ProPublica

by Mick Dumke, ProPublica; Video by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS

This report is a collaboration between ProPublica and Chicago Tonight/WTTW News from WTTW/Chicago PBS. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

When thousands of families were forced to move out of the ABLA Homes public housing complex two decades ago, Chicago and federal leaders promised they would be able to come back to new housing and a revitalized community on the city’s Near West Side.

Most of the residential buildings at ABLA would be demolished. But, officials said, thousands of new homes for both poor and more affluent families would be built to replace them. The pledge was part of a 10-year plan to “transform” public housing citywide and offer a model to other cities.

Now, after building less than a third of the promised new units, officials are moving with unusual urgency to redevelop the largest plot of empty land at ABLA — but not for housing. Instead, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Housing Authority are planning to lease the land for decades to a professional sports team owned by a local billionaire.

Under the deal, the CHA would lease about 26 acres to the Chicago Fire Football Club, which would construct a practice facility consisting of six soccer fields and a building for training and business offices. The Fire are owned by Joe Mansueto, founder of the investment research firm Morningstar and one of Chicago’s most influential business leaders.

To housing advocates and those desperate for affordable homes, the deal is the latest in a series of betrayals by Chicago mayors and the CHA.

As its rebuilding efforts have lagged over the last 15 years, the CHA has repeatedly let its land be developed for purposes other than housing. It has sold or leased property for a nonprofit tennis academy, a charter school, a police station, medical facilities, movie production space and a supermarket, according to agency records. Federal officials have signed off on the land transactions.

“We have an agency, the Chicago Housing Authority, that is supposed to provide housing for the most vulnerable, and instead of building housing they want to give that land to a soccer team,” said Rod Wilson, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing and equitable community development. “It seems that the CHA wants to get out of the business of providing quality housing for families.”

Rod Wilson on land where the ABLA Homes once stood, now the proposed site for the Chicago Fire Football Club training facility (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

Lightfoot and the CHA are pushing the Fire deal as Chicago, like many other cities, faces an affordable housing crisis. More than 30,000 people are currently on the CHA’s waiting lists for a public housing apartment or a voucher to help them rent in the private market. And the city’s housing commissioner has said Chicago needs at least 120,000 more affordable units to house everyone in need.

While the CHA is a separate agency that is not formally part of city government, its CEO and board members are picked by — and often answer to — the mayor. It is also overseen by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the source of much of its funding.

In 2000, the CHA vowed to improve the lives of its residents through what it has called the “largest redevelopment/rehabilitation of public housing in the history of the United States.” It would raze most of its apartment buildings citywide, displacing thousands of families. Then it would build or rehabilitate 25,000 units of housing within 10 years. The new communities would include people with a mix of incomes but offer far fewer homes for poor families than before.

Richard M. Daley, who was then Chicago’s mayor, and federal officials including Andrew Cuomo, then the HUD secretary, were deeply involved in crafting the plan. It received backing from nonprofit foundations and was replicated on a smaller scale in other cities.

The public housing developments were torn down, but plans for replacing them were often vague or simply abandoned. More than 20 years later, the CHA still hasn’t met its commitments. Despite receiving federal money to redevelop sites with new housing, the CHA is sitting on dozens of empty plots around the city, including the property offered to the Fire.

Altogether, 3,600 families once lived at ABLA. In 2003, as the CHA leveled most of the apartment buildings there, it announced plans to remake the development with 2,441 new and 455 rehabbed units.

After two decades, the CHA’s chosen developer has built just 667 units. The rehab work was done, but so much time has now passed that those units need to be fixed up again, the CHA says. And plots of land throughout the neighborhood remain empty. The property picked for the Fire, at Roosevelt Road and Ashland Avenue, is the largest of those vacant areas.

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CHA officials now argue that the Fire deal is needed because the land has been undeveloped for so long — even though the CHA itself was responsible for leaving it that way.

“That property has been sitting vacant for 20 years and it’s time for us to do something productive with it,” said Tracey Scott, the housing agency’s CEO. The Fire proposal, she added, is “in line with our philosophy of mixed-use, mixed-income community development.”

In a statement provided to ProPublica and WTTW, the CHA said that a lease agreement with the Fire would provide funding to fix up aging ABLA properties and recreational facilities while offering job opportunities for residents. The statement repeated promises from Scott and other agency officials that the CHA still plans to deliver all the housing units it promised.

The Fire stressed some of the same points about how the agreement could benefit CHA residents. “When this location was offered by the city, we viewed it as an opportunity to increase our investment on the Near West Side while securing a site for a world-class performance center,” the team said in an emailed statement.

Many current ABLA residents said they first heard about the plan when they received a flyer from the CHA in late April, days before CHA and Fire officials held a meeting about it at a rec center next to the site. Afterward, some residents said they welcomed the Fire facility because it might create jobs or bring new businesses to the community. But others were skeptical, and some worried it was part of a plan to remove public and affordable housing from the neighborhood altogether.

Wilson, the housing organizer, was outside the meeting leading 10 activists in voicing opposition to the plan.

“What do we want?” Wilson called out.

The others responded: “Housing, not soccer!”

A Promise Unfulfilled

The CHA has housed families on the Near West Side since its first development, the Jane Addams Homes, opened in the Little Italy neighborhood in 1938. By 1963, the agency had completed three other developments nearby.

The Grace Abbott Homes c. 1970 (Digital image collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago)

Together they were known as Addams-Brooks-Loomis-Abbott, or ABLA. The Abbott Homes, where more than 1,000 families once lived in high-rises and row houses, stood on the land that would later be offered to the Fire.

When Rita Sallie moved into an apartment in the Abbott Homes as a young mother in 1991, “it was a community,” she recalled.

“Children were outside playing, people watched them, and my kids made lifelong relationships there. But the longer I lived there, the less comfortable I was.”

Management of the properties was often poor and maintenance was neglected. By the mid-1990s, many of the ABLA buildings were deteriorating. City inspectors cited the CHA for poor lighting, broken faucets, leaking roofs, “defective lead-bearing paint” and other code violations at multiple ABLA properties. More than 4 of every 10 ABLA units were vacant or occupied by people without a lease, according to the city. Crime increased.

“They allowed it to become uninhabitable,” Sallie recalled. She and her family moved out in the late 1990s.

After watching the properties decay, the CHA concluded that most failed a HUD “viability test” and would be too expensive to fix up. The agency received nearly $60 million in federal grants and started demolishing ABLA buildings; only the Brooks Homes and Loomis Courts sections of ABLA were left standing and rehabbed. The agency forced thousands of residents to move, promising a “right to return” to those who had not violated the terms of their leases.

The citywide Plan for Transformation, unveiled in 2000, called for the old ABLA to be replaced by a “revitalized” community with more than 3,000 units. But the CHA soon whittled that number down.

