ProPublica

by Jennifer Oldham for ProPublica

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

Colorado’s snowcapped Rockies towered in the distance on a crisp April day as firefighter Emilio Palestro used a torch to ignite damp prairie grass within view of a nearby farmhouse and a suburban neighborhood.

Propelled by a breeze, orange flames crackled up a ditch bank, devouring a thick mat of dead grass, cornhusks and weeds. It was neither too windy, nor too humid, nor too hot — a rare goldilocks moment for firefighters to safely clear irrigation ditches of weeds, grasses and brush that can block the flow of water and spread wildfire.

“At this time of year, it’s a race against what we call green-up,” said Seth McKinney, fire management officer for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, as eye-stinging smoke curled over newly emerging shoots of grass nourished by a wet winter. “We are threading that needle to find the right time in between a rainstorm, red flag conditions” — when winds, temperatures and dry conditions magnify wildfire risk — “and snow melt.”

McKinney is trying to prevent conflagrations like the Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, which killed two people and incinerated 1,084 residences and seven businesses in December 2021. That fire ignited in overgrown grasslands crisscrossed by unkempt ditches, which together spread flames into urban areas with unprecedented speed, according to scientific simulations and eyewitnesses.

The out-of-control Marshall Fire raged through parts of Boulder County, Colorado, in 2021. (RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images) The Marshall Fire completely destroyed this Superior, Colorado, neighborhood, which borders a large swath of open space that did little to slow or redirect the flames (Chet Strange)

The controlled use of fire by expert crews is widely considered the most effective way to reduce the dangerous build-up of grasses and other vegetation that fuel larger conflagrations, experts agree.

But it has become nearly impossible to conduct controlled burns like the one McKinney’s crew set last month. A combination of overly broad restrictions, erratic weather patterns and public resistance have left piles of dead branches and shrubs sitting in open spaces for months.

Figuring out how to overcome these barriers, prevalent throughout the West, is crucial to addressing the fire risk, say land managers whose homes were also threatened by the Marshall Fire.

“We’ve done a lot of work in the forests about what to do to reduce fire risk and anticipate fire behavior,” said Katharine Suding, a plant community ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who is working to update fire modeling of prairie vegetation. “We need to do that in the grasslands.”

The restrictions and a burdensome planning process often postpone or indefinitely delay controlled burns. Firefighters must complete multipart plans and comply with rules that can differ in each of Colorado’s 64 counties. Large burns on federal, state or county land require permits from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to ensure they don’t violate federal clean-air regulations. And in some areas, burns are off-limits from November through February because air pollution is already high.

The end result is that only a small fraction of what needs to be burned ends up being burned. In 2020, firefighters proposed burning 312,943 piles of branches and logs throughout the state but were able to do only about 18% of that work, records show. Of 88 burns proposed to consume vegetation across a large number of acres — in a forest or grassy area — only 55% were completed that year.

Boulder County firefighters work on a prescribed burn. Only a fraction of the burns that firefighters proposed conducting in 2020 were actually carried out. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Extreme weather and climate change also are getting in the way of executing prescribed burns, documents obtained by ProPublica under the Colorado Open Records Act show. In 2022, a prescribed fire driven by high winds and tinder-dry vegetation morphed into the largest fire in New Mexico’s history, with devastating consequences for residents.

In Colorado, residents grew wary of controlled burns after one escaped in 2012 and killed three people. The Lower North Fork Fire, near the foothill community of Conifer, burned 24 structures and 4,140 acres. Afterward, prescribed burning ceased as state lawmakers enacted stricter rules governing the practice.

Only about 1 in 1,000 prescribed burns spirals out of control, statistics show, but the ones that do have added to public opposition.

The push-pull of fire prevention and community opposition could soon come to a head as the U.S. Forest Service, Western governors and Colorado counties ramp up prescribed burning to rid overgrown forests and open spaces of a century worth of fuel, aiming to better protect nearby communities. Federal fire simulations found 500,000 buildings could now be exposed to wildfire in a single year.

Public lands managers hope to treat 50 million acres with controlled burns and mechanical thinning in the next decade.

After Larry Donner, a retired fire chief in Boulder, and his wife purchased their house in 1991, they installed noncombustible siding, double-paned windows and a fire-resistant roof, and they replaced a wood deck with flagstone. Still, it burned to the ground in the Marshall Fire. He attributed the fire’s spread to poor maintenance of open spaces near communities.

“Thirty years ago, they mowed 20 feet around subdivisions, or they grazed and plowed grasslands — then they planted houses and they stopped,” said Donner, who gestured toward grassy Davidson Mesa as he stood in front of his partially reconstructed Louisville home. “Fuel reduction is a big thing for me. If you can keep fire out of neighborhoods, you can better protect those neighborhoods.”

First image: Former Boulder Fire Chief Larry Donner in front of the home he’s rebuilding in Louisville, Colorado. Second image: The Harper Lake neighborhood in Louisville was almost completely destroyed by the Marshall Fire. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica) A New Understanding of Grassland Risk

Coloradans have always understood the threat of forest fires. The state ranks first among eight Western states for the number of acres at high risk for fire, or “firesheds,” federal models show.

The Marshall Fire, however, made many residents realize that the state’s vast and populous grasslands — abutting its largest metro areas on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains — are also a wildfire threat. Cities from Fort Collins, in the north, to Pueblo, in the south, where most Coloradans live, are surrounded by thousands of square miles of flat, open space that evolved to burn every five to 15 years.

The fireshed around Boulder and the Arvada fireshed to the south are among the 10 most at-risk zones from Wyoming to Nebraska, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Boulder ranked 41st in the western U.S. out of 7,688 such hazardous areas.

Around the Denver metro area, grassland acres outnumber forest acres, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis conducted for ProPublica using wildland fire data compiled by federal agencies.

This spring, wildfires in grasslands and brush on the eastern slope of the Rockies, known as the Front Range, have already forced evacuations and concert cancellations in suburban enclaves.

“The urgency of fire in the county, whether in the mountains or on the plains, is very real,” said Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann during a February meeting.

In the forests that blanket Boulder County’s foothills, residents are accustomed to smoke in the air. Firefighters have burned vegetation there, primarily in the woods, since 1997. But for every successful burn, there are just as many that don’t happen, public records obtained by ProPublica show.

Each year, the Boulder County wildland team and the city of Boulder’s Fire-Rescue unit request smoke permits — required when burns on public lands could cause air quality issues — from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division. Many are for county- and city-managed open spaces. Some foothill areas are grassy, like the valley floor below.

The permits require contingency plans, notification of nearby residents and analysis of the vegetation, and are approved only when winds are deemed less likely to send smoke toward homes.

Burns aren’t allowed when the state issues air pollution emergencies or alerts for the area. And the number of high-ozone days along the northern Front Range and in the Denver metro area is increasing. The region is out of compliance with national air quality standards.

A prescribed burn outside of Boulder. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Brian Anacker, senior manager of science and climate resilience for the city of Boulder, said his community is “trying to accelerate our prescribed fire program.” But there are “barriers upon barriers” that stop that from happening.

Regulations can also work at cross purposes: Winter weather often offers the lowest risk of a prescribed burn getting out of control, but that’s also when smoke below 6,400 feet can most affect the region’s poor air quality.

Firefighters and state air quality regulators have begun experimenting with allowing burns in the metro Denver area during winter months.

“We are starting to look for more and more of what we would consider off windows,” said Brian Oliver, wildland fire division chief for the city of Boulder.

For example, Boulder County firefighters asked to burn up to 40 acres on Hall Ranch during snow season using “additional experimental provisions.” These included burning between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on days when the air is clear, discussing the timing with the state meteorologist and advising state air pollution staff at least a day in advance.

Firefighter David Buchanan last year asked regulators for permission to burn during the “high-pollution season,” when it’s typically prohibited. He said that granting the permit would allow crews to torch grassy areas and saplings when temperatures are low and there is more moisture on the ground. Doing so would minimize smoke, he added, because fuels burn “swiftly and efficiently.” State regulators granted the permit.

Boulder County’s challenges were echoed by federal watchdogs and Western governors. The Government Accountability Office and state leaders this spring urged the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider regulations that curtail prescribed burning in areas that aren’t in compliance with air quality standards.

Land managers told the GAO that these rules “could limit their ability” to rid high-risk areas of vegetation, investigators said in a March report. The GAO added that controlled fires could lead to less smoke overall because they help prevent future wildfires.

Both the rising interest in controlled burns and the difficulty in conducting them are apparent at the state’s Division of Fire Prevention & Control. The agency, created after the escaped Lower North Fork Fire, requires firefighters to complete a “prescription” that assesses 23 risk factors, including how quickly fuels will burn, how likely the fire is to escape, how smoke can be managed and how far the fire is from homes and businesses.

Ensuring the public understands that there’s a detailed, scientific process behind prescribed burning is key to gaining support for more controlled burns, firefighters and land managers agree.

Also included in the prescription are optimal weather conditions, including a minimum temperature for burns in grass and brush of 30 degrees and a maximum of 80 degrees; relative humidity between 5% and 40%; and wind speed between 2 mph and 15 mph.

Such conditions are becoming rarer.

Snowstorms, fire weather watches and red flag warnings — alerts sent out when dry air and high, gusty winds create conditions that could rapidly spread fires — forestalled prescribed burns this spring in the city of Boulder. Burning is prohibited when these warnings, issued by the National Weather Service, are in effect.

Sometimes, all the conditions align: The Forest Service said in May it was able to burn approximately 25,000 piles of dead vegetation this winter across the Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests. The federal agency, along with other partners, also intentionally burned more than 110 acres in this region this spring.

Grassland Wildfire Risk Foreshadowed in 2009

Residents on the valley floor in Boulder County remain leery of controlled burns, and many are also angry at what they view as a lack of urgency to address the fire threat surrounding dense suburbs.

“Our neighborhood is like a ship at sea in grasslands,” Collen Callin, a Superior resident whose home survived the Marshall Fire, said following a March community forum attended by Gov. Jared Polis and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, both Democrats.

“If they don’t mitigate them, I’m to the point that I get so stressed with winds I will probably leave,” added Callin, who handed Neguse a flier that detailed how the blaze climbed from grasslands onto wood fences that “created firebrands that were blown into our yards and caught homes on fire.”

Collen Callin, center, speaks with Rep. Joe Neguse, right, during a community forum for victims of the Marshall Fire. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Land managers are urging patience. Officials are updating Community Wildfire Protection Plans to weigh options for managing the fuels but warn the process will take a year to complete.

The last plan was made 12 years ago and acknowledged wildfire risk isn’t limited to mountainous communities. “Plains residents are also at risk,” authors wrote, citing lessons from the 2009 Olde Stage Fire.

In hindsight, that blaze was eerily similar to the Marshall Fire — severe winds and “large evacuations of residents and their animals just after the holiday season.” But unlike the Marshall Fire, it slowed as the winds died down, allowing firefighters to control it before it burned homes.

Still, it prompted planners to identify a “grassland wildland-urban interface,” though they didn’t offer ideas to address the risk to communities on the plains.

The plan that’s being developed will have to address this issue, but the reality is the options are few — mow, graze or burn — and none are easy to carry out or guaranteed to be effective.

“We have 343 miles of agricultural property boundaries we manage,” said Stefan Reinold, resource management division manager for Boulder County Parks and Open Space. “Are we going to mow a 100-foot buffer twice a year? Is that really going to stop a fire — or are embers going to make it into neighborhoods?”

Residents listen during a community forum for victims of the Marshall Fire, attended by Gov. Jared Polis and Rep. Joe Neguse. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Millions of dollars in state and federal grants are available for mitigation work on open-space grasslands. At the March community forum in Superior, state officials were asked if they would consider legislation to aid communities in deciding which methods are the most effective. Lawmakers said they will discuss their approach this summer.

Firefighters would like prescribed burns to be part of the plan.

“Prescribed fire is the best way to keep grasslands healthy and vibrant,” Meg Halford, senior forest health planner for Boulder County, said at a Jan. 30 town hall. “What is scary is that we would do it behind your communities — not that it can’t be controlled.”

One day this spring, Buchanan, the Boulder County firefighter who’d requested out-of-season burn permits, slapped out errant wisps of flame on a ditch bank with a “mud flap on a stick.” The oddball device worked well to mop up the burn as Sheriff’s Office fire manager McKinney described how he hopes to tamp down the stigma that surrounds prescribed fire.

His team would like to increase agricultural burning, which is exempt from federal smoke management regulations. Doing more ditch burns would get residents more accustomed to the sight of intentionally set flames and smoke, McKinney said.

“The goal is to normalize it so people can see the conditions are good,” he said. “And they know we’ve had moisture recently and the winds aren’t high, so we must be lighting it for a reason.”

A prescribed burn outside of Boulder. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)

Fire Revealed Danger Posed by Ditches in Boulder County Suburbs

Like other climate-fueled wildfires, the Marshall Fire revealed new fire threats that have emerged as the West heats up and dries out. Among them: the irrigation ditches that water crops across the region and grow thick with trees, grasses and other vegetation.

Until the Marshall Fire, Amy Willhite viewed vegetation in ditches just as an impediment to water flows, not as a fire risk. That fact that overgrown ditches could help spread wildfire into communities “was just a big shock,” said Willhite, a senior water resources project manager who until weeks ago oversaw the city of Boulder’s shares in about 60 ditches.

Willhite and firefighters this spring walked unkempt canals as they began a first-ever assessment of the risk they present.

A black-spotted woodpecker scolded overhead as Willhite reached a charred piece of prairie at the end of a line of 21 sedan-sized piles of gray branches and brush. Here, firefighters had begun a controlled burn of a mound in March, she said. They were forced to stop when the wind blew smoke toward homes to the east.

“The plan was to burn them all,” Willhite said of the piles. “It was really disappointing — there is huge caution used when they do these things.”

It’s often not publicly known who owns the ditches — ownership is divvied up into hundreds of shares that are tied to water rights, and shares are passed down among families — which makes it difficult to pinpoint who is responsible for their maintenance. The records are not public. Organizations that manage the canals, called ditch companies, are not required to remove the fuel that they clear and stack alongside the ditches — often on land they do not own, Willhite said.

As a result of these and other limitations, firefighters burned only a fraction of several ditches, records obtained by ProPublica show, with the number of miles ranging from 3.21 (in two ditches) in 2021 to 6.7 (in five ditches) in 2016 — out of about 113 miles of field ditches the city maintains in collaboration with its agriculture tenants.

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by Stephen Engelberg and Jesse Eisinger

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

Our reporting on the relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and Republican megadonor, has touched off a national conversation about the ethics of the Supreme Court. Other news organizations have stepped up their scrutiny of the high court, and our stories have been cited thousands of times in editorials, op-eds and Congress.

The lavish travel Crow funded and the previously undisclosed real estate deal and tuition arrangements between Crow and Thomas that our reporting revealed has become fodder for the dueling narratives of American politics.

“Today’s report continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in response to our story about the tuition payments. “I hope that the Chief Justice understands that something must be done — the reputation and credibility of the Court is at stake.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., shot back at a recent hearing of the committee: “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court. There’s a very selective outrage here.”

The furor seems destined to continue. And so we thought it might be useful if we said a bit more about the origins, timing and criticisms of our journalism on this subject.

Editors at ProPublica have been thinking about the need to look more closely at the state and federal judiciary for years. One byproduct of our gridlocked legislature is that judges have come to play a larger and larger role in people’s lives, from health care policy to affirmative action to abortion.

Last year, we worked with our partners at The Lever on a story revealing that a wealthy industrialist had gifted $1.6 billion to a group run by Leonard Leo, a key player in assembling the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Reporting in recent years has shown Leo running dark money groups focused on influencing the judiciary.

We admired the work done by our colleagues, notably at The Wall Street Journal, which found federal judges were ruling on a surprising number of cases in which they had a financial interest. A New York Times piece on what appeared to be a coordinated effort to befriend and influence Supreme Court justices also caught our eye.

But the federal judiciary still struck us as a relatively under-scrutinized branch of our democracy. So late last year, we assigned Justin Elliott, Josh Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski to take a look. The team filed a raft of public information requests for records on courts across the country.

Early on, the ProPublica team decided to focus on the highest court in the land and began by scouring the annual disclosure forms filed by the justices. Research in some obscure corners of the internet brought to light evidence that Thomas had made at least one trip on Crow’s plane that had not been disclosed. As the team dug deeply over several months, the reporters amassed a detailed picture of what turned out to be decades of unreported trips the two had taken in the United States and overseas.

The weekend after that story appeared, a reader called one of the reporters to say Crow may have renovated Thomas’ mother’s house in Savannah, Georgia. A cursory search of online records showed that Thomas’ mother’s home had, in fact, been sold to a limited liability corporation that we quickly linked to Crow. The reporters flew to Savannah, collected public records from the appropriate local government offices and interviewed neighbors. Once we established that the justice had sold properties to Crow and confirmed Thomas had never disclosed the deal, we published.

Soon after that second piece appeared, the reporters turned to another tip that came in after the initial story published: that Crow had paid tuition for Mark Martin, Thomas’ grandnephew, who the justice had legal custody of and has said publicly he was raising as his own son.

The tip was that Crow had paid tuition at two private boarding schools. One of the schools had spent a period in bankruptcy, and the reporters reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings. They found a bank statement that showed Crow had paid a month’s tuition for Martin. A former administrator at the Georgia school who had access to school financial information told us in an on-the-record interview that Crow had paid a full year of tuition. He also said that Crow had told him that Crow also paid Martin’s tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia.

Crow has issued statements about his relationship with Thomas that we’ve included in our stories. He acknowledged that he’d extended “hospitality” to the Thomases, but he said that Thomas never asked for any of it and it was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.” He said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house to preserve it for posterity. And in response to questions about the tuition payments, his office said, “Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth.” He has not disputed any of the facts in our reporting.

The timing of the stories have prompted some to wonder if ProPublica had the information about the trips, the house and the school tuition in hand at the outset and spaced out publication to achieve maximum impact. We did not.

This story developed as much investigative journalism does — organically, with one finding leading to the next. Tips like those that pushed the Thomas story forward are essential to our reporting. It’s why ProPublica publishes the email addresses of its editorial staffers to help sources connect with us. (If you have a tip for our newsroom, we have details about how to get in touch.)

Our reporting on the courts continues, and we stand ready to look into questions about judges or justices of any ideological stripe.

The response to our investigation has been generally positive, with leading commentators on legal affairs using it to examine and explain why the nation’s highest court has no binding ethical code. As is always the case, our work also has its critics.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has also criticized the reporting on Thomas in a series of columns by James Taranto, its editorial features editor.

Boiled down, his argument is that Thomas was not required to disclose the tuition for Martin and his omission of the sale of his mother’s house from his forms was an innocuous mistake. The experts we quoted, Taranto and several other critics contend, simply got it wrong.

We understand that experts may hold differing points of view about complicated subjects. It’s why we reached out to ethics lawyers who had served in Republican and Democratic administrations. We specifically sought out attorneys with expertise on the Ethics in Government Act, the federal disclosure law that binds justices and many other federal officials. We also talked to retired and currently serving federal judges about how they would handle comparable situations. Their views are reflected in our stories.

Every ethics expert we have spoken with said Thomas was required by law to disclose the gifts or transactions that we’d found.

In his columns, Taranto has used an increasingly inaccurate shorthand to refer to our work. He began by saying we had committed a “sloppy reporting error” in our story about the real estate transaction. Later, he said we were “comically incompetent” and described our story on the real estate transaction as “error-filled.”

Despite his assertions, none of Taranto’s columns cited an error in our stories. We sent an email asking him to identify the multiple facts he believes we’ve gotten wrong. He sent back a link to his first column. When we replied that the piece did not cite a single factual misstatement from our story, he ghosted us.

Perhaps more importantly, we sent detailed questions to Thomas and invited him to explain his decisions. He declined to do so but issued a statement the day after the first story appeared that said he and his wife, Ginni, counted Harlan and Kathy Crow as “among our dearest friends.” Thomas said that early in his tenure on the court, he “sought guidance from my colleagues and others on the judiciary and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

The debate over that statement continues in Congress and in public. Neither Crow, Thomas nor anyone else has identified a factual error in any of the stories. Thomas has not responded to any of the questions we sent about each of our subsequent stories, and he has not commented in public since his initial statement.

by Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon

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

On April 18, HomeVestors of America executives held a virtual meeting for its nearly 1,150 franchisees. The purpose: Alert local “We Buy Ugly Houses” operations about a forthcoming ProPublica investigation into their business tactics.

“It is not going to be flattering for us,” HomeVestors CEO David Hicks warned.

Our reporting found HomeVestors franchisees who used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling. The franchisees were trained by HomeVestors to look for signs of desperation and pounce on so-called distressed sellers. Many used legal tactics, described as predatory by five experts, to trap sellers in below-market deals.

A HomeVestors spokesperson said in a statement that ProPublica’s reporting examined a small fraction of the more than 71,400 homes bought by its franchises since 2016. "We do not discriminate or target our advertising to any specific demographic groups based on age, race, or socio-economic status,” the company said. It has removed several franchises and is investigating some cases identified by ProPublica to “determine appropriate action.”

After we first contacted the company in early March, a former FBI spokesperson who specializes in “crisis and special situations” and “reputation management” began answering questions on their behalf.

Hicks, through this spokesperson, declined requests for interviews. But during the virtual meeting — which ProPublica obtained a recording of — the CEO alternated between accusing the news organization of writing “attack articles” and praising the rigor of our investigation.

“It’s amazing what they have brought up,” he said.

In a slide titled “Public Relations,” Hicks outlined HomeVestors’ plan to drown out ProPublica’s story with “strategic ad buys on social and web pages” and “SEO content to minimize visibility” of the article.

He instructed franchisees not to click on ProPublica’s story link; doing so, he warned, might improve its internet search ranking.

“Our goal is to bury it,” he said.

The company did not respond to a ProPublica question about executives telling franchisees that they want to bury the story. But in a statement, HomeVestors wrote, “As a company, we embrace any opportunity to improve customer service and satisfaction. We used the meeting to reinforce our code of conduct and company tenets that emphasize the importance of doing the right thing for our sellers and our communities.”

During the same webinar, Hicks and other senior leaders announced new policies to end the very practices ProPublica’s investigation brought to light.

On April 11, HomeVestors updated its “Systems and Standards” to forbid franchises from clouding sellers’ titles, a maneuver that makes it difficult for homeowners to back out of a deal. The company discouraged franchisees from suing sellers for breach of contract. And it reiterated that buyers who deal with seniors should always involve family, attorneys or other guardians in the transaction.

Some franchise owners on the call pushed back on the changes, claiming they could hurt business. But HomeVestors general counsel Anthony Lowenberg was unequivocal: Those who regularly sue to enforce the sale of homes are “putting the entire system at risk,” he said.

“The juice is not worth the squeeze,” Hicks added, repeating a comment from a franchise owner in the call’s chat.

Maren Kasper, managing director at Bayview Asset Management, the investment management firm that bought HomeVestors in 2022, also spoke during the virtual meeting. Kasper said that ProPublica had uncovered two cases of improper behavior that HomeVestors had not known about. “Those franchises have since received default letters,” she said, referring to a formal notice that they are not in compliance with company policies.

In the course of our reporting, we sent the company questions that detailed our findings point by point. We issued similar letters to each franchise mentioned in the story. In all cases, we allowed ample time to respond.

During the webinar, Kasper acknowledged the depth and thoroughness of our investigation.

“They have scoured every corner of the internet,” she said. “They’ve done, you know, good reporting, I would say.” She predicted other inquiries might follow. “If the Department of Justice came knocking, and needed us to verify every answer that we provided to this reporter, we have all the data and materials to do so,” she said.

“This is going to make us a better company,” Hicks concluded. “Because overall, we're going to change some of our practices, and make sure we change our Systems and Standards to make sure that we have our franchise doing the right things.”

A few days after the webinar, HomeVestors sent its franchises an email unveiling a webpage to address and counter ProPublica’s story. Among the offerings: a copy of its corporate response, a list of talking points and the number for a “rapid response media hotline.” When a ProPublica reporter called the hotline, a company representative declined to answer questions or provide comment.

The email, signed by Hicks and HomeVestors COO Larry Goodman, also contained a warning for franchisees:

“Don’t get baited into arguments or ‘off the record’ conversations.”

Help ProPublica Investigate “We Buy Houses” Practices

by Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon

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

Cory Evans was well-versed in the HomeVestors of America playbook when he arrived at a suburban Los Angeles home on Nov. 4, 2016. His franchise with the “We Buy Ugly Houses” company had executed more than 50 deals in the preceding two years. Patriot Holdings would soon become one of the company’s most successful franchises by following HomeVestors’ strategy of finding homeowners in desperate situations, then convincing them to sell quickly.

The homeowner, Corrine Casanova, had bought the three-bedroom Baldwin Park bungalow with her husband in 1961 and now owned it outright. After raising three children there, she was days away from leaving it for an assisted living facility and had called the number on a HomeVestors ad.

“I was wondering if I could get an estimate of the value of my home,” she told the woman who answered the phone. “My husband’s gone, so it’s just me now.”

Evans, who ran the business with three of his brothers, had developed a reputation among other franchisees in the area as a “hard closer.” Casanova’s house was paid off, giving Evans room to go low with his offer because there wasn’t a mortgage to settle. He calculated the profit he wanted to make and presented Casanova with a 10-page purchase agreement during the short visit to her house.

But Casanova was incapable of engaging in a complex negotiation. Although she was once a skilled bookkeeper and president of the local women’s club, dementia now carved into her short-term memory: A recent neurological assessment had found the 82-year-old was unable to say what year it was or name the city she was in. She routinely mistook her adult son for his uncle.

Corrine Casanova (Courtesy of David Casanova)

HomeVestors cautions its franchisees never to take advantage of sellers who are unable to understand negotiations. But by the time he left that evening, Evans had a contract to buy the house for roughly two-thirds its value, signed in Casanova’s shaky script.

Weeks passed before Casanova’s family learned of the sale. But her son, David Casanova, soon sensed something was wrong.

“After we moved her, she kept saying, ‘I need to call my friend. I need to call my friend.’ And I'm like, ‘Which friend, Mom?’” David told ProPublica.

Corrine couldn’t remember.

After David learned of the contract, he explained to Evans that his mother had dementia and tried to cancel the sale. Instead of walking away, Evans dug in, recording a notice on the property’s title that essentially prevented a sale to anyone else, which forced the Casanova family into a years-long battle to keep the home. Along the way, Evans disputed that Casanova showed signs of impairment during their interactions.

HomeVestors of America boasts that it helped pioneer the real estate investment industry. Founded in 1996 by a Texas real estate broker, the company has developed a system for snapping up problem properties — and expanded it to nearly 1,150 franchises in 48 states.

Unlike real estate agents, house flippers operate in a largely unregulated space. Real estate agents have a fiduciary responsibility to represent a homeowner’s best interests in negotiations, which is defined in state laws, licensing requirements and an industry code of ethics. But in most states, flippers don’t need a license.

