminal gangs affiliated with neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups.

Midland-Odessa shooting

When: Aug. 31, 2019

Victims: seven killed, 24 injured

Chalk messages cover a sidewalk on Sept. 1, 2019, before a vigil following a shooting in Odessa, Texas. (Callaghan O’Hare/Retuers)

Description: A 36-year-old man called 911 in Odessa, about 350 miles west of Dallas, to complain about his employer after being fired. He later called an FBI tip line and made what an FBI agent described as rambling statements “about some of the atrocities that he thought he had gone through,” according to ABC News. Police said he then hijacked a postal truck, killing the letter carrier and ditching his car. He then continued to shoot as he drove through Odessa and neighboring Midland. Police shot him dead in a movie theater parking lot in Odessa.

Shooter background: He wasn’t legally allowed to possess firearms after a court deemed him unfit because of his mental health status, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. A DOJ spokesperson declined to provide specifics.

Weapon: Semi-automatic rifle.

How the weapon was acquired: The shooter first tried to purchase a gun at a sporting goods store but was rejected because his mental health status came up in a background check, according to the DOJ. Instead, he purchased a weapon from a private seller, who was not required by law to conduct a background check. At least 13 unsuccessful bills introduced between 1975 and 2015 would have required him to undergo a background check, designated the rifle an assault weapon, and prohibited the sale and possession of the firearm and of large-capacity magazines with more than 20 rounds.

What happened after: Abbott issued eight executive orders on Sept. 5, 2019, in response to the El Paso and Midland shootings, requiring state police to standardize intake questions used by law enforcement agencies and develop clear guidance to improve reporting of suspicious activity.

Patrick called for background checks for some private sales, like those between strangers, in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. Such a bill, along with red flag laws and bans on assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition, failed during the next session.

In the 2021 legislative session, lawmakers instead passed a bill allowing Texans to openly carry handguns without a license. They separately made it a crime to lie on a background check form, created a statewide active-shooter alert system and let school marshals carry their firearms.

Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde

When: May 24, 2022

Victims: 21 killed, 17 injured

Students flee after an armed man entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022. (Courtesy of Pete Luna/Uvalde Leader-News)

Description: State officials said an 18-year-old sent text messages to an online friend in Germany, including one on the day of the shooting, saying he was going to shoot his grandmother and shoot up a school. About 30 minutes later, he shot his 66-year-old grandmother in the head, stole her truck and drove about 2 miles to Robb Elementary School, crashing the vehicle in a ditch. He entered the school and began shooting, ultimately killing two teachers and 19 children in the border community about 80 miles west of San Antonio. More than an hour after he arrived at the school, federal law enforcement officials entered the classrooms and shot and killed him. FBI investigators said they didn’t believe the shooter was “motivated by a particular ideology.”

Shooter background: The shooter didn’t have a criminal history, state officials said during a news conference. He had a troubled childhood in Uvalde and was bullied at school, classmates said. He stopped attending school during the pandemic. He was also fired from his job at a Whataburger in late 2021 after a month for allegedly threatening a female coworker and “fared similarly at his next job at Wendy’s,” according to a report by a state House committee that investigated the shooting.

Weapons: Two AR-15-style rifles.

How the weapons were acquired: The shooter legally bought a rifle online the day he turned 18. On May 17, the day after his birthday, he purchased another rifle at a local gun shop. He also eventually bought 60 magazines and more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition, according to the House committee report. At least 15 bills filed in the Legislature between 1989 and 2021 that failed to pass would have made it illegal for him to purchase this type of weapon because of his age, classified the rifles as a type of banned assault weapon, or made it illegal to possess or sell large-capacity magazines with more than 20 rounds.

What happened after: Abbott rejected calls for stricter gun laws, arguing that cities and states that attempt to limit access to firearms still suffer from gun violence. Patrick described the shooting as “pure evil.” He called for more security in the state’s schools, saying on Fox News, “We have to harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except through one entrance.” His comments echoed a statement he had made following the Santa Fe High School shooting in 2018. Some of the measures filed this year include raising the age to buy assault-style weapons, allowing honorably retired law enforcement officers or veterans to provide security to schools, and requiring metal detectors at every school entrance and a police officer on every campus. One Republican wants to amend the Texas Constitution to prohibit lawmakers from regulating firearms altogether.

Lexi Churchill, Lomi Kriel and Ren Larson contributed reporting and research.

by Annie Waldman and Maya Miller

ProPublica reporters are looking into the booming business around peripheral artery disease, a condition that afflicts 6.5 million Americans over age 40. It’s caused when fatty plaque builds up in a person’s arteries, blocking blood flow to their legs. This leads to leg pain and numbness, especially when walking. The disease is fairly common, but patients may not even know they have it.

Experts say most treatments are perfectly safe. But there has been growing concern about one type of procedure — atherectomies — after researchers and doctors uncovered patterns of excessive and inappropriate use.

We have learned that some doctors may be taking advantage of high reimbursement rates and prescribing aggressive treatments even when they aren’t necessary. This could lead to a higher risk of complications, including limb amputation. (See our story on this here.)

We think this is an extremely important investigation. But to make progress in our reporting, we need to connect with patients. That’s challenging because many people may not even know they have had an atherectomy. Please help us by filling out our form if:

• You think that you, or someone you know, has peripheral artery disease and may have had a leg procedure like an atherectomy, stent or angioplasty/balloon. (If you are unsure if you have had any of these procedures, we still want to hear from you.)
• You are a health care worker and have a tip to share.
• You are a medical device representative and have a tip to share.
• You are a regulator overseeing these systems.

Commitment to your privacy: We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting, and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, see our advice at propublica.org/tips. If the form is not loading for you, please click here.

by Annie Waldman

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

On June 14, 2017, just before noon, a doctor made an incision near a patient’s groin. Kari Kirk, a representative for the world’s largest medical device company, Medtronic, looked on and began texting her colleague a play-by-play.

“Fixing both legs from the ankles,” she wrote.

It was a fairly common procedure at the Robert J. Dole Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas, performed to treat blockages in the leg vessels.

Within reach were an array of Medtronic products: tubes with blades attached to shave hardened deposits off of artery walls; stents to widen blood vessels; balloons coated with therapeutic drugs.

Each time a doctor puts a foreign device in someone’s body, it carries a risk of complication, which can include clots or even require amputation. So medical experts, research and even Medtronic’s own device instructions urge doctors to use as few as are necessary.

But, as revealed in Kirk’s text messages, this doctor took an aggressive approach.

“Just used 12 [drug-coated balloons]!!” Kirk texted her colleague.

“Does that mean I owe u $$,” he responded.

“Thats what I'm thinking!!! 🤣,” she said. “And now 14 balloons!😳”

“😜- but only one stent so far??”

“So far!”

As the texting continued, her colleague replied, “U are going to want to start going to the VA all the time.”

The messages, recently unsealed in an ongoing whistleblower lawsuit, give a window into the way money and medicine mingle in the booming business of peripheral artery disease, a condition that afflicts 6.5 million Americans over age 40 and is caused when fatty plaque builds up in arteries, blocking blood flow to the legs.

Representatives from companies are often present during vascular procedures to guide doctors on how to use their complex devices. This kind of access has the potential to influence treatment plans, as companies and their representatives profit when more of their product is used.

The suit, filed in 2017 by a sales representative for a competing medical device firm, alleges an illegal kickback scheme between Medtronic and hospital employees. According to the complaint and documents released in the suit, between 2011 and 2018, VA health care workers received steakhouse dinners, Apple electronics and NASCAR tickets, and in turn, Medtronic secured a lucrative contract with the hospital. Meanwhile, the company's representatives allegedly “groomed and trained” physicians at the facility, who then deployed the company’s devices even when it was not medically indicated.

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Independent from the whistleblower suit, internal investigators at the Wichita facility have also examined the treatment patterns of its vascular patients in recent years and found numerous cases where medical devices were used excessively. While it’s not uncommon to deploy several devices, a medical expert on the investigation team found that the VA doctors sometimes used more than 15 at a time — one used 33 — deviating from the standard of care.

“It is unconscionable — there can be no valid medically acceptable basis to cram so many devices into a human being,” wrote attorneys representing the whistleblower in legal filings from January 2023. “This is not medical treatment. This is abuse.”

Dr. Kim Hodgson, former president of the Society for Vascular Surgery and an expert retained by the plaintiff, said the findings of the internal review of patient data raise “a high level of concern regarding necessity of treatment provided,” according to case documents.

Medtronic declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions, citing the ongoing litigation. “These allegations are false and Medtronic is defending against these claims in court,” said Boua Xiong, a spokesperson for the company. Medtronic representative Kirk declined to respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

The hospital investigation found that amputations increased sixfold in the same time frame as the procedures in question, according to internal emails, but made no conclusion about whether those two things were connected. ProPublica reached out to the VA to ask whether any patients had been harmed.

The VA is “conducting an extensive review of patient care” at the Kansas hospital, “including the number of devices used on patients — to make sure that Veterans were not harmed by any procedures,” press secretary Terrence Hayes said. So far, the VA’s investigation has found no “quality of care issues,” he said, and the investigation will continue “until every Veteran’s case has been reviewed.” (Read the full statement here.) Neither the department nor the hospital has taken formal action against the medical providers, Hayes said.

The Robert J. Dole Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas (Jeffrey Beall/Wikipedia Commons)

The medical group that had a contract with the VA for vascular interventions, Wichita Radiological Group, did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment, nor did the doctors named in the suit: Dr. Shaun Gonda, Dr. Bret Winblad and Dr. Kermit Rust. It is unclear from the case documents which doctors conducted which procedures. Eric Barth, an attorney for the medical group, denied the allegations in recent legal filings, calling the claims “baseless” and the lawsuit a “witch hunt.”

The lawsuit comes amid growing concern about one of these procedures — atherectomies — after researchers and doctors have uncovered patterns of excessive and inappropriate use. Recent research has found that this procedure, a common but costly treatment to shave or laser plaque from blood vessels, is not more effective than cheaper alternatives and may even be associated with a higher risk of complications including amputation. In recent years, several doctors and clinics have been investigated for allegedly taking advantage of Medicare’s reimbursement rates, and one study found that many doctors are resorting to atherectomies in the earliest stages of peripheral artery disease, against best practices that urge noninvasive treatment.

“Atherectomy is important in certain settings. But it’s being used in a way that is entirely inappropriate and it’s largely driven by the incentive structure,” said Dr. Caitlin Hicks, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Although different payment structures govern the care of veterans, the whistleblower lawsuit alleges that outside physicians, paid hourly by the Dole VA, were motivated to conduct longer and more complex procedures that would earn them higher payment.

Under different circumstances, the patient in the procedure room on that summer day could have been done after two hours.

But, 150 minutes in, those Medtronic representatives were still texting. At that point, more than 15 of their vascular devices had been used, including stents, balloons and those for atherectomy.

“Long case!” Kirk’s colleague texted. “Is it looking ok??”

“It is,” she said. “Thought we were done a few times! Now he’s going back in to cut again!”

A little while later, she texted: “....17!”

He texted back: “😆😆😂😂”

Hospital leaders had been scrutinizing the use of these procedures at the Dole VA for years.

In 2017, shortly after Rick Ament was hired to lead the facility, he noticed something was amiss. While the longtime hospital administrator was poring over the finances, he was alarmed to discover that the relatively small Dole VA had one of the most expensive cardiac programs in the country. As Ament dug deeper, he realized vascular interventions were the reason.

Angioplasty: A compact balloon is inserted into a blood vessel and inflated to flatten plaque against its walls.

Stent: A metal mesh tube is implanted into a narrowed blood vessel to hold open its walls.

Atherectomy: A catheter, often capped with a blade or laser, is inserted into a blood vessel and removes plaque off its walls.

(Illustrations by Now Medical Studios, special to ProPublica)

“It just did not make sense that the acuity level of our patients would generate such extreme cost variances from the norm,” he testified in December, in a deposition for the whistleblower case. “It was so significant, we needed to get to the bottom of it.”

Ament, a second generation Air Force veteran, quietly assembled a task force to investigate why the facility had purchased so many medical devices for these procedures. After they examined inventory records, calculating the total number of medical devices and the cost of devices per patient, they grew concerned.

“We were more expensive than, I believe it was, the top 10 hospitals in the VA combined,” he said. “My feeling was that we either had very, very bad providers or we had product walking out the door.”

Ament enlisted experts from other VA hospitals to help his team investigate, including an administrative officer who could understand finances and a respected interventional radiologist who could examine records. The task force gathered a list of patients from 2016 to 2018, according to internal emails, and analyzed their medical charts.

According to internal VA documents released through the whistleblower suit, the review found a number of clinical failings: Evidence-based medicine had not been followed in the majority of cases reviewed. Procedures were over-aggressive, treating lesions that should have been left alone. And there was a total disregard for established best practices for treating peripheral artery disease.

One of the experts on the investigative team explained to Ament that while it was not uncommon for doctors to use a couple of devices in one intervention, the total number of devices in many of the procedures at his facility went into the double digits, sometimes five times the expected amount.

In one encounter, a doctor deployed 33 devices in one procedure — three atherectomy devices, nine stents and 21 balloons.

This use of devices was exorbitant, Ament came to understand. “I want to say the term ‘egregious’ was used,” he testified. “It was kind of like validation, but I really wish I was wrong.”

“Did it make you concerned for patient care?” a lawyer asked during the deposition.

“It did,” Ament replied.

A member of his task force pulled data for veterans who had leg amputations due to vascular disease. Over five years, the number of veterans who had amputations increased, from about six in 2013 to 38 in 2018, according to internal emails released in the suit. The VA did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the rise in amputations or whether it was due to complications from the procedures.

An internal VA email released in a whistleblower lawsuit

Even though Ament testified in December 2022 that he became aware of the excessive use of devices during his investigation that began about five years ago, neither he nor the VA have publicly acknowledged these findings outside of the lawsuit. It is unclear whether VA representatives informed the patients whose records were reviewed about their findings. ProPublica reached out to more than half a dozen veteran community groups in the Wichita area and none were aware of the investigation nor the allegations of overuse of vascular procedures at the facility.

The VA says that if its ongoing review finds instances of substandard care, it will reach out to affected patients and inform them about possible complications and benefits they may be entitled to. The press secretary said the review will take several months. Ament declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions, citing the ongoing case.

In 2018, Ament turned over his findings to the criminal division of the VA’s Office of Inspector General. He also shut down interventional radiology procedures at the facility’s catheter lab.

Federal agents separately opened an investigation into the same unit in the facility, looking into allegations of kickbacks.

More than 40 pages of expense reports from Medtronic, revealed in the whistleblower case, show sales representatives treating Dole health care workers to hundreds of meals over several years — lunches at Dempsey’s Biscuit Co.; business meals at the Scotch & Sirloin steakhouse; dinner at Chester’s Chophouse & Wine Bar, price per attendee: $122.39.

Federal agents obtained the receipts.

“Robert J. Dole VAMC employees may have received improper gratuities, in the forms of paid lunches, dinners, etc., from sales representatives from Medtronic,” wrote Nathen Howard, a special agent in the VA OIG, in an investigation memo from February 2019.

This kind of relationship could violate VA policy, which forbids federal employees from receiving any gifts, including meals, from people who do business or seek to do business with a federal institution. For health care workers, violating this policy could have serious implications for patients. Numerous studies have shown that even modest industry-sponsored gifts, including meals, may influence prescribing or treatment behavior of health care professionals.

The agents opened their investigation into kickbacks at the Wichita facility in response to the whistleblower lawsuit, which was filed by Thomas Schroeder in 2017. The VA OIG would not confirm or deny whether it was continuing to investigate kickbacks at the facility. The VA did not directly answer ProPublica’s questions about kickbacks at the Dole VA, but it said that every employee must complete an annual ethics training, which covers gift rules.

In recent years, Medtronic has settled a handful of other cases that have alleged kickbacks between company representatives and health care professionals.

In 2018, Medtronic’s subsidiary Covidien paid $13 million to settle claims with the U.S. Department of Justice that it paid kickbacks to health care institutions that used its mechanical blood clot devices. In 2019, the same subsidiary paid $17 million to resolve allegations that it provided in-kind marketing support to doctors using its vein products. And in 2020, Medtronic paid more than $8 million to settle claims that representatives had paid kickbacks to a neurosurgeon, including scores of lavish meals at a restaurant that the doctor owned, to induce him to purchase the company’s medication pumps.

Schroeder’s lawsuit is not the first time Medtronic’s vascular devices were named in an alleged kickback scheme. In early 2015, Medtronic acquired Covidien, and shortly after the merger, its subsidiary ev3 Inc. agreed to pay $1.25 million to resolve allegations that it had paid doctors who were “high volume users” of its atherectomy devices to act as evangelists for the company, and had provided physicians with company shares to participate in clinical trials for their tools.

The whistleblower in this earlier case, a former sales representative for the company, also alleged that the subsidiary was gaming Medicare’s payment system. Hospitals were often hesitant to conduct atherectomy procedures because of the low reimbursement rates. According to the suit, sales representatives encouraged doctors to admit patients for longer stays to reap greater reimbursements and make a profit, even though such stays were often not medically indicated.

“Medical device makers that try to boost their profits by causing patients to be admitted for unnecessary and expensive inpatient hospital stays will be held accountable,” special agent Thomas O’Donnell, from the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a press release for the settlement. “Both patients and taxpayers deserve to have medical decisions made based on what is medically appropriate.”