In 2003, the agency tapped LR Development, an affiliate of real estate firms Related and Related Midwest, to build 2,441 new units at ABLA sites over the following 10 years. More than 750 town homes and apartments would be set aside for public housing. But most of the new homes would be sold to homeowners either at market rates or for affordable prices, so the redeveloped community would include a mix of incomes. On the site of the former Abbott Homes, planning documents called for hundreds of new residences surrounding a park.

By 2008, the CHA had rebranded ABLA as Roosevelt Square. But Related Midwest already was years behind on delivering the units it had committed to. Then the housing market crashed, and progress stalled around the city.

In the last 14 years, just one new building has gone up at the ABLA sites: A public library with an apartment complex on top of it, which opened on Taylor Street in 2019. Even after that project was finished, the CHA still needed to build 1,773 more units, including 469 for public housing residents, to fulfill its commitments.

Fewer than 800 families have exercised their right to return to ABLA, the CHA said. The agency determined that more than 2,000 families were not eligible, and it lost track of hundreds of others. But, it said, any eligible residents can still claim their right to return.

Sallie said she was never told she might have that option. After leaving ABLA, she found an apartment for her family on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Then, in 2007, her 13-year-old daughter was shot and killed when a gang member fired into a neighborhood park. Sallie eventually found a new home and career in Atlanta.

She suspects the CHA doesn’t want to keep track of former residents like her: “They want to do other things with that land.”

Help for a Billionaire

Mansueto, the Fire’s owner, is one of Chicago’s wealthiest business leaders. He has made donations to the campaigns of several local and state officials, including former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but not Lightfoot, records show. (Mansueto’s family foundation has donated to a number of cultural and nonprofit entities, including ProPublica.) Last fall Lightfoot praised him during her annual speech on the city’s budget, citing his work with the city on a development project in an economically struggling area on the West Side.

When Mansueto bought the Fire in 2019, his plan was to give the franchise a home inside the city limits. The team would move from a stadium in suburban Bridgeview to playing home games at Soldier Field, owned by the Chicago Park District, on the city’s lakefront.

Finding a site for offices and practice fields proved trickier. “One of the downsides of being in a major metro area like Chicago is it’s pretty well built up,” Mansueto told reporters last year. “There’s not a lot of 25-acre parcels lying around.”

When the team finally found a chunk of land it liked last year — 35 acres of green space between three public schools on the Northwest Side — it couldn’t close the deal with the Chicago school system. Mayoral aides worked closely with Fire officials for months as they presented the plan at a community meeting and then sought approval from the Chicago Board of Education, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request. By fall, though, negotiations fell apart over when students would have access to the facilities.

“They did not want to meet our demands and basically walked away,” school board President Miguel del Valle told ProPublica.

The Fire and the mayor quickly pivoted to an option that generated little interference. In October, mayoral aides emailed Lightfoot a 14-page document detailing three “Opportunity Sites” for the practice facility. All three had been empty since the CHA demolished housing developments that were never replaced. One was the ABLA property.

A double exposure of the former Abbott Homes site (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

City officials had little reason to worry that the CHA might resist using its land for something other than housing: The agency had already been pursuing a broader development strategy for nearly a decade. In a 2013 update to its transformation road map, the agency declared it wanted to “promote CHA-controlled vacant land as a source for long-term public and private investment opportunity.”

That year, Target opened a new store on property that had been part of the Cabrini-Green development. In 2015, the CHA sold several Taylor Homes parcels to XS Tennis, an athletic and education organization.

Since then, the agency has also allowed its land to be used for a South Side grocery store and a Southwest Side charter school. In each of those cases, the CHA argued that their residents and the public at large would benefit from new neighborhood amenities and the money received for the sale or lease of the land. HUD approved those land uses. The federal agency did not answer specific questions from ProPublica about the transactions but said it “works closely” with the CHA.

The ABLA site offered to the Fire has been empty since the Abbott Homes were torn down. Beyond mowing the grass, the CHA has done little to develop or maintain it, and portions are still covered in rocks or concrete from when a road looped between the apartment buildings.

Former ABLA resident Bryant Spencer at home (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

On one of the first warm afternoons of the year, Bryant Spencer and Lewis Clayton were sipping cold cans of beer next to an SUV with its rear door open on the western edge of the property. Both men said they had grown up at ABLA in the 1960s and ’70s — Spencer had been born steps away in a row house that was torn down in the 2000s. Though they live in other parts of Chicago now, “we like to come back and reminisce,” said Spencer.

Neither had heard about the CHA’s impending deal with the Fire. Clayton, a proud military veteran with a salt-and-pepper mustache, said he thought the empty land was supposed to be filled in with new homes.

Spencer nodded. “When they got rid of all the housing over here, they promised they was going to rebuild.”

He looked over the open field. “They always do the Latino and Black people just like that. Always.”

“People Are Waiting”

On Jan. 26, Lightfoot introduced an ordinance to the City Council to authorize financing for the long-delayed next phase of homes at Roosevelt Square. The project is slated to include three new apartment buildings and the rehab of the last remaining building at the Jane Addams Homes, which would include space for the National Public Housing Museum.

Even with these 222 units, the CHA and developer Related Midwest will have produced less than half the new homes promised for the ABLA development two decades ago. In a written statement, a spokesperson for the company said it still plans to bring more housing to the ABLA area: “We continue to closely collaborate with the CHA to build additional homes as funding becomes available.”

Lightfoot’s ordinance acknowledged the need for more housing. Its opening section said: “WHEREAS, the City has determined that there exists within the City a serious shortage of decent, safe and sanitary rental housing available for persons of low- and moderate-income and that the continuance of a shortage of affordable rental housing is harmful to the health, prosperity, economic stability and general welfare of the City ...”

The next day, Lightfoot announced that the city and CHA were engaged in talks to lease the ABLA property to the Fire.

The announcement took many housing advocates and community residents by surprise. In one meeting with resident leaders, Alderman Jason Ervin, who represents the area in the City Council, said he shared concerns about the need for building more housing, according to a meeting participant. But he bluntly advised them that the mayor had called him early one morning and made it clear she really wanted the deal to happen, so they might as well use that as leverage to get something out of it.

Over the following months, officials from the Fire, the city and the CHA met repeatedly with the leaders of the official residents’ group. The Fire promised to upgrade a basketball court and make other community investments, while CHA officials said proceeds from a deal would fund a new round of renovations at the aging Brooks Homes and Loomis Courts. The advisory council leaders eventually got behind the plan.

Ervin later said in an interview that he supports the Fire deal but wants more details. “I think the Fire will honor whatever they agree to. My concern is with the CHA,” Ervin said. “The [housing] units still have to get built. We need to hear where these units are going, especially since they’re carving out this land.”