HomeVestors, the self-proclaimed “largest homebuyer in the United States,” goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from the hedge funds and YouTube gurus that have taken over large swaths of the real estate investment market. The company says it helps homeowners out of jams — ugly houses and ugly situations — improving lives and communities by taking on properties no one else would buy. Part of that mission is a promise not to take advantage of anyone who doesn’t understand the true value of their home, even as franchisees pursue rock-bottom prices.

A HomeVestors billboard in Asheville, North Carolina (Harrison Shull/Aurora Photos/Cavan Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

Treat every customer like they’re your 85-year-old grandma who’s never done a real estate deal, HomeVestors trainers tell franchise owners at annual conferences.

But a ProPublica investigation — based on court documents, property records, company training materials and interviews with 48 former franchise owners and dozens of homeowners who have sold to its franchises — found HomeVestors franchisees that used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling.

One HomeVestors franchisee falsely claimed to a 72-year-old woman suffering from a hoarding problem that city code enforcement officers would take her house, according to court documents. An Arizona woman said in an interview that she was forced to live in her truck after trying unsuccessfully to cancel the sale of her home. One court case documented the plight of an elderly man in Florida who was told if he sold his condo he could continue living there temporarily. But he spent his final days alive waiting to be evicted when — after the contract was signed — the franchise owner informed him the homeowners association rules didn’t allow it.

“You were always lying to them. That’s what we were trained,” said Katie Southard, who owned a franchise in North Carolina. “There was a price that you could pay, but you would always go lower and tell them that was the price you could pay.”

Even when homeowners believed they were being taken advantage of and tried to back out of deals, franchise owners sued or filed paperwork to block a sale to another buyer. Some homeowners fought from hospital beds to keep their properties. At least three died shortly after signing sales contracts; a fourth died after three years of worrying about money. Their families told ProPublica that they are convinced the stress of losing their houses contributed to their loved ones’ deaths, though all had been ill or infirm.

A HomeVestors spokesperson said the deals uncovered by ProPublica represent a tiny fraction of the company’s overall transactions, which have totaled more than 71,400 since 2016. She denied the company had targeted the elderly and pointed to a 96% approval rating among homeowners who sell to HomeVestors, which was calculated internally from what the company says was “over 500” customer reviews. The company had already taken action in some of the cases found by ProPublica, she added, and is investigating others in light of the reporting.

Within days of receiving questions from ProPublica, HomeVestors prohibited its franchises from recording documents to prevent homeowners from canceling sales and discouraged them from suing sellers. The practices not only affect the seller, the company noted, it creates a paper trail that reporters and prosecutors can follow to a franchise’s doorstep.

“If you are doing this on a serial basis, you're putting the entire system at risk,” HomeVestors’ general counsel, Anthony Lowenberg, said during a national call on April 18 to alert franchise owners to ProPublica’s upcoming story.

During that call, a recording of which was obtained by ProPublica, company leadership acknowledged the depth and thoroughness of the news organization’s investigation and discussed changes to ensure “our franchises are doing the right things.”

“This is going to make us a better company,” HomeVestors CEO David Hicks concluded.

How They Find You

HomeVestors has worked hard to ensure it is a household name, with ubiquitous advertising on billboards, mailers, television and the internet. The company has trademarked dozens of images and phrases, including “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Ugly Opportunities,” and frequently goes after imitators in court. Its cartoon caveman, “Ug,” offers a friendly smile and sometimes holds out a bag of cash implying he’s ready to help homeowners out of “Ugly Situations.”

HomeVestors deploys Ug strategically. You’ll find him on ads near homes slammed by hurricanes or charred by wildfires. He’s on mailers blanketing ZIP codes with a high concentration of homeowners who have lots of equity. He’s on postcards sent to people that public records indicate have recently divorced or had a death in the family. To family members trying to navigate probate, HomeVestors promises: “We can help.”

In recent years, scores of homeowners have complained to local authorities and the Federal Trade Commission about HomeVestors’ ceaseless overtures — sometimes claiming that the company has ignored formal requests to stop. A Texas resident whose father had recently been murdered told ProPublica that HomeVestors wouldn’t take no for an answer. The letters were so persistent, she said, that checking her mail became a traumatic experience.

A HomeVestors spokesperson said the company addresses each complaint it receives and adds people to an internal “do not call” list when they ask not to be contacted.

HomeVestors also casts its net online, hoping to reach homeowners before they talk to a real estate agent or another investor.

In an interview, a former employee of the ad agency hired by HomeVestors recalled discussions about how to serve online ads to people in the vicinity of nursing homes and rehabilitation hospitals. The goal was to catch families who needed to sell assets so Medicaid would pay their nursing home costs. The employee, who asked not to be named because they still work in the industry, also recalled the agency’s owner bragging about the ability of its digital advertising to find an elderly person who had broken a hip. That injury, the employee reported the owner saying, is effectively a 60-day countdown to death — and, possibly, a deal.

“If we can get in front of people at that point, that was like a definite way to go,” the former employee said. “Yeah, that was bad. My stomach hurts thinking about that.”

A spokesperson for the ad agency, Imaginuity, said it would be “out of character” for the owner to “disrespect or wish harm” to a client’s customers.

A HomeVestors spokesperson admitted that the company had used such ad-targeting technology but said it only did so once, more than four years ago. A spokesperson for Imaginuity said the pilot project did not target rehabilitation centers.

Still, HomeVestors’ franchisees are taught ways to find people moving into a nursing home.

Up to half of a franchise’s prospects must be generated by its own legwork, what HomeVestors refers to as “dig leads.” The company’s training manual teaches franchisees to build relationships with those who interact with people in difficult situations: nursing home administrators, probate officers, divorce lawyers. It also instructs them to comb neighborhoods for clues of distress — water shutoff notices, police tape, boarded-up windows, burn scars — and pounce on signs of desperation. If a family’s belongings are on the curb, for example, the directive is clear: “Quickly pursue the property where the trash pile indicates eviction.”

In a written statement, the HomeVestors spokesperson initially denied the company targets homeowners based on such life events as a death, divorce or moving to a nursing facility. After ProPublica pointed to company advertising documents and training materials that teach such tactics, the spokesperson said they represent a small fraction of its marketing budget. The company also denied targeting homeowners based on demographics, including age. Rather, the company focuses on smaller, older properties that may be in need of repair, the spokesperson said.

For all of its scrupulous image management, the company has at times described its targets in crude terms. Certain homes in its advertising crosshairs are referred to internally as “honeypots.” And in a 2020 interview, Hicks said houses targeted by his company smell so bad flippers want to take a shower after visiting them.

“That cat piss smell, you know what that smell is?” he said with a chuckle. “That’s money.”

Hicks declined a request for an interview.

“It Wasn’t Just One Bad Actor”

HomeVestors requires that amid the rush to find desperate homeowners and make a deal, its franchisees not engage in “underhanded methods that cheapen and risk their businesses.”

It teaches them to be clear that they are a “discount buyer,” unable to pay full price, and that the seller will instead get speed and convenience. It explicitly forbids them from lying. “A franchisee shall not knowingly make any false statements or claims concerning property value, market conditions or any other matter concerning real property to any property owner in order to influence that person’s decision to sell,” the handbook reads.

But owning a HomeVestors franchise is expensive. In addition to fees and commissions paid to the company, franchisees are required to pay hefty sums — often tens of thousands of dollars a month — to support marketing. A team of corporate auditors works to ensure no fee is delinquent. Such financial pressures can lead to desperation for deals, which in turn can lead to unethical behavior, according to former franchisees.

ProPublica found a pattern of HomeVestors flippers facing allegations they stretched the truth or deceived homeowners in pursuit of deals.

A woman in Fort Worth, Texas, said in an interview a franchisee told her she could legally sign a contract to sell her late husband’s house even though she wasn’t on the deed. A man in Broward County, Florida, believed he was signing a document for a home equity loan that in reality was a contract to sell his $100,000 house for $37,500, according to a lawsuit he filed but ultimately abandoned. (HomeVestors’ spokesperson said the document was labeled a contract for sale.) A woman in Arizona said in an interview she was told her late mother’s home in a popular outdoor recreation town would have to be torn down and rebuilt to fetch a fair price. After paying her $10,000, the HomeVestors franchise sold it for $55,000 without making any improvements.

“It wasn’t just one bad actor,” said a former California franchise owner who spoke anonymously because they feared retribution from HomeVestors. “It became pervasive in the culture.”

HomeVestors’ spokesperson said such behavior isn’t taught or tolerated, and when it’s found, “we aim to take swift action up to and including termination of a franchise.” She added that “lying is against our code of ethics and our culture.” The spokesperson would not name which franchises or even how many have been terminated for violating company standards. ProPublica found HomeVestors bestowed awards on eight franchise owners in the last two yearswho had engaged in behavior the company said is not tolerated.

In its training manuals and at its annual conferences — boisterous affairs where franchise owners pose for photos with Ug and one flipper wore a suit printed with $100 bills — HomeVestors teaches the Sandler system. Central to this sales strategy is building rapport with homeowners in order to “find the pain.”

“Pain is always a form of motivation,” the training manual reads. “Once you find the Seller’s pain, you have a much better chance of buying the house.”

Among the circumstances that can generate a fast sale: a lost job, a looming foreclosure or a child in need of surgery. One former franchisee described how he found a potential Atlanta seller’s pain by asking the homeowner why he needed to sell so fast. The answer: His mother was living out her final days in hospice 1,400 miles away.

“It’s not because they want to sell the house,” the former franchisee said. “It’s because they want to get to Colorado to see their dying mother.”

“I Will Never Sell to You”

About two months after Corrine Casanova accepted Evans’ offer, her son paid for an appraisal.

Corrine’s wasn’t one of the ugly houses mythologized in the company’s ads. The appraiser deemed it “reasonably maintained,” noting recent improvements to the plumbing, bedrooms, sewer line and exterior stucco. The appraisal put the home’s value at $440,000, $165,000 more than Evans had offered.

Over the years, the Casanovas had poured time and energy into modest improvements: A driveway, which David and his father had repaved in the 1980s, was still in good shape; a new oak floor had cost roughly $7,000 about 13 years ago. As a teenager, David worked an after-school job for his father, testing diodes and semiconductors in the house’s garage. His mother, who kept meticulous records of the family’s finances, would cut him company checks in lieu of an allowance.

“They drilled that into us when we were little,” David Casanova said. “If you want something, you work for it, you save and you purchase it.”

While David was initially unaware his mother had agreed to sell, he did know she was vulnerable and had tried to protect her. David’s father, before he passed away in 2014, warned David that Corrine’s condition was worse than it appeared — that she could fake it “real good for about five minutes” before symptoms of her dementia would become evident. By 2016, her health had deteriorated to the point that she needed full-time care. She had come to believe she was a teenager again, living in the 1950s, David said.

HomeVestors’ training materials are unequivocal about how to treat potential sellers whose abilities may be diminished: “A Franchisee shall not purchase real property from any person whom the Franchisee knows or has reason to suspect is subject to a guardianship or has a mental capacity that is diminished to the point that the person does not understand the value of the property.”

Yet records show a pattern of disregard for that directive.

In 2020, a 78-year-old man in Atlanta was convinced to sign a sales contract for $97,000, about half what it later sold for. Eight weeks later, a cognitive exam showed he was unable to write a sentence or name the year, season, date or month, according to a lawsuit that is still pending. (The franchisee told ProPublica the man appeared in full command of his faculties, and HomeVestors said the franchise is no longer part of the company.)

That same year, a 77-year-old woman in Glendale, Arizona, who could no longer manage her finances signed a contract to sell her house for under half what it was worth, according to court documents. In the ensuing fight to save her house, the woman attended a court hearing remotely from her hospital room. (A HomeVestors spokesperson said the lawsuit was not initiated by a franchise but rather another investor who bought the sales contract from the franchise. The spokesperson, however, did not comment on the franchise owner’s interactions with the elderly homeowner. The business is no longer a HomeVestors franchise, she said. The lawsuit was settled in bankruptcy court.)

And in 2021, the lawyer for an elderly man in California accused a franchisee of taking advantage of the man’s “weakness of mind due to age” to convince him to sell his house for $175,000 below market value. (A HomeVestors spokesperson said the company was unaware of this case and has since sent a letter informing the franchisee it may be in violation of its franchise agreement for not disclosing the litigation. The case was settled out of court.)

Martha Swanson, an 83-year-old Georgia woman who had suffered a series of small strokes, sold her house to a HomeVestors franchise for $82,111, then spent the last three years of her life agonizing over money, including how to pay the $3,000-a-month cost of her assisted living center.

“That’s just not ethical,” her daughter, Sherry Nixon, told ProPublica.

In Swanson’s case, the franchise engaged in “wholesaling,” flipping the property to another investor for a higher price without making any improvements to it. The result is a chunk of equity going to the flipper instead of the homeowner — money Swanson desperately needed, Nixon said. The practice has come under regulatory scrutiny in several states.

The franchise owner who bought Swanson’s house said he “takes great care” when dealing with elderly people and would have let her out of the contract if she had asked.

Martha Swanson (Courtesy of Sherry Nixon)

HomeVestors said it encourages its franchises to only rehab one house at a time, while wholesaling other properties they buy. Its spokesperson also said the company does not target elderly homeowners, adding that people over 70 accounted for less than 20% of its sellers. Nearly a third of their purchases are from people older than 65.

Corrine Casanova lived only 19 days after signing away her home. Shortly after she died, one of her neighbors found a handwritten note from Evans on her doorstep and called David. The note was a reminder that escrow was about to close. When David realized what had happened, he was enraged.

“I will never sell to you,” he told the company. “I will never let you in this house ever again for what you did to my mom.”

Hostage to the Deal

Patriot Holdings wasn’t about to walk away from Casanova’s house.

Five days after David confronted the company, the franchise filed a breach of contract lawsuit against him. They also recorded a notice of an ownership dispute against the title called a lis pendens that makes it nearly impossible to sell to anyone else.

It is common for many HomeVestors franchises to file such lawsuits when owners try to cancel a sale, or to record a lis pendens or similar documents — termed “clouding a title” — as a way to tie an owner to a deal. ProPublica found more than 50 franchisees clouding titles or suing for breach of contract in more than a dozen states. Some franchises have filed only a handful of lawsuits — though getting an accurate count is difficult because disputes are often settled confidentially through arbitration. Others, including some franchises recognized by HomeVestors as top performers, frequently clouded titles.

One Florida franchise, Hi-Land Properties, has filed two dozen breach of contract lawsuits since 2016 and clouded titles on more than 300 properties by recording notices of a sales contract. In one case, it sued an elderly man so incapacitated by illness he couldn’t leave his house.

Hi-Land Properties has been named HomeVestors’ National Franchise of the Year five times. In 2017, Hicks, the HomeVestors CEO, praised Hi-Land’s owner as a “loyal, hardworking franchisee who has well represented our national brand, best practices and values."

Cory Evans’ franchise, Patriot Holdings, filed breach of contract lawsuits as recently as 2019. During mediation on one case, the company demanded $150,000 to walk away, according to the homeowner’s daughter.

“Why would you hold people hostage?” she said. “That’s insane.”

Some flippers argue it’s a necessary practice to protect their investments, noting that as soon as a contract is signed, a property starts costing them money, including inspection and title fees and financing costs.

Real estate experts, however, say HomeVestors franchisees’ large volume of lawsuits and title notices is not only indicative of a predatory business practice, it’s a tacit acknowledgment that sellers often later learn of better options.

“People usually attempt to back out of deals they did not understand,” said Sarah Bolling Mancini, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “If your business model is convincing homeowners to sign a purchase-and-sale contract based on misrepresentations about the value of the home,” she said, it will lead to lots of sellers who “want to back out later.”

Charles Tassell, chief operating officer of the National Real Estate Investors Association, added that clouding titles is not considered “normal practice” in the industry.

“Is there a discount for selling quickly or doing something with cash like that? Yes,” he said. “But when you start clouding titles and such, that starts going down a whole different road.”

Donald Cameron, owner of Hi-Land Properties, denied that clouding titles is a predatory practice and noted he often helps people with groceries or electric bills while he tries to buy their homes. The recorded contract is necessary to ward off other investors trying to buy the property. He said he sued the man who had fallen ill because he had advanced him $4,000. He also said he followed HomeVestors’ policy of involving the man’s adult son in the discussions. The man died shortly before the court issued a default judgment in Cameron’s favor.

“My office has bought over 2,000 homes since joining HomeVestors in 2005 and take great pride in doing things the right way,” he said.

HomeVestors said it was unaware franchises had made clouding titles a routine business practice. In response to ProPublica’s reporting, the company has prohibited it.

In the April 18 call recording obtained by ProPublica, HomeVestors’ leadership admonished franchises that frequently engage in clouding titles. “Clearly, it’s just a bad practice that we are not comfortable with,” said Maren Kasper, managing director of Bayview Asset Management, the investment management firm that bought HomeVestors in 2022.

Lawmakers have recognized that pressure and abusive tactics short of fraud are so common in some industries that a consumer needs more protection. In timeshare sales, for example, some states require a defined rescission period that allows a buyer to back out. A “free-look” period is built into buying annuities. Lemon laws for used cars are also common.

Such protections are largely absent for homeowners dealing with house flippers.

But some states and cities have begun to enact regulations. For example, in Philadelphia, house flippers are required to provide prospective sellers with a “bill of rights” that identifies resources to help desperate homeowners and describes how they can get a fair price.

“I mean, I get 24 hours when I buy a plane ticket, right?” said Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project. “In these kinds of unlicensed situations, there ought to be a certain higher level of protection when there aren’t professionals involved on the side of the seller.”

“The Only Ones That Aren't Caving In”

Unlike many of the homeowners cornered by “Ugly Situations,” David Casanova had time and money to fight the HomeVestors franchise for his mother’s house.

After Patriot Holdings sued to hold the Casanovas to the sales contract, David filed a cross-complaint alleging fraud and elder abuse. Evans, he claimed, used “affection, intimidation and coercion” to get Corrine to sign the contract.

For nearly three years, Patriot Holdings fought for the house. The company didn’t release its claim until Evans became the subject of a criminal investigation over his dealings with two elderly victims in Ventura County.

In August 2020, Evans pleaded guilty to two felony counts of attempted grand theft of real property. He received a suspended jail sentence, dropped his lawsuits against both victims and paid restitution. He was prohibited from “any transaction involving the purchase or sale of real estate” during his probation. Eventually, in accordance with California law, his conviction was expunged.

When Evans was convicted, HomeVestors should have terminated its franchise agreement with Patriot Holdings, according to the terms of the franchise agreement. Patriot Holdings is one of HomeVestors’ highest producing franchises. Instead, HomeVestors required Cory Evans to be removed as an owner of the franchise he ran with his brothers Cody, Chris and Casey Evans and partner Scott Mansfield, a spokesperson said. Nevertheless, internal HomeVestors records show Cory Evans listed alongside his brothers on a 2021 “total sales volume” award. The HomeVestors spokesperson said Cory Evans was mistakenly included on the award.

Patriot Holdings no longer uses the lawyer who initiated the lawsuit against the Casanova family, according to a HomeVestors spokesperson. The lawyer has represented other franchises and has attended company conventions.

“We are not aware of any complaints since the removal of Cory Evans from the franchise,” the spokesperson said.

Neither Cory Evans nor his brothers responded to interview requests.

After the fight for Corrine Casanova’s house was over, David sold it for $510,000 — $235,000 more than Evans had tried to pay for it. David said he did none of the repairs Evans had insisted, under oath, were necessary.

Now it’s David’s turn to refuse to walk away: He’s using proceeds from the sale to continue his elder abuse lawsuit against Patriot Holdings. A trial date is set for June.

“Still, today, basically, they don't feel they did anything wrong,” he said. “They have no empathy for what they put my mom or her family through for the last six years.

“They thrive on this, and they push you, push you, push you. And as far as I know, we're the only ones that aren't caving in.”

Help ProPublica Investigate “We Buy Houses” Practices

Sarah Smith contributed reporting. Ug Spot Illustrations by Carlo Cadenas for ProPublica.

by Mike Hayes for ProPublica, and Eric Umansky

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

In the spring of 2019, two New York City Police Department officers entered the Bronx apartment of Kawaski Trawick. The 32-year-old personal trainer and dancer had called 911 after locking himself out.

But 112 seconds after their arrival, footage showed, one of the officers shot and killed Trawick, despite the officer’s more-experienced partner repeatedly telling him not to use force.

When an internal investigation later cleared the officers — saying “no wrongdoing was found” — the NYPD offered no explanation for its reasoning. But records obtained by ProPublica can now reveal how the department came to that conclusion.

Investigators never explored key exchanges between the two officers in the run-up to the shooting. They also never followed up with the officers when their accounts contradicted the video evidence.

“Any conversation between you and your partner?” the head of the investigative unit asked Officer Herbert Davis hours after the shooting.

“No,” Davis answered.

Excerpt of Interview With Officer Herbert Davis

Officer Herbert Davis told NYPD investigators that he didn’t talk to his partner before the partner, Officer Brendan Thompson, Tased and then killed Kawaski Trawick. That testimony is contradicted by video of the event.

That wasn’t true.

After arriving at Trawick’s apartment and finding him holding a stick and a bread knife, body-worn camera footage shows that Davis, who is Black, told his less-experienced white partner, Officer Brendan Thompson, not to use his Taser. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he said, motioning for Thompson to step back.

Thompson fired his Taser anyway, causing Trawick to become enraged, and Davis then tried to stop Thompson from shooting Trawick. “No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Davis said, before briefly pushing Thompson’s gun down.

The investigators had access to all that footage. They never asked either officer about it.

(Lucas Waldron and Maya Eliahou/ProPublica)

ProPublica obtained the NYPD’s full internal investigation, including audio of interviews with both officers, via a Freedom of Information Law request.

The documents and interviews provide a rare window into how exactly a police department examines the conduct of its own officers after a shooting. The newly released information also expands the public record of the Trawick case as New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board pursues disciplinary charges against both officers for wrongfully going into Trawick’s apartment and failing to render aid after he’d been shot. Thompson faces additional charges for his use of force.

The officers are contesting the charges in an ongoing administrative trial. Neither their lawyers nor their union responded to requests for comment for this story, but Thompson told police investigators that before firing on Trawick, “I feared for my safety.” The NYPD did not respond to ProPublica’s detailed questions or a request to interview Deputy Chief Kevin Maloney, the former investigative unit head who questioned both officers. He is scheduled to testify in the administrative trial on Thursday.

The NYPD’s Force Investigation Division, which conducted the investigation of Trawick’s death, was created after the killing of Eric Garner and focuses on officer shootings and other uses of force.

“You put some of your top investigators,” said then-Commissioner William Bratton in 2015 when he started the unit. “I will get a better investigation, a speedy investigation, a more comprehensive investigation.”

The investigation of Trawick’s killing took nearly two years. The two officers, Thompson and Davis, were each interviewed once, for about 30 minutes. (Bratton, who stepped down as commissioner in 2016, did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the files, investigators often refer to Trawick as “the perpetrator,” though it’s not clear that he had committed any crime — he had called 911 after he locked himself out of his apartment. They also repeatedly portray Trawick as effectively to blame for what happened.

“Due to the perpetrator becoming more agitated by the officers presence, Police Officer Thompson had deployed his taser,” an investigator wrote.

An excerpt from a document from the New York Police Department’s internal investigation into an officer’s shooting of Kawaski Trawick. (Obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request; highlighted by ProPublica)

Trawick had struggled with his mental health and with drugs. A security guard in the building had also called 911 saying Trawick was acting erratically.

But by the time the officers arrived, Trawick had already been let back into his apartment by the Fire Department. “Why are you in my home?” he repeatedly asked the officers.

The interview sessions include a number of false and misleading statements by the officers.

For example, Davis told investigators that Thompson fired his Taser after Trawick started to “take a step forward, like if he wanted to come at us.” But the footage shows Trawick wasn’t advancing when Thompson, holding his gun in one hand and the Taser in the other, used his Taser on Trawick without any warning.

Thompson recalled that after he used the Taser, he again tried to warn Trawick. “I tell him to drop the knife you know a bunch of times.” The footage shows no such warnings were issued between when Thompson used his Taser and when he shot four times, killing Trawick.

Excerpt of Interview With Officer Brendan Thompson

Thompson told NYPD investigators that both he and Davis warned Trawick to drop his knife before Thompson fired four times, but video footage of the incident shows no such warnings were given in the moments before the shooting.

Investigators never followed up. Beyond asking the officers whether they were wearing cameras, the investigators never questioned Thompson and Davis about any of the footage.

“That’s huge, they intentionally did that,” said John Baeza, a former detective who spent 16 years with the NYPD and now works as an expert witness. “That has to be intent not to question them about that.”

The investigators found no wrongdoing even when they were confronted with apparent violations of protocol.

Thompson, for instance, told investigators that he believed Trawick to be an “emotionally disturbed” person. The NYPD patrol guide says that officers facing a potentially dangerous person in crisis should “isolate and contain” them — that text is underlined — and should “immediately request the response of a supervisor and Emergency Services Unit.”

Neither Thompson nor Davis did so.

At one point, the chief investigator, Maloney, asked Davis why they didn’t call for help. “We didn’t feel we needed anybody just yet,” Davis responded. “We didn’t know how bad it was until we open the door.” Investigators did not press the issue.

A former NYPD detective who helped create de-escalation training for the department previously told ProPublica that Davis and Thompson could have simply closed the door and called in the specialized unit.

The timing and circumstances of the interviews were also significant. While Davis was interviewed just hours after the shooting, Thompson was interviewed roughly seven months later and, he said during the interview, he was given the body-worn camera footage to watch first. Advocates and many experts say officers shouldn’t be allowed to preview footage of incidents before talking to investigators in case the officers try to alter their testimony.

Though the NYPD allowed the officer who shot Trawick to see the footage during the investigation, the department long refused to show it to the public or the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The department withheld footage for more than a year and fought against a lawsuit that had sought the full recording, arguing that releasing it would interfere with the department’s investigation.

A state judge later ruled that the NYPD had illegally withheld footage and acted in “bad faith.”

When the full full footage was disclosed, it showed what happened in the minutes after the shooting. After a sergeant arrived and asked whether anyone was hurt, two officers responded in near-unison, “Nobody. Just a perp.”

The Bronx District Attorney investigated the shooting but declined to prosecute.

In the end, the NYPD investigators summarized their findings with a simple line: “No violation of department policy occurred.”

Asked about the investigation, Trawick’s mother, Ellen Trawick, called it “outrageous.” The details, she said, “show the NYPD never even tried to do a real investigation.”

The disciplinary trial of the two officers is scheduled to end in the next few days. But regardless of the ruling by the NYPD judge overseeing it, police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has the sole authority over what, if any, punishment to impose.

Do you have information about body-worn cameras and policing that we should know about? Contact Mike Hayes by email at mikeehayes@gmail.com and on Signal or WhatsApp at 203-364-7120. Contact Eric Umansky at eric.umansky@propublica.org and on Signal or WhatsApp at 917-687-8406

by 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.

The deputy director of the Anchorage Public Library is resigning, less than three weeks after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica published an article that documented her history of inflammatory comments and social media posts.

Mayor Dave Bronson announced Judy Eledge’s resignation Tuesday and said her last day will be Monday.