Medtronic spokesperson Xiong said that in each case, the company “cooperated fully with the DOJ to resolve its concerns and, where wrongdoing was found, took appropriate remedial action.”

Seton Hall Law School professor Jacob Elberg, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey who led its health care and government fraud unit, is concerned by the frequency of such settlements in the last two decades. “There are, at this point, real questions as to whether the sanctions imposed by DOJ are sufficient to deter wrongdoing and to lead to meaningful change, especially within the medical device industry.”

Although the Department of Justice has declined to intervene in the lawsuit involving the Dole VA at this time, the case is ongoing and further depositions with Medtronic sales representatives and a former VA employee are scheduled for this month.

VA employees and doctors named in the suit declined to comment or did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the alleged kickbacks and whether sales representatives may have influenced veterans’ treatment plans. In interviews with federal investigators, according to released transcripts, several of the employees who were questioned denied receiving frequent meals from sales representatives, contradicting Medtronic’s expense reports.

Their statements also stand in contrast to Medtronic representative Kari Kirk’s final text messages during that procedure in June 2017, which ultimately lasted more than three hours.

“Now u done??” her colleague asked.

“Just finished,” she texted. “Running to get them lunch!”

“👍🍺🎉”

Do You Have Experience With Peripheral Artery Disease? Have You Had a Procedure on Your Leg? Tell Us About It.

by Charles Ornstein

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.

When ProPublica publishes its most ambitious journalism, we want it to be read by the largest possible audience. But, as important, we want it to reach local communities affected by what we’re covering. All of this, of course, is with an eye toward getting our findings in front of the people in a position to make changes.

In a world that’s sliced itself into increasingly separate segments, no single news organization can accomplish these goals on its own. We do best when our stories are picked up by a wide range of other outlets, from television to radio to news sites. Sadly, the local news ecosystem around the country is collapsing faster than efforts to buttress it can be undertaken. According to the State of Local News 2022 report, more than two newspapers, on average, vanish each week. The report noted that 2,500 newspapers have shuttered since 2005, and many more are expected to close in the years to come.

That’s why we were so pleased at the end of last year that two consequential stories — one about the arrest of children at an Illinois school, the other about digging up a historic Black cemetery in Virginia — appeared on the front pages of newspapers in the communities where the events happened.

ProPublica reporter Jodi S. Cohen and Chicago Tribune reporter Jennifer Smith Richards, a member of our Local Reporting Network, revealed how administrators at the Garrison School called police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. Over the past five school years, officers arrested students more than 100 times, which is particularly stunning because the school has fewer than 65 students in most years.

No other school district in the nation had a higher student arrest rate, according to the most recent data. That school year, 2017-18, more than half of all Garrison students were arrested.

The story ran on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, which has a statewide readership. It also hit home for those living near the school — the story ran on the front page of the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, located about 2 miles from the school.

David Bauer, the newspaper’s editor and publisher, told me in an email that a lot of people in his community “are familiar with the school in passing only; this allowed readers to look at an aspect of what goes on behind the scenes on a deeper level. It helped that the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica were involved, because it made me comfortable that the story was solidly researched and reported.”

To tell the story about Garrison, our reporters analyzed U.S. Department of Education data and obtained records from the school district that included written narratives every time police were involved in the past five years. They also relied on Jacksonville Police Department records, including arrest reports and 911 calls from this school year. While reporting in Jacksonville and meeting students and their parents, the duo repeatedly heard that the student arrests were printed as part of the police blotter in the Journal-Courier. With help from the ProPublica research team, they compiled all the arrests of students in Jacksonville printed in the newspaper during the past decade, up to last year. Our newsroom subscribes to the Journal-Courier, and reporters were able to search the archives and see the blotter items in print. We published some of those in the story, “The School That Calls the Police on Students Every Other Day.”

Even before the story ran, it had an impact. The state superintendent of education at the time, Carmen Ayala, called the frequent arrests of students at Garrison “concerning.” An Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson said a state team visited the school and confirmed an overreliance on police. As a result, the state will provide training and other professional development.

Bauer said he expected some pushback from the story, but that really didn’t happen. “There was interest in the story pretty immediately. Many people said they were unaware; a few called for immediate change and asked us to do more about what has been taking place since 2017, which we did a week later, because there had been administrative and other changes both at the school and, I believe, within the police department.

“The reality is that it’s hard for many newspapers, particularly those with smaller staffs, to take on deep-dive projects like this, but they remain a crucial part of the watchdog mission of journalism. I think that any time there can be partnerships with trusted groups (certainly ProPublica is among them) to keep readers informed, the community benefits.”

Since 2017, ProPublica has opened up four regional offices, employing 27 local reporters. (Cohen works in our Midwest office.) We’re about to open a fifth this year.

In addition, we support the work of 20 more journalists at local news organizations through our Local Reporting Network, which pays the salary and benefits of journalists working at local outlets around the country so they can embark on accountability journalism projects that they otherwise could not have done.

We do this because we believe local audiences deserve coverage that holds elected officials, businesses and other powerful institutions to account for their actions and inactions. Reports show that communities with more access to news are more likely to participate in local elections and civic matters.

The power of a local audience was clear for Seth Freed Wessler’s story about the removal of Black graves from a cemetery in southern Virginia to make way for the expansion of a Microsoft data center.

Wessler, who works in our South office, found the story as he was looking into for-profit archaeology firms and their practices when conducting work on behalf of developers to comply with federal preservation laws. He came across a local news story about an archaeology firm in Virginia that had been challenged by tribal communities over the quality of a study the firm had performed at an important historical site. Indeed, Virginia had called into question the credentials of the firm’s owner, and a former employee had filed a whistleblower affidavit alleging that the company’s work was shoddy and unethical.

In the course of their conversations, the whistleblower told Wessler about the excavation of an African American cemetery that he’d worked on. He didn’t believe the work had been done with the care it deserved, and he raised concerns that he and the rest of the crew lacked meaningful expertise about Black cemeteries. He was also disturbed that no family members of the people buried in the cemetery had been contacted or consulted.

Wessler immediately requested records about the cemetery from the state and the county. There was no indication in any of the documents that descendants had been contacted. Indeed, internal county emails revealed that Mecklenburg County, Microsoft and its consultants all sought to downplay the cemetery’s significance and to dig it up and move it with as little outside knowledge or input as possible. Wessler then tracked down living relatives of the people whose names appeared on gravestones, and he reported out the story from Virginia.

The story got national and regional attention, including on the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. But meaningfully, it also was published on the front page of The Mecklenburg Sun and its sister publication, the News & Record, in the community where the graves were removed. Ironically, one of the descendents is a reporter at the Sun and hadn’t known that his great-grandfather’s grave had been excavated and moved until Wessler contacted him.

Tom McLaughlin, editor and general manager of The Mecklenburg Sun, said he ran Wessler’s story because it was a compelling read about a topic of local interest.

“Wish we had the resources to do work like this ourselves, but the reality of local journalism is that we have a daily scramble on our hands keeping up with the basics. This was a deep dive piece and an excellent one at that,” he said in an email.

“In general, I think the public’s reaction to the story was along the lines of our in-house assessment: this was an eye-opening piece for anyone who thinks everything involving local government (and trillion-dollar corporations) is done correctly and completely above board,” he wrote. “Gravesite desecration is not something that is difficult to grasp, and in our old-school, largely conservative area, I think a fair number of people are outraged by what’s happened here.”

Prior to the publication of Wessler’s article, Microsoft had reached out to the newspaper about placing a quarter-page ad to publicize its community ventures, McLaughlin wrote. The ad was canceled without explanation after the Sun published the story.

In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company “made the decision to not run the ad in December as it did not feel like the right time given the sensitivities of the story and impact on the community. This was in no way retribution for the newspaper carrying the story. We believe that local media plays a crucial role in helping to raise awareness of upcoming works and are always considering how best to incorporate it as part of our community engagement.”

I asked McLaughlin what ProPublica can do to support local newsrooms. “I wish I had a better answer for you,” he said. “We do our work because we think it’s important — it sure doesn’t pay much — and I think in fairness to ourselves, the problem of suboptimal government and outright corruption (not just government either) would be much worse in our absence. This is the problem with local journalism vanishing across much of the nation.”

I couldn’t agree more. While ProPublica can’t change the economic fundamentals of local news organizations, we’re doing what we can to help ensure readers, no matter where they live, have access to accountability journalism.

by Vianna Davila

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.

More than a year has passed since Congress adopted reforms that promised to overhaul the U.S. military justice system. Lawmakers stripped military commanders of their authority to prosecute certain serious cases but allowed them to maintain control over other alleged crimes.

However, the reforms, which will not go into effect until the end of this year, may have created additional challenges, military experts said.

Commanders, who oversee service members but are not trained lawyers, still have control over various aspects of the system, including whether to confine soldiers ahead of trial for alleged crimes, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

We spoke to two military legal experts, Geoffrey S. Corn and Rachel E. VanLandingham, about the reforms and what they mean for the future of the military justice system. Corn is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who is now a professor and directs Texas Tech University’s Center for Military Law and Policy. VanLandingham is a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. They are both former judge advocate generals, or military lawyers. Here are takeaways from those conversations.

The ReformsWere Long Overdue

The military justice system was initially formed as a way to discipline soldiers during times of war, giving commanders unfettered authority to mete out discipline and punishment. That included determining who should be prosecuted and for what crime.

VanLandingham was largely unfamiliar with that system when she enlisted at the Air Force Academy at age 18. She remembers being sexually assaulted and harassed while at the academy but said she never reported anything for fear of being ostracized or retaliated against.

She was a senior at the academy when dozens of women reported being sexually assaulted or harassed during a three-day 1991 convention of Navy and Marine Corps aviators in Las Vegas.

The incident, which became known as Tailhook after the association that put on the event, was among the first times there had ever been focus on sexual misconduct in the military or how the military treated women in the armed services. The secretary of the Navy eventually resigned in the wake of the scandal and several admirals were censured or relieved of duty. The Navy also adopted a “zero tolerance” policy to sexual harassment.

“Tailhook was the first time that I recall that it hit me that ‘Oh, there might be a bigger problem here than just this little academy world,’” VanLandingham said. “‘That was my first time thinking, ‘Huh, is the military going to take care of me?’ But at that point, I couldn’t think about it too much because I had a five-year commitment.”

Similar scandals unfolded over the next three decades, prompting additional public scrutiny of military culture and commanders’ attitudes toward sexual assault. Congress turned up the pressure in 2013 as lawmakers like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York began to push the idea that commanders should not oversee the justice system.

But large-scale reform wouldn’t happen until 2021, one year after the disappearance and murder of Army Spc. Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood in Central Texas. Her death, along with the deaths of several other soldiers at the post, spurred louder calls for change. Guillén was sexually harassed by a supervisor months before she was allegedly killed by another soldier. That year, an independent review committee appointed by the Secretary of the Army published a report that found evidence soldiers had underreported sexual assault and harassment at the post for fear of “ostracism, shunning and shaming, harsh treatment, and indelible damage to their career.”

“That commission actually found that there was an environment that was permissive of sexual harassment and assault, which was the first time any kind of military-related formal document actually pointed a finger at the commanders and said, ‘You allowed an environment that was conducive to this stuff,’” VanLandginham said.

The Compromise Will Change Only Some Things

In 2021, Congress made sexual harassment a separate offense in military courts, easing the path for charging soldiers. Previously, ambiguity in the law made it so that soldiers often would be charged with sexual harassment only in conjunction with other misconduct. Lawmakers also mandated that military judges, not jurors, sentence service members for all non-death penalty offenses and ordered the creation of recommended sentencing guidelines.

But the most significant change was lawmakers’ creation of a new office of military attorneys, called the Office of the Special Trial Counsel. Instead of leaving it up to military commanders to decide whether to prosecute cases related to serious offenses that include sexual assault and domestic assault, murder and involuntary manslaughter, attorneys within the new office will do that.

VanLandingham, who supports taking legal authority from commanders, believes that the new system does not go far enough because it leaves some cases in the hands of military commanders. For example, commanders continue to decide whether to prosecute offenses such as robbery, assault and distribution of controlled substances.

That disparity “makes no sense,” VanLandingham said. “It’s a product of politics versus a product of doing the right thing.”

By comparison, Corn supports maintaining commanders’ ability to decide cases in which service members are accused of crimes. He said commanders “are in those positions because they have had a career of exercising careful, thoughtful and decisive judgment.” But he said if Congress was going to take away that authority, it should have done so across the board and not only in certain cases.

“I struggle with the idea that Congress has said a nonlawyer commanding general is not competent to make decisions on whether or not an individual should be brought to trial for sexual harassment, but he is competent to make decisions on whether another defendant can be brought to trial on some other offense,” Corn said. “If I’m that other defendant, I’m saying, ‘Wait a minute, that’s fundamentally unfair.’”

The 2021 Law Wasn’t the Last Word

Congress passed additional changes in December that VanLandingham said helped address some of what had been left unfinished in 2021.

Lawmakers moved three additional charges under the purview of military attorneys. Those are sexual harassment, causing the “death or injury of an unborn child” and “mailing obscene matter,” which means wrongfully sending explicitly sexual materials like a nude photo of a child.

The new law also requires the U.S. president to remove such powers as the ability to grant immunity to witnesses and hire witness experts from commanders in cases that the new trial counsel office is handling.

Congress also passed a measure requiring the Secretary of Defense to annually report on the outcomes of cases handled by the new Special Trial Counsel office beginning no later than 2025.

All service members will also for the first time have the ability to seek judicial review of their convictions. Previously, only service members who were sentenced to several months of confinement or received a punitive discharge were eligible to ask for such a review.

Congress directed that an existing advisory committee examine what information about a case should be shared with lawyers representing victims of crimes allegedly committed by military personnel. Victims have historically had trouble accessing evidence connected to their cases.

Corn believes the change will bring more transparency for alleged victims. “If I’m a victim’s counsel, and the prosecutor is saying, ‘We have decided not to prosecute this case,’ and my client is distraught and doesn’t understand it, my ability to have access to the file to show the victim what the problems are in the case helps me do my job,” Corn said.

VanLandingham said one of the most significant changes in December was Congress’ decision to require that courts-martial jurors — known as panel members — be selected at random, like a civilian jury. Currently, military commanders select the panel members. Those rules are not expected to go into effect until the end of 2024.

The change is “huge, at least appearance-wise,” VanLandingham said. “It’s just one more step to show that, yes, all these things that have been done for hundreds of years in the civilian sector really do and can be done” in the military.

More Work Remains to Be Done

The 2021 overhaul, which included the creation of the Office of the Special Trial Counsel, won’t go into effect until the end of this year at the earliest. That’s too long, VanLandingham said: “We can invade a country in far shorter of a time frame.”

She expects Congress and the Department of Defense to want time to see how the new system works before considering other large-scale reforms.

VanLandingham said she believes the only solution is to transfer prosecutorial authority of all felony-level offenses in the military to the Justice Department, “whose prosecutors do nothing but prosecute.” Short of that, she said, commanders should be taken out of the military justice equation entirely instead of having the two-pronged system Congress created.

“You’ve created a Frankenstein system that is doubly inefficient and, I think, still leaves in place things like gross racial disparities, gross rank disparities in the administration of military injustice. It’s hard for me to even call it military justice when you have twice as many African Americans still court-martialed to this day,” VanLandingham said.

She said commanders should not be in the business of practicing law.

Corn said future reforms should focus on creating more uniform and effective training for commanders “on the ethical guideposts that prosecutors, good prosecutors, use to decide whether or not to send the case to trial.”

Still, he expects that prosecution of almost all criminal offenses will one day fall to the special trial counsel office.

“So 10 years from now, when the captain at Fort Hood who is a brigade or division commander, if you said to him, ‘Hey, did you know that 15 years ago, if you were in this job, you would decide what cases go to trial?’” Corn said. “He’d probably say, ‘That’s crazy.’”

by Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois, and Molly Parker, Lee Enterprises Midwest

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

Newly released reports from the Illinois Department of Human Services’ watchdog office reveal shocking instances of cruelty, abuse and poor care of patients who have mental illnesses and developmental disabilities at a state-run facility in rural southern Illinois.

The eight reports, obtained last month under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, provide new evidence of an ongoing crisis at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center, which has been the subject of numerous investigative articles by Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica.

In one report from November, the IDHS inspector general wrote that two Choate employees who had broken a patient’s arm in October 2017 bragged about how staff got away with abusing patients by providing scant details on reports and blaming resulting injuries on accidental patient falls. The staffers also boasted about intimidating and bullying other employees to keep them from reporting abuse and bragged that they retaliated against those who spoke up.

In another report, the inspector pointed to years of concerns about the care provided to patients who have pica, a disorder in which people feel compelled to swallow inedible objects such as coins and zippers.

Several nurses told an investigator that it was common practice to force patients with pica to dig through their own excrement with gloved hands or a spatula to determine whether objects they swallowed had passed, the inspector general found. The investigation was triggered by a complaint to the agency’s abuse hotline made last spring by a facility monitor who observed a patient walk out of the bathroom with a bag of feces. Patients questioned by investigators said they felt disgusted by the practice and viewed it as punitive.

A clinical consultation conducted on behalf of the inspector general found that the practice violated nursing standards and amounted to incompetence on the part of the Choate nursing department. The facility was cited for neglect, though the inspector general did not cite individual nurses for misconduct because the investigation found it was a “widely accepted procedure.” This week, an IDHS spokesperson told reporters that the practice was “limited to the reported incident and was stopped immediately upon discovery.”