He added, “We think the development team needs a kick in the rear.”

CHA officials say they have not determined how much money the agency would get from a long-term lease and will commission independent analyses to determine the value.

The CHA has received hundreds of millions of dollars in capital grants from the federal government in the last decade, and last year it made plans to undertake new maintenance work at Brooks and Loomis buildings that were rehabbed at the start of the ABLA revitalization. But officials now say the agency needs money from the Fire deal to fund those repairs.

ABLA resident Laura Donaldson at the former Abbott Homes site (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

“Our present and future needs — and the housing needs of low-income families — woefully outpace the proposed federal funding amounts,” the CHA’s statement said. “This private-public partnership helps us deliver quality housing.”

The CHA added: “We’ve held significant public engagement around this project thus far and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, including from CHA resident leadership.”

Public housing authorities are required to get federal approval to sell or lease their land, and on May 17 the CHA board discussed whether to start that process for the ABLA site. It represented the first of several steps the CHA has to take before completing the Fire deal. A city planning commission and the City Council would also need to sign off.

When members of the public were allowed to comment at that board meeting, Laura Donaldson, an ABLA resident and advocate for people with disabilities, made a plea for more housing. Donaldson herself was once homeless, and she noted that thousands of people, including many who are disabled like herself, are on the CHA’s waiting lists.

“I don’t know about this plan for the Fire or any of this, but I do know that people are waiting. It takes forever to get called back or interviewed or anything,” she said. “We’re not asking for the Taj Mahal. We’re asking for housing, which is a human right for everyone.”

The board voted unanimously to seek federal backing for a lease deal.

by Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio, and Ken Armstrong, ProPublica

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

A juvenile detention center in Rutherford County, Tennessee, that for years illegally jailed children will now be overseen by a five-member board rather than the county’s juvenile court judge, a change designed to bring greater accountability to a long-troubled system.

At a meeting earlier this year, the county’s mayor said he thought the shift could bring “more oversight or transparency.” The board members will be appointed by Rutherford County commissioners.

In October, ProPublica published a detailed account, in partnership with Nashville Public Radio, about Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system. The story chronicled how the county had illegally arrested and jailed children for years, all under the watch of longtime juvenile court judge Donna Scott Davenport. Last June the county settled a class-action lawsuit, eventually agreeing to pay more than $5 million to hundreds of people who have been arrested or jailed as children. And Davenport has since announced her retirement.

Within Tennessee, Rutherford County stood out for years in terms of the percentage of kids it locked up in cases referred to juvenile court. In 2014, for example, the county jailed children in 48% of those cases. The statewide average was 5%.

Many children in Rutherford County were placed in solitary confinement under conditions a federal judge called inhumane.

After ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio wrote about Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system, state lawmakers called the system a “nightmare” and “unchecked barbarism.” The state’s governor called for a judicial review. Eleven members of Congress signed a letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the county’s juvenile justice system.

In January, Davenport announced she would not be seeking reelection and would retire at the end of her term this summer. Two candidates are currently running to replace her. Davenport previously declined a request to be interviewed. She did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment for this story.

As director of the detention center since 2001, Lynn Duke has reported to Davenport, who appointed her to the job. (Duke did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She has previously declined to be interviewed.) The new board will oversee Duke as well as all the detention center’s policies, procedures and budget.

County officials said they want applicants with experience in law enforcement, building maintenance and the state’s child welfare system.

However, an investigation by Nashville Public Radio and ProPublica found inadequate systems of oversight starting with the county and going all the way up to the state and its Department of Children’s Services.

Duke appears monthly before county commissioners, who have rarely asked questions about policies. They sometimes liken the jail to a business, with one even joking that it’s like a hotel. At one meeting a commissioner said it would be “cool” if, instead of being a cost center, the jail could be a “profit center.”

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, which licenses juvenile jails, inspected Rutherford County’s jail every year. Not once did it flag an illegal policy under which the jail was incarcerating children.

Before publishing our story last fall, we requested an interview with the department’s longtime director of licensing. But the department refused to make him available.

by David Armstrong and Ryan Gabrielson

Update, June 10, 2022: The growing size of St. Jude’s reserve fund prompted a charity watchdog to downgrade the nonprofit’s rating one letter grade, from B to C. CharityWatch, in a report posted on its website on Friday, explained that it issued the lower grade because St. Jude’s assets now exceed three years’ worth of operating expenses.

Update, June 13, 2022: CharityWatch issued a correction to a report posted on its website Friday, saying that St. Jude's does meet all of the rating organization's benchmarks for governance and transparency. It had previously reported that St. Jude's didn't meet those benchmarks. We have adjusted our Friday update to reflect that change.

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In July 2021, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced to fanfare that it had just finished raising $2 billion in donations, a single-fiscal-year record for the nation’s largest health care charity. “Solving pediatric cancer is a global problem — a multi-trillion, multi-year problem,” Rick Shadyac, chief executive of St. Jude’s fundraising arm, told the Associated Press at the time. “The way we look at it is: If not St. Jude, then who?”

Financial disclosures newly released by St. Jude, however, show $886 million of the hospital’s record $2 billion-plus in revenues last fiscal year went unspent. Those surplus dollars instead flowed to the hospital’s reserve fund, which helped it grow to $7.6 billion by the end of June 2021. That’s enough money to run St. Jude’s 77-bed hospital in Memphis at last year’s levels for the next five years without a single additional donation.

The impressive growth in fundraising raises new concerns about the amount of money that the charity has put aside for its rainy day fund.

Last year, ProPublica reported that St. Jude had accumulated billions of dollars while many families of young patients treated at the hospital struggled financially. Parents told ProPublica that they’d exhausted savings and retirement accounts and borrowed from family and friends, despite St. Jude’s much-publicized pledge to alleviate many of the costs associated with treatment “because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.” St. Jude said they provided generous benefits to families, but cannot cover all financial obligations that a family experiences during a child’s illness. In response to the story, St. Jude significantly increased its benefits for families, including more support for travel and housing.

Some researchers, oncologists, health care advocates and families of patients complain that St. Jude’s fundraising makes it more difficult for other pediatric hospitals to raise money for their operations. St. Jude competes for fundraising dollars directly against other children’s hospitals, some of which have significant numbers of patients in clinical trials and their own research divisions focused on pediatric cancer care. To visualize just how much St. Jude outstrips its competitors: In 2020, U.S. News and World Report’s ranked the nation’s best children’s cancer centers. St. Jude’s, ranked tenth, pulled in more than the combined total of the nine hospitals ranked above it , according to financial records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

“Donors all want to get the biggest bang for their buck,” said Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s time for St. Jude to respect donors’ preferences and stop hoarding. Effectively and sufficiently spending money on the core mission is the only way to deserve donors’ trust and sustain their generosity.”