Eledge, a longtime conservative stalwart in Alaska, was appointed library director by Bronson in August 2021. But after it became clear she would not be confirmed by the Anchorage Assembly, she became deputy director, a role that does not require nomination hearings or approval by the Assembly. In that role, she essentially led the library until late last year, when a new director started work.

Eledge’s tenure was fraught with controversy, as employees accused her of making racist and inappropriate comments — some of which were recorded — and fostering a hostile work environment. She was at the center of ongoing lawsuits in state and federal court over the firing of the city’s former director of the Office of Equal Opportunity, who asserts she was let go in retaliation for reporting employee complaints about Eledge.

The Bronson administration is requesting city funds to settle with the Office of Equal Opportunity’s ex-director.

Eledge did not immediately respond to interview requests by phone and email on Tuesday.

In a resignation letter addressed to Bronson, which was obtained by the Daily News, Eledge said she is stepping down “per our discussion several weeks ago.” Eledge said in the letter her departure “is due to personal issues,” as she has a major surgery scheduled this month.

In the letter, Eledge also listed issues she worked on during her library tenure, including implementing a “one bag rule” for library visitors and a ticket system for homeless people and travelers to store items in a locked closet; taking steps toward renovating the Alaska Collection room and returning the collection there; and selecting the former City Hall building as the site for a new downtown library branch.

“Moving forward, I believe that even more positive accomplishments can be achieved if politicizing these positions can be avoided,” Eledge said in the letter.

The Daily News and ProPublica reported that on March 14, 2022, in a surreptitiously taped conversation with a co-worker, Eledge shared her disgust with the use of Indigenous land acknowledgements and the sharing of pronouns. She called transgender people “very troubled.”

“Equitable, to me, is a racist word,” she said to her subordinate, who recorded the conversation because she feared no one would believe her about how Eledge interacted with her colleagues. At one point, Eledge noted that library employees were working to “wipe out everything white in the world.”

Eledge, 76, also lamented how a library worker was removing books that contained the word “Eskimo,” a term that is now seen by many as unacceptable.

“I happened to live in Barrow,” she said, referring to the mostly Inupiat city that residents in 2016 renamed Utqiagvik. “They consider themselves Inupiat Eskimos but they got a bunch of woke, liberal, I consider racist Native people, young people. … It’s all about, ‘We stole their land.’ Which is bullshit!”

In a brief phone conversation last month, Eledge said she could not comment on accusations involving her statements at the library because they are the subject of a lawsuit. Asked about her social media posts, which are not included in the lawsuit, Eledge said, “I’ve already commented on those when I was running for school board.”

Following the announcement of Eledge’s resignation, the Assembly voted 9-2 on Tuesday night to approve a resolution drafted last week calling for her to resign. The measure’s main sponsor, West Anchorage Assembly member Kameron Perez-Verdia, initially moved to kill the measure, since Eledge had already resigned.

But Perez-Verdia rescinded his motion after several other members said they still had a duty to take an official stand and condemn Eledge’s behavior — especially, they said, because she is currently representing Alaska as part of a national education commission.

In March, Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed Eledge to the Education Commission of the States. A spokesperson for Dunleavy said Tuesday that the governor did not plan to remove Eledge from the commission. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the governor’s rationale.

Assembly Chair Christopher Constant said Tuesday night, “I’m really saddened by the fact that that is the voice Anchorage is leading with in the federal government and setting education policy for the whole country.”

An Assembly member who voted against the resolution, Kevin Cross, said that while he understands her position was controversial, “when somebody’s willing to leave, you don’t slam the door behind them.”

Perez-Verdia, who grew up in Utqiagvik, said he pursued the Assembly resolution after numerous members of the Alaska Native community contacted him with “extreme concern” about Eledge’s comments.

“I was pleased about the announcement,” Perez-Verdia said of her resignation. “I think it was the right choice.”

But the city continues to face claims about the damage caused by Eledge’s remarks. The former library employee who provided a recording of Eledge’s remarks to the Daily News on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the city, according to her attorney.

The lawsuit claims that the city failed to act on complaints made by the woman and five other library employees and failed to investigate reports of discrimination made against Eledge. The lawsuit also claims the employee experienced retaliation for reporting discrimination within the city Fire Department, where she worked before the library.

The mayor’s office did not answer emailed questions from the Daily News about whether Bronson had asked Eledge to resign or whether her resignation was connected to the Assembly’s proposed resolution, her history of inflammatory comments or the lawsuit.

At Tuesday’s Assembly meeting, Bronson thanked Eledge for her service, adding, “I personally wish her the best for her recovery from surgery.”

“I’m confident in the staff and Director [Virginia] McClure to continue leading our library successfully into the future,” Bronson said.

by Maya Miller, with additional reporting by Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong

When a health insurance company is deciding whether to pay for your medical treatment, the company generates a file around your claim. All the records associated with your case should be part of your file. This includes documents explaining the reasons your claim was denied.

You have a right to see this file. Federal regulations require most health insurance plans to give people an opportunity to review documents related to their claim for free. So if your insurer talks to your doctor, if a nurse takes notes, or if two people speak about it on the phone, all of those records should be available to you.

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said Juliette Forstenzer Espinosa, a health lawyer and senior lecturer of health policy at George Washington University. “But most people have no idea how to get it.”

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Health insurers rarely advertise that people can access their claim files, Espinosa said. Where guidance exists, it is often embedded deep in denial letters. Few offer templates or even give instructions on their websites.

Patients who make it through the records request process get information that can be revelatory. Some told us they received case notes exposing how they had been funneled into programs the health insurance company deployed to cut costs. A few obtained audio recordings of phone calls showing company staff introducing errors into their cases.

And others, such as former Cigna patient Lee Mazurek, found out exactly how much companies projected saving on their cases. Mazurek had been on a treatment regimen for nearly nine years that was keeping his Crohn’s disease at bay. Changing it, a Cigna employee estimated, could save more than $98,000. (Cigna spokesperson Justine Sessions said the insurer only suggests changes when clinically appropriate and that cost is never the sole determining factor. She said Cigna does not directly benefit from such savings.)

Taken together, these documents can offer a window into the opaque system of health insurance denials. Details in them have helped us report on some of the country’s largest insurance companies and their attempts to cut costs at the expense of patient well-being.

We have spoken with patients, health care providers, former and current health insurance employees and health policy experts to better understand how people facing denials can request their information. We believe it is important to share with our readers what we are learning about this process. To that end, we have collected advice on requesting your claim file and answers to common questions you may have, including a template you can use to get your request started.

If you end up requesting and obtaining your claim file, you can share it with ProPublica reporters by filling out this form. These documents help us better understand the systems behind claim denials and can fuel our future reporting.

If you send over your claim file, ProPublica reporters will be the only ones reading the files. We appreciate you sharing your information and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these for the purposes of our reporting, and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story. If you wish for additional anonymity, we have set up encrypted tiplines for extra security, including Signal and postal mail (address to ATTN: Maya Miller). If you have any questions, you can email healthinsurance@propublica.org to get in touch.

Since we are journalists and not lawyers, we are unable to provide any legal advice about this process.

What’s the difference between a health insurance claim file request and an appeal?

After you receive a denial, you can submit an appeal. This means you are asking the health insurance company to reconsider its decision.

When you submit a claim file request, you are asking the insurer to send you all of the records generated around your claim. Patients and lawyers said they found it helpful to submit these requests before an appeal.

Which health insurance plans can I request a claim file from? Is mine included?

You have the right to request your claim file if you:

• Have insurance through your employer.
• Have a private plan that is not through your employer (known as an individual nongroup plan). Travel insurance plans are not eligible.
• Are under a state or local government plan.

Similar rights apply to people under Medicaid plans.

I want to get my health insurance claim file. Where do I start? Is there a form?

A few insurers (namely, Cigna and Elevance Health) offer request forms that you can download and fill out, but most do not.

Here’s a template of a claim file request that you can fill out no matter what health insurance plan you have. It is adapted from one created by Health Law Advocates, a public interest law firm based in Boston that provides free legal services to people struggling to access health care. The template includes:

• A list of all of the records that should be included in your claim file.
• Space for you to write in your case details.

If you use one of the forms provided by an insurer, do not hesitate to add pages. Insurers may not provide enough space for all the language that can be helpful, according to patients and lawyers who regularly submit requests.

You will likely need to print the request out. If you do not have access to a printer you can visit your local public library, which should have one available for you to use.

Excerpt of a denial letter from UnitedHealthcare provided by a patient. The insurance company asks its members to mail in the request for a claim file. (Courtesy of a UnitedHealthcare patient) What information do I need to provide as part of my request?

Always make sure to include your name, address and phone number, plus the date you are sending the request.

You will likely need:

• Your Plan ID and unique Member ID (often listed directly below your name on your health insurance card).
• The unique case number(s) associated with your denied claim. This will allow you to ask for specific records associated with the case number(s). Health insurance plans may instead call this your service reference number or have another name for it altogether. You can often find this number on the first page of a denial letter or of a letter from your health plan explaining how much you must pay for the treatment or service (known as an explanation of benefits).
• The dollar amount of the claim.
• The dates of your appointments, procedures or other services in question.
• The date you received notice of the denial.

Can’t find one of these? Don’t stress. You can either call your insurance company’s member service line or request it from your health care provider.

If you end up calling your health insurance plan’s member service line, patients and lawyers have suggested recording the call or taking written notes so you have proof of the interaction. If you want to record the call, be sure to ask the person on the other line for permission to do so.

How do people usually word these requests?

Whether you use a health insurance plan’s request form or write your own claim file request from scratch, you may want to consider asking for:

• Case management information
• Medical utilization information
• Telephone logs and call summaries
• Recordings of telephone conversations
• Any other correspondence
• Any medical records and assessments
• All other records related to your unique claim number(s)

Example of a claim request submitted by former Cigna member Lee Mazurek. After submitting the request, Mazurek received a 55-page packet from the health plan that helped reveal why his claim was denied. (Courtesy of Lee Mazurek)

If you are writing up your own claim file request from scratch, you may also want to include a line saying this is a request for a claim file, not an appeal. (Health insurance plans have mistaken claim file requests for appeals.)

What should I actually send to the health insurance plan?

Along with the printout of your claim file request form, patients and legal experts say, it is helpful to send a copy of the denial letter, or the letter the insurance plan sent you explaining how much you owe for the treatment or service. (Patients and their advocates stressed that you should send in a copy, rather than the original denial letter you received.)

You might also want to keep a copy of the claim file request for your records.

Where can I send my claim file request?

This depends on your health insurance plan. There are a few places you can find out where to send the request:

• On request form templates
• On any denial letters or explanation of benefit letters

Most plans ask that you mail or fax the forms to a physical location. Legal advocates said they usually send these requests to the appeals and member request departments because employees there often understand the process best. We’ve listed department addresses below for some of the country’s largest health insurance plans.

If you send the request through the mail, experts on the process recommend that you do so through certified mail so you can track it.

Note: While we have confirmed the addresses below, some companies administer subsidiary health plans that may require different mailing addresses, so you may want to double-check whether the address below applies to your specific plan before actually sending your request. Search “appeals department mailing address” plus the name of your health insurance plan and see what comes up on a search engine like Google.

If you have trouble finding this address, you can try two more steps: (1) You can search for your plan’s appeal form, which often includes the address of the appeals department, or (2) You can call your health insurance plan’s member service line and ask for the mailing address for the plan’s appeals department.

• Aetna CVS Health:
  • Mailing address: Aetna Appeals Department P.O. Box 14463 Lexington, KY 40512
  • Fax number: 859-425-3379

• Anthem BCBS (now Elevance Health):
  • Mailing address: Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield P.O. Box 659403 San Antonio, TX 78265-9403

• Cigna:
  • Mailing address: Cigna Healthcare, Central HIPAA Unit P.O. Box 188014 Chattanooga, TN 37422
  • Fax number: 877-815-4827 or 859-410-2419

• Humana:
  • Mailing address: Humana Grievance and Appeal Department P.O. Box 14546 Lexington, KY, 40512-4546

• UnitedHealthcare: Depends on the plan you have. Below find the mailing addresses and fax numbers for major plans, and find the rest of the contact information at this link:
  • Mailing address for anyone who has a health plan through their employer: UnitedHealthcare P.O. Box 30573 Salt Lake City, UT 84130-0573
  • Mailing address for anyone who has bought a health plan through the insurance exchange: Member and Provider Appeals and Reconsiderations: UnitedHealthcare P.O. Box 6111 Cypress, CA 90630
  • Fax number: 888-404-0940

I still can’t figure out where to send my request.

You can send the claim request to your health insurer’s appeal department or HIPAA unit, according to patients and legal advocates who help people submit claim request files. They said people working in these units, and particularly in appeals, are often more familiar with claim file requests than customer service representatives are.

If you can’t find these addresses online, you can call your insurance company’s member service line and ask for them.

Do I really have to send my request via snail mail or fax?

If that is what your insurance plan requires, then yes. You can try uploading your request through your online health insurance portal. But mailing or faxing seems to be the preferred delivery method for most health insurance plans, at least for now. Legal advocates say this may change. For example, Massachusetts recently passed a law requiring health insurers to accept appeals and requests for authorizing representatives via email.

If you learn that your state requires that companies accept these documents via email, please let ProPublica reporters know through the form below so we can keep this post up to date.

How long does it usually take to get the claim file?

If you have health insurance through your employer, you should get a response to your claim file request within 30 days of sending it in. The plan provider could be fined up to $110 for each day it is late, which could be awarded to you. However, courts, rather than regulatory agencies, have discretion over enforcing these fines. This means one would have to file a lawsuit to retrieve this sum.

No matter what kind of health insurance plan you have, legal advocates said, if you do not receive your claim file request in a timely manner or receive an incomplete set of files, you can ask the insurance plan to pause all other countdowns related to your denied claim. For example, when you receive your denied claim, you have a specific number of days to appeal the denial. Legal advocates said you can request that the health insurance plan pause this countdown until the company completely fulfills your claim file request.

I am having trouble getting my claim file. What are some possible next steps?

If you have health insurance through your employer and do not work for a city, state or federal government agency, your plan is generally governed by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act. You may want to double-check with your human resources department to confirm that is the case. If your health plan is under ERISA and you have not heard back about your claim file request within 30 days, you can reach out to the United States Department of Labor’s Employees Benefits Security Administration to alert them and ask that they intervene. You can contact them by phone at 866-444-3272 or online through this portal.

If your employer is a city or state government agency, you can reach out to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. You can contact them by phone at 877-267-2323 or by email at nonfed@cms.hhs.gov. If your employer is the federal government, you can connect with the Office of Personnel Management through this website.

If you have an individual (nongroup) private health plan that is not through your employer, or if your employer’s plan is fully insured, you can contact your state agency that regulates insurance for help. If you do not know whether your employer’s plan is fully insured, you can reach out to your human resources department to check.

When reaching out to government agencies, it can be helpful to include a copy of any forms you submitted as part of the request.

ProPublica reporters are also interested in hearing about any problems you have in getting your claim file. Feel free to reach out to healthinsurance@propublica.org to tell us about any challenges you might be experiencing.

I got my health insurance claim file. What next?

The claim file should include more information on why your health insurance claim was denied. This may help you and your health care provider if you end up appealing your denial.

For Lee Mazurek, the claim files shed light on a Cigna cost-saving program that played a role in his denial. (Cigna said it would not directly benefit under a self-funded plan like Mazurek’s, but would pass along the savings to the employer.)

Mazurek was eventually able to continue receiving treatment, but he dipped into his savings to buy secondary insurance during the process. He has since switched health plans.

Lee Mazurek of Groton, Connecticut, wondered, “How much is a human life worth per year?” after seeing his claim file. (Tim Tai for ProPublica) I want to tell reporters my story and share my claim file.

ProPublica is continuing its reporting on the systems that lead to health insurance denials. Claim files can help us better understand these systems.

If you would like to send your claim file to a ProPublica reporter, you can fill out this form. You can also email healthinsurance@propublica.org with any questions.

To reiterate: If you send over your claim file, ProPublica reporters will be the only ones reading the files. We appreciate you sharing your information and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these for the purposes of our reporting, and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

Share your claim file with ProPublica reporters

These documents help us better understand the systems behind claim denials and can fuel our future reporting.

Get in Touch

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.

When Patty Troyan’s son Logan Castello died by suicide in November 2019 in his Central Texas home, she immediately tried to understand what prompted him to take his own life not long after getting married and days before a planned family Thanksgiving gathering.

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Castello was a 21-year-old private first class in the Army. He was stationed at Fort Hood but had died in his off-post home in Killeen, a city of about 156,000 people that abuts the massive military installation. Troyan assumed she’d get some details about what happened from the civilian police, who responded to the scene.

But what she got back only left her with more questions. The city of Killeen’s legal department sent her 19 pages of police records, but almost every detail about what happened was redacted. No one told her that they suspected foul play, and there’s no indication that Castello was being investigated by police at the time of his death.

The heavily redacted incident report that Castello’s mother, Patty Troyan, got about her son’s death. Only three lines of narrative were not redacted. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

“I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand why so much was redacted,” Troyan said.

“I thought that there was either a lot that they weren’t telling us or they were very inept and didn’t do a thorough job,” she said. “If they send me black pages, then I can’t question the thoroughness.”

Killeen officials denied Troyan the records by citing an exception in Texas’ public records law that allows law enforcement agencies to withhold or heavily redact police reports if a person has not been convicted or received deferred adjudication in the case. The rule was established in 1997 as a way to protect the privacy of people who were accused of or arrested for criminal activity that’s never substantiated.

However, law enforcement agencies have often used the exception, sometimes referred to as the dead suspects loophole, to withhold information in cases in which suspects die in police custody or at the hands of police officers. KXAN-TV, an Austin television station, published an extensive series on the practice in 2018.

What has gotten far less attention are cases like Castello’s. He wasn’t a suspect in a crime. He didn’t die in law enforcement custody. He took his own life and was discovered only after a relative arrived at Castello’s apartment and couldn’t get in because the deadbolt was locked from the inside. The relative called 911; Killeen police entered the second-floor apartment using a ladder, according to an Army investigative report, and discovered Castello dead in a bedroom. No one else was in the home, and there were no signs of forced entry, the report said. The Army investigation listed Castello’s death as a suicide and said no criminal act had occurred.

Troyan requested her son’s suicide report from the city of Kileen’s legal department, but the heavily redacted report she was sent gave her few answers about her son’s death. (Rich-Joseph Facun for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have identified at least two other cases like Castello’s involving apparent non-officer-related suicides in which the city of Killeen refused to release complete police records, citing the “no convictions” exception.

In all three cases, the people involved were soldiers stationed at Fort Hood who died off-post in Killeen, one in December 2004 and another a few weeks before Castello in 2019.

Texas Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, who is trying to pass a bill this legislative session that would close the loophole, told the news organizations the use of the exception in the case of a service member’s suicide “is so far outside the contemplated exception, that I find it odd that it’s even raised.” Moody has also said he feared that the loophole would be used to hide records involving a mass shooting last year at a Uvalde elementary school. But officials have so far cited other exceptions to withhold those records.

When government agencies want to deny the release of public records, they must ask for a ruling from the Texas attorney general’s office. The attorney general upheld Killeen’s request to withhold the complete police report on Castello from Troyan, saying the office reviewed the city’s arguments and the police report and concurred with the city’s conclusion.

Ofelia Miramontez, a spokesperson for the Killeen Police Department, said department leadership would not speak about pending legislation and referred the news organizations to the city’s legal department.

Killeen City Attorney Holli Clements refused to answer specific questions the news organizations sent her. She wrote in an email that the city “strictly adheres to the provisions of the Texas Public Information Act and the interpretive opinions of the Texas Attorney General and the courts. The City has released information required to be released by law. The City has no further comment.”

Lt. Col. Tania P. Donovan, a spokesperson for the 3rd Corps at Fort Hood, referred questions to the city of Killeen and the Texas attorney general’s office.

ProPublica and the Tribune reached out to First Amendment advocates and lawyers in the state who said the use of this public records exception in these suicide cases reflected the broader trend of law enforcement agencies trying to withhold information whenever they can.

“If this provision of the Public Information Act is being used in this particular way by law enforcement, it’s yet another reason this part of the law needs to be repealed,” said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. “It’s a misuse of the Public Information Act.”

Reid Pillifant, a First Amendment attorney, said: “The application of this has spread well beyond what was intended and has led to these kinds of absurd results in cases where the public clearly has a right to know what happened.” (Pillifant represents a coalition of media outlets, including ProPublica and the Tribune, in two lawsuits seeking the release of information about the Uvalde shooting.)

“The fact that family members can’t even get records about their deceased relatives just shows how kind of perverse the application of this provision has been,” he said.

Left Only With Questions

When Troyan got the redacted report back from the Killeen police, she immediately called the city’s legal department. The woman Troyan spoke to — she cannot remember her name or title — apparently told her the city didn’t have to release any records.

Under Texas law, records are presumed public unless a government agency cites an exemption in the Public Information Act that supports withholding those records. Cities have discretion over whether to invoke the no conviction exception.

Castello’s father, Kenny Castello, was equally stunned by the city’s decision. He’d had a 20-year career in law enforcement in Ohio and could understand withholding records if a criminal investigation was ongoing.

“But if this was a cut-and-dry suicide, why the hell are you, why are you blacking things out? Why are you not letting us see the entire report?” Kenny Castello said. “At times that makes me think there was something more than what they’re leading on.”

Castello’s father, Kenny Castello, worked in law enforcement for 20 years and couldn’t understand why his son’s suicide report was redacted so heavily. (Rich-Joseph Facun for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Moody, the state representative, said governmental agencies’ decisions to withhold this information naturally leaves families with nothing but unanswered questions.

“If you have unanswered questions, and no willingness from the governmental entity to release records, you’re probably gonna start making assumptions that something bad, that something wrong happened,” he said. “Otherwise, why use the exception?”

Starting in 2017, Moody has filed bills every legislative session attempting to revise the exception. In his first two attempts, the bill made it out of committee but was never approved by the state House of Representatives. In 2021, the bill did not get a committee hearing. Moody’s bill cleared the Texas House last week and now moves to the state Senate.

The exception drew intense attention on May 24 last year, when an 18-year-old man fatally shot 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde before law enforcement killed him. It was the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history. Days later, Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan tweeted it would be “absolutely unconscionable” if the dead suspects loophole were used to deny the public more information about how the shooting unfolded. He went on to tweet, “I think it’s time we pass legislation to end the dead suspect loophole for good in 2023.”

Phelan declined comment for this story.

So far, governmental agencies that have denied records requests related to the Uvalde shooting have cited another exception that allows records to be withheld if an investigation is ongoing. However, many First Amendment advocates fear agencies will cite the no conviction exception should no one ultimately be prosecuted in the case.

Moody’s latest proposal, House Bill 30, would modify the public records law so the exception couldn't be used if someone other than a police officer is the subject of the police report and is either dead or incapacitated or has consented to the information being released.

Law enforcement agencies such as the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, the state’s largest police union, have argued releasing this information could reveal public information about peace officers who are falsely accused of wrongdoing. Language in the proposed bill would also allow for the release of information about a police officer’s alleged misconduct in their personnel file if the person described in the information is dead or incapacitated or consents to its release.

CLEAT Executive Board President Marvin Ryals, with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, testified against Moody’s bill last month before a Texas House committee. He said he would be fine if only families could get the records.

Troyan recalled the Killeen official telling her that if the city released the full police report to her, then anyone could get those records.

“And my response was, ‘I don't care if you print it on community flyers as long as you give it to us,’” Troyan recalled.

Every suicide has its own set of ramifications, said Joseph Larsen, a First Amendment attorney and board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. There’s also some measure of public good that can come from understanding soldier suicides, which may very well be tied to their military service, he said.

Kenny Castello wears his son’s dog tags and a cross with some of his son’s ashes around his neck. (Rich-Joseph Facun for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Suicide rates of active-duty service members have gradually increased since 2011, although the 2021 rate was lower than the previous year, according to a recent Department of Defense report. Families of military personnel who die by suicide are often left grasping for information; the military can takes months or years to release investigative files, and those can still leave loved ones with questions. Troyan eventually got Army reports on her son’s suicide, but she said much of that was redacted as well.

If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

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

Three and a half years after Castello’s death, Troyan is trying her best not to focus on how he died but on the person he was. Captain of his high school football team and class president. Caring, charismatic and joyful. “He did not know a stranger,” she said.

She now accepts that he died by suicide, that he was experiencing depression though his parents had no idea until after his death.

“I don’t think I’ll get any more answers than what I already have, which is minimal,” Troyan said. “I’m going to keep hitting that wall. Now hopefully if this law changes, it won’t be like that.”

Lexi Churchill contributed research.

by Kiah Collier and Lexi Churchill

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.

Over the past quarter-century, former NFL player Kenny Hansmire has leaned on government officials across the country to grow the National Child Identification Program. The Texas-based company sells kits that it claims help track down missing kids.

A ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation found that politicians have committed millions of dollars to purchasing the fingerprinting kits despite little evidence of their effectiveness and the company’s use of exaggerated missing-child statistics. Numerous Texas law enforcement agencies told the news organizations they couldn’t recall using a kit to help find a runaway or kidnapped child.

For Hansmire, NCIDP stands out as a success amid a decadeslong string of troubled business ventures, from municipal debt collection to college all-star football games. In some cases, he has recognized politicians who supported the company with awards at NFL games and other events.

Hansmire has formed or been involved with at least a dozen Texas businesses in the past three decades. Many of them have faced lawsuits from creditors, lenders or contractors for unpaid bills, or they lost the right to operate in the state after failing to pay taxes or file tax returns, according to a ProPublica and Tribune analysis of business filings and court and tax records.

In raising money for some of his businesses, Hansmire linked up with a Connecticut securities broker to persuade at least 10 investors to lend some of his companies $1.9 million, according to public records. The effort drew scrutiny from the Connecticut Department of Banking, which found that the men defrauded or misled investors in the sale of securities. Hansmire reached a settlement with the Banking Department and agreed to stop seeking investments and to pay an undisclosed amount in restitution.

Hansmire did not respond to detailed questions from the news organizations about the legal and financial challenges his companies have faced. Instead, he issued a broad statement to the news organizations saying that he’s “always taken responsibility and paid debts entirely.”

“I have always been an entrepreneur with both ups and downs,” Hansmire said in the statement. He added that he believes that “most businesses” face legal disputes and noted that the lawsuits against him “have been properly resolved, closed, and are completely unrelated to the National Child ID Program.”

Hansmire said his company’s kits have been lauded by law enforcement leaders for helping during the “first and most critical minutes of a search for a missing child.”

He didn’t provide proof that he had paid off his debts, and publicly available records show that numerous state and federal tax liens against him and his companies remained in place as of early May. A public IRS filing shows that Hansmire and his wife had at least $2 million in outstanding tax liens as of October 2022, though the agency would not confirm if that’s how much they still owe to the federal government.

Little information is available on Hansmire’s more recent companies. They have no websites, and we found no liens or lawsuits against them. Others appear frequently in court records, news reports, business filings and other public documents. Below is an accounting of those ventures.