In yet another report, the inspector general cited two nurses for neglecting a terminally ill patient in the days before he died in July 2021. One of the nurses failed to properly manage his pain, and the other failed to notify a physician that the patient had lost 21 pounds in one week. These shortcomings caused him to experience pain, emotional distress and further deterioration of his physical health, according to the inspector general’s clinical review. Proper care “could have provided him a higher quality of life and more time with his family,” the report said.

These newly released reports, relating to events that occurred between 2017 and last spring, come on the heels of a series of news stories documenting repeated failures at the Choate facility. In September, reporters found that the IDHS inspector general had investigated more than 1,500 reported incidents of abuse and neglect over the decade ending in 2021, though staff have rarely faced serious consequences.

In addition to the abuse and neglect at the facility, which houses up to 270 people with disabilities, the series revealed a culture of cover-ups at Choate, later confirmed by inspector general reports. The news organizations uncovered workers colluding before being questioned by investigators, obstructing investigations and lying to avoid consequences in abuse and neglect cases. In response to that reporting, Gov. JB Pritzker said the patient abuse at Choate was “awful” and called for change.

IDHS has not disputed the news organizations’ findings and has acknowledged the seriousness of concerns about the facility that date back years. Once again this week, in response to reporters’ questions, the agency detailed some of the steps it has taken to correct poor conditions at Choate, including enhanced staff training on responding to abuse and neglect allegations, campus safety assessments and a partnership with an outside organization to provide additional clinical support for patients who have experienced trauma.

Other findings in the new inspector general reports include mental health technicians who neglected patients and compromised safety by sleeping on the job or failing in other ways to provide proper supervision. In one case from May 2019, two patients who had been left unsupervised each accused the other of rape. In another, a patient was discovered wandering naked outside at about 4 a.m. on a mid-December morning in 2021 when the temperature had dipped into the 30s. And in a third case, a staff member’s failure to provide proper supervision led to one patient assaulting another in June 2022.

Further, an incident in November 2021 extended beyond neglect. A mental health technician was found to have also mentally abused and retaliated against a patient who wet himself after the tech rejected his request to use the bathroom. The worker made the man mop up the mess and tossed his personal letters in the bucket of dirty water, according to the inspector’s report. When questioned by an investigator, one of the patients who witnessed the incident and corroborated the account began to cry and said he “was tired of being abused.”

“Unwritten Rule” to Cover Up Abuse

A patient abuse case from 2017 reflected a broad range of problems that have been documented at Choate. It revealed how some employees hide abuse and obstruct investigations, retaliate against those who speak up and indoctrinate new employees into the cover-up culture. Their actions, the inspector general wrote in his November 2022 report, reflect “a brazenness and sense of impunity amongst certain Choate staff that must be combatted.”

The case involved two mental health technicians who fractured a patient’s shoulder in October 2017 but failed to report it. Nearly five months later, someone called the agency’s abuse hotline and said they had overheard the technicians — Cody Barger and Jonathan Lingle — bragging about breaking a patient’s arm and coordinating their stories to say the patient had fallen in the shower.

That call led the Illinois State Police to investigate. One person told them that he had been interested in working at Choate but had confided to Barger that he was not confident he could handle the residents. He said Barger told him it was easy “to get around stuff,” for instance by claiming the patients had injured themselves.

Another worker told police that Lingle had instructed him to disregard most of what he would learn in training, saying that he should fill out injury reports with minimal details and abide by the “unwritten rule” that staff cover for each other.

But in this case, the staff culture of complicity went even further. Months later, a security officer at the facility told Barger who had called in the complaint against him. Two days after that, he showed up at his then-fiancee’s house, yelling at her for reporting him, knocking her down and daring her to kill herself before shooting an AR-15-style rifle twice into the air, according to police records. The woman’s young son called 911. The security officer who disclosed the identity of the person who reported Barger to the inspector general’s office was initially charged with felony official misconduct, but her case was dismissed; she received more than $65,000 in back pay.

Barger and Lingle were fired from Choate in 2018 for unrelated misconduct. Both men were criminally charged in the injury case, not with battery, but with obstruction. They each pleaded guilty and received probation. Both men agreed not to seek employment in a health care setting. In the administrative review, the inspector general ruled that claims that both men had physically abused the patient were substantiated. Attempts to reach Barger and Lingle by phone, via Facebook messages and through their attorneys were not successful.

The case prompted Peter Neumer, the IDHS inspector general, to issue recommendations to combat Choate’s “cover-up culture,” including subjecting employees to consequences for retaliatory threats or behavior. He also reiterated his repeated request for Choate to install cameras.

The IDHS spokesperson said the agency protects employees who report misconduct, and that “instances of retaliatory threats or behavior are investigated and administrative actions taken as appropriate.” She said that IDHS is in the process of installing cameras at outdoor locations across the campus and in some interior public spaces.

More broadly, the troubles at Choate have led to calls for reform from advocacy organizations, the IDHS inspector general and the governor. Last month, Pritzker renewed demands that Choate clean up its act or face closure.

“We obviously want to make sure that we’re keeping everybody safe in these facilities,” Pritzker said at an unrelated news conference in January. “And if we can’t — and I’ve said this before — then we shouldn’t have that facility open.”

Stacey Aschemann, a vice president with Equip for Equality, a legal advocacy organization that has been appointed to monitor troubled state facilities including Choate, said the most recent reports of misconduct were “very disturbing and at times chilling to read.” Staffers’ actions, she said, were inhumane, set individuals back in their treatment and, in some cases, caused lasting harm.

“The large number of staff involved in these multiple substantiated OIG reports reveals a concerning trend indicative of a culture problem at the facility,” she said.

by Kristen Doerer for ProPublica

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On Jan. 23, 2023, the IRS began accepting and processing returns for the 2022 tax year. That means that the window for filing your individual tax return is nearly three months long.

There’s hope that the process will be less of a headache this year: The IRS promises improved service and has added 5,000 new phone workers and more in-person staff to support taxpayers, thanks to an influx of funding from the August passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. With the new funding and electronic filing options, tax time might just be smoother this year.

When Are My Federal Taxes Due?

2022 federal income tax returns for individuals are now due April 18, 2023. The IRS announced in January that its tax deadline would be pushed back from the usual date, April 15, due to the 2023 calendar.

A note for victims of severe storms: In January, after torrential rainstorms, mudslides and tornadoes hit California, Georgia and Alabama, the IRS announced that victims of severe storms in these states have until May 15, 2023, to file their taxes.

Members of the military serving in a combat zone also get an extension. This extension is typically 180 days after leaving a combat zone.

I’m a victim of a severe storm. Am I eligible for the May 15 tax deadline?

Whether you’re eligible for the May 15 deadline largely depends on the county you live in and is based on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster declaration. A list of counties eligible for the May 15 deadline is available on the IRS website. The new deadline applies to various individual and business tax returns as well as payments.

The IRS automatically identifies individuals living in those counties as eligible for the new deadline. If you’re a taxpayer affected by these severe storms who’s living outside the disaster area, you can call the IRS disaster hotline at 866-562-5227 to request this tax relief.

Does the April 18 deadline apply to all taxes?

Yes. This applies to all individual tax filers as well as trusts, corporations and other noncorporate tax filers. Quarterly estimated taxes for individuals are due April 18, 2023, too.

When Are My State Taxes Due?

There’s a good chance the April 18 deadline applies to your state taxes, too. Most states have followed the IRS’ lead and made their tax deadlines April 18. Some have imposed slightly later deadlines. Your state’s tax office website will have the most accurate information about your state income tax deadline.

Can I Get an Extension on My Taxes?

Yes. Individual taxpayers can ask for an extension to Oct. 16, 2023, by filing form 4868 by April 18. The IRS encourages taxpayers to file for an extension electronically, filling out form 4868 with IRS’s Free File program. You can also file for an extension when you pay your estimated income tax electronically with IRS’s free Direct Pay, the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System or a credit or debit card and indicate that the payment is for an extension.

An extension provides you with more time to prepare and file your tax return. It does not, however, grant you more time to pay your taxes. Taxpayers who need an extension to file but still owe tax payments can avoid penalties by making an estimated payment by the deadline.

A note for victims of severe storms: Victims in FEMA-designated disaster areas can request an extension from the IRS after April 18, but they must do so by mail instead of electronically. Electronic extension requests are only available prior to April 18. Details are provided on the IRS website.

When Should I Expect My Tax Refund?

The IRS says that most tax refunds are being paid within 21 days of filing. The IRS encourages taxpayers to file electronically with direct deposit as it’s the quickest way to receive your refund.

While the IRS continues to accept paper forms, it has a severe paperwork backlog and warns that it may take six months or more to process your tax return if you file on paper.

There are two credits that may delay your refund. If you filed for the Earned Income Tax Credit or Additional Child Tax Credit, by law, the IRS cannot begin issuing your refund until mid-February.

About this guide: ProPublica has reported on the IRS, the Free File program and other tax topics for years. ProPublica’s tax guide is not personalized tax advice. Speak to a tax professional about your specific tax situation.

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Kristen Doerer is a reporter in Washington, D.C. Her writing has appeared in PBS NewsHour, The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other outlets. Follow her on Twitter at @k2doe.

by Paul Kiel and Jeff Ernsthausen

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

At first glance, July 24, 2015, seems to have been a brutal trading day for Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO. He dumped hundreds of stocks, losing at least $28 million.

But this was no panicked sell-off. Among the stocks Ballmer sold were those of the Australian mining company BHP and the global oil giant Shell. Had Ballmer lost confidence in BHP’s management? Was he betting that the price of oil would not soon recover? Not at all. That very day, Ballmer also bought thousands of shares in BHP and Shell.

Why would he sell and buy shares in the same companies on the same day? The answer is counterintuitive to the average person but obvious to a sophisticated investor: A loss, for tax purposes, is valuable; a big one can wipe out millions in potential taxes. Ballmer’s two-step process allowed him to use the loss to lower his taxes, while the near-simultaneous purchase meant he effectively hadn’t changed his investment.

Since 1921, claiming tax losses from so-called wash sales — selling shares of a company then buying them again within a short period — has been forbidden. But Ballmer collected his losses anyway because, technically, the types of shares he bought and sold weren’t the same.

Both Shell and BHP offered two different versions of their common stock. For each company, the two stocks were legally distinct, but they performed very similarly because, after all, they were shares in the same company.

Ballmer’s not-so-bad day, in fact, was carefully planned, part of a strategy by Goldman Sachs, which conducted the trades on Ballmer’s behalf, to wield the stock market’s natural volatility to the billionaire’s advantage. At Goldman, the hundreds of stocks in Ballmer’s “Tax Advantaged Loss Harvesting” accounts were selected to follow the movement of the broader markets. Over time, the markets, as they had historically, would buoy Ballmer’s investments upward. When, inevitably, some of the stocks underperformed or the whole market dipped, Goldman was ready to pounce, selling off the losers and replacing them with equivalents.

Sometimes, the replacements were nearly identical securities, as with Shell and BHP. More often, they were not. But well-tuned software could easily find the right stocks to keep the accounts tracking the market. His losses secured, Ballmer was ready to catch the bounce back.

Over and over, Ballmer sold and bought stocks in roughly equivalent amounts, as on that July day, when he swapped around $200 million worth. A month later, he did it again, landing at least $23 million in tax-reducing losses. Similar efforts that December brought $26 million more.

ProPublica estimates that from 2014 through 2018, Ballmer was able to generate tax losses totaling $579 million without changing his investment portfolio in a meaningful way. The tax savings from these losses amount to at least $138 million.

The scale of Goldman’s feat was remarkable, but Ballmer was just one client pursuing such a strategy. And Goldman was just part of an industry that helps the ultrawealthy report billions in losses — and save billions in potential taxes — even as their fortunes rise.

ProPublica was able to reconstruct the tax-loss strategies of scores of the nation’s wealthiest people, including Ballmer and Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, using a trove of IRS data that has been the basis for “The Secret IRS Files” series. This trove includes not only some two decades of tax returns for thousands of the nation’s wealthiest citizens but also voluminous records of their trading.

After inquiries by ProPublica, Goldman said it would halt transactions like Ballmer’s Shell and BHP trades. Goldman conducted a review, according to a statement by the bank, and found that a “very small percentage” of its “tax investment solutions” trades were “inadvertently made in a manner inconsistent with our strategy.” The bank said it strives “to provide best-in-class investment advice to clients, consistent with both the letter and the spirit of all applicable tax laws and regulations.”

A Ballmer spokesperson said: “Steve takes his responsibility to pay taxes very seriously. Goldman Sachs has just provided Steve with corrected loss reporting information for prior years. Steve will amend his filings and pay any associated tax, interest or penalty promptly.”

But, by Goldman’s own description, it is halting only a narrow slice of its loss-generating trades — the ones involving two kinds of stock from the same company. The bank will continue its broader practice of finding similar stocks that achieve the same effect.

(Sources: Forbes, IRS data, ProPublica analysis. See below for our methodology.)

Goldman’s ability to deliver tax losses to its clients won’t be significantly curtailed. That’s because over the past 25 years, investing has undergone a transformation that’s made the law against wash sales toothless. Improved computing, new financial products, cheaper trading costs and a shift away from picking stocks to passively tracking the broader market are the main ingredients of the change.

Asset managers have used these advances to forge loss-harvesting accounts that boast hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. What the law sought to prevent — generating a tax loss without a substantial change in the investment — is now commonplace.

That ability is available even for small-time investors, who can mimic the sorts of techniques used by Goldman on their own or opt for products offered by mass-market brokerages such as Vanguard and Charles Schwab. But relatively few Americans have stocks or mutual funds outside of tax-protected retirement accounts, meaning most can’t employ the strategy.

It is the wealthiest who benefit most. The losses can be used to erase an unlimited amount of investment gains. Someone like Ballmer can easily deploy $100 million in losses to cancel out a $100 million gain from selling some of his vast Microsoft holdings. It’s a very different story when it comes to wages and other forms of income, of which only $3,000 can be offset. On average, only the top 0.001% of taxpayers made a majority of their income through investment gains in 2018, according to public IRS data.

Those gains, like many aspects of wealthy Americans’ tax returns, are usually the result of careful planning. Since, in the U.S. system, gains aren’t taxed until they’re sold, even the richest Americans can have years where they owe no tax at all.

The story is exactly the opposite with investment losses. From 2014 to 2018, Ballmer grew $22 billion richer, a fact that doesn’t appear on his tax returns. Meanwhile, Goldman made sure that even momentary losses were listed by the thousands.

High-Income Taxpayers Collect the Right Sort of Investment Losses and Avoid the Wrong Kind (Source: Public IRS data, ProPublica analysis. Note: Data includes taxpayers with net short-term or long-term capital losses on their tax returns as a percentage of all taxpayers in that income range who reported either capital gains or losses.)

For the rich, the “tax system is sort of like a rigged coin,” said David Schizer, a tax expert and professor at Columbia Law School: “If you win, you get to keep all of it, but if you lose, you can pass some of those losses on to the government.” The wash sale rule, he said, is easily skirted by “well-advised taxpayers.”

IRS data shows how widespread the use of investment losses is among the richest Americans. In the U.S., short-term gains, those sold less than a year after buying, are taxed at about twice the rate (around 40% for the top bracket) as long-term gains. That makes short-term losses more valuable since they reduce this higher tax rate income. In 2018, almost two-thirds of Americans with income over $10 million reported net short-term losses. That was the highest share of any income slice; with more income, counterintuitively, came more losses — at least, on their taxes. Meanwhile, long-term losses were rare for them.

Take a look at the taxes of Jim Walton, the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton and the 10th-wealthiest American, and you’ll see years of short-term losses, thanks to a tax-loss harvesting account at Northern Trust, a bank that specializes in managing the assets of the rich. (A representative for Walton declined to comment.) From 2014 to 2018, Walton grew $10 billion richer, according to Forbes, but reported only $111 million in long-term gains on his taxes. Since his losses easily overwhelmed those gains, he paid no taxes on them at all.

In November 1920, a reader of The Wall Street Journal identified as R.H.T. wrote in with a question. It was a time with parallels to today: The stock market, after reaching highs amid a pandemic (then the Spanish flu), had plummeted. R.H.T.’s portfolio had fallen about $50,000 ($750,000 in current dollars).

“I do not want to sell these stocks at the present market,” wrote R.H.T. “Would it be legal for me to sell these stocks and deduct the loss from this year’s income, even though I bought them in again the same day?” Yes, the Journal responded, the transaction was permitted under the law.

“Basically, the strategy went viral,” said Lawrence Zelenak, a law professor at Duke Law School, and author of a history of the early income tax.

Lawmakers decided to do something about “evasion through the medium of wash sales,” as a 1921 Senate conference report put it. They passed a law that barred taking a tax deduction if, within either 30 days before or 30 days after a sale, an investor bought a security that was “substantially identical” to the one sold.

In the following decades, investors still found ways to collect losses that would reduce their taxes. Often, the volume of selling at year-end was enough to temporarily depress stock prices.