In a statement, St. Jude said the large reserve was a prudent cushion against swings in the stock market as well as the economic uncertainties created by global crises like the war in Ukraine. It said it expects the yearly cost of operating the hospital and making capital improvements to increase from a total of $2 billion in fiscal 2023 to $2.2 billion by fiscal 2026. At that point, according to the statement, contributions may not keep pace with spending and the hospital may need to tap the reserve fund. The hospital said it expects to spend a total of $12.9 billion over the six-year period beginning with fiscal 2022.

St. Jude said it cannot be fairly compared to any other hospital because its operating model relies disproportionately on public donations.

“Our reserves allow us now, and in the years ahead, to treat patients and continue research projects — no matter what happens to the economy or in the event of a disaster,” the statement said.

St. Jude said it is also expanding its work internationally, including a plan to spend $200 million over five years to help thousands of children in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world receive free chemotherapy drugs. In recent months, the hospital has also helped pediatric cancer patients in Ukraine continue receiving care.

“Having a responsible reserve fund is critical to fueling this comprehensive, global strategic plan,” St. Jude wrote.

The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, which sets standards for charitable spending, advises charities to avoid accumulating funds that could instead be used for current programs. It says a charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the past year’s expenses or the current year’s budget. The alliance' deducts assets like land and buildings from its calculations and combines the expenses of the hospital and its fundraising arm. The alliance calculation puts the reserve fund at 3.05 times higher than the current year budget of the hospital and ALSAC, which the charities provided to the alliance. Though St. Jude itself is slightly above the limit, the alliance said it remains in compliance.

St. Jude’s fundraising arm, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, or ALSAC, spent $626 million in fiscal 2021, about 35% of the organization’s total expenses, the financial disclosures show. That figure includes fundraising and educating the public about childhood cancers. St. Jude spent $1.2 billion on treatment for children with major illnesses, laboratories and clinical trials and hospital administration. St. Jude said its fundraising and marketing expenses were well within industry standards.

The record-breaking $2 billion in contributions to St. Jude represented a 16% increase over the previous year. St. Jude said that it benefited from investment gains in a hot stock market in addition to the increase in contributions in fiscal 2021.

One key driver of the boost in donations was bequests, in which donors name St. Jude as a beneficiary in their wills. Such donations increased 24% from the prior year to $478 million, or almost one in four dollars donated to St. Jude.

The bequest program, while one of the most successful in the country in terms of dollars raised, has also led to disputes with donors’ family members and allegations the hospital is too aggressive in seeking monies from inheritances. St. Jude says that it operates with the highest ethical standards in carrying out donors’ intents.

While St. Jude’s fundraising thrived, the pandemic shutdown devastated many other charities.

St. Baldrick's Foundation is one of the largest funders of childhood cancer research in the country. Its wide-ranging programs pay for clinical trials to test new treatments and provide training for new doctors and researchers entering the field.

The charity primarily raises money through events where people shave their heads to solicit contributions. When COVID-19 triggered quarantines in March 2020, St. Baldrick's had to cancel scores of events and lost millions of dollars in donations, said Kathleen Ruddy, the organization’s chief executive.

In the fiscal year before the pandemic began, St. Baldrick's financial disclosures show it raised more than $36 million. Total donations last fiscal year, ending in June 2021, were about $18 million — a 49% drop. The charity had to close several research grant programs and lay off staff, Ruddy said.

People often ask if St. Baldrick's is part of St. Jude, Ruddy said, but in fact St. Jude applies for, and sometimes receives, research grants from St. Baldrick’s.

St. Jude is one of a number of deserving charities serving kids with cancer, Ruddy said.

“We have funded about $9.3 million worth of research at St. Jude” since the foundation launched in 2004, Ruddy said. “But we've funded over $300 million at other hospitals. So it tells you that no institution has a monopoly on talent and innovation and ideas.”

She said St. Baldrick’s fundraising has begun to recover and the charity plans to restore one of its shuttered research grants next fiscal year.

by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY

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.

Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.

Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.

This had all become a sickeningly familiar routine. Amari had struggled since she was little, racked by a terrible fear that Taylor — who is her great-aunt and has raised her for most of her life — would leave her and not come back. She often woke up screaming from nightmares about someone hurting her family. During the day, she had ferocious tantrums, breaking things, attacking Taylor and threatening to hurt herself.

Taylor searched desperately for help, signing Amari up for therapy and putting her on waitlists for intensive, in-home mental health services that are supposed to be available to New York kids with serious psychiatric conditions. But the programs were full, and it took months to get in.

During Amari’s worst episodes, Taylor had little choice but to call 911 — which Taylor, who is Black, said made her nauseous with fear. She and Amari live just a few miles from the block where Daniel Prude, a Black man with a history of paranoia and erratic behavior, was hooded and pinned to the ground by police until he stopped breathing, in a 2020 incident that began after his brother called 911 for help. Prude died days later at the hospital. In 2021, a video went viral that showed Rochester police officers handcuffing a 9-year-old Black girl and pepper-spraying her in the face while she sat, sobbing, in the back of a squad car. Every time police entered her home, Taylor was terrified that Amari would end up hurt or dead.

“We know that Black children with mental illness are criminalized,” Taylor said. “When you have men with guns coming into your house to handle your sick child, that’s frightening.”

Several months earlier, in 2019, Taylor had filled out paperwork to apply for a place where she thought Amari would be safe: a residential treatment facility for kids with very serious mental health conditions. But the application was still pending in March 2020, and Taylor had no idea how long it might be before Amari got a spot.

Since the early 1980s, New York’s residential treatment facilities have served as an option of last resort for very sick children and adolescents, after outpatient and community-based services have failed. Like psychiatric hospitals, they provide round-the-clock medical and mental health care, but they are designed for much longer stays. Kids typically end up in them after cycling through emergency rooms and hospital beds without getting better. Often, they’ve had multiple encounters with police and their families see residential treatment as a last-ditch chance to get help before they end up in a juvenile lockup — or worse.

In the past 10 years, however, more than half of New York’s residential treatment facility beds for kids have shut down, with the total bed count plummeting from 554 in 2012 to just 274 this year. Sick kids often wait months to get into the remaining beds, despite a 2005 federal court settlement in which the state agreed to cut waitlists and make admissions faster.

State officials, who license and regulate residential treatment facilities, have done little to fix the problems, an investigation by ProPublica and THE CITY found. Instead, the officials made bed shortages worse, greenlighting facility closures even as the number of kids in psychiatric crisis soared. In recent years, the state also made the admissions system even more complex, keeping sick kids in limbo while they wait for care.

“Years ago, when you needed to move a kid up” to a residential treatment facility, “it just got done,” said James Rapczyk, who directed mental health programs for kids on Long Island for more than a decade. In the last several years, “the system just froze up.”