1990s

Company name: Capital Assistance Group When it was active: 1990s Status: Unclear Hansmire’s role: President, according to news coverage from the time What it did: The collections agency landed contracts with cities across the state to recover unpaid traffic tickets that had resulted in warrants. During a 1991 meeting, Hansmire promised officials in White Settlement, a municipality near Fort Worth, that the company would “at least double the amount you pay us or we will write you a check for the difference.” Legal and financial issues: Tax records show that the IRS and the state of Texas filed four liens against Capital Assistance Group in the early and mid-1990s that totaled more than $31,000. The state ones are still outstanding, according to Texas Workforce Commission spokesperson Angela Woellner, who said the liens were for unpaid unemployment insurance taxes. In 1993, a county court judge ordered Hansmire and Capital Assistance to pay $9,850 plus $3,283 in attorneys fees to an 87-year-old East Texas widow, Ruby Flournoy, who has since died. According to court records, Flournoy loaned Hansmire the money, which he promised to pay back with “certain funds to be paid over to him by the city of Forest Hill,” a suburb of Fort Worth that had hired Capital Assistance, according to news coverage. Flournoy’s son, Robert Flournoy, an attorney who represented his mother in the case, said in an interview that Hansmire never paid. In 1995, Hansmire was sued by the city of Arlington for “unpaid collection fees.” A judge subsequently ordered Hansmire to pay the city $5,000 plus attorneys fees, court records show. Arlington Assistant City Attorney Ursula Monroe Patterson said the office couldn’t confirm if Hansmire paid because records are no longer available and none of its current employees are familiar with the case. Hansmire did not directly address questions about the lawsuits or specific liens.

Company name: Inkless Image Security Corp. When it started: 1996 Status: Voluntarily terminated Hansmire’s role: Secretary, treasurer and president What it did: Hansmire partnered with Peter A. Pyhrr, a Dallas-area inventor, to form the company. The men were granted a patent in 1999 for an “inkless fingerprint methodology” that could be used to verify the authenticity of written medication prescriptions or to confirm the true identity of airline passengers “for security purposes in case something illegal happens to the plane (bombing or hijacking).” To do this, doctors and airlines would use paper coated with an invisible chemical solution that pharmacists and boarding agents would check by applying another chemical solution. Pyhrr could not be reached for comment. Legal and financial issues: In 2004, a justice of the peace ordered Hansmire and the company to pay Riddell Inc., a manufacturer of professional football gear, nearly $5,000 plus interest and fees. It’s unclear why Riddell filed suit, as the case file is not available online and the court ignored repeated requests to provide it. Available records indicate Hansmire paid. He did not directly address questions about the case. A Riddell spokesperson said that the company couldn’t comment because its general counsel wasn’t around at the time of the lawsuit and its prior general counsel had died.

Company name: Identaprint Texas Inc. When it started: Registered in 1996 Status: Forfeited existence Hansmire’s role: Hansmire’s lawyer at the time, Carl Barnhart, was listed on the Texas secretary of state website as the registered agent. The company’s incorporation filing isn’t available online, but court records from a 1996 lawsuit against the company state that Hansmire was its president. What it did: The company sold inkless fingerprint materials to individuals and businesses, including in the area of child identification, according to court records. Legal and financial issues: In 1996, a contract sales employee who also had invested in the company sued Hansmire in a Dallas state district court, alleging the company failed to pay her commission on the sale of inkless fingerprint materials. She also alleged that Hansmire failed to repay loans for $9,205 and $1,880 that she gave him in exchange for 10% of company stock, as well as an undisclosed security interest and the rights to any future patent for “Inkless Fingerprint Tamperproof Tape,” a product designed for use by the drug testing industry. The parties reached a settlement that required Hansmire to pay more than $40,000 to the employee-investor, who did not respond to requests for comment. It is unclear if it was paid. Hansmire did not directly address questions about the case.

2000s

Company name: Overtime Sports Pacific Inc. When it started: 2004 Status: Forfeited existence Hansmire’s role: Chair, CEO, co-director and registered agent What it did: In late 2004, Hansmire bought a majority share of a 58-year-old college football all-star game in Hawaii with his longtime friend and business partner Mark Salmans and his wife, Mindy. Local news coverage stated that, before the sale, the Hula Bowl had struggled with attendance, sponsorships and debt. Legal and financial issues: In January 2006, less than two years after purchasing the game, the company sold it following a string of public controversies centered on naming rights, relocation of the game and ongoing struggles with attendance. Later that year, the company that Overtime Sports had hired to handle promotion and advertising sued Hansmire’s company and the bowl’s new owner for $103,000, claiming it hadn’t been fully paid. The new owner blamed Overtime Sports, according to news coverage, but Hansmire asserted that his company “left Hawaii without any debts.” Court records and news coverage indicate the parties were working toward a settlement, though it’s unclear if they reached one. Hansmire did not directly address questions about the case, and none of the other parties responded to requests for comment. Mark and Mindy Salmans also did not respond to requests for comment. The case was dismissed in October 2008.

Company name: Overtime Marketing LLC When it started: 2005 Status: Voluntarily dissolved Hansmire’s role: President, CEO and director What it did: Overtime Marketing LLC did business as the National Child Identification Program, according to federal tax liens and court records. It’s unclear if running NCIDP was the entity’s primary purpose, but Hansmire moved to terminate the company in September 2015, citing an intent to restructure the business. Two days later, he formed Stillwater Solutions 23 LLC, which does business as NCIDP. Legal and financial issues: In April 2009, the IRS filed a lien against the company for nearly $9,000 in unpaid employment taxes. Records show Hansmire paid the full amount later that year. In 2012, the IRS, which declined to comment, filed additional liens against the company for unpaid unemployment taxes totaling more than $73,000. Nearly $45,000 of that was still outstanding at the time of publication, according to publicly available records. In 2014, a district court judge in Dallas ordered Overtime Marketing, which was doing business as Texas vs. The Nation, to pay almost $35,000 to a sports radio station that had sued the company, alleging it was not compensated for on-air advertisements. Two years later, Frost Bank sued Overtime Marketing and Hansmire for overdrafting his business accounts by nearly $50,000. A county court judge approved a settlement agreement that required him to reimburse the bank. A Frost spokesperson confirmed that Hansmire paid but declined to comment further. Hansmire did not directly address questions about the case.

Company name: Overtime Sports Southwest LLC When it started: 2006 Status: Forfeited existence Hansmire’s role: Member and president What it did: After leaving Hawaii, Hansmire launched a new bowl game in El Paso called Texas vs. The Nation, which pitted the state’s top college football players against their peers from across the country. According to local news coverage from the time, he recruited the University of Texas at El Paso’s football coach to lead the state team and persuaded local officials to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in the venture on the promise that it would turn the city into an important destination for NFL scouts and have a multimillion-dollar economic impact. After a few years, attendance fell. Hansmire blamed El Pasoans for not showing up to the fourth game, on Feb. 6, 2010, describing turnout as a “big disappointment,” and threatened to relocate. He later apologized, but the City Council scaled back El Paso’s financial commitment. He moved the game to San Antonio the following year and later the Dallas suburb of Allen, where it was played a final time. Legal and financial issues: Overtime Sports Southwest was later renamed Overtime Sports Southeast. In 2014, Hansmire and Overtime Sports Southeast filed a lawsuit against Dethrone Royalty Holdings Inc., the title sponsor for the final game, which resulted in a settlement that allowed Hansmire to pay outstanding bills from the game. A year later, California-based Direct Access Fund LLC, which had lent Overtime Southwest money, sued Hansmire for failing to repay. The parties settled that year, but in July 2016, Direct Access Fund asked that the case be removed from the dismissal docket because Hansmire still hadn’t paid. A settlement later awarded Direct Access Fund, whose attorney did not respond to requests for comment, $213,750 plus $13,000 in attorneys fees. It’s unclear if Hansmire paid. “I am very proud of what Texas vs. The Nation accomplished in El Paso,” Hansmire said in his statement. “The game was instrumental in furthering numerous football careers.”

2010s

Company name: Safety Blitz Foundation Inc. When it started: 2015 Status: In existence Hansmire’s role: No formal role is listed in state records, but in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune, Hansmire said that Safety Blitz, a nonprofit, was formed so that the for-profit National Child Identification Program could accept donations. Mark Salmans, who is director of operations for NCIDP, is listed as the foundation’s registered agent. What it does: According to its federal tax filings, Safety Blitz’s mission is “to provide child ID safety kits that allow parents to collect specific information by easily recording the physical characteristics and fingerprints of their children on identification cards that are kept by the parent or guardian.” In Texas and South Carolina, the millions of dollars that lawmakers have approved for kit purchases went to the foundation, which then used the money to purchase kits from the National Child Identification Program. Legal and financial issues: A review of IRS records found that the foundation didn’t file its required annual tax form for the first three years of its existence. That resulted in the loss of the organization’s tax-exempt status. A letter from the IRS to Safety Blitz shows its exemption was reinstated in 2019. “I have no position with the Safety Blitz Foundation,” Hansmire said in a statement. Salmans did not respond to questions about the organization.

Company name: Stillwater Solutions 23 LLC, doing business as the National Child Identification Program When it started: 2015 Status: In existence Hansmire’s role: Registered agent and manager What it does: The company sells child identification kits to governmental entities and schools across the country, according to contracting records. Federal records show the company spent more than $200,000 on lobbyists since 2019 to push legislation in Congress that would support taxpayer-funded purchases of the company’s kits. Legal and financial issues: In November 2021, Stillwater temporarily lost its legal right to operate after a tax forfeiture but was reinstated in January 2022. Tax forfeitures can occur when a company fails to pay taxes, but Hansmire said in this case it was because the company didn’t file its franchise tax return on time. “Stillwater missed a mundane filing deadline,” Hansmire said in a statement to the news organizations. “This was corrected, and we are in good standing.”

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Jeremy Schwartz contributed reporting.

by Kiah Collier and Jeremy Schwartz

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Last fall, millions of public school children in Texas brought home envelopes that bore the state seal and read, “A gift of safety, from our family to yours.”

Tucked into each envelope were an inkpad and a piece of paper prompting parents to take their children’s fingerprints, record their physical attributes and get a DNA sample by having them suck on the corner of the form.

Every envelope also came with a warning: “Over 800,000 children are missing every year — that’s one every 40 seconds.”

The fingerprinting kits were produced by the National Child Identification Program, a Waco, Texas-based company that has persuaded lawmakers and attorneys general in at least 11 states to provide the kits, at times spending millions of dollars purchasing them. In Texas alone, lawmakers allocated about $5.7 million on kits for all students in kindergarten through eighth grade. They are currently considering funding additional kits for the next two years.

But similar kits are available for free from nonprofit and governmental entities, and claims made by the company about the number of missing children and the effectiveness of such kits are exaggerated, according to missing child and law enforcement experts.

“The organizations promoting the kits are preying on people’s fears,” said Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant who oversaw the Louisiana Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children during a 20-year stint with the Louisiana State Police.

The envelopes that contain the National Child Identification Program’s fingerprinting kits claim that over 800,000 children go missing every year. The figure is outdated and exaggerated, according to experts. (Obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Pearson called the kits “crime control theater,” a term used to describe criminal justice laws and policies that make people feel as though they are being proactive but in reality accomplish little. “They’re promoted as preventative measures, but they’re not preventative at all,” she said.

The National Child Identification Program, or NCIDP, is led by Kenny Hansmire, a former NFL player who has a string of failed business ventures, has racked up millions of dollars in outstanding federal tax liens, has twice pleaded guilty to felony theft and, in 2015, was sanctioned by banking regulators in Connecticut for his role in an alleged scheme to defraud or mislead investors, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Hansmire has deep connections within the world of professional and college football, and he promotes those relationships while seeking support for his child ID kits from elected officials. He has offered to honor lawmakers and attorneys general at high-profile events such as football games, where he has handed out awards at pregame ceremonies and lauded supportive officials as child safety champions.

In touting his kits, Hansmire has cited a feature that he says makes them superior: They use a colorless chemical solution rather than the usual black ink, resulting in less mess. He said parents and guardians can store the kits at home and present them to law enforcement if their children disappear.

A trifold brochure prompts parents to record their children’s physical description, collect a saliva sample and take their fingerprints using the enclosed “inkless” solution. (Obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Over the years, Hansmire has claimed that the kits helped law enforcement identify multiple missing children and that officers say they are helpful in the early stages of a search.

In an interview last year with the news organizations, he recommended that reporters call various Texas law enforcement agencies and speak to “any policeman” about their effectiveness, specifically mentioning the case of a runaway girl in Dallas whom he said was found with the use of a fingerprinting kit.

The news organizations did just that, contacting 15 police departments and sheriff’s offices in the state’s major metropolitan areas, including three Hansmire mentioned specifically.

Out of the 11 law enforcement agencies that responded, none could recall using a kit to help find a runaway or kidnapped child. The executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas also said he could not think of a case in which the kits helped.

ProPublica and the Tribune also found that the startling figure Hansmire and his company have repeatedly cited to promote his product is inflated.

Eight hundred thousand children do not go missing every year. The figure, which comes from a 24-year-old Department of Justice study, is no longer accurate and overstates the scale of the missing children problem, according to David Finkelhor, a co-author of the report. Nearly half of the cases cited in the study, for example, are for children who are missing for “benign” reasons such as spending the night at a friend’s house or coming home later than expected, said Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

“It is a mistaken number to cite without any context,” Finkelhor said. “It sounds very scary and is not a good reflection of the number of kids who need serious law enforcement mobilization.”

Hansmire said his company’s messaging has shifted away from what he called the “historically high” number of missing children, though at the time of publication his website continued to feature the claim. But, he said, the number itself should not matter because “one missing or exploited child is one too many.”

Serial Entrepreneur

A San Antonio native, Hansmire played in the NFL in the mid-1980s for the Houston Oilers and Philadelphia Eagles.

After retiring, he sought to reinvent himself as an entrepreneur. He teamed up with a Dallas inventor to form a company called Inkless Image Security Corp. in 1996 and later filed a patent application for an “inkless fingerprint methodology” that would allow businesses and other entities to verify the authenticity of documents.

In January of that year, 9-year-old Amber Hagerman disappeared while riding her bicycle near her grandparents’ home in Arlington, Texas. She was found dead four days later. Her murder got Hansmire thinking about the need for child ID kits, he later told the San Angelo Standard-Times. He pushed for widespread distribution of the kits, talking with police departments, churches and schools, but found no takers.

“Feeling beaten, Hansmire prayed about the situation, and, during the night, something told him to call Grant Teaff,” the story stated.

Kenny Hansmire leads the National Child Identification Program, a Waco, Texas-based company. (Lauren Crow for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Teaff, a legendary former Baylor University football coach, had just become executive director of the American Football Coaches Association and was working to expand the organization. Hansmire quickly sold him on the idea of a program that would distribute free inkless child identification kits at football games across the country.

In a video last year celebrating NCIDP’s 25th anniversary, Teaff thanked Hansmire for his “vision, passion and relentless dedication” while describing Hagerman’s disappearance as a major inspiration for the collaboration.

“It took her parents several days to provide law enforcement with needed information,” Teaff said. “At the time, less than 2% of parents had copies of their child’s fingerprints.”

Arlington Police Department spokesperson Tim Ciesco disputed Teaff’s assertion that fingerprinting kits would have made a difference in Hagerman’s case, saying her parents provided a photo and basic descriptive details. “The bigger challenge for us was getting that information widely circulated to the public,” Ciesco said. The case was the impetus for the Amber Alert, a notification system for missing children.

Teaff did not answer questions about his relationship with Hansmire, the company or Ciesco’s comments. He did, however, express his continued support for the company.

The collaboration with the coaches association came at a critical time for Hansmire, who had faced a series of legal and financial troubles, according to public records.

In the decade before the partnership, Hansmire pleaded guilty to two felony charges — cattle theft in 1988 and theft by check in 1993 — and was convicted of drunken driving. He got 75 days in jail, a $500 fine and a one-year license suspension for the DWI. For the two felony charges, he received deferred adjudication, a process that lets people accused of certain crimes avoid a conviction if they successfully complete probation without any other violations. The terms of his probation included drug and alcohol programs and hundreds of hours of community service in addition to paying thousands of dollars in restitution.

Hansmire and various companies he founded were sued at least four times in the 1990s for unpaid debts including rent, according to court records. A judge ordered him to pay in three of those cases. He reached a settlement in the fourth case. He also began to rack up what would eventually become millions in federal tax liens, public records show.

Over the next decade, Hansmire pursued a series of entrepreneurial ventures that centered on college football all-star games in Hawaii and Texas. The companies, which faced several lawsuits and financial and public relations struggles, eventually fizzled.

In an effort to raise funds for his businesses, Hansmire linked up with a Connecticut securities broker named Dale Quesnel. Quesnel received $166,000 to persuade at least 10 investors to lend $1.9 million to Hansmire’s companies, according to public records. One of the promissory notes obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune shows Hansmire pledged to pay back the money at an interest rate of 12%.

The Connecticut Department of Banking investigated the scheme and found that the men defrauded or misled investors in violation of the state’s securities law. It determined that Hansmire and Quesnel failed to register the promissory notes they sold to investors and to notify them of the risks associated with the loans. In June 2015, the department ordered the men to stop seeking investments and to pay an undisclosed amount in restitution.

Quesnel failed to pay, according to a March 2019 settlement agreement his employer reached with the Banking Department. Neither he nor the employer responded to requests for comment.

Hansmire reached a settlement agreement with the state in which he admitted no fault but acknowledged the evidence against him. He agreed to pay restitution and not conduct certain types of finance-related business in Connecticut again. At the time, he said he didn’t have enough money to reimburse investors, records show. He later paid two of them $63,000, according to the Banking Department, which declined to say if that was the full amount Hansmire owed.

“As with most businesses, there have been legal disputes including the one with the State of Connecticut. Those matters have been properly resolved, closed, and are completely unrelated to the National Child ID Program,” Hansmire told ProPublica and the Tribune in an emailed statement.

A public filing shows that Hansmire and his wife had more than $2 million in outstanding tax liens as of October 2022 even after making a $374,000 payment. An IRS spokesperson would not confirm if that’s how much the couple still owes to the federal government, but publicly available records show that none of the liens had been released at the time of publication. That usually means that they have not been paid in full, the spokesperson said.

Hansmire’s wife did not respond to emailed questions. In his statement, Hansmire claimed to have “paid debts entirely.” He did not provide details or respond to additional questions about the tax liens.

Speaking broadly about his legal and financial troubles, Hansmire said: “We live in a society of second chances. My story is no different.”

“A Gift of Safety”

In the past four years, Hansmire has been increasingly successful in securing support from politicians despite persistent concerns about whether his kits are effective or necessary.

He has promoted the kits as a vital child protection tool alongside his former college football teammate and business partner Mark Salmans and Mike Singletary, an NFL Hall of Famer who played for the Chicago Bears.

“Our program enjoys bipartisan support from elected and unelected leaders who agree this is a gift of safety that provides parents with the peace of mind of knowing they can safely store most of the information law enforcement needs should their child ever go missing,” Hansmire told the news organizations.

Salmans did not respond to requests for comment or to detailed questions. Singletary declined to comment.

In 2019, the company hired lobbyists to push federal legislation that would bring in more business. One measure — filed in the House by Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat, and in the Senate by Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican — would have allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to award grants to local law enforcement agencies to purchase child ID kits.

Twenty Republican attorneys general, including Texas’ Ken Paxton and South Carolina’s Alan Wilson, sent a letter to then-President Donald Trump urging him to support the legislation. In the letter, they noted that “the cost for protecting approximately 30 million K-6 students across America is just below $52 million.”

“Statistics show that more than 800,000 children go missing each year including runaways and those abducted. That is one child gone every 40 seconds. And we are seeing those statistics rise along with child sexual abuse, exploitation and human trafficking,” stated the letter, which was penned by Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton signed on to a letter that urged former President Donald Trump to support federal legislation that would make grant money available to purchase the kits. (Lauren Crow for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Finkelhor, the child safety researcher, said a more accurate number to use is the FBI’s list of 30,000 active cases for missing children under 18, which better represents instances in which law enforcement agencies are working to locate them. Even the FBI’s figure, which includes runaways, can misrepresent the number of abductions in which children are hurt, killed or taken great distances by strangers, Finkelhor said. That number is just over 100 per year, according to multiple Department of Justice studies.

Emails obtained through public records requests show that staff members for Reyes and Wilson raised questions either about the 800,000 statistic or the effectiveness of the kits as their states pursued partnerships that extended beyond the support of federal legislation.

Reyes’ staff concluded the figure was far too high as the Utah attorney general moved to set up a five-year, $1.7 million public-private partnership to provide kits to schoolchildren, according to internal emails. The company ultimately agreed to remove the number from the kits it handed out to parents. Yet Reyes’ office included a breakdown of missing child statistics that added up to the figure when it issued a press release about the program last year. The office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In South Carolina, a top staffer for Wilson could find no evidence of the kits’ effectiveness, saying in a June 2021 email that investing in them was not an “an eligible or wise use” of dedicated funds for crime victims’ assistance. Despite the conclusion from his staff, Wilson emailed Hansmire the next day to say he was “very interested” in partnering with the company. Wilson’s office successfully lobbied lawmakers who appropriated $2 million last year to purchase inkless fingerprinting kits. NCIDP was awarded the contract in January.

Wilson did not respond to detailed questions.

Staffers for attorneys general weren’t the only ones warning about the company as it sought to expand its reach.

In correspondence with members of Congress, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children criticized the use of the 800,000 statistic, calling it erroneous. The nonprofit questioned why federal lawmakers would direct taxpayer money toward a specific company when “more robust, lower-cost/free kits are available to the public.” (The nonprofit, which was created by Congress during the Reagan administration as a national clearinghouse for missing child cases, is among a wide variety of entities that provide similar kits for free or for a lower cost.)

While pushing back against federal legislation that would specifically direct funding to NCIDP, center officials said the company’s kits lacked necessary educational programming to teach young students how to avoid and extricate themselves from dangerous situations.

“The legislation presents a false narrative that if a child ID program were funded through state Attorneys General, child abduction or runaways would not exist,” the center wrote in comments provided to lawmakers including Cruz.

Hansmire told the news organizations that the nonprofit’s concerns were “rooted in a funding turf war” but gave no details. He also said that NCIDP is planning to publish a new educational tool kit this year.

In the end, the legislation did not pass.

Norcross did not respond to detailed written questions.

Darin Miller, a spokesperson for Cruz, pointed to the company’s long history of support from leaders in Texas and in Washington, D.C., as a reason the senator filed the legislation.

The company “isn’t a controversial organization and child ID kits are not a controversial idea,” Miller said in a statement. “Senator Cruz was proud to introduce this measure to try and help keep kids safe.”

Neither Cruz nor other elected officials whom the news organizations reached out to responded to questions seeking examples of cases in which the kits helped locate missing children.

In an interview with the news organizations last year and during several other public appearances, Hansmire broadly pointed to the case of a runaway girl from Dallas.

When the news organizations reached out to the Dallas Police Department, a spokesperson said she was unaware of the case and asked for more information. Reporters returned to Hansmire seeking additional details to confirm the case.

He did not provide any of the requested details, instead responding in an email: “My apologies for the difficulty with the Dallas departments. The anecdote I mentioned was several years ago and would have involved one of the 50+ departments in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.”

“A Very Hot Item”

Texas leaders have been instrumental in directing millions of dollars to Hansmire’s child ID kit business.

A key win came in 1998, when then-Gov. George W. Bush discovered the kits at a Texas A&M University football game and, according to Hansmire, requested some for his daughters. Two years later, Texas became the first state to distribute the kits to all of its 4 million schoolchildren. Voluntary contributions from various organizations and individual donors covered the cost, according to House and Senate resolutions.

After becoming president, Bush was also crucial in helping NCIDP land a formal partnership with the FBI to distribute kits across the country, according to Hansmire, who said the relationship ended around the same time Robert Mueller, a Bush appointee, left the bureau in 2013. Neither Bush nor Mueller could be reached for comment.

Bush is only one of the Texas politicians who have supported Hansmire over the years. During his tenure, former Gov. Rick Perry directed at least $3 million in public funding to the company to purchase kits.

The support stopped after Perry, who could not be reached for comment, left office to run for president. Then, during a committee hearing in April 2021, Texas state Sen. Donna Campbell introduced legislation that would not only reestablish funding for the kits but enshrine that commitment in state law.

Texas state Sen. Donna Campbell, a New Braunfels Republican, introduced legislation in 2021 requiring the state to provide inkless child identification kits to the families of all public elementary and middle school students. (Lauren Crow for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Campbell repeated the claim that 800,000 children go missing every year while touting the importance of the program. “This bill seeks to help locate the missing children,” Campbell said during a hearing.

She said the bill was brought to her by Hansmire, Singletary and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. She proudly exclaimed that its passage would “make Texas the first state in the United States to legislatively implement this essential program.”

Then she urged her colleagues to support the measure, turning to the state’s famous refrain.

“And what do we say?” Campbell, who declined to comment, said during the hearing. “How goes Texas, so goes the nation.”

No one spoke publicly against the measure, but Gary Gates, a Republican state representative from Richmond, was among the few dozen lawmakers who voted in opposition to the bill.

“Nobody would really tell me: How are kids saved by this?” Gates, a father of 13 children, recalled in an interview.

“This program has been in existence for 20 years,” Gates said. “If it really was an effective program, someone would have gotten up there and cited statistics.”

The bill passed with large majorities in the state Legislature and was signed into law that June by Gov. Greg Abbott, who didn’t respond to detailed questions from the news organizations.

The Texas Education Agency then scrambled to finalize an agreement to get the kits out amid pressure from Patrick’s office and a looming kit price increase that the company blamed on its supplier, according to emails obtained under a Texas Public Information Act request.

“This is for a very hot item with the Lt. Gov’s office looking over our shoulder,” Patrick McGinnis, a contracts and grants accountability manager, wrote in an email to colleagues in August 2021. “And time is also of the essence as prices go up soon which means about 600,000 less Texas students can be served.” McGinnis didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Records show that the education agency determined it didn’t need to undertake a longer and more rigorous contracting process and instead gave NCIDP funding through a noncompetitive grant.

Patrick did not answer questions related to the comments from McGinnis about his involvement. In a statement to the news organizations, Patrick noted Texas’ long history with the program and its broad support base among the football community. He said the participation of Singletary, the NFL’s former Man of the Year, gave the company credibility. Patrick said Singletary did most of the talking when he and Hansmire pitched the kits during a meeting in early 2021. He said he didn’t remember meeting Hansmire previously.

“Anything we can do to speed the safe return of a missing child should be a priority for the state,” Patrick said.

Hansmire used Texas as an example later that year while speaking to attorneys general as he promoted the positive publicity politicians could get for purchasing the fingerprinting kits.

“We have a captured audience of parents and grandparents in our college and NFL games,” he said during a conference.

Then he laid out his plans in Texas. The state, he said, would distribute 3.6 million child ID kits. The company would give out a ceremonial first kit at a Dallas Cowboys game with Texas’ attorney general, Paxton, and the governor in attendance. Ceremonial kits would also be handed out at University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M and Houston Astros games, he said.

“We want our communities to know the great things that the AGs are doing, and it doesn’t hurt that you know half a million fans will know that in the great state of Texas,” Hansmire said.