But with the wash sale rule in effect, there were real risks to what was often known as “tax-loss selling.” Investors could sell their losers and try to pick stocks with better prospects. That, as The New York Times reported in 1983, often led to “regret” when an abandoned stock went to the moon. If investors wanted to stick with a stock, they’d have to work around the 60-day limitation. That meant either buying the same stock 30 days before they sold (called “doubling up”) or after. Both options carried danger. If the stock continued to tank while they were doubled up, their losses were compounded, and if the stock boomed before they could buy back in, they missed out.

In the mid-1990s, amid a historic market ascent, new strategies were forged to serve a new generation of superrich Americans. Asset managers began to emphasize post-tax returns. “Tax-aware investing is the challenge of the moment,” wrote Jean Brunel, the chief investment officer of JP Morgan’s global private bank, in the journal Trusts and Estates in 1997. The “tax-sheltering volatility” of stock movements, he explained, presented a “free option” to investment managers, who should “make a greater effort to identify ‘harvestable’ tax losses.”

Enabling this new “tax-loss harvesting” was a shift away from stock picking and toward passive products, such as funds that track the S&P 500. The wash sale rule still foreclosed easy solutions to the problem of replacing a specific stock. But replacing an investment in something as broad as the S&P 500 with another similar product became increasingly simple. As the Times reported in 1998, “it is getting easier for investors to find a close double for almost any portfolio.”

Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, which emerged in the ’90s, fit this purpose perfectly. Unlike mutual funds, they could be traded like stocks, making them easier to use in loss-harvesting transactions.

Consider a trade by one billionaire in the summer of 2015. Markets had dropped after troubles in the Chinese economy, providing a loss-harvesting opportunity for investors with exposure to Asia.

Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp, which a year before had been sold to Facebook for $19 billion, was one of those investors. He owned shares of Vanguard’s emerging markets ETF, which tracks an index of companies in China and elsewhere.

At the end of August 2015, according to ProPublica’s IRS data, Acton sold $17 million in shares, resulting in a loss of $2.9 million. The same day, he bought $17 million worth of the emerging markets ETF offered by Blackrock.

The two funds have only minor differences, with large holdings in many of the same Chinese companies. Unsurprisingly, the two funds perform similarly.

When emerging markets fell even further toward the end of the year, Acton did the same deal in reverse: He sold Blackrock and bought back into Vanguard. That allowed him to bank another $600,000 in tax losses.

In 2015, well over 100 wealthy Americans in ProPublica’s database switched from one company’s emerging markets ETF to another to collect tax losses.

Asked about loss-harvesting transactions, Acton told ProPublica, “To be honest I’m not really aware of any events like that.”

“Broadly my wealth is managed by a wealth management firm and they manage all the day to day transactions,” Acton, who has donated to ProPublica, added in a brief exchange over the messaging app Signal, where he is now interim CEO. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Why was Acton’s trade, and the many others like it, not a wash sale?

In theory, the stocks inside two different funds could overlap so much that the IRS might deem them “substantially identical” and thus disallow any tax loss on such a trade.

In practice, however, there is only one scenario in which the wash sale rule is consistently enforced. IRS regulations require brokerages to mark a trade as a wash sale if, in the 60-day period around the sale, the investor buys, in the exact same account, the exact same security (with the same ID, called a CUSIP number). The amount of the forbidden loss is then noted on a form, called a 1099-B, that brokerages send to the IRS each year to detail stock trades.

Beyond that, the IRS has provided no clear guidelines. Instead, the agency has commented on only a few little-used scenarios, while directing taxpayers to “consider all the facts and circumstances” of a trade. Is it OK to swap Vanguard’s ETF tracking the S&P 500 for Blackrock’s version of the same index? Some tax experts say yes, some say no. Besides the IRS’ vague guidance, there are few relevant court cases, and all are decades old. (The IRS declined to comment.)

ProPublica’s analysis of its IRS data found dozens of examples of taxpayers switching between funds with the exact same holdings. More common were switches like Acton’s between funds with significant, but incomplete, overlap.

The clearest sign that these sorts of trades do not, in the IRS’ eyes, violate the wash sale rule is that ProPublica could find no example of the agency challenging one.

In fact, audits very rarely target wash sales at all, attorneys who’ve represented wealthy taxpayers in IRS disputes told ProPublica. “I have had only one audit on this,” said Bryan Skarlatos, a partner with Kostelanetz & Fink, and it was “for a trader who totally screwed up.”

As popular as ETFs are for harvesting losses, the premier vehicle for delivering tax losses to wealthy clients is another innovation of the 1990s: the separately managed account.

In these accounts, managers make decisions about what to buy as they would for a fund, but the investor owns the stocks directly. When the account mimics an index like the S&P 500, it’s called direct indexing. Such products have boomed in recent years. A 2021 report by the consulting firm Cerulli Associates estimated that $362 billion was invested in direct-indexing accounts, most for “high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients.” The main use of such accounts are for “tax optimization,” the report said.

The advantage, as Goldman Sachs explained in a recent promotional document, is that “with an ETF, an investor may only harvest a loss when the entire index is down.” But if you own the components of an index, now you have hundreds of stocks that might dip.

The year 2017, for example, was great for investors, with the U.S. market up around 20% and world markets up even more. There were no obvious, broad dips to exploit — but that didn’t stop Goldman Sachs from delivering big tax losses to its clients.

That year, Ballmer’s direct indexing accounts, which tracked both U.S. and world indexes, posted over $100 million in tax losses through 15 loss-harvesting transactions. At the same time, the performance of those indexes in 2017 meant that, overall, Ballmer’s accounts were actually way up.

In a direct indexing account, you don’t need to own all the stocks that compose the index, and it doesn’t really matter which specific stocks they are. Instead, what matters is that the collection of stocks closely tracks the index’s movements. This is achieved via a “thoughtful sampling of the underlying positions,” as a team of Morgan Stanley wealth managers put it in a recent issue of an investment journal. When it comes time to harvest tax losses, the manager sells off the losing stocks and then chooses replacements with the aim of continuing to match the index.

Tax records show that Goldman Sachs routinely made trades for direct-indexing clients like Ballmer that included the sale and purchase of the same company’s stock. These companies offered two classes of common stock, and when Goldman traded from one class to another, it was not required to flag them as wash sales.

Often, these two classes of common stock were distinguished only by the right to vote on things like directors and shareholder initiatives. The sports apparel company Under Armour, for instance, offers a Class A voting stock and Class C nonvoting stock. The two classes command a slightly different price, with the Class A shares usually trading at a premium of around 10%. But the prices move in sync, making them nearly perfect loss-harvesting replacements.

As part of larger rebalancing trades, Goldman clients also swapped other voting-nonvoting pairs from companies like Discovery, Twenty-First Century Fox and Liberty Global.

Shell and BHP, both part of Ballmer’s loss-harvesting trade in 2015, each offered shares based in two different countries. Each company viewed these two versions as interchangeable in value. In fact, in 2022, both companies chose to merge their two classes into a single stock on a 1:1 basis.

ProPublica’s IRS data contained several hundred examples of these kinds of trades by Goldman clients dating back as long as 10 years ago. The records show instances of these sorts of trades through other brokerages, but the overwhelming majority were made through Goldman.

Goldman said that the impact of the now-halted trades on its clients would be “minimal,” and that it would “cover any costs they incur” as a result of disallowed losses. “We have also initiated a discussion with the IRS and will address any questions they may have on this matter,” the statement said. Generally, only returns filed within the past three years would be subject to possible audit.

At wealth management firms, loss harvesting accounts are often designed to work in tandem with other services, as a kind of knob to turn up or down, depending on the need.

At Iconiq Capital, this is part of an approach that goes far beyond investing to things like managing personal staff. In 2007, the firm’s co-founder, a former Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley banker named Divesh Makan, told a wealth management magazine that he’d even organized clients’ parties and helped find possible marriage partners. Clients, he said, “want us to look after them these days.”

The San Francisco-based firm manages about $13.2 billion for its 337 high-net-worth clients, according to a regulatory filing. Among them is Facebook co-founder Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s old roommate at Harvard. Since the mid-2000s, when Moscovitz’s six-figure Facebook salary made up almost all his income — he’s now worth more than $7 billion — his financial life has grown considerably more complicated. After leaving Facebook, Moskovitz co-founded Asana, a software company, in 2009, but his stake in Facebook still accounted for the vast majority of his wealth. He set about changing that. From 2012 through 2018, he sold $3.6 billion worth of his stock, funds that he, with Iconiq’s help, could then use for other investments.

One of those new ventures was a tax-loss generating account. In late 2012, Moskovitz harvested his first tax losses, according to ProPublica’s analysis. It was a tiny haul by the standards of a billionaire, just $309,000, but it was a start. By 2013, he’d put over $100 million into the account, and his tax losses began to swell. In December of that year, he sold off 153 stocks to produce his first million-dollar loss.

Asset managers recommend adding to a direct indexing account over time, since it ensures there are always new losses to harvest. That’s the strategy Moskovitz followed, every few months seeding $13 million here, $25 million there. As the account grew, so did the tax losses.

Although ProPublica could not determine which index Moskovitz’s account tracked, the transactions followed the telltale pattern of direct indexing. In March 2016, for instance, Moskovitz sold off a basket of 85 stocks worth $27 million and bought a collection worth about the same amount. The two baskets were stuffed with stocks that had performed very similarly in the previous year, according to ProPublica’s analysis. The trade delivered $6.2 million in losses.

Meanwhile, Iconiq arranged other investments for Moskovitz, and the point of these was simply to make money. Most of the money Iconiq manages is in the form of venture capital, private equity and hedge funds, and Moskovitz bought large shares of partnerships run by the firm with names like Iconiq Strategic Partners and Iconiq Access. From 2014 to 2018, Iconiq entities sent over $200 million to Moskovitz.

The two types of investments were complementary, with the direct indexing account helping to blunt the tax sting from that income. Over the same period, Moskovitz’s dozens of loss-harvesting trades resulted in $84 million in tax losses. That saved him at least $20 million in taxes, ProPublica estimates.

For Zuckerberg, too, Iconiq provided the same twin services of providing and erasing income. His Iconiq investments earned him $88 million during the five-year period, while his tax-loss harvesting trades produced losses of $34 million.

Representatives for Iconiq and Moskovitz, who has tweeted that he’s “in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy,” did not respond to written questions. A representative for Zuckerberg said, “Mark has always paid the taxes he is required to pay.”

To prevent the wealthy from easily skirting the wash sale rule, Congress would need to change the law, experts said. One fundamental, but long-shot, reform would be to automatically tax the annual fluctuations of investments’ value (called “marking to market”). That would prevent the wealthy from being able to defer taxes on gains forever — and also render tax-loss harvesting unnecessary.

But even narrower changes could have an impact. Steve Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center suggested a law aimed at how products like direct-indexing accounts are marketed: If an asset manager touted the ability to replace securities with positions that were economically the same, then those losses could be deemed wash sales. This, he said, wouldn’t be a major change, “but it might slow people down.”

Schizer, of Columbia Law School, suggested a more comprehensive reform: Congress should replace “substantially identical” with “substantially similar,” a phrase that is used in some other areas of tax law. That could rule out some of the most common harvesting moves, he said. The rule, he said, “ought to be updated to reflect how people invest today instead of how they invested 100 years ago.”

Methodology Total Tax Losses Harvested

To calculate the total tax losses harvested for each taxpayer, we limited our analysis of 1099-B forms to days in which all the following conditions were true:

• At least 10 positions were sold that day.
• Of those positions, at least 90% resulted in a loss.
• The total losses from sales that day exceeded the total gains by a factor of 10 or more.

The purpose of these limitations was to exclude days that did not appear to be motivated by harvesting losses. The method effectively identified sales from direct-indexing accounts, which tend to involve dozens or even hundreds of positions, but did exclude some loss-harvesting transactions that involved only a few positions — for instance, selling a couple large ETF holdings. As a result, these are conservative estimates that likely understate total losses. The totals shown in the story represent the net losses accumulated from loss-harvesting days in 2014-18.

Steve Ballmer’s estimate uses a different methodology to calculate his total losses. For an unknown reason, ProPublica’s IRS database did not have information about Ballmer’s 2018 trades, so we based his totals for 2014-18 on the Schedule D forms from his tax returns. Our analysis of his 1099-Bs from other years showed that his direct-indexing accounts at Goldman Sachs dominated his short-term trading results, as represented on his tax returns. These he noted on his Schedule D, in the field reserved for trades that had been reported on a 1099-B form that included the basis. As a result, Ballmer’s total is the sum over 2014-18 for short-term trades that included a 1099-B form with the basis reported.

ProPublica provided detailed descriptions of our loss calculations to all the individuals named in this article, and none contested our totals or methodology.

Tax Savings

Since both Ballmer and Moskovitz did not have extensive net capital gains from short-term trading during the periods we studied, we opted for a simple method for calculating their tax savings: 23.8% of losses, representing the long-term capital gains rate plus the net investment income tax. The tax benefit of a harvested loss can be diminished if stock is sold in the future (given the lower basis). But Ballmer, Moskovitz and other billionaires we analyzed held on to their gains, and there’s good reason to think they will hold on to them indefinitely.

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Image credits: Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images, Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED, Araya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch, Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images, Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Alejandro Serrano, The Texas Tribune

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.

A Texas state senator announced a slate of bills this week that aim to better prepare schools and law enforcement for mass casualty events, including one that seeks to improve emergency medical response.

Flanked by several family members of victims of the Uvalde massacre and of the 2018 Santa Fe, Texas, shooting, Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat, on Tuesday called for more robust training to improve coordination among public safety agencies. The proposed measures include establishing a clearer chain of command and better preparing emergency medical responders so that they can minimize casualties.

The legislation comes two months after an investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Washington Post revealed that communication lapses among medical crews further delayed treatment for victims.

Nineteen children and two adults died in the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary.

Nearly 400 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting, but police did not confront the gunman for more than an hour. While experts said that law enforcement’s failure to do so was the most serious problem in getting victims care, the news organizations’ investigation revealed for the first time communication flaws and unclear lines of authority in the medical response that further hampered lifesaving efforts. An earlier story by ProPublica and the Tribune found failures to take charge at all levels of law enforcement.

Since the shooting, several local and state police officers who responded that day have been terminated or suspended. Others remain under investigation. Law enforcement leaders have defended most officers’ actions as reasonable under difficult circumstances.

Eric Epley, executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, a nonprofit that helps coordinate trauma care in Southwest Texas during mass-casualty events, previously told the news organizations that medics encountered challenges, including a faulty radio system, and did the best they could in an “inherently confusing” situation.

Gutierrez said the problems in the Uvalde response require thoughtful and far-reaching action from the Legislature.

“Everybody in Texas needs to examine the complete and utter failure that happened on this day,” he said. “It must not ever happen again.”

As part of the investigation, ProPublica, the Tribune and the Post detailed medical responses for multiple victims who emerged from the school with a pulse but later died.

Gutierrez said those victims and others “might have lived” had the response been more in line with the average length of a mass shooting, which he said was about 12 to 14 minutes, compared to the 77 minutes children waited in Uvalde before the shooter was killed.

“We do not know how many of the other kids that didn’t have a pulse, at what time did they expire?” he said. “We do not know that.”

Gutierrez introduced other measures that sought $2 billion for school hardening, such as bulletproof glass and fencing at campuses, and another $2 billion to expand mental health care access. He said he wants about $750 million to fund 10,000 additional state police officers, who would be assigned specifically to school security efforts.

The state senator also pushed for legislation that would bolster rural communication tools. Emergency radios faltered on the day of the shooting, in part because Uvalde’s frequency was designed for rural terrain rather than inside buildings, according to Forrest Anderson, the county’s emergency management coordinator who oversaw its radio system’s implementation two decades ago.

Gutierrez called the fact that the radios did not work a “complete and utter failure.”

“Imagine that. 2022, and everybody in Texas should be very afraid. 2022, not one damn radio worked inside of that building. Not one radio. Cops were out there playing telephone for 77 minutes, trying to figure out what was going on inside and outside and who was talking on one side of the hallway and who was talking on the other.”

He took aim at Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative, saying that if Texas is going to spend billions of dollars on Operation Lone Star, the state should also increase funding for improved emergency communications in border counties. Under the governor’s program, thousands of National Guard members and state police have deployed to the region.

“This story, yes, is a story about terror. It’s also a story about rural neglect, neglect in Texas,” Gutierrez said.

A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to questions about Gutierrez’s proposals or his criticisms of the border security program. Neither did representatives for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick or the Department of Public Safety.

At the news conference, Christina Delgado, a Santa Fe mother who has become an advocate with the Community Justice Action Fund, a nonprofit focused on ending gun violence, said that in the coming weeks she and others impacted by gun violence would meet with lawmakers to discuss legislation related to mass shootings.

“We have got to take a stand. Now,” she said, pleading for lawmakers to listen and act. “This is coming up on five years of zero action, of showboating, of putting out legislation and allowing it to die just as we let our Texans and our children die in classrooms and in communities.”

by Marjorie Childress, New Mexico In Depth, and Steve Myers, ProPublica

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

This is a follow-up to an investigation into high discipline rates of Native American students in New Mexico. Read the article: “This School District Is Ground Zero for Harsh Discipline of Native Students in New Mexico.”

At New Mexico in Depth and ProPublica, we practice “no surprises” journalism: No one should read anything about themselves in our articles without first having had a chance to respond.

So journalists in our newsrooms were surprised to read in the Gallup Sun, a weekly newspaper, that the superintendent of Gallup-McKinley County Schools had criticized our story about his school district. We had given him ample opportunity to respond to our reporting, but the Sun did not give us that opportunity in turn.