The residential treatment facility closures are part of a larger trend. New York has repeatedly promised to fix a mental health care system that officials have acknowledged to be broken, but in fact the state has made it even harder for the sickest kids to find treatment. As we reported in March, New York has shut down nearly a third of its state-run psychiatric hospital beds for children and adolescents since 2014, under a “Transformation Plan” rolled out by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. At the same time, the state promised to massively expand home-based mental health services designed to prevent kids from getting so sick that they needed a hospital or residential program at all. In reality, those services reach a tiny fraction of the kids who are legally entitled to them.

That’s why, when the hospital called to say that Amari was ready for discharge, Taylor made one of the most difficult decisions of her life: She refused to pick Amari up. Taylor knew that she would be reported to child protective services and investigated for abandoning Amari — and that there was a chance she could lose custody of her altogether. But she was banking on the hope that, if Amari had nowhere else to go, state officials would fast-track her into residential care.

“The last thing I wanted to do was send my little girl away from home,” Taylor said. “But I couldn’t keep her safe.”

Up through the 1930s, children who were violent or psychotic — or even suicidal — were likely to either spend their lives in state-run asylums or be labeled as delinquents and sent to reform schools on the theory that they could be punished into good behavior.

Residential treatment programs appeared in the 1940s, founded on the premise that kids with mental health and behavioral problems were sick, rather than criminal, and needed specialized treatment. Over the next several decades, the model evolved to include a sprawling assortment of group homes, boot camps and therapeutic boarding schools — some with horrific histories of abusing and neglecting children. As of 2020, just under 19,000 kids were living in close to 600 residential treatment centers in the United States, according to federal data.

A few of those programs are run directly by states, but the vast majority are operated by independent providers that survive on a mix of public funds, private insurance reimbursements and patients with deep pockets. Often, insurance covers a stay of a month or two, and then families may be on the hook for anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 for a year of treatment.

New York created its residential treatment facility program in the early 1980s as an option for young people who tend to get kicked out of other settings. In a typical year, more than 80% of kids in the facilities are physically aggressive; about 60% have histories of running away. When young people are admitted, the state nearly always enrolls them in Medicaid, the public insurance program, which reimburses providers $500 to $725 for each day of stay. Kids live in dorms, attend full-day schools and do art and recreational therapy, in addition to traditional counseling.

After a surge in the use of residential treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, however, advocates and the federal government have pushed to reduce the number of kids in institutions. This is partly because of new research: Studies show that young people who receive intensive mental health services at home have better outcomes — at far lower costs — than those who are removed from their families and communities. It’s also because kids in institutions are especially vulnerable to abuse. New York’s residential treatment facility providers have been sued at least five times in the past 10 years by kids who say they were sexually or physically abused by staff or other patients. (Four of the cases are still open; one was closed with no finding on the facts.)

A decade ago, the Cuomo administration announced a plan to cut psychiatric hospital beds. Residential treatment facilities warned state officials that they might have to close beds down, too. Reimbursement rates hadn’t gone up in years, and providers couldn’t pay enough to attract employees, according to a 2013 report commissioned by a coalition of mental health care agencies.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo, told THE CITY and ProPublica that facility closures were part of “a national movement away from one-size-fits-all institutionalization and redirecting resources toward out-patient treatment.”

This year, thanks to a budget surplus and an infusion of federal money, the state legislature approved increases to funding for residential treatment facilities — up to about $25 million, in addition to nearly $9 million for COVID-19 relief and employee recruitment. The state also earmarked funds to open 76 new beds where kids can stay short-term during emergencies, according to the Office of Mental Health. But much of that new money has yet to reach providers, some of whom have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the programs in recent years.

Keeping staff in place is a persistent challenge. Residential treatment facilities rely on workers who earn as little as $15 per hour — not enough to convince most people to work with kids who are confrontational and sometimes violent, said Cindy Lee, the CEO of OLV Human Services, which runs a residential treatment facility in Lackawanna, New York. “Our wages are not competitive with Walmart, Tim Hortons, Burger King. You can go work an eight-hour shift at Target for more money, no mandated overtime and not be challenged by children with trauma.”

The 2013 report’s alarm bell went unheeded. By 2020, three facilities had shut down, while others cut back on beds. Then, in 2021, the system went into freefall when The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services — one of the state’s largest providers of mental health care for kids, and one of just a few agencies to run residential programs in or near New York City — got out of the residential treatment facility business altogether, closing three sites in the Bronx and Westchester County.

In addition to budget deficits, the facilities had faced several “programmatic concerns,” including excessive use of restraints, kids going AWOL and allegations of serious abuse, according to The Jewish Board’s closure application. But the model had also become obsolete, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, the agency’s CEO, told ProPublica and THE CITY. The Jewish Board is expanding other programs that keep kids close to their families and get them home faster, Brenner said.

By law, proposed residential treatment facility closures must be reviewed by a state oversight board called the Behavioral Health Services Advisory Council, which hears petitions and makes recommendations to New York’s mental health commissioner. In September 2021, when The Jewish Board presented the council with its closure plan, however, all of the residents had already been discharged. At the Bronx site, staff had vacated the premises and the parking lot was stacked with moving boxes.

During the council meeting, members discussed their concerns about the disappearance of residential treatment facility beds. Michael Orth, the commissioner of the Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, said that referrals had increased in the region, and that facility closures left “significant gaps” in care.

In the end, however, the council unanimously voted yes on The Jewish Board’s closure proposal. “Telling folks to stay open when it’s fiscally unfeasible makes no sense,” another council member said.

In response to questions about the timing of the closure application, a Jewish Board spokesperson wrote that the agency had worked with the Office of Mental Health, “diligently obtaining the required approvals at every stage of the process of closing down our three RTF programs.”

The Office of Mental Health did not address the timing of the closure application submission, but said that all of the children from the Jewish Board facilities were appropriately discharged.

Amari was 11 months old when she came to live with Taylor. Her biological mother — Taylor’s niece — was 18 and “so smart and capable,” Taylor said, but she was also alone and struggling with a depression that seemed to suffocate her after Amari was born. She had dropped out of high school and was bouncing from house to house when her sisters — Amari’s aunts — asked Taylor to take the baby in.

Taylor’s own son was grown. The idea of raising another child seemed unimaginable, but she didn’t want to see Amari end up in foster care. On Memorial Day weekend in 2009, she met her nieces, with Amari, in Erie, New York. “They gave me a $100 bill, a child carrier and a gym bag and said, ‘Here she is.’ I cried like a baby,” Taylor said.

At first, Amari saw her mom by video every night, but the calls faded away. She started calling Taylor “mommy.”