Because of pandemic restrictions, none of those ceremonies occurred, according to Hansmire, who said he didn’t promise Texas officials awards in exchange for their support.

Hansmire honored numerous politicians for supporting the company at an October 2021 Green Bay Packers game in Wisconsin. Campbell, Patrick and Paxton were among those who received awards.

“As other Texans before me, I was focused on a program that could keep children safe. I was not looking for or asking for an award,” Patrick said.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was a key supporter of legislation that paid for the kits. (Lauren Crow for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Campbell and Patrick, who were seeking reelection at the time, promoted the recognition on their websites and in newsletters to constituents.

“Selling False Hope”

A week after the ceremony in Wisconsin, Hansmire set his sights on a bigger prize.

In conversations with attorneys general from both parties, Hansmire learned that the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Attorneys General was receiving millions of dollars in interest payments annually.

The nonpartisan association provides training and advocacy for attorneys general across the country. Its foundation manages more than $100 million in assets from a 1998 multistate settlement with the tobacco industry. Interest from the fund typically goes toward education, research and training for attorneys general; enforcement of the settlement; and funding for the association’s programs and initiatives.

Some Republican members of the association have criticized it for accumulating large sums of settlement money that they argue should be distributed to individual states.

Hansmire told the news organizations that he had discussions with attorneys general in which they considered whether the association could use some of that money to help pay for the kits.

On Nov. 1, 2021, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry asked that the association’s executive committee set aside time at its next meeting to explore how “resources” could be used to support Hansmire’s company, explaining that “$9 million would fund a Child ID Kit for every kindergarten student in America.”

No member had ever made a request that large and much less one to support an outside organization, prompting Chris Toth, then the association’s executive director, to ask that staff to look into the company.

Two weeks after Landry’s request, Hansmire reached out to the president of the association, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine. Racine, who had attended the Green Bay Packers game the previous month, is pictured holding an award alongside other attorneys general. In an email, Hansmire offered to host a reception in Racine’s honor with Singletary and various other former NFL players who were going to be there lobbying for federal legislation in support of the company.

A staffer for Racine declined the invitation a week before Landry made his pitch to the association’s executive committee.

At a Dec. 6, 2021, meeting, Landry proposed a grant program that would allow corporate sponsors to match the association’s contributions. Draft minutes from the meeting, which were obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune through a public records request, say that Landry wanted committee members to know what the company “will be able to do for the attorneys general. AG Landry states that there ‘has to be a quid pro quo.’”

It’s unclear what Landry meant by “quid pro quo.” Neither Landry nor Racine, who has since left office, responded to requests for comment.

The phrase, however, didn’t appear in the final version of the meeting minutes. That’s because Landry requested that it be removed, Toth said.

As the executive committee considered Landry’s request, association staffers began gathering information about the company and Hansmire that they considered troubling, including the 2015 Connecticut settlement, details of which are easily found on the state Banking Department’s website.

As part of its inquiry, association staff reached out to the FBI to ask about the agency’s relationship with NCIDP. On its website, the company claims to sell the only kit to have partnered with and been approved by the FBI.

In an email responding to the inquiries from the association’s staff, FBI attorney Thomas Aldridge said that the agency was no longer associated with NCIDP and that any mentions of the FBI should be removed from the company’s website. Neither the FBI nor Aldridge would comment.

“No one should rely upon statements made on the website as FBI endorsement, partnership, or approval for that organization or its products,” Aldridge wrote in the email obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

For his part, Hansmire said NCIDP’s website does not “reflect a current partnership” but rather a “historic relationship.”

Staff members of the attorneys general association completed their research and provided a report to the chair of the committee weighing the request for funding. At a Feb. 16, 2022, meeting, the board decided against the grant for NCIDP.

“While AGs overwhelmingly supported the request, NAAG staff did not want to lose control of how they spent the money,” Hansmire said in a written statement. He claimed that criticisms of his company largely stem from “the biased opinions of a former staffer of a national organization.” He did not respond to questions about who he was referring to or how the person was biased.

Landry, who also received a copy of the staff’s findings, didn’t give up.

Nine months after the association turned down his request, he announced that his office, along with the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association, was entering a partnership with NCIDP to provide kits to Louisiana students. Private partners would pay for the kits, according to his office.

At an Oct. 21 press conference announcing the partnership, Hansmire called Landry, who had declared a bid for Louisiana governor a few weeks earlier, “one of the top leaders in this country.”

Landry is one of at least five attorneys general who have begun partnerships with the company in the past year. That is disappointing, said Toth, who retired last year after 18 years at the association.

“Anyone can spend 20 minutes on the internet and realize there is something fishy about this guy,” Toth said in an interview. “I was flabbergasted that Hansmire was operating this way for so long, without anybody calling it out.”

“What really bothers me is he’s making a buck off of selling false hope,” he added. “This isn’t going to protect any children.”

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Lexi Churchill contributed reporting.

by Jessica Priest and Jeremy Schwartz

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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.

Update, May 7, 2023: Scott Beard lost his Abilene City Council race, as did the two other conservative Christian candidates who vowed to protect children by removing what they deemed to be obscene books from the public library and banning family-friendly drag shows from the city.

Three churches in West Texas have made financial contributions to a pastor running for a hotly contested seat on the Abilene City Council, a clear violation of federal rules prohibiting nonprofits and churches from endorsing candidates, financial disclosure records show.

Fountaingate Merkel Church, Remnant Church and Hope Chapel Foursquare Church donated a combined $800 to the campaign of Scott Beard, senior pastor at Fountaingate Fellowship church, who is running for a seat on the seven-member City Council in Saturday’s election.

The donations represent a new level of brazenness as some churches across Texas and the United States become more active in political campaigns, a prominent expert said. Rules posted on the IRS’ website say campaign contributions from churches and other nonprofits “clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.”

“This is absolutely something every church should know — and probably does know — that they’re not allowed to do,” said Sam Brunson, a law professor specializing in religion and tax exemption at Loyola University Chicago.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported last year that church leaders in Texas and across the country endorsed candidates from the pulpit at least 20 times in apparent violation of the Johnson Amendment, a law passed by Congress in 1954. Three experts on nonprofit law, including Brunson, reviewed the sermons and said they crossed a line.

The IRS can strip violators of their tax-exempt status, but there’s only one publicly known example of it doing so, nearly 30 years ago. Brunson said this lack of enforcement has emboldened bad actors, and he called on Congress to explicitly tell the IRS it can also fine violators.

Beard told ProPublica and the Tribune in a phone interview on Thursday that the churches did not know they weren’t allowed to donate to him and that he has sent the checks back.

“Look, we’ve made mistakes,” he said. “Every campaign makes them. I’m just kind of under the microscope because of me being a pastor, honestly.”

Dewey Hall, the pastor of Fountaingate Merkel Church, which is nearly 18 miles west of Abilene and not affiliated with Beard’s church, said Beard told him on Wednesday that his church’s $200 donation was illegal, but he thought Beard would “be a good councilman, and we need to have Christians in politics nowadays.”

A representative of Remnant Church, which Beard reported gave him $400, responded to a question via Facebook Messenger to say that its donation was intended for Fountaingate Fellowship Church, not Beard’s campaign.

“They must have a mistake,” wrote the representative, who did not identify themselves when asked. “We will look into it.”

Beard told ProPublica and the Tribune on Friday that he thought Remnant Church’s check was written to his campaign, but that he would review his records and talk to the pastor of Remnant Church.

Hope Chapel Foursquare Church, which gave $200, did not respond to a voicemail and email seeking comment.

The IRS declined to confirm whether it had received any complaints or was investigating.

Though the donations made by the churches are small, local races are typically lower-dollar affairs than legislative elections or statewide offices. The donations may also violate Texas election law, which prohibits both nonprofit and for-profit corporations from making political contributions to candidates or political committees. Violations are considered third-degree felonies.

The Texas Ethics Commission is charged with investigating such violations and can assess a civil penalty of up to $5,000 or triple the amount at issue, whichever is greater, said J.R. Johnson, the commission’s executive director. Agency commissioners also have the authority to refer violations to local district attorneys for criminal prosecution, he said.

In February, the commission issued a $12,400 civil penalty against a for-profit corporation that it found had made two prohibited donations worth a combined $3,700 to the campaign of a county clerk candidate in South Texas. The company didn’t respond to the commission, which issued a default judgment. A message left for the company was not returned; the president’s voicemail inbox was full.

According to the Texas secretary of state, Fountaingate Merkel Church formed as a nonprofit corporation in 2017 and Remnant did so in 2021. Hope Chapel is part of the California-based International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which is formed as a nonprofit corporation. (The IRS automatically considers churches to be tax-exempt even if they don’t apply for that status directly.)

The Abilene City Council race has been marked by allegations of Johnson Amendment violations for months. At least five churches have displayed campaign signs for three conservative Christian candidates who have all vowed to protect children by removing what they deemed to be obscene books from the public library and banning family-friendly drag shows from the city.

Campaign signs for mayoral candidate Ryan Goodwin and City Council candidates Scott Beard and James Sargent are displayed outside First Church of the Nazarene, first image; Hope 4 Life Church, second image; and New Beginnings Pentecostal Church, third image; in Abilene last week. (Emil T. Lippe for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Two of the candidates are pastors: Beard and Ryan Goodwin, a mayoral candidate, who is both a real estate agent and an associate pastor at Mosaic Church. The third candidate, James Sargent, who is running for a City Council seat, is an Air Force veteran and an auto mechanic who has made his identity as a Christian central to his campaign. Sargent’s campaign motto is “biblically founded | constitutionally grounded.”

All three organized to outlaw abortion in Abilene before the Supreme Court ruling that said it was not a constitutional right and prior to Texas enacting a near-total ban on the procedure.

In interviews with ProPublica and the Tribune, Sargent said the churches he asked to display his campaign signs said yes because they were willing to display all candidates’ campaign signs if asked, which Brunson said was not a defense to a potential Johnson Amendment violation. Goodwin said some churches asked him for his campaign sign, and he’s not concerned they’ll face IRS enforcement.

First image: Goodwin in the sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church in Abilene. Second image: Sargent, an Air Force Veteran and an auto mechanic, has made his identity as a Christian central to his campaign for City Council. (Emil T. Lippe for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) A campaign sign for Sargent was placed outside Mosaic Church in Abilene. (Emil T. Lippe for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

“What I think we’re seeing is a fiction of the law,” Goodwin said. If the issue were to ever reach the U.S. Supreme Court, he said, “churches would have a voice and wouldn’t have to worry about anything like this.”

Beard said the Texas Ethics Commission has so far notified him of three complaints about his campaign this election.

One complaint stemmed from Beard telling his congregation at the end of a service to pick up his campaign signs in the church foyer.

Michael Bob Starr, the former commander of Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, filed the most recent ethics complaint about Beard’s campaign, alleging that Beard had not reported the in-kind donations his church had made to his campaign, specifically his church allowing him to use its property for his campaign activities. Starr told ProPublica and the Tribune on Thursday that he will submit another complaint to the commission about Beard accepting donations from the three churches even though Beard sent the checks back.

Starr, who ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for Congress in 2016, can’t vote in the City Council election because he doesn’t live within city limits, and he’s upfront about his friendship with Beard’s opponent, Brian Yates. During their time in the Air Force, Starr said, he and Yates traveled to countries run by those who believed they had a mandate from God and those who tried to impose their religion on others. He said that’s why he’s speaking up.

Beard told ProPublica and Tribune on Thursday that he is cooperating with the Texas Ethics Commission regarding Starr’s first complaint.

Beard stands by his belief that the nation was founded as a Christian nation and if it doesn’t turn back to God, it will fall like the Roman Empire and other great civilizations have throughout history.

Tell Us How Religious Organizations in Your Area Involve Themselves in Elections

by Talia Buford

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

We are excited to announce the names of the 11 distinguished journalists chosen to launch ProPublica’s new investigative editor training program.

The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program was established to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, with a focus on journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

This program is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports journalism, film and arts organizations whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy.

Participants will undergo a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually every two months for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers.

We’re encouraged by the response we’ve received for this effort. All told, 159 people applied for 10 advertised slots for this year’s training. The applicants represented a broad array of news organizations across the country. And due to their impressive credentials, we added one more slot than we’d initially planned.

“This is an exciting moment for both ProPublica and the field of investigative journalism,’’ said Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of ProPublica. “The breadth of our applicant pool demonstrates the deep interest in publications at every level in developing the skills that will give readers the in-depth reporting our democracy so desperately needs.’’

We’re thrilled to introduce the inaugural cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program:

Maha Ahmed is managing editor at Type Investigations, where she runs its fact-checking operation, develops newsroom processes and edits climate, labor,and other stories. Previously, she was Type's head of research. Ahmed also spent several years as a fact-checker, researcher, reporter or editor at a range of other newsrooms, including The Intercept, Mother Jones, In These Times, South Side Weekly and the Invisible Institute. She's spoken at IRE and NICAR, in journalism school classes and to other newsrooms about fact-checking and research methods. She is based in Brooklyn and was born in Houston.

Melissa Barragán Taboada is the editor of The Boston Globe’s Great Divide education team. She previously worked as a reporter and editor at the Austin American-Statesman, where she spearheaded the paper’s education coverage. Taboada also taught a "Reporting on Education" course at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, her alma mater.

Meghann D. Garcia is managing editor of the Uvalde Leader-News, which has won South Texas Press Association Sweepstakes honors six times over the last eight years. She joined the newspaper staff in 2008 as a production assistant and worked as a staff writer and assistant editor before taking on her present role in 2013. Garcia has won multiple regional and state press association awards for news and feature writing and page design. A lifelong resident of Uvalde County, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and an Associate of Arts from Southwest Texas Junior College in Uvalde in 2005.

Maia Hibbett is the managing editor at New York Focus, a statewide nonprofit investigative newsroom. She has written for The Nation and The Baffler, as well as for The Intercept, where she was previously an editor. She is interested in the way politics affect people across the world, particularly in the realm of contemporary imperialism and the military-industrial complex. Hibbett is from central Massachusetts and lives in Brooklyn.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. She is an award-winning longtime education reporter, having worked for nearly two decades as a K-12 reporter for the Detroit Free Press. Prior to that, she covered education for the Green Bay Press Gazette and the Manhattan (Kansas) Mercury. At Chalkbeat, she supervises coverage of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, one of the most troubled in the nation, as well as state education policy issues and statewide trends in K-12 schools.

Tracy Jan is a deputy health and science editor at The Washington Post, where she collaborates with reporters who cover the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, medical misinformation, abortion, long COVID and other health accountability stories. She joined The Post in December 2016 to launch a beat on the intersection of race and the economy, producing work that delved deeply into reparations for slavery, systemic racism in America and the economic and health impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Black, Asian, Latino and immigrant communities. She was previously a reporter at The Boston Globe. She was a 2015 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, as well as a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan. Her work has been recognized by the George Polk Awards, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Headliner Awards, the Online News Association and the Asian American Journalists Association.

Brendan Klinkenberg is an executive editor at Gimlet Media. He's edited stories about Harlem rappers, Russian hackers, art thieves, domestic terror cells and tech utopias gone awry. Prior to Gimlet, Brendan was an editor at Rolling Stone and Complex, and a reporter for BuzzFeed News (RIP) and Wired. He lives in Brooklyn.

Hayat Norimine is the accountability editor for the Idaho Statesman in Boise and oversees reporters who cover politics, education, the outdoors, criminal justice and investigations. She's the local editor on a 2023 ProPublica Local Reporting Network project examining Idaho's dilapidated school facilities. Before she became an editor, she covered state politics in Idaho and city halls in Dallas, Seattle and Southwest Washington. Hayat immigrated to the U.S. with her family at age 4 and grew up in Eastern Washington. She holds an English degree from the University of Washington and a master's in journalism from Northwestern University.

Lillian M. Ortiz is the managing editor at Shelterforce, a national nonprofit publication that aims to inform and hold accountable those working toward more just and equitable communities. Before joining Shelterforce, Lillian was editor of the Verona-Cedar Grove Times, an award-winning publication in New Jersey. Throughout her career, Lillian has earned dozens of honors for her reporting, layout and design and photography.

Dalila-Johari Paul is the national editor at Capital B, where she manages a growing team of reporters from across the country, covering politics, criminal justice, health and other beats. She previously worked at CNN Digital, where she led the race and equality team and, before that, was the overnight supervisor overseeing late night and early morning news coverage. She’s also held multiple editorial positions at the Guardian US, the Star-Ledger in New Jersey and the Hartford Courant in Connecticut.

Elaine Teng is a senior editor in ESPN's investigative and enterprise unit, where she works on breaking news, longform features and cross-platform projects. She was previously a writer and editor at ESPN The Magazine, where she covered soccer, Olympic sports, esports, tennis and action sports, and the managing editor of The New Republic. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing. A California native, she now fully embraces the New England seasons. In her free time, she sings in a choir, plays intense games of Settlers of Catan and tries to make the perfect mapo tofu.

by Ken Ward Jr., Mountain State Spotlight

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

For years, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice has been dogged by allegations that his family businesses haven’t paid their debts, including fines for environmental violations at their coal plants. One bank is even seeking to garnish his salary as governor to cover an unpaid personal guarantee of a business loan, court documents show.

But these disputes are likely to resurface in what will be one of the most hotly contested races for control of the U.S. Senate in 2024. Last week, Justice, a Republican who is immensely popular in the state, announced that he will challenge U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is often the swing vote on key legislation.

A review by ProPublica in 2020 found that, over three decades, Justice’s constellation of mining, farming and hospitality companies were involved in over 600 lawsuits in more than two dozen states. Many were filed by workers, vendors, business partners and government agencies, alleging they weren’t paid. Often, similar cases were filed in multiple jurisdictions, as lawyers for plaintiffs tried to chase down a Justice company’s assets to settle debts.

By late 2020, the total in judgments and settlements for Justice family businesses had reached $140 million, ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight found.

Since then, his family business empire has faced more turmoil. Lenders are trying to hold him personally responsible for hundreds of millions in debt. Courts are ordering payment of long-standing environmental penalties.

Neither representatives for Justice nor the family’s businesses responded to a request for comment. In the past, Justice has said that he and his family companies always pay what they owe. The governor has said that his businesses don’t create any conflicts of interest and that he didn’t run for office to get anything for himself.

Justice inherited a coal fortune from his father and expanded it to an empire of agricultural companies and resort hotels, including The Greenbrier, a posh, historic resort located in a valley where southern West Virginia’s mountains meet western Virginia’s rolling hills.

Last week, Justice used The Greenbrier as the backdrop for his announcement that he would seek the Republican nomination, facing U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney in the GOP primary. (Manchin has not announced a reelection bid yet, but in response to questions about Justice he said, “Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter.”)

As we documented, the resort has been at the heart of various conflicts of interest, as major trade associations that lobby state government for their industries have held meetings and conferences there.

And just two days before Justice’s Senate announcement, another of his resorts, Glade Springs, was the subject of state Supreme Court arguments in a case in which the resort homeowners’ association is seeking $6.6 million in property upkeep fees from one of Justice’s companies, which owns lots at the resort.

When he became governor in 2017, Justice said he was turning control of his family businesses over to his adult children. But our investigation found that, while governor, he continued to steer the empire.

In his political campaigns, Justice frequently touted his experience as a businessman and said that his long career in coal and other industries made him suited for the role of West Virginia’s chief executive.

Justice’s coal operations have also been repeatedly pressed to settle allegations of significant pollution problems in deals with regulators, yet the environmental violations have continued. Last month, a federal appeals court ruled that Justice companies must pay $2.5 million in environmental fines. Lawyers for the companies had argued the fines were the result of a misreading of an earlier settlement.

In December, an industrial plant owned by Justice’s family agreed to pay nearly $1 million in fines after releasing excessive air pollution into Black neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. An attorney who works with the Justice family said the consent order would “provide the certainty that the company needs to complete its evaluation of the plant’s future.”

For years, Justice had been considered West Virginia’s richest man and listed by Forbes as a billionaire. But in 2021, Forbes removed that listing. The magazine cited a dispute over $850 million in debt to the now-defunct firm Greensill Capital.

The Justice companies settled that dispute with a payment plan. But last week a longtime banking partner of Justice’s, Carter Bank & Trust, filed documents seeking to collect on a separate $300 million debt. Justice’s son, Jay Justice, said in a statement that the bank had refused a reasonable repayment plan.

by Marilyn W. Thompson; Photography and video by Cheney Orr for ProPublica

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The meeting was arranged in secret. On Nov. 19, 2021, the chief of staff for South Carolina’s Senate Judiciary Committee texted Dalton Tresvant, a key aide to Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state’s most powerful Democrat.

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“Hey Dalton - Andy Fiffick here,” he said. “We wrapped up some morning things quicker than we thought, so if you want/can come earlier than 1:30 we’re available.”

The state legislature had begun the crucial task of redrawing voting district lines after the 2020 census. Even small changes in the lines can mean the difference between who wins office, who loses and which party holds power. As the process commenced, Clyburn had a problem: His once majority Black district had suffered a daunting exodus of residents since the last count. He wanted his seat to be made as safe as possible. Republicans understood the powerful Black Democrat could not be ignored, even though he came from the opposing party and had no official role in the state-level process. Fortunately for them, Clyburn, who is 82 and was recently reelected to his 16th term, had long ago made peace with the art of bartering.

Early in South Carolina’s redistricting process, an aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn delivered a map to Republicans that outlined the lawmaker’s desires. (South Carolina Senate)

Tresvant made his way to the grounds of the antebellum Statehouse, a relic still marked by cannon fire from Sherman’s army. The aide carried a hand-drawn map of Clyburn’s 6th District and presented it to Fiffick and the other Republican committee staffers who were working to reconfigure the state’s congressional boundaries.

Some of Tresvant’s proposals appealed to Republicans. The sketch added Black voters to Clyburn’s district while moving out some predominantly white precincts that leaned toward the GOP. The Republicans kept Tresvant’s map confidential as they worked through the redistricting process for the following two months. They looped in Tresvant again near the end, according to public records obtained by ProPublica.

The resulting map, finalized in January 2022, made Clyburn’s lock on power stronger than it might have been otherwise. A House of Representatives seat that Democrats held as recently as 2018 would become even more solid for the incumbent Republican. This came at a cost: Democrats now have virtually no shot of winning any congressional seat in South Carolina other than Clyburn’s, state political leaders on both sides of the aisle say.

The redrawn map, finalized in January 2022, made Clyburn’s lock on power stronger than it might have been otherwise. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

As others attacked the Republican redistricting as an illegal racial gerrymander, Clyburn said nothing publicly. His role throughout the redistricting process has remained out of the public view, and he has denied any involvement in state legislative decisions. And while it’s been clear that Clyburn has been a key participant in past state redistricting, the extent of his role in the 2021 negotiations has not been previously examined. This account draws on public records, hundreds of pages of legal filings and interviews with dozens of South Carolina lawmakers and political experts from both sides of the aisle.

While redistricting fights are usually depicted as exercises in raw partisan power, the records and legal filings provide an inside look that reveals they can often involve self-interested input from incumbents and backroom horse trading between the two parties. With the House so closely divided today, every seat takes on more value.

South Carolina’s 2021 redistricting is now being challenged in federal court by the NAACP. The organization contends that Republicans deliberately moved Black voters into Clyburn’s district to solidify their party’s hold on the neighboring swing district, the 1st. A three-judge federal panel ruled in January that aspects of the state’s map were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that must be corrected before any more elections in the 1st District are held.

But Clyburn’s role already has complicated the NAACP’s case. The judges dismissed some of the group’s contentions partly because Clyburn’s early requests drove some of the mapping changes. The Republicans are now appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court, which has yet to decide if it wants to hear oral arguments in the case.

The redistricting process was the first South Carolina has undertaken since a series of Supreme Court rulings made it easier for states to redraw their districts. In 2013, the high court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, removing South Carolina and other Southern states, with their history of Black disenfranchisement, from Department of Justice oversight. And in 2019, the Supreme Court opened the door to more aggressive gerrymandering by barring federal court challenges on the basis of partisanship. But it can be illegal to draw lines based on race. Republican gerrymanders in Florida, Texas and several other states have recently been challenged for targeting Black voters.

The fight over the South Carolina redistricting has exacerbated racial wounds in a state where the growing white population now accounts for about 68% of residents, up from 66% a decade ago. Driven by the immigration of white retirees and a slow emigration of Black people, the state’s Black population has dropped over the years to just over a quarter of its 5.2 million residents. The GOP now controls all major state elected offices except for Clyburn’s seat.

Clyburn’s role highlights an underbelly of the redistricting process: In the South, Black Democratic incumbents have often worked with Republicans in power to achieve their own goals.

Few state Democrats will criticize Clyburn by name on the record. Bakari Sellers, 38, a former state Democratic lawmaker who once served on the redistricting committee, said, “There is a very unholy alliance between many Black legislators and their Republican counterparts in the redistricting process.” Clyburn’s district “is probably one of the best examples.” Moving that many Black voters into Clyburn’s district meant “we eliminate a chance to win” in other districts, he said.

Bakari Sellers, a former state Democratic lawmaker who once served on the redistricting committee, said, “There is a very unholy alliance between many Black legislators and their Republican counterparts in the redistricting process.”

“I’m not saying that we could win, but I’m saying we could be competitive, and people of color, those poor people, those individuals who have been crying out for so long, would have a voice,” Sellers said.

Clyburn speaks in the deep baritone of a preacher’s son, but his voice rises in anger when the subject turns to criticisms of his involvement in redistricting. Unfounded, he says.

In an interview, Clyburn said the redistricting plan signed by the Republican governor in early 2022 proves he did not get all that he wanted, mainly because his district lost its majority Black status. On questions about Tresvant’s work, a Clyburn spokesperson acknowledged that the office had “engaged in discussions regarding the boundaries of the 6th Congressional District by responding to inquiries” but did not answer detailed follow-up questions about his role. Tresvant did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“Any accusation that Congressman Clyburn in any way enabled or facilitated Republican gerrymandering that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred is fanciful,” Clyburn’s office said in a statement, calling the notion a “bizarre conspiracy theory.” Clyburn agrees with the decision of the three-judge panel and “hopes it will be upheld.”

Backroom Deals

Clyburn’s district, the 6th, itself resulted from what political experts would later describe as a racial gerrymander. After the 1990 census, a federal court imposed a plan that gave South Carolina’s Black population, then about a third of the state, a fair shot at electing a member of Congress. It hadn’t done so since 1897.

The 6th’s boundaries brought in Black people from across the state to create a crescent-shaped district. Black people made up almost 6 in 10 residents. National Democratic Party strategist Bill Carrick, then a South Carolina campaign consultant, said race guided the GOP. “It was like the Republicans decided, ‘Let’s see how many African Americans we can put into one district — instead of our own,’” he said.

This redistricting technique is known as “packing.” Packing can be a double-edged sword, giving underrepresented communities a voice but also limiting them to one — and only one — member of Congress. Clyburn, the first Black person in modern times to head a South Carolina state agency, won the seat in 1992. He rose to prominence in Washington, climbing to the post of House majority whip by 2007. His 2020 endorsement helped Joe Biden seal the Democratic presidential nomination, and he was recently named a co-chair of Biden’s 2024 campaign.