Superintendent Mike Hyatt told the Sun and school board members that he ignored our requests to talk to him because he believed we had a predetermined narrative.

That’s not the case. ProPublica, a national nonprofit investigative news outlet, partnered with New Mexico In Depth, a state-based nonprofit news organization, to look at school discipline across New Mexico. We wanted to understand what was driving high rates of discipline for Native American students in the state.

We found that Gallup-McKinley County Schools was responsible for a disproportionate amount of the disparity. It has a quarter of the state’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020.

Our Dec. 21 story was republished by the Albuquerque Journal, the Gallup Independent and the Gallup Sun.

We had reached out to the school district months earlier, in February 2022, to ask about disparities in discipline between Gallup-McKinley and other school districts in New Mexico. We called and emailed repeatedly over the following months, reiterating our desire to talk to district officials and asking for additional data. Hyatt was copied on almost 100 emails with district staff.

We emailed Hyatt a 10-page letter on Nov. 11, a month before publishing our story, to detail our findings, ask again for an interview and seek clarifications or corrections. We never heard from him.

Hyatt disputed our findings at a school board meeting on Jan. 9 and elaborated in the Sun article on Jan. 27.

He said most of the 211 expulsions we found in the district’s own data for the four academic years ending in 2020 should be reclassified as suspensions because those students were not permanently removed from school. Under that definition, he said, the district had expelled just 15 students over the most recent seven years.

The Sun sent us an email on Jan. 25 to say it planned to publish a story in response to ours, which would include an interview with Hyatt. When we asked for the opportunity to respond to claims about our work, the reporter refused, saying we could respond afterward. Gallup Sun publisher Babette Herrmann later told us that was her call. She didn’t think it was necessary for the reporter to interview us, she said, even though the story quoted Hyatt criticizing our reporting.

Here’s what we would have said if the Sun had given us the opportunity to respond.

After a careful review of the data, we stand by our conclusions. Our analysis relied on the district’s own data as reported to the state, and the vast majority of expulsions we analyzed fit the district’s definition at the time. Before this school year, the district’s handbook defined an expulsion as a removal from school for at least 90 days and up to 365. Now it says an expulsion is a “permanent” removal from school.

Our original reporting found that Gallup-McKinley was responsible for at least three-quarters of all Native expulsions in the state over four years. That held true when we counted all removals from school of 90 days or longer, regardless of whether they were called suspensions or expulsions.

Download the Data

We’ve compiled enrollment and discipline data on all New Mexico school districts. Download it here.

We also reported that Gallup-McKinley’s expulsion rate for those four years was at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state. When we counted all removals from school of 90 days or longer — again, regardless of whether they were categorized as expulsions or suspensions — Gallup-McKinley’s rate was just as high.

In addition, we looked at suspensions and expulsions longer than 10 days. Gallup-McKinley still reported far higher rates of these removals than the rest of the state.

Our findings remain unchanged: Gallup-McKinley County Schools is responsible for an outsized share of serious punishments of Native students in New Mexico. Revising the definition of an expulsion does not alter that fact.

Hyatt’s comments come after months of denials and delayed responses to many of our public records requests. When we asked for enrollment data broken down by race, the district at first claimed the data didn’t exist. Then they said they couldn’t provide it. We eventually got it from the state, which had received it from the district.

That pattern continues. When we asked to see the documents that Hyatt read from during his presentation to the school board, the district responded that they’d need at least another 30 days to provide them because doing so within the 15-day legal deadline was too onerous.

A principal even called the police when we came to the school to drop off a document saying a student’s guardian had given us permission to review the student’s school discipline records. (We dropped off the form without incident and only later learned, as we reviewed emails obtained through a public records request, that the principal had called the police.)

According to Gallup-McKinley’s own numbers, the district bears significant responsibility for the disparity in harsh punishments faced by Native students in New Mexico. We worked hard to understand that data. We engaged with the school district at every turn. And we believe it was in the public interest to share what we found.

Marjorie Childress is managing editor at New Mexico In Depth. Steve Myers is a senior editor at ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

by Megan Rose

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

Join us for an upcoming live virtual event, “Post-Roe: Today’s Abortion Landscape.”

For 50 years, Roe v. Wade shut down the biggest ambitions of the anti-abortion movement. Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned that decision, unleashing a flurry of abortion legislation across the nation. And anti-abortion advocates have eager partners in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country.

“It’s exciting because our hands have been untied,” Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said. “We’re going to see what we can do and do it.”

The new legal landscape has also energized blue states, shaking them out of their longstanding confidence that federal protections for abortion were unmovable.

Dueling efforts to protect and restrict abortion, divided along political lines, are making what was already a patchwork of access across the country even more pronounced.

“We’re going to see a bigger shift to the edges,” said Elisabeth Smith, a director with the Center for Reproductive Rights.

ProPublica reviewed proposals across the nation to see what trends are developing as state lawmakers began the first full legislative sessions since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling in June.

Going Beyond Abortion Bans

States that already outlawed abortion are looking to further limit access by introducing novel ways to hinder people from evading such bans. Twelve states currently enforce abortion bans in almost all circumstances, in most cases through trigger laws, which were passed while abortion was protected by the court but went into effect after Roe was overturned.

“The next step is: Who’s helping people getting abortions and how do you regulate those organizations?” said Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a global research group that advocates for abortion access.

Lawmakers in some states are either moving in some fashion to block residents’ access to abortion medication — a two-drug combination approved by the Food and Drug Administration to be taken in the first 70 days of pregnancy — or considering measures that target companies and local governments that protect abortion access.

In Texas, a lawmaker has introduced a bill to deny tax breaks to businesses that help pay for employees to leave the state for care. Tennessee, which has one of the strictest bans in the country, is considering a bill that would prohibit local governments from providing financial and health benefits to their employees who seek abortions. And in Idaho, a proposed law would withhold tax dollars from municipal governments that refuse to enforce state abortion laws.

Katie Glenn, the state policy director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said that controlling distribution of abortion medication at the state level is a top priority. Georgia, for example, she said, is one of the only states in the deep South that doesn’t explicitly prohibit telemedicine, which pregnant people can use to obtain abortion medication from out of state. Glenn said she is expecting the state’s legislature to introduce a bill outlawing at least some aspects of telehealth soon. Georgia bans abortion after around six weeks.

In Wyoming, where a near-total abortion ban is being blocked by the courts, the state is considering legislation that would outlaw medication abortions unless the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest or the abortion was necessary to save the pregnant person’s life. But the legislation explicitly says that mental health conditions and the risk of suicide can’t be used as a reason to allow a medication abortion.

Republican lawmakers are also brainstorming ways to prevent abortion pills from being mailed into their states.

In Texas, which has long tested the limits of state regulation and already has a near-total ban, lawmakers are looking to target other realms of reproductive health. They’re debating a bill that would allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense not just abortion medication but also emergency contraception, which helps prevent conception after unprotected sex.

Republican-Controlled Legislatures Look to Amp Up Restrictions

The aim is to pass increasingly restrictive laws until the goal of ending abortions nationwide is reached, anti-abortion advocates said.

In Nebraska, for example, a total ban was defeated by a Democratic filibuster last year, so the focus is now on a newly introduced bill that would ban abortions once cardiac activity can be identified in an embryo, at around the sixth week of pregnancy. Many people don’t yet know they are pregnant at that time.

“That’s where they’ve found the political will to be,” Glenn, with SBA Pro-Life America, said. “That certainly would be a great step forward, in our estimation.”

Advocates on both sides are closely watching Florida. Despite previously passing a 15-week ban last session, Republicans, who have a supermajority, have vowed to enact an even earlier cutoff. In the South, where many states have total or bans that start around six weeks, Florida currently offers critical abortion access. The state has more than 50 clinics, which often see out-of-state patients, so any change to Florida’s laws has an outsized impact across the region, said Nash, of the Guttmacher Institute.

In Kansas, where voters last year rejected a ballot initiative that would have amended the state constitution to say there was no right to abortion in the state, the Republican-controlled legislature is planning to limit access anyway. GOP lawmakers announced they will look to pass more abortion restrictions and increase funding to crisis pregnancy centers, which often aim to prevent people from getting abortions.

State Courts Take the Reins

Ultimate constitutional oversight of abortion law has moved from the U.S. Supreme Court to 50 state courts that are newly interpreting what rights are protected by state constitutions. South Carolina’s highest court, for example, recently struck down a six-week ban for violating the state constitution, but was ambiguous about whether a ban at a later stage of pregnancy would be constitutional. The same day, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled the opposite way: Its state constitution did not protect abortion, allowing a near-total ban to go into effect.

Georgia bans abortion after around six weeks, but the law’s constitutionality is being challenged and the issue will likely be heard by the state’s highest court this spring. Several states, including Utah, Indiana and Wyoming, passed bans that are currently blocked by the courts as part of ongoing litigation.

Without the Roe precedent, the guardrails are gone, Nash said. “You don’t have federal protections, and it’s unclear what state constitutional protections are,” she said. “I think we’re going to see a lot of experimentation in this period.”

Some states frustrated by judicial intervention on abortion restrictions are moving to limit the authority of state courts. In Utah, for example, Republicans are looking to restrict the power of judges to grant injunctions. Utah passed a trigger law in 2020 to ban abortion, but after Roe was overturned, a judge blocked the ban from going into effect while a lawsuit challenged its constitutionality.

Contemplating What Was Once Taboo

A common refrain of many anti-abortion advocates has always been that should Roe be overturned, they wouldn’t try to punish people who obtained abortions. They claimed the liability should fall on the provider. Recently, however, some officials have put proposals criminalizing abortion-seekers on the table.

Last month in Alabama, where abortion is banned but the law doesn’t allow prosecuting the patient, the attorney general said that he’d use the state’s chemical endangerment law to go after people who took abortion medication. The law is intended to protect children from drug manufacturing operations, such as meth houses, and the state has used it aggressively to punish pregnant people, as ProPublica reported. The attorney general later walked back his comments.

But he’s not alone in his instinct to punish patients: Lawmakers in Oklahoma and Arkansas have proposed removing language from each state’s abortion ban that prohibits prosecuting people for obtaining abortions.

In May of last year, more than 70 anti-abortion organizations signed a letter denouncing any effort to hold a woman criminally liable for obtaining an abortion. They stated that in their view, patients in such situations are victims.

Medication abortion is a gray area. Advocates have been largely mum on whether private individuals, such as a family member or a teacher, should be targeted forhelping someone obtain the medicine. Glenn said SBA Pro-Life America is focused on those who make and sell the medication, but she did allow that some areas of enforcement will require prosecutorial discretion.

Blue States Shore Up Protections

For those who support abortion rights, the last six months have been disheartening as abortion became unavailable in 14 states, including two that have no clinics providing the procedure. But one bright spot is that there’s a “nationwide conversation about abortion like never before,” Smith, of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said.

A majority of Americans support legal abortion, but prior to the Dobbs decision, Smith said, many didn’t think it was possible for Roe to be overturned and were complacent. Now the country is hearing more from parties who previously stayed out of the political fray, such as doctors.

“I think doctors who provide care but never saw themselves as abortion advocates realized they had an important story to tell,” Smith said.

The amplification of the issue is galvanizing states where abortion is still accessible but there are barriers to care, such as a waiting period, according to Angela Vasquez-Giroux, with NARAL Pro Choice America.

“There’s more awareness. More willingness to hear about it,” she said, adding that abortion rights advocates are now finding willing partners to dismantle those laws.

And in some states that abortion-rights advocates might have given up as lost causes a year ago, the midterm elections have thrown those calculations out, Vasquez-Giroux said. In Kentucky and Kansas, voters soundly rejected changes to each state’s constitution saying there was no right to abortion. And now advocates have seen that those people who show up in opinion polls as supporting abortion rights are willing to also vote, even in solidly red states.

States that have maintained access to abortion and are controlled by Democrats are rushing to enshrine abortion rights in their states.

Minnesota, where the highest court had already ruled that the state constitution protects the right to abortion, has fast tracked a bill to codify abortion rights into law. And though a judge last summer struck down several restrictions on abortion, including a 24-hour waiting period, Minnesota lawmakers say they intend to remove those laws from the books. After the fall of Roe, relying on court precedent felt more precarious, Minnesota Democrats said.

Other Democratically held states, such as California, New Mexico and Maine, are boosting protections for providers and for reproductive choice. Illinois has already passed a shield law taking immediate effect, which protects providers and patients from out-of-state legal action involving abortions.

California voted last year to amend its constitution to guarantee abortion as a right. The New York legislature just voted to put a similar constitutional amendment on the ballot next year, and Maryland is working on doing the same.

California, which sought to advance abortion access even before Roe fell by passing measures such as a mandate requiring college campuses to carry abortion medication, has a website that gathers the text of all its abortion-related laws to inspire lawmakers in other states.

Are You in a State That Banned Abortion? Tell Us How Changes in Medical Care Impact You.

by Seth Freed Wessler

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.

For the second time in six months, a federal agency reprimanded a Louisiana developer for its failure to offer an adequate assessment of the harm that its proposed $400 million agricultural development would cause to neighboring Black communities and historic sites.

In a forceful letter dated Dec. 23, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected claims by the developer, Greenfield LLC, that its massive grain transfer facility in St. John the Baptist Parish upriver from New Orleans will have “no adverse effects.” The Corps is considering a permit application by Greenfield to build on federally protected waters and has the power to halt the project.

This is the second time the Corps has intervened.

In May, ProPublica revealed that a whistleblower had raised alarms about the project after the report she drafted on behalf of Greenfield — concluding that the facility would inflict damage on communities and historic sites — was gutted by the consulting firm where she worked to exclude any mention of that harm. In response to that story, the Corps deemed the drastically edited archaeological and historical survey “insufficient” and ordered Greenfield to produce a new report.

That new report, which the Corps received in November, did not address the agency’s demand that the developer conduct a more complete assessment of how the project could damage historic sites and harm residents of nearby towns, according to the Corps’ December letter.

“The report,” the letter reads, “just doesn’t demonstrate adequate engagement and that must be rectified.”

A Greenfield spokesperson said in a statement that “we and our team of respected expert consultants have done thorough evaluations to consider any and all potential impacts.” The statement went on to say that “Greenfield takes seriously its responsibility to provide regulatory agencies with accurate and complete information consistent with the regulatory requirements.”

The Corps’ letter criticizes Greenfield and its contractors for failing to meaningfully consult with people whose lives would be impacted by the dozens of looming grain silos, new rail, truck and shipping traffic and pollutants from the facility. It says Greenfield and its consultants have not done enough to account for the ways that the development project might harm communities of color, a requirement under federal environmental justice standards.

“It’s very disappointing that they would continue to double down on the report, that they are still saying there will not be any detrimental effects,” Erin Edwards, who blew the whistle on the earlier report, told ProPublica in a recent interview. Edwards co-authored the first version of the report when she worked as an architectural historian for Gulf South Research Corporation, the for-profit cultural resources and archaeological consulting firm that had been hired by another of Greenfield’s consultants to conduct a federally required assessment of historic sites.

Edwards resigned in late 2021 after her report was stripped of every mention of possible harm to communities or cultural properties, including her conclusion that the area surrounding the development should be listed as a historic district because of its connection to histories of slavery. In internal Gulf South emails obtained by ProPublica, a company manager wrote that it would lose its contract for the report — and could lose future work — if it didn't change the findings.

“Gulf South knew all along that the project would have an adverse effect on the historic plantations there, and they knew that it would have an adverse effect on the area as a whole,” Edwards said. “There’s no way to look at the evidence and not see that it’s going to be detrimental.”

Gulf South, which did not respond to questions about the new report or the Corps’ response letter, had earlier told ProPublica that it stood by the edited report and that Edwards’ version had been nothing more than a draft. Ramboll LLC, the consulting firm Greenfield hired to clear permitting hurdles and had in turn contracted Gulf South, also did not respond.

In response to the Corps’ recent letter, Ramboll said in a letter of its own that it and its client have consulted with community members and local groups. The company cited meetings between Greenfield and members of the environmental justice group Rise St. James, including the group’s founder, Sharon Lavigne. Ramboll’s letter claimed that Rise St. James “expressed support for Greenfield and its engagement approach.”

But when contacted on Friday, Lavigne told ProPublica that she said no such thing.

“I am not in favor of it. I oppose it,” Lavigne told ProPublica. “I don’t know how the writing got changed around to say that I support the grain elevator.”

When asked about the inconsistency, a Greenfield spokesperson told ProProPublica in an email, “There was an error in the characterization which has been corrected, and we’ve apologized to Rise St. James for the error.”

Greenfield added that the response by the Corps and the community to the new report “helps to make a good project even better. In areas where more information will help the Corps understand what we've proposed, we'll provide it.”

The Greenfield grain facility has been the target of sustained pushback from nearby communities, civil and human rights groups and historic preservation organizations, as well as from other federal agencies, including the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which oversees federal preservation policy. The land where the development is planned sits beside the Whitney Plantation Museum, which serves as a memorial to people who were enslaved in Louisiana. One plot of land down the river is another unusually well preserved plantation designated as a National Historic Landmark.

The cane field where Greenfield wants to build its grain elevator is seen through nearby trees. The Whitney Plantation is visible in the far distance. (Akasha Rabut, special to ProPublica)

The Corps is also asking questions about the impact that the Greenfield development will have on existing communities. In its letter, the Corps asks Greenfield to more rigorously account for the grain facility’s likely impact on Wallace, a small, nearly all-Black rural community that sits directly beside the planned construction.