From the beginning, she had a terrible fear of separation. She sobbed inconsolably when Taylor left her at day care in the mornings, and she threw toys and hit other kids. As she got older, she seemed to have trouble focusing and following simple instructions. Her pediatrician prescribed her medication for ADHD when she was 4.

Later, social workers would make lists of Amari’s strengths. She loves her family and has a great sense of humor. Even at her most recalcitrant, she likes showing off her gymnastics moves. And she has very big ambitions: When she grows up, she plans to be a rapper, a nurse and an actor, she said in one clinical interview. But she was also lonely. At school, she sat by herself most of the time. At home, her tantrums spun wildly out of control. She’d exhaust herself, sobbing, “I want my mom. Why doesn’t she want me?”

Taylor, left, has raised Amari for most of the girl’s life. Since she was little, Amari has struggled with a fear that Taylor would leave her and not come back. (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

When Amari was 9, Taylor took her to a therapist, who helped to get her approved for in-home mental health services, including a crisis-response team that would come during emergencies and a specialist who would work with her on coping and social skills. But the waitlist was more than six months long, and by the time Amari finally got into the program, everything had fallen apart.

It was the spring of 2019, and Amari was 10 years old. Her mother came for a visit, but when she left, she didn’t answer or return Amari’s phone calls. The family’s pastor, whom Amari had known since she was a baby, died suddenly. And then Taylor went on a business trip, leaving Amari with a cousin. When Taylor came back, Amari told her that the cousin’s boyfriend had molested her.

Over the next 11 months, “our lives were chaos,” Taylor said. Amari had always been a bad sleeper; now she refused to get up in the mornings. When Taylor dragged her out of bed, she’d throw things, punch the walls, grab onto Taylor’s neck and refuse to let go. Sometimes, she told clinicians later, a “bad emoji” would tell her to do things like run out of the house, into the street. More than once, she jumped out of Taylor’s car and into traffic.

After Daniel Prude’s death, the City of Rochester — along with many other jurisdictions, including New York City — promised to transform how emergency services responded to people experiencing mental health crises. Carlet Cleare, a spokesperson for the City of Rochester, told THE CITY and ProPublica that police officers participate in numerous mental health courses and training activities, and that all uses of force are reviewed by supervisors. In the coming year, the city will add staff to its crisis intervention programs, Cleare wrote in a statement.

Those efforts, however, remain small and limited. The reality for most families is that, if they can’t physically contain a child who is threatening to hurt themselves or someone else, there is no option except to call 911 and wait for police.

What happens next depends on who shows up at the door, Taylor said. Once, she and Amari got lucky. An officer who happened to have an autistic child saw Amari rushing at Taylor. Instead of putting his hands on her, he got between the two of them and talked Amari down.

Other police officers got physical far too fast, Taylor said. “They would handcuff her, manhandle her. I would be crying.”

By 2020, Taylor had left her job in order to take care of Amari. She started organizing support groups and advocating for families of color with kids in the mental health system, who are often reluctant to seek help because they are afraid that they’ll be reported to child protective services or that their kids will be treated like criminals, she said.

After Prude’s death, “Black and brown parents were terrified,” Taylor said. “Nobody with a Black child with a mental health condition was calling the police.”

Taylor, too, decided that no matter what happened with Amari, she would handle it on her own. But then, just two months after the video of Prude came out, Amari called 911 herself, intending to report Taylor for refusing to let her out of the house. When police arrived, Taylor could feel her heart pounding, she said. She tried to force the image of Prude, face down on the sidewalk and suffocating, out of her mind.

“I went to the door as articulate as I can be, because I can’t have them coming in my house harming my child,” Taylor said. “I said, ‘My child is highly dysregulated. This is not a criminal justice issue; this is mental health. I need you to take it easy when you come in my house.’”

At first, the officers tried to talk to Amari, but when she ran toward Taylor, they grabbed her and forced her into handcuffs, Taylor said. “I’m frantic, begging them to take it easy, telling her to calm down, saying, ‘Don’t touch her like that.’ They take her outside — rough, like a criminal. I’m crying, ‘Stop, stop!’”

Amari struggled, refusing to get in the police car, Taylor said. “I’m watching them physically wrestle each other. It was like flashbacks. What’s going to happen when they get her in the car?”

Eventually, an ambulance arrived, and Amari climbed into it, unhurt. But Taylor thinks a lot about what it must have been like for Amari — how much it must have scared her, and what it taught her about herself — to be physically overpowered, again and again, by adults with guns, nearly all of them men, most of them white.

It’s damage that can’t be undone, Taylor said. “If I’m traumatized as a parent when they handcuff her and take her out like a criminal, can you imagine how she feels? This child who from the age of 10 has had multiple restraints and arrests? I can’t even imagine what that’s like for her.”

New York’s application system for residential treatment facilities has been a subject of contention for a long time. In 1999, the Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit against New York state’s Department of Health and its Office of Mental Health on behalf of kids who were sitting on waitlists for residential care. Many kids waited more than five months for a bed, the lawsuit alleged; some waited over a year. During that time, they were either locked in restrictive hospital units or left unsafe at home. Some ended up in juvenile or adult jails.

The state settled with plaintiffs in 2005, with a requirement that the state must place kids in residential treatment facilities within 90 days of certifying them as eligible. A judge encouraged officials to solve the problem by opening more beds. Instead, providers and advocates say, the state created a complex, multilayered application system that slows down applications and keeps kids off the waitlist.

“If you deem a kid eligible, you have some responsibility for providing services,” said Jim McGuirk, who recently stepped down as the executive director of Astor Services, which operates a residential treatment facility in Rhinebeck, New York. The state evades that responsibility by doing “whatever you can to reduce the waiting list by not approving people. By making it harder,” he said.

Two years ago on Long Island — in the far corner of New York state from Rochester — a 16-year-old named M (his first initial) spent more than a year in the limbo of the application process. As a little boy, M had watched his dad abuse his mom for years, according to treatment records. After his parents split up, M got violent with his mom, hitting her and threatening to kill her when she didn’t give him what he wanted. It got so bad that his mom would lock herself in the bathroom to hide.

When M was 12, the Office of Mental Health placed him in a community residence — a group home that’s less restrictive and has fewer services than a residential treatment facility. As M got older, however, his behaviors only got worse. He attacked workers and bullied kids who were smaller than him. M “will conduct himself in a charming manner to get what he wants,” according to notes from mental health professionals who treated him, but he “displays no remorse” and “has no empathy.”

In June 2020, M’s treatment team submitted an application for a residential treatment facility. He urgently needed intensive treatment — in a more controlled environment — before he became an adult, his providers said. The first step was to bring his case to a regional outpost of the Office of Mental Health, where a local committee would decide whether to forward it to a second committee, which can authorize kids to be placed in residential treatment facilities.