Clyburn, center left, with Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., in December 1992. Clyburn became House majority whip in 2007 and was recently named a co-chair of President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign. (Maureen Keating/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

Clyburn’s stature within the state was unparalleled. He had learned early in his career the value of backroom negotiations, at first dealing with staunch segregationists running the state government. His role in Washington required negotiating with GOP leaders to pass legislation though he would publicly criticize them when they rejected Democrat’s initiatives, like new voting rights proposals.

He is best known back home for delivering federal money. Clyburn’s name is emblazoned on taxpayer-funded structures all over the state, including a Medical University of South Carolina research center and an “intermodal transportation center” (otherwise known as a bus station) in his hometown, Sumter.

Clyburn also was willing to help local Republicans. When the family business of George “Chip” Campsen, a top GOP state leader, had a dispute with the National Park Service over how much it owed the federal government, Clyburn co-sponsored a Republican lawmaker’s bill to pressure the service into mediation. The parties then settled in 2002 on favorable terms to the Campsen family company. Clyburn’s office said he did nothing improper. (Campsen did not respond to a question about the deal.)

A bill Clyburn co-sponsored ended up helping settle a dispute between the National Park Service and the family business of top GOP state leader George “Chip” Campsen, shown in the first image and at center in the second image.

Clyburn’s ties with Republicans have come in handy during the previous redistricting battle. Clyburn has repeatedly angled to keep a majority Black constituency, according to documents and political observers.

Redistricting is meant to follow clear principles. Each congressional district’s population must be as similar as possible. Maps are supposed to be understandable, with counties and cities kept whole and lines following natural boundaries, like rivers or highways. And the process is designed to be transparent, guided by public input.

But it has rarely worked out that way. Despite a recent history of moves to disenfranchise minority voters, Republicans have sometimes been able to capitalize on individual politicians’ self-interest. In the early 1990s, then-Republican National Committee counsel Benjamin Ginsberg seized upon Black disenchantment with white Southern Democrats’ gerrymanders to forge what has come to be known as the “unholy alliance” between the RNC and Black elected officials. Ginsburg told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 1990 that the RNC would share its redistricting tools with minorities as part of a “natural alliance born of the gerrymander.” The upside for the Republican party is that Black voters in Southern states could be limited to as few seats as possible.

In 1994, the GOP took over the House and the Congressional Black Caucus reached its largest membership since Reconstruction. Redistricting “increased the political power of both groups,” said David Daley, author of “Ratf**ked,” a book on gerrymandering that delves into the history of the alliance between the GOP and Black Southern Democrats. “Republicans regained control of the House, and the Congressional Black Caucus grew to its largest numbers since Reconstruction.”

Clyburn is part of a generation of Black officials who lived through the Jim Crow era and cherished the protections of the Voting Rights Act. But many politicians who agree about the importance of the act say that the notion that Black politicians need majority Black districts to get elected is outdated. Because he’s been in office so long, “Jim Clyburn could win reelection with 20% Black voters,” said former Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina. “He’s trying to protect the district for the candidate coming after him.”

Despite state and local resistance, the number of elected Black officials in South Carolina increased from 38 in 1970 to 540 in 2000 and continued growing. Yet complaints continued to flood into the Justice Department about gross abuses of voting rights, including biased handling of redistricting.

The last congressional redistricting overseen by the Justice Department in South Carolina was in 2011. Then, as now, the state’s population was booming, and it had gained another congressional seat, which both parties hoped to claim. As is the case today, Republicans controlled the legislature. The Democrats, however, could rely on the Justice Department, which had to preapprove the plan, to prevent gross abuses.

Both Clyburn and the NAACP were among those who publicly submitted their own maps as part of the state’s legal submission to the Justice Department. Clyburn’s map suggested that his district include a Black voting age population of nearly 55%, a higher level than what the NAACP’s map recommended.

Some Democrats proposed moving Black voters out of Clyburn’s district to create a new district, with the hope that the party could elect a second member of Congress. The Republican House speaker blocked the efforts.

Behind the scenes, some lawmakers believed Clyburn was working with the speaker. On a visit to Columbia, the capital, Clyburn went to the House map room and made suggestions to protect his position, according to a nonpartisan former House staff member, who asked not be named because he was not authorized to discuss his work.

During the process, Clyburn met privately with then-Republican state Rep. Alan Clemmons, head of that year’s redistricting panel, according to an account Clemmons later gave to local media. Clemmons said Clyburn had Tresvant act as his “eyes and ears,” the same role that he would take on in 2021. Tresvant “would request specific businesses and churches be included in Clyburn’s district,” according to a 2018 report by The Post & Courier of Clemmon’s account.

Clemmons, now an equity court judge, declined to comment, citing the judicial ethics code.

The 2011 redistricting plan also prompted a federal lawsuit, which unsuccessfully challenged Clyburn’s district as an illegal racial gerrymander. Clyburn did not testify, but in an affidavit, he accused Republicans of making “an intentional effort” to decrease the political influence of Black people by packing them into a single district. He said nothing about his own behind-the-scenes negotiations with Republican leaders.

The 2021 Strategy

Ten years later, Clyburn followed a familiar strategy when Republicans began redistricting again. For the first time, the Justice Department had no oversight role. This time, however, none of his actions were public.

First image: A view of a neighborhood in the 1st Congressional District in Ladson, South Carolina. Second image: The railroad tracks in Ladson serve as a new dividing line for the 1st and 6th districts.

Clyburn’s district had lost about 85,000 people. Each new district had to be drawn to represent 731,203 people. One obvious place to look for additional constituents would be the 1st District, just to the southeast along the coast. That district was overpopulated by almost 88,000. The First District was the last remaining swing district, with a history of tight races. In 2018, a Democrat had won by about 4,000 votes. Two years later, a Republican, Nancy Mace, won it by about 5,000. If the GOP could remove enough Black or Democratic voters from that district, it could give the party a lock on the seat.

The map Clyburn’s aide Tresvant had quietly brought to the GOP at the beginning of the 2021 process included suggestions that would help both Clyburn and the Republicans. His map gave his boss a larger portion of heavily Democratic Charleston County, drawing from Mace’s district. Clyburn’s suggested lines reflected a move of about 77,000 new people to his district, according to an expert who analyzed the maps for ProPublica.

The Old and New 6th District (Source: Redistricting Data Hub, IPUMS NHGIS)

Not every request of his was about race. Clyburn also sought to move an additional 29,000 people into his district from Berkeley County, which he split with Mace. Berkeley is a fast-growing area, adding white voters, but is also home to some of the state’s largest employers.

Clyburn didn’t only suggest adding Democratic voters. He was also willing to give up pockets of his district where elections were trending Republican. One such proposal would help Republicans seal control of the 1st. Clyburn suggested giving up about 4,600 people in Jasper County, an area that was trending Republican as white Northern retirees relocated there.

During the NAACP’s trial, some Republican senate aides said they did not rely on Clyburn’s map. But the staffer for Senate Republicans who was chiefly responsible for redrawing the lines testified that he used it as a starting point. And then the GOP went further. As the redistricting plan made its way through the legislature, Republicans further solidified their hold on the 1st District. Clyburn monitored their progress in calls to Democratic allies, according to two state senators who spoke with him during the period.

A plan proposed by Campsen, the state senator whose family company Clyburn helped years earlier, moved almost all of Charleston County’s Black and Democrat-leaning precincts to Clyburn. The shift gave Clyburn the city of Charleston, where he had deep connections, and consolidated the county’s major colleges and universities into his district, a political plus. The new borders for Clyburn gave him a number of small pockets of Black voters, including about 1,500 in Lincolnville, which juts out of the election map like an old-fashioned door key. “The congressman was hoping to get Lincolnville years and years ago” and finally succeeded in 2022, said the town’s mayor, Enoch Dickerson.

First image: Lincolnville, South Carolina, which was moved into Clyburn’s district. Second image: Enoch Dickerson, the town’s mayor. “The congressman was hoping to get Lincolnville years and years ago” and finally succeeded in 2022, he said.

As a result of Campsen’s plan, the Black voting-age population of the 1st District fell to just over 17%, the lowest in the state. In the 2022 election, Mace beat her Democratic opponent by about 38,000 votes — a 14 percentage point landslide, up from her 1 percentage point in the previous election.

Clyburn said nothing publicly as some Democrats in Charleston County, led by former Rep. Joe Cunningham, protested Campsen’s plan. On the Senate floor, Campsen praised Clyburn and said Charleston County would be well served by having both Clyburn and Mace looking out for its interests.

“Jim Clyburn has more influence with the Biden administration perhaps than anyone in the nation,” Campsen said.

As Clyburn monitored the debate, Fiffick kept Tresvant in the loop, texting him again on Jan. 14, 2022, to share a link to the redistricting webpage. It’s unclear why Fiffick sent it.

Campsen’s plan was approved by the legislature and signed by the governor Jan. 26, 2022.

In the end, Clyburn didn’t get everything he wanted. Republicans moved all of rapidly growing Berkeley County to the 1st District. The percentage of Black voters in his district has dipped below 50%, the threshold he long sought to preserve.

The congressman soon got to work serving his constituents. Shortly afterward, Clyburn had Lincolnville added to a federal program that protects historic stops along the Gullah Geechee trail. In the 2022 election, Clyburn won 62% of the vote, lower than the 68% he won in 2020 but comfortable nonetheless.

Consequences

Soon after the new redistricting plan went into effect, the NAACP pressed ahead with its lawsuit against state Republican leaders, charging that many congressional mapping decisions were based predominantly on race. The case dealt with more than just the changes in Mace’s district that had an impact on Clyburn.

A three-judge federal appeals panel ruled that the plan’s division of the 1st and 6th districts was an unlawful racial gerrymander aimed at creating “a stronger Republican tilt” in Mace’s district. The court said that the movement of about 30,000 Black voters into Clyburn’s district was “effectively impossible” without racial gerrymandering.

But the court knocked down some of the NAACP’s claims. In several cases, it said, Clyburn had requested the mapping changes. The NAACP declined to comment.

Antonio Ingram, an assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said lawyers for Republican leaders tried to shift the emphasis to Clyburn’s early requests. He said it was “inappropriate to blame a congressman for the General Assembly’s decision to pass discriminatory maps.”

Republican leaders appealed the panel’s decision and asked the Supreme Court to reject the racial gerrymandering charge.

If the court orders that the map be redrawn, it could have ripple effects on Clyburn’s district and other parts of the state. Although a Republican challenger gained ground on him in 2022, he’s considered a shoo-in if he chooses to seek reelection, no matter how the lines are drawn.

Taiwan Scott, who lives in Mace’s district and is the lead plaintiff in the NAACP lawsuit, said racial gerrymandering has deprived Black voters of fair congressional representation. A small businessman in Hilton Head, Scott said Black people are showing disapproval by declining to vote.

“It is bigger than myself. It’s systemic,” he said.

Taiwan Scott is the lead plaintiff in an NAACP lawsuit over South Carolina’s 2021 redistricting.

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Andy Kroll contributed reporting. Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski and Brett Murphy

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Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow paid tuition for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ grandnephew for two years at two private boarding schools, according to a statement released Thursday by a longtime friend of Thomas’.

The statement came in response to a ProPublica story that disclosed Crow had paid the fees at two schools for Mark Martin, a relative who Thomas had legal guardianship of and said he was raising “as a son.” Thomas did not include the payments in the financial disclosures he is required to file each year.

Mark Paoletta, the friend, acknowledged that Crow paid Martin’s tuition at both Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia and Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia, saying Crow paid for one year at each school. Paoletta did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to roughly $100,000. Martin attended Randolph-Macon for multiple years, and the statement did not say who had paid for the remainder of his high school education.

Paoletta, Crow and Thomas did not respond to further requests for comment.

The revelation of the tuition payments deepens the financial ties between Crow, a Republican megadonor, and Thomas, who earns $285,000 a year as a Supreme Court justice. Last month, ProPublica reported that Crow had paid for decades of luxury vacations and travel for Thomas and his wife and had bought the home of Thomas’ mother, making tens of thousands of dollars of improvements to it.

“This story is another attempt to manufacture a scandal about Justice Thomas,” Paoletta wrote. “But let’s be clear about what is supposedly scandalous now: Justice Thomas and his wife devoted twelve years of their lives to taking in and caring for a beloved child — who was not their own — just as Justice Thomas’s grandparents had done for him.”

“They made many personal and financial sacrifices to do this. And along the way, their friends joined them in doing everything possible to give this child a future.”

Paoletta asserted that Thomas was not required to report the tuition payments “made directly to these schools” because Martin was not his “dependent child” as defined by federal disclosure law. Thomas has said he was advised he didn’t need to disclose the luxury travel because it was hospitality from a friend.

Legal ethics experts said the justice should have disclosed the payments as a gift because they defray tuition costs that he would otherwise be responsible for paying. Several years earlier, Thomas did disclose a $5,000 gift to help with Martin’s education from another friend. Minor children are seldom responsible for their own tuition. Martin told ProPublica in an interview he had not been aware Crow had paid his fees.

In Washington, prominent Democratic lawmakers renewed calls for ethics reform. One called for a Justice Department investigation.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that ProPublica’s latest report “continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question.”

“I think that all Justices should be held to the same ethical standards as every other federal judge,” he said. “The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee who previously sent a letter to Crow requesting a full accounting of the gifts he’s given Thomas, said: “Harlan Crow has been subsidizing an extravagant lifestyle that Justice Thomas and his family could not otherwise afford. This is a foul breach of ethics standards.”

If Crow doesn’t comply, Wyden added, the lawmaker intends to “explore using other tools at the committee’s disposal to obtain this critical information.”

In an interview with CNN, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., reiterated a call for a Justice Department probe and subpoenas to force Thomas to testify before Congress. Chief Justice John Roberts has previously rebuffed invitations to testify before Congress. He cited the “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

Blumenthal told CNN that “the drip, drip, drip of these destructive disclosures is going to destroy the United States Supreme Court unless there is an effective proper investigation.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who has sought Supreme Court ethics reform for years and has co-authored bills to shore up the ethics rules for justices on the high court, wrote on Twitter: “When does the stench get bad enough that SCOTUS stops the cover-up and ends the mischief? This is on the Chief Justice to solve, plain and simple. Mom’s rent, family tuition, vacations and gifts — and secret? Any other government employee would be fired.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, an array of experts — including a retired federal judge and a former attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush — debated the constitutionality of Congress regulating the Supreme Court, as well as the balancing act between two pillars of American government: checks and balances versus the separation of powers.

Former federal circuit judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative, sent a letter to the committee ahead of Tuesday’s hearing and argued that Supreme Court justices need to act and appear “beyond reproach.” He said Congress can pass laws to codify ethical standards for Supreme Court justices. But, Luttig added, lawmakers shouldn’t have to.

“The ‘judicial power,’ the power of the Supreme Court, is ultimately dependent on the respect that its judgments command, or not, from the American People,” he wrote. “Whether the Supreme Court is subject to ethical standards of conduct or not is emphatically not a partisan political issue and must not become one.”

During the hearing, Democrats, led by Durbin and Whitehouse, said there is a long tradition of Congress passing laws to regulate the Supreme Court’s administration — which, they said, is decidedly separate from the justices’ decision-making remit. Republicans said lawmakers across the aisle only care about enforcing ethics rules because they dislike the majority-conservative Supreme Court.

“There’s a very selective outrage here,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, ranking member of the committee’s minority side. Some Republicans on the committee cited examples of liberal justices accepting trips in the past but did not distinguish those from Thomas’ unreported trips. “This is not about making the court better,” Graham said, “this is about destroying a conservative court. It will not work.”

Last month, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, publicly criticized Thomas’ relationship with Crow. “If the reports are accurate, it stinks,” he told reporters.

Thursday morning, the Twitter account for the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee invited followers to retweet a tweet featuring a goat emoji, shorthand for the greatest of all time. “RT if you think Justice Thomas is the 🐐”

Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court or the judiciary? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

by Paul Kiel

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One year ago, all 50 states and the District of Columbia announced a $141 million settlement with Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. The investigation, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, centered on how the company had steered customers into paying for tax preparation even though they qualified for a free government program. The attorney general said the probe was sparked by ProPublica’s reporting in 2019.

About 4.4 million low-income Americans will receive payments under the agreement. On Thursday, James announced that the process of actually mailing checks to all those people will begin next week.

“TurboTax’s predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes,” she said. “Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes.”

The payments range from $29 to $85, depending on how many years each eligible consumer used TurboTax. (A number of people cited in ProPublica’s articles said they had paid over $100 for what they had thought would be free services.) The agreement covered 2016 through 2018. Those eligible for payments will be contacted by email and will not need to file a claim.

Intuit did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

As ProPublica documented in story after story, TurboTax for years lured consumers with the promise of “free” tax filing and then deployed a range of tricks and traps to steer them to paying products.

Meanwhile, Intuit has lobbied for decades to prevent the government from developing a free tax filing system. One result of that fight, 20 years ago, was the IRS Free File program: In exchange for the IRS agreeing not to develop a free filing system, the tax prep industry agreed to offer something similar. On paper, the program allowed 70% of taxpayers to file for free. But only a tiny percentage of people ever used Free File — in part because Intuit, H&R Block and others actively sought to prevent taxpayers from finding out about it while pushing their own “free” products.

After ProPublica’s articles in 2019, the situation shifted. The IRS and the tax prep companies dropped the provision that prevented the IRS from making its own free filing system. H&R Block and TurboTax dropped out of the Free File program. And the IRS is actively studying how a public free filing program might work.

In addition to the investigation by the state attorneys general, the Federal Trade Commission also sued Intuit, claiming the company deceived consumers with its “free” marketing. Intuit defended the accuracy of its ads but said it voluntarily ceased broadcasting its “free, free, free” TV ads in a “spirit of cooperation.” That case is ongoing.

by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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Update, May 4, 2023: This story has been updated to reflect that Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, acknowledged Harlan Crow’s tuition payments.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

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Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.

“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.

A July 2009 bank statement for Hidden Lake Academy shows a wire from Crow Holdings LLC. (Excerpt from court records. Highlights added by ProPublica.)

Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.

ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.

“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.

Get in Touch

ProPublica plans to continue reporting on the Supreme Court. If you have information we should know, please get in touch. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”

Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.

“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.

Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”

A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.

Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.

But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.

“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”

Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.

[After this story was published, Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, released a statement. Paoletta confirmed that Crow paid for Martin’s tuition at both Randolph-Macon Academy and Hidden Lake, saying Crow paid for one year at each. He did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to roughly $100,000.

Paoletta said that Thomas did not have to report the payments because Martin was not his “dependent child” as defined in the disclosure law. He criticized ProPublica for reporting on this and said “the Thomases and the Crows are kind, generous, and loving people who tried to help this young man.”]

Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.

Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.

The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”

Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.

“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.

Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.

Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.

Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.

That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.

Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)

Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.

For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.

Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.

Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas attended the 2007 dedication of a statue gifted by Crow to Randolph-Macon Academy. (The Sabre Magazine)

Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.

The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.

Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”

Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.

Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.

In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice’s memoir.

It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.

In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.

“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”

Thomas disclosed an education gift to Martin from a friend in his 2002 disclosure filing. (Free Law Project)

Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court or the judiciary? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY, photography by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica

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

It was almost time for school pickup when Paul’s mom saw the text on the classroom messaging app: Paul — her 7-year-old — “ended up running out of class today and it escalated rather quickly.” Someone at the school had called 911. Paul’s parents could contact the main office for more information, the message read.

Paul’s mom remembers the physical feeling of dread, like ice under her skin. Paul — that’s his middle name — has a neurological disorder. He loves to cuddle with his mom and help take care of his baby sister, and he’s wild about Greek mythology. Like a lot of kids with developmental disabilities, he also has very big tantrums, hitting, spitting and throwing things when he gets upset. Since the end of first grade, he’s been in a special public school classroom in Brooklyn that integrates disabled and nondisabled kids.

The day of the message, in early December, Paul’s mom was so panicked that she couldn’t fully make sense of what it said. Why had the school called 911 instead of calling her? Was her child hurt? Had something gone terribly wrong? She wanted to run the last few blocks to the school, but her legs felt frozen. It was hard just to walk.

When she made it into the school building, she found Paul lying facedown on the floor of a computer room, his whole body heaving with sobs. She touched his back, and he screamed and tried to scramble away. Then he recognized his mother’s voice and jumped into her arms. “Mommy, don’t let them handcuff me,” he begged.

“I said, ‘What are you talking about? No one is going to handcuff you.’”

But that’s when she found out: Someone already had.

That afternoon, Paul had had a meltdown that started in his classroom and spilled into a hallway. When he didn’t calm down, someone called a school safety agent — an officer of the New York Police Department who is stationed full-time in the building. Paul knocked off the agent’s face mask and glasses, and that’s when it happened. The agent pulled out a pair of Velcro restraints and forced them over Paul’s hands.

Looking now, Paul’s mom could see red marks where the handcuffs had rubbed Paul’s wrists raw. But she felt more bewildered than ever. She must be misunderstanding, she thought. Who would handcuff a 7-year-old?

New York City officials have promised for years to stop relying on police to respond to students in emotional crisis. Under the terms of a 2014 legal settlement, schools are only supposed to call 911 in the most extreme situations, when kids pose an “imminent and substantial risk of serious injury” to themselves or others.

And yet an investigation by THE CITY and ProPublica found that city schools continue to call on safety agents and other police officers to manage students in distress thousands of times each year — incidents the NYPD calls “child in crisis” interventions. Unless a parent arrives in time to intercede, cops hand kids off to EMTs, who take students to hospital emergency rooms for psychiatric evaluations. In close to 1,370 incidents since 2017, students ended up in handcuffs while they waited for an ambulance to arrive, according to NYPD data. In several incidents, those kids were 5 or 6 years old.

Schools Called the Police on Students in Emotional Distress Thousands of Times Note: 2017 is the first year that the New York Police Department released data on all incidents where a school employee called 911 over a student in emotional distress, known as child-in-crisis incidents. Data Source: NYPD quarterly School Safety Act report. (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

Ten years ago, in the runup to the 2014 settlement, a group of parents sued the city’s Department of Education, claiming that schools violated their children’s constitutional rights and broke federal law by sending them to hospitals when they weren’t experiencing medical emergencies — in many cases in response to behavior that resulted directly from a student’s disability.

The experience was traumatic and humiliating for the kids, the plaintiffs claimed. Students were terrified to return to school; 6- and 7-year-olds thought they were being arrested. Two schools filed child welfare reports on parents who didn’t allow EMTs to put their children in ambulances.

Meanwhile, the hospital visits served no useful purpose, plaintiffs claimed. Students missed crucial class time only to wait for hours in emergency rooms — sometimes with seriously mentally ill adults — and then be sent home. At least one parent lost her job because she was repeatedly forced to leave work to rush to the hospital, and then she was stuck with bills for ambulance trips and ER services her child didn’t need.

As part of the 2014 settlement, the department issued a regulation that requires schools to make every effort to safely manage students in distress without involving police — including by deploying trained crisis response teams and allowing parents to speak to their children by phone if possible. Schools are never allowed to use 911 calls as a punishment for misbehavior. When cops do get involved, they must use the “minimum level of restraint necessary.”

Despite the promises and regulations, New York City public schools call 911 on students in emotional distress as often as ever, an analysis by THE CITY and ProPublica of NYPD data shows. Prior to the lawsuit, city-run and charter schools saw an average of 3,000 child-in-crisis incidents per year from 2005 to 2010 and an average of 3,300 incidents in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years, according to court documents. Since 2017 — the first post-lawsuit year for which the NYPD reported complete data — schools have seen an average of 3,200 incidents per year. (The analysis excludes 911 calls made in 2020 and 2021, when schools operated on a remote or hybrid schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Schools are far more likely to call 911 on Black students, who make up less than a quarter of the student body but account for nearly half of child-in-crisis incidents and 59% of instances in which students were handcuffed since 2017, the analysis shows. And schools continue to call police to respond to young children: Last year, more than 560 child-in-crisis incidents involved students aged 10 or younger. In five cases, the kids were 4 years old.

Black Students Are Disproportionately Handcuffed During Child-in-Crisis Incidents

Black children, who make up a quarter of students in New York City schools, accounted for 59% of handcuffed students.

Note: Data for all New York City child-in-crisis and handcuffing incidents covers 2017 to 2022. Data for student population demographics includes school years 2017-18 to 2021-22. Data Sources: New York City annual student enrollment snapshot and New York Police Department quarterly School Safety Act report. (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

“The things that needed to change did not change,” said Nelson Mar, an education attorney at Legal Services NYC who represented the plaintiffs in the 2013 lawsuit.

That’s partly because the Department of Education fails to hold schools accountable for not following its own regulations, Mar and other advocates said. Schools are required to file occurrence reports after calling 911 on students, but they don’t have to show that they took the mandatory steps to manage a crisis first. Unless parents have a lawyer or a paid advocate, they rarely know the reports exist, much less get the opportunity to contest a school’s account of an incident or to object if they believe school staff called 911 to punish a student they were fed up with.

In an emailed statement, Department of Education spokesperson Nathaniel Styer wrote that, if parents believe a school called 911 in violation of city rules, they should contact their school district’s superintendent, who oversees school leaders and can provide additional training. “Situations where young children are in crisis and/or are at risk of harming themselves or others are among the most difficult for our educators and school staff,” Styer wrote.

“Nevertheless,” Styer continued, “whenever there is evidence the policy hasn’t been followed, it will be reported and investigated, and we review every case where 911 is called to ensure that it was necessary and complied with our policy.”

But thousands of children are still being forcibly removed from schools each year, which means the oversight clearly isn’t working, said Amber Decker, a public school parent who was a plaintiff in the 2013 lawsuit and now works as an advocate for parents of kids with disabilities.

If schools were being held accountable for unnecessary 911 calls, “the numbers would have gone down,” Decker said. As it is, “there’s no consequences other than the ones you push for until you’re blue in the face or banging your head against the wall.”

To understand why police are so involved in New York City schools, you have to look back to the late 1990s. Rudy Giuliani was mayor, and schools were at the junction of two of his biggest campaign promises: to slash crime and to fix the education system. For students, that meant a “zero tolerance” approach to school misconduct.

In 1998, the city created a new division of the NYPD, transferring school safety operations — which had previously been managed by the Board of Education — to the police department. Agents were allowed to arrest students for all kinds of misbehavior, including spitting, talking back to teachers and cutting class.

Eighteen years and two administrations later, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio presided over a city that approached young people and police very differently. According to a 2016 mayoral task force that included the commanding officer of the NYPD’s School Safety Division, overly punitive practices weren’t making students safer; they were pushing vulnerable kids out of schools and into the juvenile justice system.

The task force pointed to child-in-crisis incidents as part of the problem. “With little mental health experience or training, and scant access to mental health professionals, ER overuse is the norm,” the task force wrote.

De Blasio promised to transform the city’s approach to school discipline by reducing the role of police and dramatically increasing the mental health resources available to students and teachers. “We’re revolutionizing our school system,” he said in 2019.

The revolution never materialized. In 2021, after New York City students experienced some of the longest school shutdowns in the country, the city hired 500 new school-based social workers to help respond to trauma connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. De Blasio’s was “one of the first administrations to recognize that schools are where kids with mental health problems land,” said Peter Ragone, a longtime de Blasio adviser.