“Wallace will be directly impacted by the proposed action,” the letter said, adding that other federal agencies, including the National Park Service and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, have urged the Army Corps “to ensure that the community of Wallace is considered in the evaluation of the permit decision.”

Because the project would be built on federally protected waters, including wetlands and the Mississippi River, Greenfield had to apply for a permit from the Corps. Before it can grant the permit, the Corps has to enforce provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act.

“What we feel is that Greenfield intentionally ignored people in our community, that they just moved ahead without us,” said Joy Banner, who lives in Wallace and is the co-founder, along with her sister Jo Banner, of a group called the Descendants Project. The group supports communities whose members trace their ancestry to people enslaved in the region. “Now the Corps is backing that up,” she said. “The Corps is saying, ‘You did not talk to them about cumulative impacts, and the information that you provided is not consistent with the actual impact that a massive grain terminal would have.’ The story they offered is not adding up.”

In response to ProPublica’s reporting last year, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation raised concerns about Greenfield’s plans. In an interview, Sara Bronin, the agency’s incoming chair, said that federal agencies like the Corps need to hold developers and their consultants accountable when they don’t follow the law.

“There should be an alignment between environmental justice, equity and historic preservation,” Bronin said. “Especially in communities that have lacked power, that have been underrepresented in our histories, we must be more cognizant about and motivated to address the historical injustices that people still feel very deeply today.”

by Kyle Hopkins and Emily Goodykoontz, Anchorage Daily News

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.

Since Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson took office in July 2021, he and his administration have been criticized for their words and their deeds. Top officials have been fired or have resigned. Lawsuits have been filed against the city, and complaints have been filed with the office of the city’s ombudsman, who told city prosecutors that employees are worried about being spied on.

Bronson was narrowly elected on a wave of support from conservative voters who opposed COVID-19 mandates and were frustrated with the city’s ongoing homelessness crisis.

The previous mayor, Ethan Berkowitz, resigned less than a year earlier after a television news reporter revealed he had texted her a photo of his naked backside. Berkowitz, a Democrat who was unable to seek reelection because of term limits, acknowledged his “unacceptable personal conduct” in messaging the reporter.

Here’s a timeline of some of the controversies and accusations that have hit the seat of government in Alaska’s largest city since Bronson’s election.

Bronson has declined all recent interview requests and has not responded to questions, citing potential litigation from his former municipal manager, who claims she was fired because of raising whistleblower concerns. Bronson’s adviser Larry Baker did not respond to questions.

Another of the mayor’s executives, human resources director Niki Tshibaka, resigned Monday as this story was being prepared for publication.

September 2021 Comparing Mask Mandates to the Holocaust Christine Hill cuts out Stars of David before an Anchorage Assembly meeting where the body heard public testimony about a proposed mask mandate on Sept. 29, 2021. Hill, who is opposed to a mask mandate, said she wore a star as a comparison to the oppression and genocide of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

During a COVID-19 surge that prompted the state to enact crisis standards of care at hospitals, the Anchorage Assembly debated whether to pass legislation requiring masks in public spaces. Opponents of the mandate, including many Bronson supporters, wore yellow Stars of David pinned to their chests to compare mandatory mask wearing to the oppression of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.

Bronson, who pledged not to enact any COVID-19 mandates, defended the use of the stars.

“We’ve referenced the Star of David quite a bit here tonight, but there was a formal message that came out within Jewish culture about that and the message was, ‘never again.’ That’s an ethos. And that’s what that star really means is, ‘We will not forget, this will never happen again.’ And I think us borrowing that from them is actually a credit to them,” Bronson said.

The next day he apologized.

October 2021 Stopping Fluoride Treatments of Water

While touring a water treatment plant, Bronson abruptly ordered workers to shut off fluoridation of Anchorage’s water supply despite a city law that requires fluoride in the water. When asked about the shutoff, a Bronson spokesperson falsely said the event didn’t happen before saying a few days later that it did, indeed, occur. The shutoff lasted about five hours.

The mayor’s office contended that Bronson did not violate the city code because the fluoride levels in drinking water did not significantly change while it was off. Administration officials also said that the utility’s manager had asked the mayor to shut it off — which the manager denied in a public statement to the Assembly and in an email to the city manager.

Fluoride has been added to city water to prevent tooth decay since the 1950s. Unsubstantiated claims about potential dangers of fluoride have circulated for decades and prompted waves of debate before the Anchorage Assembly in the 1990s. Bronson said he made the order because utility workers told him they were experiencing health issues related to the substance.

A business manager for the union representing the workers said it had received no such complaints from members.

May 2022 “I’m With Judy”

Bronson fired the director of the Anchorage Office of Equal Opportunity as she began investigating claims that the mayor’s pick to run the city libraries had made racist statements and other derogatory comments.

The library’s deputy director, Judy Eledge, was accused of telling an employee that, “If it weren’t for the white man and his oil, the natives would still be living in caves,” calling books about drag queens “filth” and saying that movements like Black Lives Matter are “killing libraries in this country.”

Library employees said they felt they couldn’t bring their complaints about her remarks to Bronson’s director of human resources, Niki Tshibaka, as both Tshibaka and Eledge are political allies of the mayor. Tshibaka was blocked from investigating complaints from library employees after wearing an “I’m with Judy” T-shirt to a library advisory board meeting. The mayor’s office and Tshibaka did not answer questions about the matter at the time. A spokesperson said only that the administration “complied” with recommendations from the city ombudsman to pull Tshibaka from involvement with library personnel complaints and hiring.

Tshibaka resigned on Monday, citing “an increasingly toxic, hostile, and demoralizing work environment.”

The former Office of Equal Opportunity director, Heather MacAlpine, has filed a lawsuit accusing the mayor of wrongful firing and violation of whistleblower protections. The city answered the complaint in July, denying that Eledge made racist statements and denying that MacAlpine was fired for acting as a whistleblower.

June 2022 Moving Homeless People

At the end of June, Bronson shuttered the city’s COVID-19 emergency mass homeless shelter inside a sports arena and moved homeless residents to a far-flung campground in Northeast Anchorage.

Bronson refused to call the city’s sanctioned homeless campground an official part of Anchorage’s homelessness response. The administration provided no food and no supportive services. Nonprofits, service providers and volunteers scrambled to meet basic needs at Centennial Park Campground.

Black bears began raiding campsites regularly. Wildlife officials shot and killed multiple bears there.

A female black bear and two cubs look for food inside a tent in June 2022 at Centennial Park in Anchorage. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

Advocates for homeless people decried the conditions as “deplorable.” Some Assembly members and community leaders called the situation a “humanitarian crisis.”

A city law requires Anchorage to set up emergency winter shelter once frigid temperatures arrive. So, at the end of September, the city moved people living in Centennial back into the arena.

August 2022 Health Director’s False Resume Joe Gerace, then the director of the Anchorage Health Department, conducts a press conference in December 2021. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

The mayor’s pick to run the city Health Department suddenly quit just before Alaska Public Media revealed he had lied and exaggerated much of his resume.

Joe Gerace falsely claimed to be a physician’s assistant who held two master’s degrees and a high-ranking post within the Alaska National Guard.

Several people who said they had worked under Gerace, volunteered with him or worked in the Health Department had tried to tell the Bronson administration that his background didn’t add up. Tshibaka, the human resources director, at one point accused the employees of “character assassination” and apologized to Gerace for “disparagement of your sterling character.”

Two women raised concerns about Gerace’s apparently fabricated resume during a closed-door Assembly meeting, which the mayor attended, according to Alaska Public Media. The Assembly at that meeting voted to confirm Gerace as director.

In September, Gerace acknowledged to Alaska Public Media that he “took some liberties” regarding his work history and military service.

The state filed a lawsuit against Gerace in December, claiming he owes more than $61,000 after fraudulently claiming to be a high-ranking former U.S. military officer. As a result, Gerace was assigned a high rank within the official state militia and was overpaid, the lawsuit asserts. Gerace wrote in an email on Monday to the Daily News and ProPublica that he has made a settlement offer to the state in hopes of avoiding “a costly trial for both parties.”

Gerace wrote in the email that he has not formally been served with the complaint and was unable to comment further, although he added that others within the militia also were awarded ranks above their prior military service.

In his resignation letter to the mayor on Monday, Tshibaka wrote that he was “directed to vet and onboard” Gerace within a single day. He did not say who gave him that direction.

September 2022 Spending Millions on Construction Without Approval

The Bronson administration began $4.9 million in construction work on a homeless shelter and resource center project without approval from the Assembly, leaving the future of the unfinished project in question.

Former City Manager Amy Demboski, fired by Bronson in December, claimed in an 11-page letter to city leaders that the mayor and adviser Larry Baker, in knowing violation of Anchorage law, pressured a subordinate city executive to sign off on the work. Demboski alleged that Bronson expected that the subordinate would “take the fall” for the decision.

Demboski said she immediately sent the construction work contract to the Assembly for proper consideration after discovering that work had already begun.

A construction site for the East Anchorage homeless navigation center and shelter in October 2022. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

A Bronson official publicly conceded to the Assembly that the administration had made an “error” by starting construction without Assembly approval. The Assembly later voted to pull the plug on the homeless shelter.

City lawyers say Anchorage is on the hook for the millions in construction work. If the city can’t pay, it will likely face a lawsuit.

February 2022-January 2023 Sexism, a Hostile Work Environment and Penis-Shaped Cookies

City Hall employees said in interviews that Purchasing Director Rachelle Alger twice brought penis-shaped cookies to distribute at City Hall.

Demboski claims that when she reported the issue to the mayor and Tshibaka, they took no apparent action. Alger did not respond to a phone message and emailed questions. Tshibaka also did not respond.

More generally, Demboski said in her letter to the city that the mayor encouraged and condoned behavior that created a hostile work environment, and that blatant sexism is tolerated in City Hall. The mayor treated women differently than men and chastised Demboski for reprimanding a man, she claimed.

“You raised your voice while showing her your hands held at different heights to indicate that because this subordinate is a man and Demboski is a woman — the male employee is ‘up here’ and Ms. Demboski is ‘down there,’” according to her letter of complaint.

Bronson has refused to answer questions about Demboski’s claims. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office in a statement said that the acting city attorney advised the mayor not to discuss issues relating to “potential litigation.”

December 2022-January 2023 Fear of Spying, Surveillance Cameras

According to the Anchorage ombudsman, multiple City Hall employees said they were afraid to make complaints because an executive had been talking openly about reviewing surveillance footage within the building.

The ombudsman, Darrel Hess, on Jan. 19 sent a memo to the mayor and the Assembly chairperson saying he had referred the matter to the city prosecutor, citing his belief that “there may have been a breach of duty, misconduct, or illegal activity.”

“Employees have stated that they are hesitant to visit our office because they are afraid that access to our office is being monitored,” Hess said in the memo.

The deputy chief of staff, Brice Wilbanks, resigned the same week. His attorneys sent a letter of their own to the city, attempting to rescind the resignation and accusing the ombudsman of acting inappropriately — even though the ombudsman never publicly accused Wilbanks by name of spying and intimidation. Wilbanks’ attorneys claimed he had been denied due process. Wilbanks did not respond to requests for comment, and his attorney declined to comment.

by Kyle Hopkins and Emily Goodykoontz, Anchorage Daily News

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.

In August 2021, two city of Anchorage officials toured the wood-paneled halls of the Golden Lion Hotel, known for the 200-pound taxidermied lion that once stood among the teal lounge chairs in its lobby.

At the time, Anchorage was seeing a soaring number of overdoses. The city faced a deadline to use proceeds from a utility sale to launch a new treatment center and needed a place to put it. The hotel, built in the 1970s, had 85 rooms, including suites that might house visiting doctors. The ballrooms could serve as meeting areas or host group therapy sessions. There was even an old salon that could be used for job training.

Best of all, the city already owned the building. A previous mayor had bought it as part of a plan to overhaul homeless services in Alaska’s largest city.

But the city’s new mayor, Dave Bronson, had ridden a wave of support from voters frustrated by COVID-19 mandates and those opposed to the city’s approach to homelessness. Among his supporters were people who lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the Golden Lion, and Bronson promised on the campaign trail to sell the building.

Municipal Real Estate Director Christina Hendrickson and Operations and Maintenance Director Saxton Shearer held out hope that they could make a case for using the hotel based on savings to the public, according to a letter Hendrickson later sent to the Anchorage Assembly. After visiting the hotel that August day, they began working on a proposal.

The next day, Shearer appeared at Hendrickson’s office, alarmed, she said in an interview. “He sits at my desk and closes the door.”

Shearer had been at City Hall for a meeting on another matter and excitedly told the mayor’s good friend and top adviser, Larry Baker, about the potential to transform the Golden Lion into a treatment center run by the Salvation Army, according to Hendrickson’s letter.

Hendrickson said Shearer told her that Baker said the project was a no-go. Baker “told him not only ‘no,’ but ‘hell no, that’s not happening,’” Hendrickson said in an interview.

“He didn’t want a treatment center in his neighborhood,” she said.

The hotel remains empty. It became neither a shelter nor a treatment center, though Bronson recently reversed himself and said the hotel would be used for housing.

Baker’s role in the Golden Lion decision and other actions taken by the Bronson administration have been at the center of a burgeoning scandal at Anchorage City Hall, in which numerous top officials have been fired or resigned. Hendrickson was fired in September 2021, two days after delivering a whistleblower complaint to the city Assembly accusing the mayor of violating the city code. She has filed a lawsuit accusing the city of retaliation.

The city has denied that Bronson fired Hendrickson for acting as a whistleblower, and it said in an answer to the lawsuit that she had been insubordinate and that “the decision to terminate Hendrickson was made prior to the Mayor’s office learning of her ‘whistleblower’ complaint to the Assembly.”

Municipal Manager Amy Demboski was fired in December, and she subsequently wrote an 11-page letter to the city accusing the mayor and his administration, including Baker, of corruption, illegal contracting and blatant sexism. Bronson has never publicly said why Demboski was fired.

Demboski, Hendrickson and other City Hall employees speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs allege that the mayor allowed Baker to further his self-interests using the power of City Hall. Among the allegations is that Baker and the mayor attempted to use their influence to protect a man accused of domestic violence and pressured Shearer to sign off on millions of dollars of construction work in violation of city code.

Bronson and Baker are so close that the mayor boasted to employees that he personally drove to Baker’s home with a gun to help with a trespassing call on Nov. 26. The mayor’s office later asked the Police Department to review 911 dispatch tapes of the incident to see why police didn’t respond sooner.

Since a December interview about her firing, Demboski has declined to speak to reporters and has not answered questions about her letter; Shearer did not respond to requests for comment. Baker initially referred questions to a spokesperson for the mayor and has not responded to phone calls, texts or emailed questions.

Bronson declined to be interviewed and did not answer specific questions about Baker and the accusations involving his top adviser. The mayor, through a spokesperson, instead sent reporters a statement on Jan. 10:

“Larry Baker was asked to join the Administration on a contract basis due to his vast background in both the executive and legislative branches of our government. Mr. Baker has served as an Anchorage Assembly member, state legislator, and Chief of Staff under former Mayor Dan Sullivan. There are very few people who have this amount of experience. The Mayor thinks that having this historical perspective is invaluable.”

Since receiving Demboski’s letter, Bronson has refused to talk about Baker, the domestic violence cases or any of the accusations leveled by his former municipal manager. Through a spokesperson, he has said that the acting city attorney advised him not to comment on “potential litigation.”

The questions have thrown Anchorage City Hall into turmoil for the second time in recent years. In October 2020, then-Mayor Ethan Berkowitz resigned after a television news reporter revealed he had texted her a photo of his naked backside. Berkowitz acknowledged his “unacceptable personal conduct” in messaging the reporter. At the time, he was the top elected Democrat in Alaska.

What’s happening at City Hall is affecting the city’s operations, insiders say. In one example, the city Finance Department, hobbled by vacancies, is asking the Assembly for an extra $2 million to hire contractors to help with routine bookkeeping. The department had operated without a permanent chief financial officer for months, until a new CFO was confirmed in January. Many departments are working under acting supervisors, including the Law Department, which hasn’t had a permanent city attorney since June.

The mayor’s human resources director resigned Monday as this story was being prepared for publication.

“I can no longer continue to serve in what has become an increasingly toxic, hostile, and demoralizing work environment,” he wrote.

A Lifetime in Business and Politics

Baker, now 80, has played many roles in Anchorage over the years. He opened the first Burger King franchises in Alaska in 1975 and ran them until his business declared bankruptcy in 2003. Worried that a rival burger chain owner might run for city office, he ran for the Anchorage Assembly himself and served five years before an unsuccessful run for mayor. He was a state legislator and, for six years, chief of staff to former Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan. (Not to be confused with the Alaska U.S. senator with the same name.)

For decades, Baker has lived in a Midtown neighborhood known as Geneva Woods. A collection of houses built in the late 1960s and early 1970s — old by the standards of the 49th state — the subdivision is also home to a former Assembly chairman who helped run an independent expenditure group for Bronson, as well as a former Republican mayor, a retired president of one of the largest oil companies in Alaska and an owner of state’s biggest shopping mall.

Baker’s home is a few hundred yards from the Golden Lion.