The rationale for the multiple layers of screening is that these facilities are such restrictive environments that, under federal law, it’s the state’s responsibility to try everything else first. In practice, providers say, the result is constant deferral and delay. If a committee doesn’t make it through all of its pending applications, “Well, wait until next month,” said Christina Gullo, the president of Villa of Hope, a nonprofit mental health care agency in Rochester that closed its residential treatment facility this year because it was running at an annual deficit of over $500,000.

Rather than referring M’s application to the authorization committee, the local committee said that he should try to find a spot at a residential school, paid for by the state Education Department. The schools, however, rejected M because he was too aggressive and his mental health needs were too great. M’s team came back to the Office of Mental Health in October 2020. This time, the local committee declined to advance the application because it had questions about M’s physical health: Was it possible that his neurological issues or sleep apnea caused the behavior problems? Had the family tried getting services through the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities? (The answer was yes — it had turned M down too.)

“My jaw just dropped at that one,” said a family advocate who worked with M’s mom through the process. “It’s a sin that they’re not helping this boy. He’s just falling through the cracks, and he has been for years.”

Finally, on the third submission, the local committee agreed to pass M’s application to the authorization committee, which approved M for placement and sent his information to individual providers. By that time, however, three residential treatment facilities in the region — run by The Jewish Board — were getting ready to close. The shutdowns hadn’t yet been made public, but the facilities were discharging the kids they had, not taking new ones. One by one, the facilities turned M down.

State data shows that delays and denials are common. While the number of applications for spots in residential treatment facilities has gone up since 2018, the share of applications that the committees approved has dropped, from close to 70% in 2018 to just over 50% in the first half of 2021. The percentage that were denied nearly doubled, from 16% to 29%. Close to 20% of committee reviews resulted in a deferral.

And even when kids are authorized for admission, many don’t end up entering residential treatment facilities. In 2020, for example, 444 young people were approved by the authorization committees, but only 364 were actually admitted.

Some of those kids may have gotten the treatment they needed in the community, according to James Plastiras, a spokesperson for the Office of Mental Health. In that case, “the family may decline to proceed with an RTF admission, or the child may no longer meet RTF eligibility criteria,” Plastiras wrote in a statement.

No one would disagree that it’s best for kids to live at home whenever possible, said Rapczyk, who directed the Long Island community residence where M lived. But it doesn’t make sense to close beds when young people still can’t find outpatient care, Rapczyk said. “It was so crazy to me that they were closing all of these places without any contingency plan, in a pandemic, without any hospital beds available and kids’ mental health skyrocketing,” he said. “It was just crazy to me that this was going on.”

For M, time ran out. He aged out of the group home and moved into an adult housing program, which — unlike in the kids’ system — can kick him out if his behavior is too disruptive.

The next stop would be a homeless shelter or jail, M’s mom said. “He never got the help he needed, so what do you expect? The system says, ‘Oh, we’re here to help you,’ but it’s such bullshit. They just give you the runaround.

“My fear is that it’s gonna be a complete train wreck and my son will have a truly horrible life,” she continued. “I think his evils will take him over.”

What Taylor did in the spring of 2020 — refusing to pick Amari up from the hospital — is not so unusual, said Dr. Michael Scharf, chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, which encompasses Strong Memorial Hospital.

Amari first went to Strong Memorial in April 2019. She’d woken up in the middle of the night, shaking uncontrollably. Taylor took her to the emergency room, where a security guard scanned her with a wand for potential weapons and escorted her to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program. A heavy steel door locked shut behind them. Staff sat behind thick glass.

Once kids are inside, they wait — sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. The setup delivers the message that kids with mental health problems are bad rather than sick, Taylor said. “Children with medical conditions — they treat them completely different than children with psychiatric disorders. Our families are blamed; our children are blamed.”

Scharf agrees that the emergency room is not a good place for kids in crisis. But like the rest of New York, Rochester faces a crisis-level shortage of outpatient mental health care. The hospital’s outpatient clinic — the largest in the region — gets calls from about 100 families a week looking for services, and it typically has at least 125 kids on a waiting list, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Without access to outpatient care, the sickest kids often cycle in and out of hospital beds, where providers focus on treating their most acute symptoms, not on addressing long-term behavioral problems.

The cycle is exhausting and scary for kids and their families, Scharf said. Often, hospital staff get involved in the search for residential treatment, but there are never enough beds available. “It’s almost silly to be in some of these meetings” with the Office of Mental Health, Scharf said. “They will say, ‘This child is on our highest-needs, crisis list.’ The parent thinks, ‘OK, that means something is going to happen.’ But there’s 70 people on that list. That list doesn’t necessarily mean a bed is coming.”

A stack of Taylor’s files concerning Amari (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

In a way, Amari was fortunate. In April 2020, less than a month after Taylor refused to pick her up from the hospital, the Office of Mental Health worked with a social service agency called Hillside Family of Agencies to get her into a residential treatment facility in Rochester.

For Taylor, it was an excruciating victory. She believed that if the mental health system had done its job, Amari would never have had to leave home. But she also blamed herself. Amari’s worst fear was being abandoned, and now Taylor was dropping her off and driving away.

She remembers sobbing all the way home. At one point, she pulled the car over to throw up. “The guilt and shame runs so deep,” she said. “I was sick in bed for two days.”

At the facility, Amari cried for Taylor and begged to go home. Many of her behaviors got worse. Counselors wrote that she frequently tried to run away, was aggressive with her peers and made homicidal threats. She would yell and swear, pounding on the walls and flipping tables. She told an evaluator that she often wanted to hurt herself. After a few weeks, she was placed on a “prevent from leave” status, meaning that staff should physically restrain her if she tried to leave a building without permission. Even so, there was a night when she ran out of the facility and was left outside, unsupervised, with a 17-year-old boy, until morning.

To Taylor, it seemed like she was constantly getting calls from staff saying that Amari had been restrained. She thought about bringing Amari home, but then what? Ending up in a juvenile justice facility would surely have been worse, she thought.

Maria Cristalli, Hillside’s CEO, told THE CITY and ProPublica that staff rely on nonphysical interventions whenever possible, using restraints only as a last resort. “Hillside is committed to maintaining therapeutic environments that are free of violence and coercion,” Cristalli wrote. “We do not tolerate unnecessary, inappropriate, or excessive physical intervention.”

In November 2020, Amari was in such constant crisis that the residential treatment facility staff applied to get her into a state-run psychiatric hospital for acute care. The hospital was full, so Amari waited more than a month to get in. When she came back to Hillside, the facility told Taylor that Amari needed an even higher level of supervision. They wanted to transfer her to their Intensive Treatment Unit — a residential treatment facility that was more restrictive, with a lower staff-to-resident ratio.