But while the hiring push put the city ahead of many other jurisdictions, New York City schools still have just one social worker for every 475 students — close to double the National Association of Social Workers’ recommended ratio of 250 students per social worker.

The city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, announced a sweeping mental health plan in March that includes a “Mental Health Continuum,” a project that was conceived under de Blasio and rolled out last year to connect schools directly to mental health clinics and mobile crisis teams. But Adams’s proposed city budget, released a month later, included no funding for the project.

“It’s mind-boggling,” said Dawn Yuster, who directs the School Justice Project at the group Advocates for Children. “This would expedite care for young people with the most significant needs. If you’re going to say it, fund it.”

The mayor’s office did not respond to questions about the Mental Health Continuum, but Patrick Gallahue, press secretary for the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, wrote in an emailed statement that a new teletherapy program for high schoolers will “connect even more young people with services by reaching them where they are.”

Meanwhile, in 2022, City Council members acknowledged the need for more oversight of child-in-crisis incidents, introducing a bill that would have required school safety agents to document that school staff tried to de-escalate a crisis before involving police. But the bill never made it out of committee. (Neither Councilmember Diana Ayala nor Councilmember Rita Joseph, both of whom sponsored the bill, responded to requests for comment.)

When school staff don’t get the support they need from mental health experts, they often resort to punishing kids for behaviors they can’t control, Yuster said. It might start with “calling parents every day about a student’s behavior. Then they up the ante, calling to say, ‘We’re suspending for five days, and next time we’re going to call EMS if this behavior continues.’”

Not only do the escalating punishments violate city rules but they also destroy trust between students and schools, said Crystal Baker-Burr, an attorney who directs the Education Project at The Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit public defense agency.

“Even if a school is at their wit’s end,” Baker-Burr said, “sending a student to the ER is not going to help the situation. Getting police involved, handcuffing them, it doesn’t make anything better at school the next day.”

Three years ago, Baker-Burr saw the impact of 911 calls up close — on her 7-year-old nephew, Ethan. (Ethan’s family asked us to identify him by just his first name.)

In 2019, Ethan was a second grader at P.S. 157 in the Bronx. He was a gentle and sweet kid at home, but he got overwhelmed and acted out at school, said his mom, Jacqueline De Jesus. He’d hit other kids or run out of the classroom. Sometimes he’d bite himself. This was before he was diagnosed with autism, and his parents were still trying to figure out what to do. De Jesus asked the school for help, she said, but teachers told her that Ethan didn’t need to be evaluated for educational services because his schoolwork was at grade level.

Instead, De Jesus said, Ethan, who’s Black and Latino, got punished. Teachers yelled at him and sent him out of the classroom. He wasn’t allowed to join music or sports clubs or sign up for the after-school program. The school constantly called his parents to pick him up early.

De Jesus felt like the message was clear. “They didn’t want to deal with him,” she said. It seemed like the school was making it as difficult as possible for Ethan to stay.

When Jacqueline De Jesus’ second grader, Ethan, threw tantrums at school, staffers repeatedly called 911. Ethan loves stuffed animals, reading, playing with clay and building paper boxes.

P.S. 157’s principal did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Education declined to comment on Ethan’s experience, even though De Jesus signed a release allowing it to share information with THE CITY and ProPublica.

In April 2019, De Jesus got a phone call that shocked her. It was the school secretary, saying that an ambulance was on its way to take Ethan to the hospital. De Jesus was at work in Manhattan — a 40-minute cab ride away — so she called Baker-Burr, who went straight to the school. When she got there, Ethan was curled up in a ball underneath a desk, rocking back and forth and sobbing. His face was swollen and red from crying for so long.

Two uniformed police officers were “standing over my very small nephew,” Baker-Burr said. “They were saying things like, ‘Don’t lie to us, Ethan. When you’re older, we could arrest you for things like this.’”

Baker-Burr asked the officers to leave the room, then got down on the floor and convinced Ethan to come out from under the desk, promising that she wouldn’t let anyone hurt him. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was calm, talking to Baker-Burr about his new Five Nights at Freddy’s backpack. Baker-Burr rode with him to Lincoln Medical Center, a public hospital in the South Bronx, where a doctor interviewed him and sent him home with a note saying he was fine to return to school.

Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx

“They were like, ‘Why is this child even here?’ It was a colossal waste of time,” Baker-Burr said.

That didn’t stop the school from calling 911 on Ethan two more times in the next month, De Jesus and Baker-Burr said. Nor did it prevent De Jesus from being billed hundreds of dollars for ambulance rides and ER visits.

Eventually, De Jesus gave up and petitioned the city to move Ethan to a different school. “I didn’t want to send him somewhere he wasn’t wanted,” she said.

Calling 911 on kids “is the last thing any teacher wants to do,” said Kristen GoldMansour, a former teacher and coach who works with dozens of New York City schools to support inclusive programming for students with disabilities.

“The question is, how did we get there?” GoldMansour said. “There’s probably a thousand million things we could have done to avoid getting to that point.”

In fact, when students’ behavior or mental health needs get in the way of learning, federal law requires schools to intervene, proactively offering them evaluations and services like occupational therapy or a functional behavioral assessment — a detailed analysis of what triggers kids’ behaviors and the best strategies to prevent an emergency.

But getting the right services can be difficult or impossible — especially for parents who can’t pay attorneys to help them navigate the city’s convoluted system for students with disabilities. Instead, as THE CITY and ProPublica reported last year, kids who are disruptive or aggressive often get pushed out of mainstream schools and into failing special education schools that are packed with other students who have behavioral and mental health challenges. Even if they are capable academically, their chances of graduating with a diploma plummet.

Meanwhile, their odds of encountering police go way up: Special education schools, which disproportionately serve low-income and Black students, call 911 on kids in distress at four times the per-student rate of general education schools, according to a data analysis by Advocates for Children.

In Brooklyn, Paul’s parents are doing everything they can to keep him in a school with general education students. This is his chance to be integrated into mainstream life, his mom said.

On the day after Paul’s school called 911, his parents asked for a meeting with school staff and officials from the Department of Education — something they only knew to do because they were working with paid education advocates, they said. Paul’s dad went to the meeting, which was recorded on Zoom, with a list of questions: What kinds of restraints were used on his son? Could he see a picture of them? Would the school share its plan for responding to students in crisis or its policies on handcuffing kids? What if Paul had another incident — would staff call his parents before calling 911?

School staff said that they had tried to calm Paul down, but no one explained why the NYPD safety agent had become involved or why the school hadn’t called Paul’s parents first. The principal would only say that the school had done nothing wrong. “Protocols were followed,” she said. Everything was “by the book.” Meanwhile, she repeated a list of Paul’s transgressions: He had “assaulted” teachers, his behavior was “egregious.” (Paul’s parents asked us not to use their names or identify his school, in part to protect Paul’s privacy but also for fear of alienating education officials who hold power over Paul’s future school placements.)

After an hour, Paul’s dad was reduced to pleading: “Promise me, if this happens again, you have to call us,” he said. “I'm begging you. This is my son.”

Two weeks after the meeting, the Department of Education transferred Paul to a school that has more experience teaching disabled and nondisabled kids together. It’s a better outcome than many families get, Paul’s mom said. “We’re white, and we have a lot of resources to put toward our son. I have no idea how you would manage this situation without the resources to pay for help.”

So far, things at the new school are going well. Paul’s tantrums have not been quite so explosive, and his teachers seem comfortable managing them, his mom said. “They don’t shame him or drag him through the mud.”

Still, it’s impossible for her not to worry. If Paul was handcuffed at 7, what happens as he gets bigger and older?

She finds herself shutting away the memory of what happened in December. “It’s like this other, alternative reality,” she said. “I’m with my joyful, wonderful child, and I’m like, ‘How could this happen?’”

Sophie Chou contributed data analysis.

by Adriana Gallardo and Duaa Eldeib

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

Every year, more than 20,000 pregnancies in the U.S. end in a stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. Research shows as many as 1 in 4 stillbirths may be preventable. We interviewed dozens of parents of stillborn children who said their health care providers did not tell them about risk factors or explain what to watch for while pregnant. They said they felt blindsided by what followed. They did not have the information needed to make critical decisions about what happened with their baby’s body, about what additional testing could have been done to help determine what caused the stillbirth, or about how to navigate the process of requesting important stillbirth documents.

This guide is meant to help fill the void of information on stillbirths. It’s based on more than 150 conversations with parents, health care providers, researchers and other medical experts.

Whether you’re trying to better prepare for a pregnancy or grieving a loss, we hope this will help you and your family. This guide does not provide medical advice. We encourage you to seek out other reliable resources and consult with providers you trust.

We welcome your thoughts and questions at stillbirth@propublica.org. You can share your experience with stillbirth with us. If you are a health care provider interested in distributing this guide, let us know if we can help.

What Is Stillbirth?

Many people told us that the first time they heard the term stillbirth was after they delivered their stillborn baby. In many cases, the lack of information and awareness beforehand contributed to their heartache and guilt afterward.

Stillbirth is defined in the U.S. as the death of a baby in the womb at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. Depending on when it happens, stillbirth is considered:

• Early: 20-27 weeks of pregnancy.
• Late: 28-36 weeks of pregnancy.
• Term: 37 or more weeks of pregnancy.

About half of all stillbirths in the U.S. occur at 28 weeks or later.

What is the difference between a stillbirth and a miscarriage?

Both terms describe pregnancy loss. The distinction is when the loss occurs. A miscarriage is typically defined as a loss before the 20th week of pregnancy, while stillbirth is after that point.

How common is stillbirth?

Each year, about 1 in 175 deliveries in the U.S. are stillbirths — that’s about 60 stillborn babies every day — making it one of the most common adverse pregnancy outcomes, but it is rarely discussed.

If you are surprised by that fact, you are not alone. Many people we spoke to did not know how common stillbirths are. Leandria Lee of Texas said she spent her 2021 pregnancy unaware that her daughter, Zuri Armoni, could die in the last phase of her pregnancy.

“If I was prepared to know that something could happen, I don't think it would have been as bad. But to not know and then it happens, it affects you,” she said of her stillbirth at 35 weeks.

First image: Leandria Lee. Second image: Lee holds a photo of her partner, Jermon Jackson, comforting her in the hospital after their daughter was stillborn. (Nitashia Johnson, special to ProPublica)

Some doctors have told us they don’t introduce the possibility of a stillbirth because they don’t want to create additional anxiety for patients.

Other doctors say withholding information leaves patients unprepared.

“We have this idea that we can’t scare the patient, which to me is very paternalistic,” said Dr. Heather Florescue, an OB-GYN near Rochester, New York, who works to inform doctors and patients about stillbirth prevention.

What causes stillbirths?

There is a lot we don’t know about stillbirths because there hasn’t been enough research. The cause of the stillbirth is unknown in about 1 in 3 cases.

What we do know is that a number of factors may cause or increase the risk of a stillbirth, including:

• The baby not growing as expected.
• Placental abnormalities or problems with the umbilical cord.
• Genetic or structural disorders that cause developmental issues.
• High blood pressure before pregnancy or preeclampsia, a potentially fatal complication that usually appears late in pregnancy and causes high blood pressure.
• Diabetes before or during pregnancy.
• An infection in the fetus, the placenta or the pregnant person.
• Smoking.
• Being 35 or older.
• Obesity.
• Being pregnant with more than one baby.

But not all doctors, hospitals or health departments perform tests to identify the potential cause of a stillbirth or determine if it could have been prevented. Even when a cause is identified, fetal death records are rarely updated. This means data is sometimes inaccurate. Researchers strongly encourage doctors to perform a stillbirth evaluation, which includes an examination of the placenta and umbilical cord, a fetal autopsy and genetic testing.

If your hospital or doctor does not proactively offer one or more of these exams, you can ask them to conduct the tests. Research shows that placental exams may help establish a cause of death or exclude a suspected one in about 65% of stillbirths, while autopsies were similarly useful in more than 40% of cases.

Are Stillbirths Preventable?

Not all stillbirths are preventable, but some are. For pregnancies that last 37 weeks or more, one study found that nearly half of stillbirths are potentially preventable.

Dr. Joanne Stone, who last year was president of the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, leads the country’s first Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The clinic is modeled on similar facilities in the United Kingdom that care for people who want to conceive again after a stillbirth. She said many doctors used to think there was nothing they could do to prevent stillbirth.

“People just looked at it like, ‘Oh, it was an accident, couldn’t have been prevented,’” said Stone, who also is the system chair of the obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science department at the Icahn School of Medicine. “But we know now there are things that we can do to try to prevent that from happening.”

Dr. Joanne Stone (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

She said doctors can:

• More closely monitor patients with certain risk factors, like high blood pressure, diabetes or obesity.
• Ask about prior infant loss or other obstetrical trauma.
• Carefully assess whether a baby’s growth is normal.
• Work to diagnose genetic anomalies.
• Teach patients how to track their baby’s movements and encourage them to speak up if they notice activity has slowed or stopped.
• Deliver at or before 39 weeks if there are concerns.

What are the risks of stillbirth over the course of a pregnancy?

The risk of a stillbirth increases significantly toward the end of pregnancy, especially after 39 weeks. The risk is higher for people who get pregnant at 35 or older. The risk begins to climb even earlier, around 36 weeks, for people pregnant with twins.

What you and your doctor can do to reduce the risk of stillbirth.

While federal agencies in the U.S. have yet to come up with a checklist that may help reduce the risk of stillbirth, the Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence in Australia has adopted a Safer Baby Bundle that lists five recommendations:

1. Stop smoking.
2. Regularly monitor growth to reduce the risk of fetal growth restriction, when the fetus is not growing as expected.
3. Understand the importance of acting quickly if fetal movement decreases.
4. Sleep on your side after 28 weeks.
5. Talk to your doctor about when to deliver. Depending on your situation, it may be before your due date.

We talk a lot about miscarriages, and no one ever mentions stillbirth. I think there’s this fear that you can speak it into existence. Even when we found out CJ was dead, I assumed I was going to have a C-section. You don’t think you’re going to have to give birth.”

—Ashley Spivey, whose son CJ was stillborn in 2020 Ashley Spivey (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has compiled a list of tests and techniques doctors can use to try to reduce the risk of a stillbirth. They include:

• A risk assessment to identify prenatal needs.
• A nonstress test, which checks the fetus’s heart rate and how it changes as the fetus moves.
• A biophysical profile, which is done with an ultrasound to measure body movement, muscle tone and breathing, along with amniotic fluid volume.

The group stressed that there is no test that can guarantee a stillbirth won’t happen and that individual circumstances should determine what tests are run.

Are some people at higher risk for stillbirth?

Black women are more than twice as likely to have a stillbirth as white women. There are a number of possible explanations for that disparity, including institutional bias and structural racism, and a patient’s pre-pregnancy health, socioeconomic status and access to health care. In addition, research shows that Black women are more likely than white women to experience multiple stressful life events while pregnant and have their concerns ignored by their health care provider. Similar racial disparities drive the country’s high rate of maternal mortality.

How to find a provider you trust.

Finding a doctor to care for you during your pregnancy can be a daunting process. Medical experts and parents suggest interviewing prospective providers before you decide on the right one.

Here is a short list of questions you might want to ask a potential OB-GYN:

• What is the best way to contact you if I have questions or concerns?
• How do you manage inquiries after hours and on weekends? Do you see walk-ins?
• How do you manage prenatal risk assessments?
• What should I know about the risks of a miscarriage or stillbirth?
• How do you decide when a patient should be induced?

Dr. Ashanda Saint Jean (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

If a provider doesn’t answer your questions to your satisfaction, don’t be reluctant to move on. Dr. Ashanda Saint Jean, chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at HealthAlliance Hospitals of the Hudson Valley in New York, said she encourages her patients to find the provider that meets their needs.

“Seek out someone that is like-minded,” said Saint Jean “It doesn’t have to be that they’re the same ethnicity or the same race, but like-minded in terms of the goals of what that patient desires for their own health and prosperity.”

Never fear to advocate for yourself or your child. Because if your baby was in your arms, you would not hesitate to go to the pediatrician or the ER. Don’t think you’re being paranoid. You’re a mother already.”

—Fernanda Sheridan, whose daughter Natalie was stillborn in 2018 What to know in the last trimester.

The last trimester can be an uncomfortable and challenging time as the fetus grows and you get increasingly tired. During this critical time, your provider should talk to you about the following topics:

• Whether you need a nonstress test to determine if the fetus is getting enough oxygen.
• The best way to track fetal movements.
• What to do if your baby stops moving.
• Whether you are at risk for preeclampsia or gestational diabetes.

Rachel Foran’s child, Eoin Francis, was stillborn at 41 weeks and two days. Foran, who lives in New York, said she believes that if her doctor had tracked her placenta, and if she had understood the importance of fetal movement, she and her husband might have decided to deliver sooner.

She remembers that her son was “very active” until the day before he was stillborn.

“I would have gone in earlier if someone had told me, ‘You’re doing this because the baby could die,’” she said of tracking fetal movement. “That would have been really helpful to know.”

Researchers are looking at the best way to measure the health, blood flow and size of the placenta, but studies are still in their early stages.

“If someone had been doing that with my son’s,” Foran said, “my son would be alive.”

A placental exam and an autopsy showed that a small placenta contributed to Foran’s stillbirth.

How often should you feel movement?

Every baby and each pregnancy are different, so it is important to get to know what levels of activity are normal for you. You might feel movement around 20 weeks. You’re more likely to feel movement when you’re sitting or lying down. Paying attention to movement during the third trimester is particularly important because research shows that changes, including decreased movement or bursts of excessive activity, are associated with an increased risk of stillbirth. Most of the time, it’s nothing. But sometimes it can be a sign that your baby is in distress. If you’re worried, don’t rely on a home fetal doppler to reassure you. Reach out to your doctor.

Saint Jean offers a tip to track movement: “I still tell patients each day to lay on their left side after dinner and record how many times their baby moves, because then that will give you an idea of what’s normal for your baby,” she said.

Other groups recommend using the Count the Kicks app as a way of tracking fetal movements and establishing what is normal for that pregnancy. Although there is no scientific consensus that counting kicks can prevent stillbirths, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other groups recommend that patients be aware of fetal movement patterns.

Dr. Karen Gibbins is a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Oregon Health & Science University who in 2018 had stillborn son named Sebastian. She said the idea that babies don’t move as much at the end of pregnancy is a dangerous myth.

“You might hear that babies slow down at the end,” she said. “They don’t slow down. They just have a little less space. So their movements are a little different, but they should be as strong and as frequent.”

Dr. Karen Gibbins (Kristina Barker, special to ProPublica)

What to Expect After a Stillbirth What might happen at the hospital?

Parents are often asked to make several important decisions while they are still reeling from the shock and devastation of their loss. It’s completely understandable if you need to take some time to consider them.

Some other things you can ask for (if medical personnel don’t offer them) are:

• Blood work, a placental exam, an autopsy and genetic testing.
• A social worker or counselor, bereavement resources and religious or chaplain support.
• The option to be isolated from the labor rooms.
• Someone to take photos of you and your baby, typically either a nurse or an outside group.
• A small cooling cot that allows parents to spend more time with their babies after a stillbirth. If one is not available, you can ask for ice packs to put in the swaddle or the bassinet.
• A mold of your baby’s hands and feet.
• Information about burial or cremation services.
• Guidance on what to do if your milk comes in.

I wish I would have known that I could hold my son longer, that I could have given him a bath, that I could have dressed him in the clothes that I wanted to, that I could have kept him in my room longer, that I could have taken more pictures, that I didn't have to be afraid of him physically.”

—Domenique Rice, whose son TJ was stillborn in 2017 After Domenique Rice’s son TJ was stillborn, she framed a collection of his clothes and other items. (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica) Getting an autopsy after a stillbirth.

Whether to have an autopsy is a personal decision. It may not reveal a cause of death, but it might provide important information about your stillbirth and contribute to broader stillbirth research. Autopsies can be useful if you are considering another pregnancy in the future. Families also told us that an autopsy can help parents feel they did everything they could to try to understand why their baby died.

But several families told us their health care providers didn’t provide them with the right information to help with that decision. Some aren’t trained in the advantages of conducting an autopsy after a stillbirth, or in when and how to sensitively communicate with parents about it. Some, for example, don’t explain that patients can still have an open-casket funeral or other service after an autopsy because the incisions can easily be covered by clothing. Others may not encourage an autopsy because they think they already know what caused the stillbirth or don’t believe anything could have been done to prevent it. In addition, not all hospitals have the capacity to do an autopsy, but there may be private autopsy providers that can perform one at an additional cost.

You can read more about autopsies in our reporting.

It was explained to us that an autopsy would have been extremely expensive. It wouldn’t have given us any answers, and it wasn’t covered by insurance. And with those three things that the medical staff and professionals told us, we made the emotional decision to not do it. I wish that I would have been more prepared. I 100% regret not doing it. An autopsy is the closest we will get to finding out what is taking our babies.”

—Elizabeth Nicholson, whose son Barret was stillborn in 2022 Paying for an autopsy after a stillbirth.

If you decide you want an autopsy, you may wonder whether you need to pay out-of-pocket for it. Several families told us their providers gave them incomplete or incorrect information. Many larger or academic hospitals offer autopsies at no cost to patients. Some insurance companies also cover the cost of an autopsy after a stillbirth.

When hospitals don’t provide an autopsy, they may give you names of private providers. That was the case for Rachel Foran. The hospital gave her and her husband a list of numbers to call if they wanted to pay for an autopsy themselves. The process, she said, shocked her.

“I had just delivered and we had to figure out what to do with his body,” Foran said. “It felt totally insane that that was what we had to do and that we had to figure it out on our own.”

An independent autopsy, records show, cost them $5,000.

What is a certificate of stillbirth and how do I get one?

A fetal death certificate is the official legal document that records the death. This is the document used to gather data on and track the number of stillbirths in the country. Many states also issue a certificate of stillbirth or a certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth, which acknowledge the baby’s birth. Families told us they appreciated having that document, since typical birth certificates are not issued for stillbirths. You can usually request a certificate from the vital records office.

Grieving After a Stillbirth What are the effects of stillbirths on parents and families?

Over and over, families told us the effects of losing a baby can reverberate for a lifetime.

I had so much love in my heart, but I was so broken. It’s really such an empty feeling when they go to wheel you out of labor and delivery and you’re passing monitors that you hear babies’ heartbeats after your baby just died. And you hate these women, even though they’ve done nothing to you and neither have their children, but you’re just so envious of it.”

—Sydney Mayhew, whose son Adam was stillborn in 2021

Bereavement support groups may help provide a space to share experiences and resources. Hospitals and birth centers may suggest a local grief group.

We talked with Anna Calix, a maternal health expert who became active in perinatal loss prevention after her son Liam was stillborn on his due date in 2016. Calix leads grief support groups for people of color in English and Spanish.

She suggested rededicating the time you would have spent taking care of a new baby to the grief process.

“You can do that by addressing your own thoughts and feelings and really experiencing those feelings,” Calix said. “We like to push those feelings away or try to do something to distract and avoid, but no matter what we do, the feelings are there.”

It’s important, she said, to give yourself permission to grow your connection with your child and work through thoughts of guilt or blame.

What You Might Say and Do After a Loved One Experiences a Stillbirth

Finding the right words can be difficult. The following are a few suggestions from parents who went through a stillbirth.

Helpful:

• Acknowledge the loss and offer condolences.
• Ask if the baby was named and use the name.
• Allow space for the family to talk about their baby.

Unhelpful:

• Avoid talking about the baby.
• Minimize the loss or compare experiences.
• Start statements with “at least.”

Suggested phrases to avoid:

• “You’re young. You can have more kids.”
• “At least you have other children.”
• “These things just happen.”
• “Your baby is in a better place now.”

Help Us Report on Stillbirths

Sophia Kovatch contributed research.

by Michael Grabell

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The trouble that brought Heather Brown to Tire Town Auto Service in Picayune, Mississippi, had started with a shake as she drove down the interstate. The tires she relied on to guide her gold 2014 Nissan Rogue and grip the asphalt when she braked seemed to shift and bounce unpredictably. The 29-year-old single mom had purchased the used SUV in early 2022, and when she brought it to a dealership, a mechanic diagnosed a condition that was potentially dangerous for Brown and her 10-year-old son: The steel cords in all four of her tires were separating.

Brown replaced two of the tires in July and tried to save for the other two. But inflation kept eating away at her paycheck from her $14.31-an-hour job at a nursing home. So, needing the tires and with Christmas on the way, she took out a personal loan and pulled up to Tire Town on a drizzly Saturday morning in late November.

Tire Town sits at the intersection of Mississippi Highway 43 and U.S. Highway 11 near a Waffle House, a supermarket and a Family Dollar. Unlike the instantly recognizable fast food chains and box stores that anchor the American landscape, tire shops tend to blend in along highways and access roads. Grimy. Tedious. Necessary. Most Americans, rich or poor, have had the experience of popping a tire, upending their day and forcing them to wait in a tire shop with strangers who’ve had the same miserable luck.

Brown, who has wavy dirty blond hair and wore a gray sweatshirt and jeans, clutched her keychain as she approached the counter.

“Hi, I called about the tires,” she said hesitantly, quickly adding, “The Nissan Rogue.”

Brianne Williams, a Tire Town salesperson, pulled up Brown’s records on a computer. “You just need two of them, right?”

“Yeah, just two,” Brown said.

Williams went over some options, describing Tire Town’s road hazard package, which includes free flat repairs and discounts on replacements if the tires are damaged before the treads wear out.

“How much is it?” Brown asked.

Heather Brown, a 29-year-old single mother, replaced two of her SUV’s tires last November and had to take out a loan to afford the expense. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

It’s a question that has echoed across America these past two years as the price of almost everything reached new heights. Retail counters have become the front lines of sticker shock, a place to vent frustrations about an amorphous global economy that’s strangled people’s ability to make ends meet.

The lowly tire shop, it turns out, may be one of the best places to examine the post-pandemic recovery and its uncertain future. Tires have been buffeted by nearly every force driving inflation since the pandemic began — from border shutdowns that prevented migrant workers overseas from reaching rubber plantations to the war in Ukraine’s toll on an obscure but essential ingredient in tires called carbon black. Americans depend on tires to get to work, to get groceries — essentially to live, in much of the country. But unlike food and gas, tires aren’t something people typically budget for.

The average price of tires has risen 21.4% over the past two years, more than 70% higher than core inflation. A tire that previously cost $100 might now cost $120; one that was $250 might be $300. That’s not counting labor, and people often have to buy more than one tire.

While inflation has eased since last summer, increased prices for many items, including tires, are proving sticky. Widely debated issues like lingering supply chain problems and rising wages are not the only reasons. As consumer brands pushed prices higher last year, many corporate executives noted an economic paradox. Customers continued to buy their products anyway. That led some companies to rack up record profits. Now, as the economy slows, many of the costs that drove inflation have fallen away. Yet the leaders of well-known brands continue to bet — sometimes baldly in investor calls — that they can keep prices high, almost ensuring that consumers will feel the effects of inflation long into 2023.