Some of the homeowners became alarmed in June 2020 when they learned of a proposal by then-Mayor Berkowitz, a Democrat, to buy the nearby Golden Lion and turn it into a substance abuse treatment center.

The city had recently sold its publicly owned power utility. As part of the sale, the municipality agreed to spend $15 million of the proceeds to create an addiction services center. In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic had created new urgency among service providers to house hundreds of residents, with drug and alcohol treatment considered a crucial step in reducing homelessness.

Baker and five others in August 2020 formed a nonprofit called Alaskans for Real Cures to Homelessness, which opposed the plan. Baker served as a director.

Berkowitz’s resignation in October 2020 created a leadership opening. Enter Bronson, a former U.S. Air Force and commercial pilot whose campaign drew momentum from a backlash against city leadership.

When Bronson won the election in May 2021, he chose Baker to co-chair his transition team.

Until recently, Baker had his own office on the top floor of Anchorage City Hall. But he isn’t a city employee.

Under Bronson, the city has awarded Baker three $29,500 contracts to work for the mayor as a “policy adviser.” In each of the contracts, the city signed the agreements after Baker had already started working and took the unusual step of removing an indemnity clause that would have made Baker legally liable for his work.

As a result, any lawsuit settlements or judgments against the city of Anchorage, based on Baker’s actions on behalf of the mayor, would be paid by the public rather than Baker himself. Working as a contractor, instead of an employee, could also allow Baker to argue he is not subject to the city ethics code, which says “a public servant shall place the public interest above any financial or private interest when taking official action.”

For Bronson, who had no experience in municipal government, Baker brings an understanding of its inner workings. Where Bronson fought all-or-nothing battles with the progressive Assembly, Baker worked behind the scenes as a peacemaker. City Hall executives say the two men talk every day.

“Unlike Bronson, he knows he needs to get along with people and relationships matter,” said Assembly member Austin Quinn-Davidson, who filled in as mayor for several months after Berkowitz resigned.

“I like him,” she said of Baker. “I think he relies on that, which is smart. People sort of trusting him or liking him as a person to get things done.”

“Not an Honest Communication”

Baker’s most public role was to help decide where to place shelters, housing and services for homeless people.

Unhoused people had fewer options for emergency shelters after Bronson closed the city’s main low-barrier entry, the Sullivan Sports Arena, for three months last summer and moved homeless people to a campsite that attracted black bears.

All the while, the Golden Lion remained vacant.

In August, the Bronson administration arranged to meet with the regional director for the state Department of Transportation at Baker’s office to discuss a highway project that had been planned for more than a decade and happened to be located right next to the Golden Lion.

Bronson’s chief of staff asked DOT to write a letter describing the status of the project and how it might impact the hotel. The final draft of the letter included a key sentence that Bronson used to justify denying the treatment center: that the highway work would likely result in a total “take” of the hotel property. It was signed by Wolfgang Junge, the DOT’s central region director.

What he meant, Junge said in an interview, was that because the road project would gobble up some of the hotel’s parking spots, it would likely no longer be viable as a commercial hotel, which would affect its resale value.

But that’s not how Bronson framed the letter in a Sept. 8 news release suggesting the building was doomed to be condemned by the highway project.

“Based off of this new information from the DOT&PF to eventually take the Golden Lion Hotel property, it does not make sense to set up a treatment facility in a location that will be taken away,” Bronson said.

Junge said that the mayor’s description of his letter was not accurate.

“The way the (Bronson) administration communicated to the assembly was not, it was not an honest communication,” he said. “If my letter was weaponized or used as a pawn somehow in trying to achieve an outcome of an administration, that’s a choice that the administration used.”

In addition, in her letter, Demoboski said Baker and the mayor pressured Shearer, the maintenance and operations director, to sign off on up to $4.9 million in construction work on a mass homeless shelter and navigation center without Assembly approval. Demboski alleges that sidestepping the approval process amounted to a “knowing violation” of city law. (A navigation center provides low-barrier access to a variety of resources and homeless services, like case management, health care, food and housing programs.)

Bronson and Baker assumed that if the illegal activity was discovered, Shearer would “take the fall” as the subordinate city worker, she claims.

According to Demboski, Bronson said that the city couldn’t wait for the proper approvals to start pouring concrete on the project, and that “we can’t stop once the pour is started.”

The administration green-lit millions in construction work over the summer under what was initially a $50,000 contract. In October, a Bronson official conceded the administration had made an “error.”

The Assembly later rejected Bronson’s belated request for approval of the contract upgrade, citing doubts about the project and the administration’s competence. That, essentially, left the partially constructed project dead.

Now the city must pay millions for a project that may never be finished or risk a lawsuit, city attorneys say.

A Business Partner Accused of Domestic Violence

Though Baker and Bronson are close political allies, Baker’s closest business associate is Brandon Spoerhase. Baker and Spoerhase together created a trio of limited liability companies in 2015. All are named BSI for Baker Spoerhase Investments.

When the companies were created, Baker had just finished working as chief of staff to Sullivan, the mayor at the time. Spoerhase had been working for several years as a commercial real estate broker and had been named one of state’s “Top Forty Under 40” by the Alaska Journal of Commerce. Sullivan had appointed Spoerhase to the influential city planning and zoning commission.

Baker and Spoerhase were partners in BSI Commercial Real Estate, according to cached versions of the company website. (The website went dark in January as reporters asked for interviews with Baker and Spoerhase.)

Demboski alleges that with the mayor’s “support and blessing,” Baker tried to get the city attorney to drop domestic violence charges filed against Spoerhase. The victim in the cases was a member of the mayor’s own executive team at City Hall.

Spoerhase was accused of kicking in the bedroom door of a woman he’d been dating in June 2019. The victim, Kolby Hickel, described the night in a request for a protective order. (She has given the Daily News permission to use her name given it was already in the public record.)

Hickel woke that night to Spoerhase hitting her in the face “with a piece of processed game beef stick,” city prosecutors later wrote in a probable cause statement charging Spoerhase with misdemeanor assault and criminal mischief. Spoerhase grabbed Hickel’s wrist and tried to stop her from walking to another room, the charges said.

At a hearing at which she requested a restraining order, Hickel said she went back to her room and locked the door.

“He said, ‘I’m going to kick it in’ and he did,” she testified. “He broke the door and the hardware. And the inside of the door frame.”

A judge granted Hickel the long-term protective order on July 19, 2019. Spoerhase was charged with violating that order six days later.

All told, Spoerhase was charged in three separate city cases of domestic violence and one state case of felony first-degree stalking. (In Anchorage, city prosecutors typically file misdemeanor charges while felonies are charged by the state.)

After one arrest, Baker paid his partner’s bail using the name Larry Willis, according to the receipt filed in state court. He later acknowledged using this name when paying the bail but said Willis is his middle name and disputed that it was an alias.

All four criminal cases were pending against Spoerhase when Bronson announced Baker would be the co-chair of the mayoral transition team.

Since then, one city case has been dismissed entirely. Spoerhase pleaded no contest to criminal mischief (for kicking in the bedroom door) and to violating a protective order, in an agreement with city prosecutors to resolve the two remaining cases. Prosecutors dropped four other charges: counts of violating conditions of release, unlawful contact, stalking and misdemeanor assault.

The state felony first-degree stalking case against Spoerhase is awaiting trial.

Hickel, Spoerhase and his current attorney, Michael Branson, have all declined to comment, citing the ongoing felony case.

Around late May or early June of 2021, Municipal Attorney Patrick Bergt first told Demboski that Baker had asked him to dismiss the pending criminal charges against Spoerhase, according to Demboski’s letter to the city.

“Patrick Bergt ... reported to Ms. Demoboski that he was approached by Baker — both during the transition and after the administration took office — to get these charges dismissed,” Demboski wrote. “Mr. Bergt came to Ms. Demboski expressing shock and discomfort about Mr. Baker’s request.”

According to emails obtained through a public records request to the city, the municipal attorney sent or received at least 88 pages of emails related to the Spoerhase cases between September 2021 and February 2022. It’s unclear what most of the emails said. The city redacted all but 19 pages of the messages, including 14 separate emails between the city attorney and prosecutors on his staff who were handling the Spoerhase cases.

The few unredacted emails show a back-and-forth between Bergt and Spoerhase’s defense lawyer that appears to start mid-conversation, in which the defense attorney sends the city attorney pages of court documents outlining the charges against Baker’s business partner. Bergt responded to one of the emails by asking for a copy of the felony indictment in the state’s case against Spoerhase.

Bergt declined to say whether Baker pressured him to drop or reduce the city charges against Spoerhase, citing concerns that he could break legal rules protecting confidential communications between attorneys and clients.

In his first public statement about Demboski’s claims, Bergt provided a written statement last week.

“I can assure the public that at no time during my tenure as Municipal Attorney did I direct or attempt to influence criminal prosecutions for unethical or improper purpose,” he said. “I took very seriously my ethical obligation to my client — the Municipality of Anchorage — and always acted in its best interest.”

Demboski wrote that Baker also had tried to prevent her from hiring Hickel, the victim in Spoerhase’s cases. It didn’t work, Demboski wrote, and the new mayor announced Hickel as his new director of enterprise services.

City Hall employees said Bronson was well aware Spoerhase was awaiting trial and talked openly about the cases. Bronson said he knew he might one day be forced to “choose” between Hickel, his new executive, and Spoerhase, the business partner of his friend and adviser.

The conflict triggered a confrontation among the crowd at Bronson’s inauguration day celebration. In an email to an Office of Victims’ Rights attorney, Hickel wrote that Spoerhase appeared at the event on her first day on the job despite court orders to stay away from Hickel at all times.

“(Spoerhase) saw me, smirked, looked over at me, stood around for a few minutes and then engaged in conversation with Larry Baker,” Hickel wrote that night in the email.

Hickel said a friend asked Spoerhase to leave the event. After initially protesting, he departed, she wrote to the Office of Victims’ Rights. (The office is an agency of the state Legislature that provides legal services to crime victims and advocated for Hickel in the cases.) No charges were filed.

In October, Spoerhase was quietly appointed to a city advisory committee created by the mayor, despite his pending trial on the felony stalking charge. The mayor was aware of the appointment, according to the chairman, and Spoerhase remained on the committee until the Daily News began asking questions about it the week of Jan. 9, when he resigned.

“It’s Almost Magical to Behold”

Bronson once told a city Rotary Club that the best thing about coming to City Hall each day was watching his hand-picked team at work.

“We’ve got young, we’ve got old, and they work together,” Bronson said. “We’ve got a 21-year-old who’s virtually a genius and I watch him and Larry (Baker) work together day in and day out and it’s almost magical to behold.”

“And I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t run the city. Amy Demboski runs the city.”

Now, key pillars of Bronson’s team are either gone or threatening to sue him. Other executives and City Hall staff are actively seeking new jobs while attempting to stay out of the fray. All asked for anonymity, saying they feared retaliation if they spoke on the record.

After Demboski went public with her allegations, the city ombudsman warned that one of Bronson’s staff might have been spying on employees to see who was talking to investigators and referred the accusation to prosecutors for investigation. The ombudsman described the complaints city staff had lodged against a Bronson executive in a public memo.

Bronson’s young “genius,” Deputy Chief of Staff Brice Wilbanks, who is now 23, resigned in mid-January — as multiple City Hall workers alleged he had spoken openly about reviewing surveillance footage to see who might be whistleblowing to the ombudsman or Assembly members.

After quitting, Wilbanks immediately tried to rescind his resignation and demanded paid administrative leave in a letter from his lawyers. The letter accused the ombudsman of acting inappropriately and of denying Wilbanks due process and violating confidentiality — even though the ombudsman never publicly named Wilbanks as the accused executive.

At the time, Wilbanks did not respond to interview requests and one of his attorneys declined to comment. His attorneys did not return another phone call and request for comment on Thursday.

The city’s acting municipal attorney gave the mayor her letter of resignation on Jan. 23.

Many City Hall workers have continued to describe an ongoing atmosphere of low morale, fear and suspicion in the top levels of Anchorage government.

The ombudsman, Darrel Hess, said he is investigating six or seven open cases lodged by current and former employees. He also said that between November and the end of January, he’d received 12 to 14 complaints from current and former city employees, all raising a variety of concerns. Some made allegations of purposeful violations of the city code by staff. But by far, the most common concern raised by complainants is a hostile work environment — in unusually high numbers, he said.

Hess has been the ombudsman for 10 years.

“I would say in the last year, we’ve seen more allegations of a hostile work environment than the other nine years put together,” he said.

As Hess spoke to a Daily News reporter last week, he glanced at his email inbox and said, “As we’re speaking, I just got an email from a municipal employee alleging a hostile work environment.”

“I’d better respond to it,” he said.

by Lizzie Presser

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

Last month, Washington state Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, a Democrat, introduced a first-of-its-kind bill aimed at providing attorneys for parents who are facing hidden foster care, the subject of a ProPublica-New York Times Magazine investigation in December 2021. The story documented how, across the country, caseworkers who have not petitioned a court persuade parents to send their children to live in another home, often by threatening a foster placement if they refuse. The Washington bill unanimously passed out of the House Committee on Human Services, Youth and Early Learning on Friday.

The ProPublica-New York Times Magazine story exposed a shadow foster care system in which parents and their children have little or no legal protections. Caseworkers investigating allegations of mistreatment sometimes coerce parents to place their children with a relative, friend or family. Child welfare departments then often skirt their responsibility to keep families together or to monitor the informal arrangements, saving money in the process; the hidden system strips parents of access to free lawyers, judicial oversight and court-mandated services to attempt to reunite families.

The investigation focused on Cherokee County, North Carolina, and it revealed how children who had been diverted into hidden foster care there had suffered extreme consequences, like homelessness and alleged sexual abuse. Without any court oversight or access to legal representation, parents struggled to appeal the informal placements and reunify with their children.

The Washington state bill would provide parents with the option to consult by phone or videoconference with legal representation, through the Office of Public Defense, when the Department of Children, Youth and Families suggests a “voluntary placement agreement” to move a child to another home for up to 90 days. If after that consultation the parents request to have an attorney assigned to them, the Office of Public Defense would provide one. The state would roll out the program gradually, with full implementation by 2026.

The bill originated among the Keeping Families Together coalition, a group composed of child welfare stakeholders and activists. The coalition decided to focus its advocacy on providing pre-petition counsel because members wanted parents to be protected in the early stages of child welfare cases, when they often believe they have little choice but to comply with caseworkers’ requests in order to avoid a dependency hearing.

Between 2017 and 2021, an average of 538 children in Washington were removed from their homes through voluntary placement agreements each year. In about 35% of those cases, they were never returned home, according to data from the Department of Children, Youth and Families.

“Why wouldn’t parents be informed and why wouldn’t they be able to have counsel?” asked Shrounda Selivanoff, who leads Keeping Families Together and also directs public policy at Children’s Home Society of Washington. “That seems like the obvious step.”

This past summer, Keeping Families Together brought the idea to Ortiz-Self, who introduced the bill on Jan. 13. “Parents are at their most vulnerable when they are being asked to enter a voluntary placement agreement,” said Ortiz-Self, who, as a school counselor and mental health counselor, has witnessed the effects of family separation. “This seemed like a critical gap that needed to be fixed.”

Ortiz-Self is optimistic that the bill will continue to appeal to representatives across party lines as it makes its way through the House and the Senate. It is still unclear, though, how legislators will decide to allocate state funds this session and whether pre-petition counsel will be deemed a budget priority. The cost of the proposed legislation has yet to be assessed.

John Pollock, the coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, which works to ensure that parents are not deprived of their rights in child welfare cases, believes that the effort in Washington, if successful, could have countrywide implications. “This bill is unparalleled,” he said. “When you get one like this that a state passes, it can really help push change forward in other states.”

New recommendations around hidden foster care are also being considered at the national level. The Hidden Foster Care Working Group, a coalition advocating for hidden foster care reform, sent the ProPublica-New York Times Magazine article, along with other research and scholarship, to the federal Children’s Bureau, an office of the Administration for Children and Families, ahead of a meeting with the bureau this October. The working group shared its own statement of principles, which also recommends free counsel for parents.

At the meeting, Commissioner Aysha Schomburg, who heads the bureau, said that her team would release new guidance around hidden foster care to state agencies across the country, according to two participants. The Children’s Bureau has not provided additional information on the guidance it plans to issue or on whether it will include recommendations for due process for parents. The bureau did not return multiple requests for comment.

by Brett Murphy

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

On Wednesday, RowVaughn Wells joined the grim sorority of Black mothers who have buried their children after deadly police encounters and then pleaded for those deaths to spur reform. Parents of other victims were in attendance at the funeral — along with Vice President Kamala Harris and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Tyre Nichols, 29, was blocks away from Wells’ home when five Memphis, Tennessee, police officers pummeled him after a short foot chase in early January. He died three days later in the hospital, his face a mash of swollen flesh. The officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder.

The scene, captured on body camera and security video, was similar in many ways to the other encounters that Americans have seen for years — from Rodney King to George Floyd — before taking to the streets in protest. The situation had escalated from a traffic stop. The responding officers shouted conflicting commands that Nichols, an unarmed Black man, tried to obey. They tased and pepper sprayed him repeatedly before laying into him with their fists, feet and a metal baton. Most of this wasn’t mentioned in the initial report.

As he lay on the ground, trying to shield his face from the blows, Nichols called out for his mom. Floyd had begged for his mom too.

“No mother, no mother, no mother, should go through what I’m going through right now,” Wells told reporters during a press conference the day after Nichols died. She said she believed her son was sent from God to marshal police reform. Her attorney called on lawmakers to once again try to pass sweeping police reform laws like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which stalled in the Senate two years ago.

Wells now finds herself addressing the country in a gantlet of interviews and public appearances that could go on for months or even years. In other cases, parents in her position have learned, their time with the microphone can be fleeting.

Mona Hardin, whose son Ronald Greene died after a police chase outside Monroe, Louisiana, in 2019, is a veteran in the ranks of mothers who have calcified themselves and turned to activism, lobbying and media appearances.

For two years, Louisiana State Police leaders told Hardin that her son had died in a car crash. Then, in 2021, The Associated Press published videos showing troopers beating and dragging Greene across the ground. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded, blood splashed on his skin and clothes. “I beat the ever-living fuck out of him,” one officer said. Greene stopped breathing soon after.

I first met Hardin, a diminutive woman with a nonetheless commanding presence, while reporting on whistleblower retaliation in Louisiana law enforcement. Hardin was marching alongside another mother, whose son had also died in police custody, during a protest in downtown Baton Rouge. Hardin refers to their families as casualties in a “national genocide.”

On Tuesday, Hardin and I spoke on the phone about what’s happened since then, the ethics of watching police brutality videos and why some cases garner breathless media coverage while others — including Greene’s — seem to fade from the public eye. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the meetings you’ve been having after you heard about the Nichols case. Who are you talking to?

These are the other families, and their kids were also killed by police. We call and check on each other. These meetings are for all the families to get together and we talk about individual cases. It’s basically how we help each other heal. There are a lot of families still looking for help. They have yet to have anyone looking at their situations. People are pissed and everyone’s trying to keep it under control.

We let each other know there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. Each family has been thrown into this. We give each other suggestions for emotional healing, where to go to — programs that help. We help them dig for help, wherever they’re at.

This sounds like a full-time job. Do you think you have a responsibility to be in these conversations?

It’s a must. I went back and forth with my own therapist. A lot of times you come out of these situations shallow on the other end. With the families, we all know: There’s no describing the pain. We can finish each other’s sentences. The connection is there because of the grief that we share identically, the sorrow, the heartaches, the sleepless nights. Our families, what our families go through. It’s not just the mothers and fathers. It’s the sisters and brothers too.

Did you watch the videos from Memphis?

Yes I did. I had to stop at one point. But out of respect for him — and for what they did to him — I had to go back and see it and finish it. I’m still struggling with a lot of others.

It’s just like with Ronnie: The lawyers told us we don’t have to see the video. While we were there, down the hallway, we could hear Ronnie’s screams on the tape. We were just in the other room. After more than an hour, a lawyer came in and said, “Do you want to?” I told my daughter that we have to. And I’m glad I did.

Why are you glad you did?

I had to see him take his final breaths. I was literally in a trance, when I think of it. My eyes get wide. I’m staring at the walls right now just to focus. It was horrific. He didn’t stand a chance. He did not stand a chance.

On the video in Memphis, one of the officers can be heard saying something like, “He was going for your gun.” That kind of thing seems common. The initial press release was also very similar to the one after George Floyd was killed. [At the funeral, Nichols’ stepfather called it “lies, deceit, trying to cover it up.”]

That stands out. They’re all repetitive. When you look at all the cases, you just skim over the press releases and police statements because you already know what you’re going to read. Instantly you know if this is a cover-up. They’re trying to justify what they have done and what they're about to do.

I can say for Ronnie it would have just stayed that way. [Louisiana State Police initially said he had died in a car crash.] If it wasn’t for the videos and the whistleblowers, my God, I would have gone to my grave grief-stricken thinking that Ronnie crashed into a tree and died. That’s what I would have thought if they were successful.

Nichols’ family has invoked Emmett Till, a case that became infamous because of the open casket picture. What do you think of the idea that there is a responsibility — The New York Times called it a civic duty — to watch these videos?

It's suggested that those who are emotionally drained should not burden themselves more. Do what your body tells you. We have families that have to heal.

But for me, oh hell yeah. The outside public needs to see this; what’s happening with state-condoned killings; how people vote; how they see the officers; how everything unfolds. Without the videos, testimony from whistleblowers, it will stay buried.

When we first met, you chose your words carefully. Now, I’ve noticed, a little less so. Is there a person that you feel like you’re supposed to be? How do you navigate that role as it’s changing?

They told us we had checks and balances with the law firms that represent us. But with all this public relations, my question is, where’s Ronnie’s case? I saw slowly that the PR was not really for him — the one who was beat up and killed. I think the corruption is all over with a lot of other entities I never saw coming.

What do you mean by that?

They keep saying, “We’re right here.” Then another year passes. Then it’s, “Now’s not the time.” Another year passes. “Now’s not the time.” And another year passes. All I can tell you is that the anger and the anxiety when you last saw me, I’m 1,000 times beyond that now.

Yesterday I had a call with Troy Carter [Democratic congressman from Louisiana] and he invited me to the White House to meet with Biden.

What do you think about that invitation?

It’s another photo-op. But you have to take every opportunity that comes up. Biden called Tyre’s family and invited them. I’m not impressed with anybody until changes are made. I’m not impressed by the suits you wear or positions you hold. I’m pretty beat up and sickened by it. Everybody has a job but nobody takes their job seriously. Other than the reporters and whistleblowers and families and activists. Those are the only minds of determination I see. The resistance is from all those above.

Have you grown kind of cynical? I was with you in Washington when you met with the congressional committee right after the original Floyd bill failed. What’s happened since then?

I wouldn’t use the word cynical. I have to grab every grain I can. At the indictments, they were acting like it was a big deal. [In December, a grand jury indicted five officers involved in Greene’s death, with charges ranging from negligent homicide to malfeasance in office and obstruction of justice.] This shouldn’t be a big deal. This should have been done a while ago. I was so pissed I couldn’t even talk when the indictments came. It’s a murder and you end up with these piss-poor charges.

We still can’t trust no one. We’re not represented. Nobody is taking the death of my son seriously. This May will be four years since his death. And to still not know what will happen. The FBI investigations? Will they bring out all these top brass that were allowed to retire or promoted?

You mentioned that you watched RowVaughn Wells speak at the press conference the other day. What did you make of her statements?

When you see that mom up there, that’s us. Over and damn over again. She’s repeating what all of us have said. It’s so hurtful and heartbreaking. It’s another family that’s been added to the list. I’m glad that it got national attention — I am so glad — like they all should have been.

One thing she said that I identified with was: The only way I can move forward is knowing that God taking Tyre might make a difference in the world. That’s how she has to accept it. I feel that because the only way I can get past my anger was to know that God has Ronnie. God had to take you for a reason and maybe changes will happen behind this.

I had to put myself there, in that way of thinking, in order not to focus on the fact that my family has become a statistic. I can’t even think of my son as my son. Mentally I’ll shut down. It’s the same reason I cannot put his name in the past tense.

There is a sense of numbness in the communities to where this is what’s expected. It’s sickening that it takes another killing of a young black man to push the hands of fairness across the board and say OK this needs to stop. This mass genocide in communites of color. It takes another killing. How many more before we actually move the needle and make those changes?

Are you worried about becoming desensitized by going through the motions so often with these other families?

I don’t think desensitized is the word. In order to be focused, the numbness sets in. As me and the kids talk, we say, “Damn, I can’t believe we got through this.” We have to literally lean on each other. When one shuts down the other picks up. Desensitized might be a good word actually. But we always resurface.

I have to say, where are the officials at the White House? They’re the ones desensitized. Why doesn’t this bear enough meaning to make legislative changes. How can you uphold any part of the Constitution when this is going on? How can you address what’s wrong in other countries when this is happening here?

We’re waiting for change but change doesn’t come. I pray that Tyre Nichols will be the last and change comes from that.

Do you believe that it will?

I have to. I was hoping that the minute Ronnie hit the news. But it dropped to silence. Every time it was on the news and then not, my heart sank. There was no assistance. Absolutely nothing. And you know what, we still have absolutely nothing. We have a legal team but we are still left alone. We have absolutely nothing. No guidance. No reassurance. I hate that.

I’m just happy the Nichols family does. This is how it should happen; how she’s been received; how it went public immediately. Nothing should be under secrecy. If only we could have had that recognition.

So you see how the Memphis case was handed as a step forward for transparency?

Oh my gosh, yes. When people gather and stage protests, if that’s what you have to do, then do it, damn it. I agree with Tyre’s mom, though. We don’t want craziness. That’s not how we do things. Hell yeah we’re mad. We’re mad as hell.

When you meet Tyre’s mother in Washington, have you thought about what you might say to her?

I'm glad you brought that up. In the past, when we met each other, we just hug and hold and sort of just melt into each other. That’s how it was when I met with Katrina Mateen. [Mateen’s 15-year-old son was shot and killed by police in Gulfport, Mississippi, last October.] There are no words other than “I love you. I’m so sorry.”

How can you take it past that when it’s so indescribable, the pain? We identify. There’s a lot of hurt in that young mother to where you have to be careful. You have to be very, very gentle with that. I know I’ll hug her. I know I have to. That’s what we all do.

by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press

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

JACKSON, Miss. — The freeze of early 2021 wasn’t the origin of Jackson, Mississippi’s water system collapse. But the winter storm introduced the country to Jackson’s aging and improperly maintained pipes and water plants, which failed and left residents without clean water for over a month.

The crisis surged back in the summer of 2022, leaving residents without clean water for two months and drawing comparisons to Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoning scandal, another banner example of America’s ruinous infrastructure systems. Here, as in Flint, the federal government stepped in: In November, the Department of Justice appointed a federal manager to take control of the beleaguered utility, and less than a month later, Congress approved $600 million exclusively for the city’s water system.

But the rescue effort is already running up against the realities of local politics, reflecting historic tensions between Jackson and the rest of the state. For decades, state and city leaders have clashed over who should control local spending, services and infrastructure. Now, both the federal manager and the city’s mayor are warning that state politicians are attempting to take over Jackson’s water system, along with hundreds of millions in federal funds meant for repairing it.

At the heart of the feud is Senate Bill 2889, introduced in mid-January by a lawmaker who says his only goal is to ensure the Mississippi capital’s water system is restored.

The legislation would create a new regional water-authority board to oversee the system’s water, sewer and drainage systems. The governor and lieutenant governor would appoint a majority of the board. Over the years, state leaders including the current governor, Tate Reeves, have expressed skepticism about whether Jackson is capable of managing its own affairs. Federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, have also questioned the city’s management of its water and wastewater systems.

The latest move in the Legislature worries the manager, Ted Henifin, who says a regional authority could allow improvements and debt relief to flow out of Jackson and into suburban utilities that join the entity. “I believe the $600+ million in federal funding has created a monster in the Mississippi Legislature,” Henifin told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica in a written statement last week. A federal judge appointed Henifin to the position of interim third-party manager in late November.

Ted Henifin was appointed by a federal judge to shepherd Jackson’s water system out of crisis. (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press)

Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba built on Henifin’s critique Monday. “It is a colonial power taking over our city. It is plantation politics. I have not been shy in the ways that I have referenced this,” he said.

The mayor highlighted a litany of other proposed legislation that together would give Mississippi authority over segments of Jackson’s police and court systems. He called the legislative proposals a “unified attack” against the city’s autonomy.

“It reminds me of apartheid,” he said. “They dictate our leadership, put a military force over us and we’re just supposed to pay taxes to the king.”

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. David Parker, R-Olive Branch, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, whose office helped design the measure, strongly denied that attempts to divert federal funds were behind the legislation. After the news organizations asked Parker about some critics’ concerns, he and Hosemann agreed that the state should recoup none of the federal funds, and Parker pledged to introduce an amendment that would explicitly prohibit the use of the funds outside Jackson’s city limits.

Henifin was unmoved, saying he was concerned that amendments could be overwritten later, and that a regional utility was the wrong solution for Jackson in any case.

“We Need an Arbitrator”

If the Senate bill becomes law, the Mississippi Capitol Region Utility Act would effectively give the state authority over Jackson’s water system once the federal manager’s authority lapses.

That’s because it would grant the governor power to appoint three of the nine members, and the lieutenant governor two, giving statewide leaders, who are white, majority control over water, wastewater and stormwater utilities in Jackson, whose population is 82% Black. The mayor would get four appointments, including one that he would have to select in “consultation” with the mayor of nearby Byram, majority Black, and another chosen with the mayor of Ridgeland, a demographically mixed suburb. The board would then elect a president to formally lead the new regional utility.

In an interview, Henifin said he believes Jackson’s system requires judicial and federal oversight to prevent the mismanagement of critical infrastructure funds, which he estimates would take years to properly spend.

“I think at the end of the day we need an arbitrator, and I think that’s a federal judge in this case.” He said he believes this oversight should be extended to protect the federal dollars, estimating that five years of some form of oversight should be sufficient to lock in the necessary contracts and investments.

He later said that legislative interference might threaten efforts to procure a contract to address the water system’s crucial staffing shortages because the prospect of a change in the water utility’s leadership while a long-term contract is still being executed could scare off large corporations.

Although Parker and Hosemann were complimentary of Henifin in interviews with the Mississippi Free Press, Henifin says neither of the parties involved has ever consulted him. Indeed, he said that Hosemann’s office rebuffed his attempt to set up a meeting. Hosemann acknowledged that he had not spoken with Henifin yet but said he intended to “shortly.”

“I Wanted to Be Very Sympathetic”

Parker said that although he lives 200 miles from Jackson, he did experience the city’s water crisis firsthand.

“I have a daughter that I live with during the legislative session,” he said. “I’ve spent numerous times walking down to the swimming pool and dipping water into a cooler, taking it back up to the toilet to flush. We live in an apartment complex that’s had to put portable facilities on the ground floor to allow people to go to the bathroom.”

“I wanted to be very sympathetic and compassionate to the feelings of the mayor and other people who have spent a long time trying to seek answers to this problem,” Parker said. “So in setting up a board that would be overseeing the water and sewer system, my idea was to give the mayor four appointments on a nine-member board.”

He said he believed the governor and lieutenant governor should appoint a majority of the board’s members because Mississippi’s failure to “provide the basic needs and services that our people deserve is reflected 100% back on the governor and the people in this building.”

Sen. David Parker, R-Olive Branch, introduced Senate Bill 2889. He said his only goal is to ensure the Mississippi capital’s water system is restored. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo)

Parker said he initially believed that residents in Ridgeland drew water from Jackson’s treatment plant. Though the facility itself is located in Ridgeland, reporters told Parker that Ridgeland does not currently receive water from Jackson’s water system; they also told him that parts of Ridgeland may use Jackson’s greater sewage system. He then suggested the bill may have included that city’s mayor in light of that fact.

He expressed surprise over Henifin’s comments and strongly denied any intent to divert money away from Jackson.

“There is no intent on my part to stack a board in any way, shape or form that would give preferential treatment to the fringe areas of the water authority,” he said. “My hope would be that if the majority of the water authority is within the city of Jackson, I would hope that the governor, lieutenant governor and mayor would put people on the board from those geographic areas.”

Parker said he intends to speak with Henifin as his bill makes its way through the Senate.

“Crafting something like this is an extreme challenge.”

The bill gives the surrounding municipalities a path to join the new capital water authority, transferring their assets and debts to it, a common feature of regional utilities.

The news organizations asked Parker if any part of SB 2889 prevented that regionalization from allowing federal funds to be dispersed to utilities outside Jackson. Parker said he would look into that question. A day later, Hosemann said he had agreed with Parker that they should address any gaps that might allow money to be spent outside of the authority itself.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann’s office helped craft SB 2889, which would allow the governor and lieutenant governor to appoint the majority of a newly created regional water-authority board. (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press) “It Is Plantation Politics”

Lumumba said the feud over spending the federal funds highlights the friction between the state’s majority-white leaders and the majority-Black capital city.

“It is plantation politics,” Lumumba said. “It’s consistent with this paternalistic relationship that the state of Mississippi believes that it maintains with the city of Jackson.”

Lumumba compared it to the 1% Sales Tax Commission, a system the Legislature designed to assert control over spending derived from a special sales tax Jackson maintains to fund infrastructure projects.

The mayor identified other bills as part of what he considers an assault on the city’s right to self-determination, including bills to expand the Capitol Police’s territory. Another bill would create an independent court system of unelected judges and prosecutors for that same area. Lawmakers said the legislation was needed to respond to a rise in crime rates.

“It’s all a unified attack,” he said.

In a response to additional inquiries, Hosemann’s Deputy Chief of Staff Leah Rupp Smith said they defer to Parker on the legislation but “share a desire with all parties to find a long-term solution,” and she said that a regional utility authority “has been viable in other parts of our state.” They said they planned to meet with Henifin the week after next.

Parker said his conversations with the mayor have been “productive and congenial.” He added that they “share an interest in ensuring all people served by the systems have access to safe and reliable water and wastewater services at a fair and reasonable cost.”

Lumumba called bills to transfer authority in Jackson to the state “plantation politics.” (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press)

In recent years, Lumumba has clashed repeatedly with Hosemann over Jackson’s autonomy. “The last time I met with him, he said that I needed to look at a possible relationship with the state of Mississippi, because ‘what did I think, that Biden was gonna write me a check?’”

“I recently told him I do, and he did,” the mayor said of Biden.

Senior reporter Kayode Crown of the Mississippi Free Press contributed reporting.