Brown’s need for a loan to buy tires has become surprisingly commonplace amid the worst period of inflation since the early 1980s. Scores of people have taken to GoFundMe over the past year, pleading for help to buy tires so they could get to work and doctor’s appointments. One parent wrote of seeing her son’s preschool teacher regularly use a portable air compressor to fill her tires at the end of the day. A young mother in California said she sold her prom dress and her toddler’s play kitchen to try to raise enough money for tires.

After she got her loan, Brown called around to a few tire dealers. A couple of places didn’t have her tire size in stock. The Nissan dealership wanted $550 for the two tires. “That was ridiculous; that’s more than a car payment,” she said, laughing. “I only had $137 in my bank account after bills — and that was before groceries.”

Standing at the counter, Brown waited for Williams to tell her the cost. On the shop’s TV, the kid in the movie “A Christmas Story” was triple-dog-daring his friend to press his tongue to a flagpole, as other Tire Town customers waited on a worn black-vinyl couch.

The optional road hazard package, Williams said, would bring her bill to $393.56.

Without it, the tires and installation cost $346.50.

That was already about $40 more than Brown had paid for the tires she had bought there four months earlier. Life wasn’t great at the moment. Her son’s birthday was two weeks before Christmas and, with bills and food, there was no way she could afford a party or gifts. Brown declined the additional package. She gave her keys to Williams and walked outside to wait for a ride.

Brown’s son, Brantley, plays in front of their home. Brown was financially stretched by the expense of new tires coming shortly before Christmas and Brantley’s birthday. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

The paperwork Brown held in her hand offered no insights as to why tire prices had risen so sharply. But there would be a clue on her new tires. Each was stamped with an identification number that could be traced to where and when it was made. I wrote down one of the numbers — 00B KP RB1A 4521 — and set out to retrace the path of her tire across the globe, from the rubber trees to the repair shop, to understand why prices were really going up.

The sticker shock that Brown saw at Tire Town started more than two years earlier in a stand of rubber trees. Before Brown’s new tire was even a ribbon of tread, part of it was a trickle of white latex dripping out of a tree in Southeast Asia. Rubber tappers sliced a groove into the bark, allowing the milky fluid to spiral down the tree into a container. Exposed to air, the latex coagulated into a lump before being collected by tappers and sent to a processing plant. The rubber was then shredded, dried and packed into blocks, which look like chewy granola bars the size and shape of hay bales.

Passenger and light truck tires are 19% natural rubber, according to the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association. And as COVID-19 swept through Asia in 2020, major rubber producers like Thailand and Malaysia shut their borders to slow the spread of the virus. This public health precaution had a ripple effect: Migrant workers from neighboring countries couldn’t reach the plantations. The lack of labor led to a drop in production. The supply was further weakened by extreme weather and fungal leaf disease that struck just as the demand for latex gloves soared. By early 2021, rubber futures had spiked nearly 50% from the year before.

The Vietnam Rubber Group, the main natural rubber supplier to the factory that made Brown’s tire, was also affected, as the pandemic and heavy storm damage created what the company called a “double disaster.” Rubber harvesting and processing was suspended for long periods because of COVID-19 cases and travel restrictions. Then, starting in September 2020, nine storms bombarded the company’s plantations, unleashing winds and flash floods that toppled and uprooted rubber trees and triggered landslides that blocked critical roads, it said in its annual report.

But natural rubber was only one part of the problem, and to understand why, consider the complex science of tires. To some degree, tires are about as unsexy and primitive as the lump of rubber many people mistake them for. The wheel, after all, dates back thousands of years. The goal of creating a smooth ride with a material that can withstand bumps hasn’t changed much since 1887, when a Scottish veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop wrapped the wheels of his son’s tricycle in sheet rubber, filled them with air and noticed how much better they rolled than the wheels made of wood or metal at the time.

Over the last century, however, chemists and engineers have fiddled with that formula to make tires more agile, more durable, more fuel-efficient, quieter, better at braking on slick roads and able to perform as well in extreme heat as extreme cold. “We ask tires to do conflicting things,” said Howard Colvin, a retired tire industry chemist who once led Goodyear’s polymer research group. When driving on the freeway, we want tires to have as little friction as possible. But when braking in emergencies, we want them to be able to endure as much friction as possible. “When you think about what we ask a tire to do,” Colvin said, “the fact that tires and tire engineering can do it, to me, it’s pretty remarkable.”

Tires need natural rubber to resist tears, synthetic rubber polymers to improve traction and keep the tire inflated, steel wire and textile cord to provide stability and a soot-like filler called carbon black to reinforce the rubber. By the summer of 2021, when the components for Brown’s tire were likely being purchased, the prices of all those materials were starting to go up.

And it only got worse. Synthetic rubber and carbon black, which together make up roughly half the weight of a car tire, are made from petroleum. As oil prices soared in the summer of 2022, so did the cost of materials for making tires. It wasn’t just that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions had tightened the global oil supply. Russia was also the second-largest exporter of carbon black. The powder is the essential ingredient that gives tires their color and strength, and tire and rubber goods factories scrambled to secure a supply.

“Without carbon black, a tire would be like a rubber band,” Colvin said.

And the material doubled in price in two years.

Juan Cantu, a technician at Tire Town, started up Brown’s Rogue and carefully pulled it into the fourth service bay and onto a red automotive lift. He read the work order for the brand, model and size of the tires needed — Milestar MS932 Sport, size 225/60R18 — and headed out back across a gravel lot to one of the metal sheds where Tire Town kept its stock.

It was dark inside, and Cantu maneuvered through a warren of tires, some stored in orange racks, others stacked in columns up to 12 tires high. He removed several from one of the stacks and pulled out Brown’s new tires.

“932,” he said, confirming the model.

With one tire in each hand and a Maverick-brand cigarette dangling from his lips, Cantu, 24, hauled the tires back to the garage.

Cantu grew up in Texas, where he helped his dad work on cars. After he moved to Mississippi, he decided to work in tire shops. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

Tire Town’s owner, Kevin Cates, never intended to go into the tire business. He got an MBA and went to work for Philip Morris, climbing the corporate ladder to a finance position at the company’s office in Zug, Switzerland. But in 1998, after his wife’s mother got sick, they decided to move back to New Orleans, where Cates helped his father-in-law and brothers-in-law run the family tire business, Delta World Tire.

After getting divorced, Cates purchased the Tire Town chain in 2012, with shops in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Slidell, Louisiana. He later closed the Baton Rouge location and added a store in LaPlace, Louisiana, as well as the one in Picayune. He sells name brands like Michelin and Goodyear but has carved out a niche in the discount market, seeing Asian imports as a better value for his cost-conscious customers. And while most shops rely on distributors, Cates buys many of his tires by the shipping container directly from factories in Asia. That practice has given Cates, who is 60 and wears tortoiseshell glasses, a rare perch to watch the economy’s ups and downs firsthand.

“I’ll have a customer tell me he bought a tire a year and a half ago, and the price has gone up at least 30% — they can’t believe it,” Cates said. “My guys on the counter see that every day.”

Owner Kevin Cates at the Tire Town in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. The shop has seen the ups and downs of the post-pandemic economy firsthand. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

Unlike the typical waiting rooms of Tire Town’s other locations — with a hazy glare, coin-operated candy machines and 4-year-old Sports Illustrateds strewn on a table — the Picayune shop exhibits an industrial chic remodel, with corrugated chrome wainscoting and faux whitewashed shiplap on the walls.

The morning Brown dropped off her car, Tire Town’s customers included court clerks and truck mechanics who commute to New Orleans, 60 miles each way. Picayune had once been known as the “Tung Oil Center of the World” because of its orchards of tung trees, whose nuts produce an oil used in wood varnish. But many people moved there from the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina.

The New Orleans metropolitan area has experienced some of the highest inflation in the country over the past year, according to Moody’s Analytics. Rural areas like those near Picayune have been hit hard. A nationwide study by Iowa State University found that while urban households saw their discretionary income fall by 13% from June 2020 to June 2022, inflation cut rural households’ discretionary income nearly in half. “Not having this extra financial cushion,” the study’s authors concluded, “puts rural families at greater risk for increased debt, default, and potential bankruptcy.”

Like many businesses, Tire Town struggled at the beginning of the pandemic, as people stayed home and stopped driving. But as the economy reopened, traffic picked up — and so did the stores’ sales. A semiconductor shortage, caused in part by a splurge on consumer electronics during lockdown, meant automakers couldn’t get the chips needed for new vehicles. That led car prices to skyrocket, putting them out of reach for many buyers.

“People are having trouble buying the new cars that they want,” Cates said. “So they’re keeping their cars longer, and therefore fixing them.” Last year, the average age of cars and light trucks in the U.S. hit an all-time high of 12.2 years.

Decades ago, tires generally came in a few dozen standard sizes. But eventually automakers began to demand tires that were specific to a model and upgrade package. As of May 1, Michelin listed 432 different sizes on its website.

The changes have given tire manufacturers a great deal of pricing power. Tires come in four pricing tiers, ranging from top-of-the-line brands to generic imports, theoretically giving customers a choice. But since tire dealers now have to carry so many sizes, they may only have a couple of brands in stock. And drivers tend to flock to the few that have name recognition.

For most customers, a tire is — as one industry veteran put it — a “grudge purchase.” They have little time to shop around and a huge information gap. “Consumers don’t really have a frame of reference on what a tire should cost, because you only buy them every few years,” said Phillip Kane, a business consultant and former executive at Goodyear and Pirelli. Bill Wood, an economist who studies the plastics and rubber industries, was more blunt: “They can tell you it’s going to cost whatever it’s going to cost, and as long as it doesn’t sound like it’s made out of gold, you’re going to say, ‘OK.’”

Since the start of 2021, manufacturers have announced dozens of price increases, sometimes amounting to double-digit percentage hikes. Yet customers have continued buying. “If we could make more, we can actually even sell more in the environment that we’re seeing,” Goodyear CEO Richard Kramer told investors in February 2022. That confidence hasn’t always been enough to appease investors. The same day Kramer made that comment, Goodyear’s stock tanked more than 25%, as investors feared whether the company could overcome rising raw material and ocean freight costs. Since then, Goodyear has repeatedly tried to reassure investors that it has enough pricing power to charge more and boost profits. “Our increase in the replacement tire prices more than offset our costs,” the company’s chief financial officer said at its next earnings call, reiterating the point a half-dozen times.

Goodyear recently announced layoffs and weaker-than-expected financial results, but the company said it hasn’t seen any decreased demand for its premium tires. It hopes the combination of higher prices and declining material costs in the second half of 2023 will allow it to increase its profit margins. Though Goodyear hasn’t announced new price hikes this year, Michelin, Bridgestone and Pirelli all increased their U.S. tire prices in January.

Goodyear has faced increased raw material and supply chain costs, leading it to raise prices multiple times. The company said customers have been willing to pay the higher prices. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

“Although our results — and the results of other players in the industry — have recently been negatively impacted by rising input and manufacturing costs,” a Goodyear spokesperson said, “our objectives are to generate competitive margins and deliver returns for our shareholders.” Michelin and Pirelli said their decisions were based on ongoing instability and inflation. Bridgestone did not respond to requests for comment.

As more affluent drivers continue to buy name-brand tires, Tire Town’s price-conscious customers have been trading down, Cates said. People who used to buy midrange brands are now opting for budget tires. People who might have replaced all four tires are trying to skate by with two.

That’s boosted demand for budget tires. Each week, the Fitment Group, a tire industry data provider in Duluth, Minnesota, analyzes 8 million advertised tire prices from retailers’ websites across the country. And looking at that data from January 2020 to December 2022 shows a startling trend: For many tire sizes, the cheapest tires have gone up twice as much in price as premium brands.

Customers like Brown have little choice but to pay up.

In the shop, Cantu stacked Brown’s new tires next to her Rogue. Stamped on the sides beneath the Milestar logo, amid load limits and safety warnings, was the string of letters and numbers that make the tires’ origins traceable. The first three characters were “00B.” For safety reasons, the U.S. Department of Transportation has assigned a code to every tire factory in the world. This one belonged to the Casumina Radial Tire Factory in Uyen Hung, Vietnam, about an hour’s drive north of Ho Chi Minh City.

Inside the baby blue factory in an industrial area along the Dong Nai River, the materials that would become Brown’s tires were loaded into giant mixers. The machines blended several batches of gummy black substances, each carrying different chemical compositions. The compounds were then sent to other machines to be pressed into sheets and strips. Strands of steel wire were coated in rubber and formed into two hoops to make the edges of the tire, known as the beads, which lock the tire onto the wheel.

Those hoops were then placed onto a rotating drum along with a sheet of rubber that would form the inner liner of the tire. From there, several plies and belts of different rubbers — some embedded with polyester, nylon and steel — were laid on top and pressed together to build the body of the tire.

“A tire is a complicated product,” said Nguyen Dinh Dong, Casumina’s deputy general director. “To make it, it needs many, many processes.”

The process can be seen in videos of the Casumina factory, which opened in 2014. It was perfect timing for the company, which started after the Vietnam War selling to the local market and exporting bicycle tires to socialist countries in Eastern Europe. The United States imported few tires from Vietnam in 2014, but that was about to change.

The Obama administration had been waging a trade battle against Chinese tire manufacturers, which it accused of flooding the market to undercut the U.S. industry and harm American workers. The administration was about to impose another round of penalties, and tire companies were shifting their work to factories in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia.

Today, more than three-quarters of passenger replacement tires in the United States are imported, according to Tire Business, a trade publication. The import value of passenger tires from Vietnam boomed to $390 million last year — about 20 times what the United States imported a decade ago. Casumina is now the 66th largest tire manufacturer in the world, according to Tire Business. The factory where Brown’s tires were made produces more than a million tires a year.

“Last year was very, very difficult for us,” Nguyen said. The cost to ship its tires to the United States jumped from $2,000 to $16,000 per container. And with raw materials prices rising, it had to raise the prices it charges its U.S. buyers by 8%, he said.

Even though Casumina makes the tires, Milestar isn’t actually the company’s model. It’s a brand produced for Tireco, one of the largest American tire distributors, based in Gardena, California. The company also markets Westlake, Nankang and Patagonia tires and calls Milestar “the official tire of adventure.” Not that Brown planned to climb winding mountain roads, as shown in the company’s promotional video. The MS932 Sport is what’s known as an all-season touring tire, meaning it provides a comfortable ride and can handle most weather conditions. It’s available in more than 60 sizes.

Tireco declined to comment, but in industry publications it has said its goal is to create a tire that can perform as well as a midrange tire but at a budget price.

Just before Brown’s tires were made, as raw material costs were already putting pressure on prices, another problem flared up for Tireco and Casumina. The Biden administration believed that tires from South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam were being unfairly subsidized and dumped in the U.S. market. And it was threatening to slap penalties on them, which would increase the price to import them.

Victor Li, Tireco’s executive vice president, had testified before the International Trade Commission in May 2021 that the company’s brands “service a critical segment of the U.S., which U.S. producers have shifted away from.” Tireco had tried to produce its tires in the United States, he said, but domestic manufacturers had “no interest,” focusing instead on the premium market. Penalizing imports, he said, would not bring production to the United States; it would only raise prices.

But the commission wasn’t swayed, and the Biden administration imposed the penalties. One of the brands that Tireco distributed, Nankang, which was made in Taiwan, was hit the hardest, with duties over 100%. The administration also determined that Vietnam had manipulated its currency to give its exports a competitive advantage, but it spared tiremakers like Casumina from the stiffest penalties.

Those global policy decisions trickled down to Tire Town in Picayune, which was seeing an ever-changing mix in where its tires were coming from. “It used to be we’d always see China,” said Dennis Sarchet, the Picayune store manager. “Then we got to where we started seeing a lot from Thailand and Indonesia. And now I’m seeing more and more coming out of Turkey.” In fact, the two tires that Brown bought in July had been made in Turkey.

Now, her new tires were working their way through a factory in Vietnam. A machine that acts like a big waffle iron molded the Milestar tread pattern onto each tire. Steam heated the tire to about 300 degrees to bond its components together and harden the rubber. When the mold lifted, it revealed not only the treads but the string of characters stamped on the side: “00B KP RB1A 4521.”

The last four numbers correspond to the 45th week of 2021, meaning that Brown’s tire was made sometime between Nov. 8 and Nov. 14, 2021.

It was a terrible time to try to ship tires to the United States.

That week, 111 cargo ships lined up at or outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, waiting for dockworkers to unload hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, containers full of goods like furniture, appliances, toys and tires. A consumer buying binge during the pandemic had stretched the supply chain to its limits. Shipping rates soared as retailers raced to get their products onto shelves before the holidays.

Importers, including tire companies, complained to regulators that the world’s biggest ocean carriers were taking advantage of the situation by ignoring their contracts, forcing them to pay inflated rates to get their products to the United States. Though carriers denied it, businesses said the freight companies were also tacking on exorbitant fees for shipping containers that couldn’t be picked up or returned on time because of port congestion.

At Tire Town, Cates struggled to get the tires his customers needed. “Our suppliers were charging us $2,500 shipping surcharges, $5,000, $10,000. It got up to $15,000 to $16,000,” he said. “Imagine what that does to the price of the tires that I have to pass on to my customers. And that’s before I have to factor in the price of the raw materials and labor that manufacturers are passing on to us.”

Cates is a member of one of North America’s largest tire-buying groups, where independent retailers like him band together to negotiate prices directly with manufacturers. The group was founded in the 1990s as Walmart and Sears began to use their buying power to offer discounts that other tire dealers couldn’t match.

The average price of tires has risen 21.4% over the past two years, more than 70% higher than core inflation. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

With the buying group, Cates rarely had to worry about getting tires from overseas. Whenever he needed more, he’d place an order and about 90 days later a truck carrying a container full of 750 to 820 tires would arrive at his shops. Getting tires was so easy that Cates had a side business distributing tires to local repair shops. The manufacturing shift from China to Southeast Asia had lengthened the lead time on orders to 120 days. But as the shipping backlogs grew in late 2021 and early 2022, delivery times were running over 200 days, he said.

Usually about half of the 25,000 tires that Cates sold each year came in shipping containers directly from factories. But while Tire Town received 24 containers in 2020, in 2021 it received less than 10. “Inventory is a big deal in the tire industry,” Cates said. “People are in the market for a tire for 24 hours. If you don’t have it, they’re going somewhere else.”

Because of the supply chain problems, Cates had to depend more on distributors like Tireco. But Tireco was having its own difficulties. It discontinued its factory-direct order process, according to Tire Business, and started running all its tires through its 1.1 million-square-foot warehouse in Southern California. “We expect the next nine months to continue to be challenging, but we are confident in our partners and our ability” to fulfill orders, Andrew Hoit, then Tireco’s vice president of sales and marketing, told the trade publication Modern Tire Dealer in November 2021.

It's difficult to know exactly when Brown’s tires arrived in the United States. Government import records collected by ImportGenius, which tracks global shipping, show that from February through June of last year, Tireco received at least 172 shipments from Casumina, totaling 626 containers of tires. Most of the shipments left from Vietnam’s Vung Tau Port and arrived at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Brown’s tires eventually made their way to Kentucky-based distributor Rudolph Tire. Tire Town’s general manager, Andrew Washington, said they were part of an order he placed with Rudolph’s Dallas warehouse that arrived at the New Orleans Tire Town shop in either a van or a box truck in early October. From there, Tire Town loaded them, along with a pile of other tires, into the back of a white Chevrolet pickup and drove across Lake Pontchartrain to Picayune, where the tires sat in a shed awaiting the work of Juan Cantu.

Cantu looks for replacement tires inside a shed behind Tire Town in Picayune. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

Cantu flicked a switch on the lift and raised Brown’s SUV a few feet so its tires would be at shoulder level. New tires are typically mounted on the rear of a car to provide greater traction and prevent hydroplaning. So, Cantu first needed to take off the rear tires that Brown had bought in July and rotate them to the front. He wielded an impact driver, a tool that looks and sounds like a high-powered drill, and unscrewed the lug nuts from the driver’s side wheels. He pulled the rear wheel off and bounced and rolled it to a machine called a balancer.

When a tire is changed properly, the wheel should be “balanced” to ensure that weight is distributed equally to prevent vibrations and uneven wear. Cantu slid the wheel onto the machine’s spindle, locked it in place and lowered the machine’s plastic hood. The wheel automatically spun as a computer measured the imbalance. If the wheel was out of balance, Cantu would have to correct it by adding small steel weights to the rim. Many technicians will work on one tire at a time, but as the rear wheel spun, Cantu returned to the Rogue and pulled off the front wheel.

“I like to multitask to keep my momentum going,” said Cantu, who wore a goatee and speaks with a deep drawl from growing up in Texas. He placed the front wheel on a tire changer — a machine that technicians use to remove a tire from the rim — and let the air out of the tire, unleashing an ear-piercing hiss.

Once the air wheezed out, he placed the wheel next to a metal arm on the tire changer that wedges under the tire’s edge to unseal it from the rim, a process known as “breaking the bead.” With the tire now hanging from the rim like an ill-fitting collar, Cantu easily pried it free and rolled it onto a pile of old tires.

Returning to the balancer, Cantu checked the reading. The wheel was indeed out of balance. Cantu chiseled the wheel’s old weights off of its rim and scraped the inside of the rim clean. Using red lights like those in a supermarket barcode scanner, the machine pinpointed where Cantu needed to place the new weights. He hammered a 0.75-ounce clip-on weight onto the outside rim and, from a drawer, pulled out a rectangle of weights divided into pieces like a chocolate bar. He broke off a 2-ounce piece and stuck it inside the rim. The tire was now balanced and ready to go back on the SUV.

With that task done, Cantu peeled the sticker off the new Milestar tire. He brushed its edges with lubricant and pressed it onto the rim that had been waiting on the tire changer. He then used a part of the machine called a duck head — because of its shape — to pry the tire over the rim. Next, Cantu grabbed the air hose and filled the tire until it made two satisfying pops, indicating the tire was sealed.

Multitasking again, Cantu placed the new tire on the balancer. He then lifted the other one and remounted it onto the driver’s side front. He slid the wheel onto its hub, fastened the lug nuts by hand and then tightened them with the impact driver. Zth-oom! Zth-oom! Zth-oom! Zth-oom!

After adding a quarter-ounce weight to the wheel with the new Milestar tire, he rolled it to the back of the SUV and repeated the process. Zth-oom! Zth-oom! Zth-oom! Zth-oom! The driver’s side was now done.

Finding technicians like Cantu has become increasingly difficult. While the U.S. economy has regained the jobs it lost during the pandemic, tire dealer employment numbers remained below their pre-pandemic levels until December, according to the Labor Department.

Cantu saw his wages increase significantly over the past two years as tire dealers struggled to find technicians. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

Some of the reasons are obvious. Tire work is heavy, repetitive and dirty. Technicians typically get paid close to entry-level wages, like workers at warehouses, restaurants and big-box stores. There’s a lot that can go wrong.

“You have to make sure the car is lifted properly and safely,” Cates said. “You have to have the right tire sizes. You have to have the right speed ratings. You have to make sure the tire is set properly and tightened to a certain torque specification. When mounting a tire, you have to make sure you don’t scratch the rim. There’s tire pressure involved. You need to make sure there aren’t problems with sensors.

“It’s a lot more technical than it sounds,” he continued. “It’s not just something that you can just hire a guy. You’re always debating: Should you hire a guy with the right experience or hire a guy with the right attitude and train him?”

Cantu, who moved to Mississippi from Texas three years ago, said he started at Delta World in early 2021 at around $10 an hour but quickly got a series of raises before being recruited by Tire Town in March 2022 with an offer of $16.50 an hour. “I probably went through like six raises in the course of a year,” Cantu said. “I worked for it, though.”

Rising wages led Tire Town to raise its labor rate for tires from $40 an hour to $50, an added cost that would be baked into Brown’s bill.

Cantu repeated the process of changing the tires on the passenger side. He tightened all the wheels to the precise measure of torque and filled the tires to 35 pounds per square inch of pressure. Then he took a swig from a bottle of Sprite.

He pressed the switch to lower the lift. He headed to the sink to wash his hands and then slid back into the driver’s seat. About 45 minutes after he began, Cantu fired up the ignition, backed the SUV out of the garage and parked it in front of the shop.

The Picayune shop closes at noon on Saturdays, and by 11 a.m. it was nearly empty. The sequel to “A Christmas Story” hummed on the overhead TV as Williams and Sarchet waited for customers to pick up their cars.

“Five years ago, there would be eight to 10 cars waiting here when we opened,” said Sarchet, who has a long white “Duck Dynasty” beard. “I just think that people don’t have the money to spend like they used to.”

Dennis Sarchet, manager of the Tire Town in Picayune, at his home in Louisiana, where he works on cars in his time off and even has tire machines. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

Tire Town would sell the Picayune location at the end of the year, but for now it was entering its slow period, when the cold weather keeps people inside and away from tire stores — and when Tire Town barely breaks even. To make matters worse, the supply chain had finally opened up. While that might seem like a blessing, the shops were suddenly flooded with tires ordered in the spring.

Normally, when businesses are stuck with too much supply, it results in lower prices. But for products like tires, that tenet doesn’t always hold. It goes back to tires being a “grudge purchase.” Unlike with refrigerators or smartphones or cars, it’s tough to lure customers to upgrade their tires.

The dynamic seen in this small tire chain is perhaps a microcosm of the larger economy: Prices seem to be holding for other products as well. Retailers have complained about having too much inventory and not enough warehouse space. That’s resulted in slower factory orders, causing ocean shipping rates to fall back to normal. But many companies have been stuck in higher contracts negotiated during the supply chain crisis — and sales are keeping up with supply. So the expected savings hasn’t worked its way through the economy.

And it hasn’t filtered down to customers like Brown. Her “grudge purchase” was wrapping up. Williams called Brown to let her know her car was ready and that the store would be closing soon.

“She did say she was on her way,” Williams told Sarchet.

“So, everybody else has picked up?” he asked.

“Umm-hmm.”

The door swung open. The driver of a 1995 Ford Bronco wanted to know if the shop had an Interstate car battery. Several minutes passed, and another customer needed an oil change.

Around 11:30 a.m., Brown walked in and approached the counter.

“$346.50,” Williams said.

The tires themselves came to just over $250. The price of Cantu’s work installing the tires was about $40, plus $15.99 to change the valve stems of the tire pressure sensors. There was a $10 shop supplies fee, a couple of tiny fees for disposal and $22.54 in tax.

“I just gotta switch the money over,” Brown said, picking up her phone to transfer the funds. “I try to keep it in my savings account so that way I won’t touch it.”

After Williams ran her card, Brown walked out to look at her new tires. They’d traveled more than 10,000 miles from a factory in Vietnam to the shop in Picayune. They’d traversed a pandemic, a volatile raw materials market, a consumer spending boom, a trade war, a supply chain crisis and a labor shortage. Now they sat on the rear axle of her Rogue, ready to do the thing they were destined to do.

Brown started up the engine and put her SUV in gear. She now felt confident that she and her son could travel the roads safely. But obstacles undoubtedly lay ahead as she navigated a world in which higher prices have become the norm, and companies fight to hold on to their new profit margins.

The tires rolled through the parking lot as she steered toward the exit. She turned right and sped off toward the interstate.

At last, Brown’s grudge purchase for her Nissan Rogue was over. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

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