At first Taylor said no. She spent weeks trying to secure in-home mental health services, but no one could promise her anything other than what Amari had been getting before. Eventually, she gave up and agreed to the higher-level facility. Beds were full there, too. It took six months before a spot opened up for Amari.

Last month marked two years since Amari left home. Taylor hopes she’ll come back in the fall, in time to start a new school year. She’s given up the idea that Amari will get the services she needs at home — or that anyone, really, will be there to help her.

“At this point, I’m just trying to keep her alive,” Taylor said, her voice breaking. “I have a very sick child. She wants to come home. How do I keep her alive?”

Taylor is hopeful that Amari will be able to return home for school in the fall. (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Correction

June 8, 2022: The caption for the first picture in this story originally misstated Amari’s age. She is now 14 years old, not 11, which was her age at the time of her 2020 hospitalization.

by Sarah Blustain

This column was originally published in Not Shutting Up, a newsletter about the issues facing journalism and democracy. Sign up for it here.

Most of the time, my colleague Irena Hwang works with numbers. An electrical engineer by training, she wrangles impossible data sets into intelligible sentences that word-bound people like me can understand. What she does seems like a kind of intellectual alchemy, drawing solid and valuable facts out of barely visible particles of knowledge.

But this year, as Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica worked to document the extent to which the salmon hatcheries of the Pacific Northwest were failing to sustain fish at healthy levels, another of Irena’s talents emerged. One she had been keeping secret.

Since November, we — by which I mean, she — had been trying to count fish: specifically the large number of salmon released by government-funded hatcheries into the Columbia River to swim down to the Pacific and the much smaller number that completed the hard journey back upstream. Her co-reporter, OPB’s Tony Schick, was finding through interviews that nowhere near enough salmon were surviving. Despite more than a century of promises from the U.S., native tribes were losing access to traditional fishing, and with it their way of life. Counting fish would help us prove that.

The publicly available data and reports from experts measured the flow of fish in myriad ways, and Irena’s analysis goals seemed to shape-shift with every conversation. Irena read hundreds of pages of reports, conducted many hours of interviews with fish scientists and encountered a number of dry riverbeds — data-wise — along the way.

Little did I know, however, that Irena was working on more than the data. In mid-April, at one of our weekly project meetings, she presented a draft of the graphics for the story, including a few icons of fish pulled from the internet, and asked us which style we liked best. I hadn’t really focused on them, but I saw they were very different. One, a digital illustration with hard lines and uniform colors, was almost a caricature. Another looked hand-drawn, with subtle variations in color. We all agreed the more detailed and colorful version was best. In hindsight, Irena was coming very close to tipping her hand, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

Irena, however, was thinking. “I did a lot of art when I was a kid,” she told me later, but “when it came time to go to college, I ended up doing highly technical work, and art just fell by the wayside.” She said she occasionally thought about art but felt paralyzed. “I didn’t feel creative enough to be a, quote, true artist.” As she worked her way through an undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree in electrical engineering, Irena said, she lost the motivation to sketch more than a handful of times each year or to even doodle in the margins of a notebook. She stopped visiting art museums.

Then the fish project rolled around. There was a blank spot where illustrations might go. And she thought that maybe she had been avoiding art because “it was this big open-ended thing”; that maybe it would be easier with some structure. A straightforward assignment — just four anatomically accurate fish! — with a deadline seemed like just the type of contained project that Irena had been looking for. She wrote to one of ProPublica’s visuals editors, Andrea Wise, and shared two older pieces she’d done. Immediately, Andrea said she would love to art direct as Irena created illustrations for the story.

A watercolor cat portrait Irena Hwang painted for a friend in 2017. This was one of the pieces she shared with ProPublica’s visuals team when she asked about taking on fish illustrations for an article. She says she’s learned a lot more about fish anatomy since designing the satirical coat-of-arms in the background. (Courtesy of Irena Hwang)

Seen one way, painting and data work are very different. As Irena said, “Coding uses the part of my brain that’s good at planning and breaking complex tasks down into little components. But when I’m painting, I let the other half of my brain take over, the part that seems a little mysterious, squishy and does things because they just feel — and look — right.”

But while that distinction is very real, it’s not the whole picture. In talking with Irena about the four beautiful watercolors she created for this project, I also recognized that she brought to her art the same intensity she brings to her data work every day. She briefly considered creating stylized fish using Adobe Illustrator — it would have been easier — but settled on painting fish that were as accurate as they were beautiful. And painting visually accurate fish for ProPublica meant research, and a lot of it.

Irena tried a stylized digital approach to illustrating the salmon before deciding on watercolors instead. (Irena Hwang/ProPublica)

As she tried to identify the right source photographs on which to base her work, the variables were almost as endless as with the data she had been analyzing. For one thing, “there’s a lot of sexual dimorphism in fish”; that is, the males and females of a species can look very different. There are also geographic differences: a Chinook in Alaska may mature to a completely different color from a Chinook in Oregon.

On top of that, each fish looks different at different points on its journey, sometimes undergoing dramatic changes as it swims upstream to spawn. Most salmon species are silver in the ocean but erupt in browns, greens and bright reds as they make the freshwater journey to spawning grounds. Chinook, coho and sockeye males can develop a pronounced, hooked upper jaw. Male sockeye grow a prominent hump. And, Irena pointed out to me, fish actually look different in water than they do in hand, held high for the trophy shot. She had built files and folders of fish research. But if she could only represent one image of a coho salmon, which coho salmon would it be?

“There was a lot of really fun nerdery going on,” she admitted. “Among my nightmares was that someone would write in and say this isn’t what a salmon looks like.”

Ultimately, Irena had to make some key decisions she could stand by: She focused on fish as they were returning to spawn, deciding that those brightly colored ones would be more iconically recognizable than their silvery ocean selves. She focused on underwater fish to capture their brilliant colors in their native state. And, finding that many available pictures were of the more brightly colored male fish, she decided, “Yeah, we’re going to feature female fish!”

Certainly it was an artist who created those watercolors for publication. Even Irena seemed to experience it that way. “What I love about watercolor is that it is very transparent. You’re working in layers so every time you add a layer, it’s like you are revealing something that was hidden in the paper all along, waiting for you to bring it out.”

Irena’s images of what she calls “my setup.” The fish were painted in her apartment on 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper, which she called a “manageable size.” (Courtesy of Irena Hwang)

But the engineer in her was not far away. Those images needed fact-checking. Irena needed to know that, even beyond her precise choices, her images had turned out precisely right.

Some of the flaws were obvious: She had forgotten to give the Chinook “something that looks like a nose on a salmon.” We struggled for the technical word. She Googled it. “Nostrils! I had to give it nostrils!”

Some of the flaws were in the eye of the beholder: She sent three of the images over to Tony, her co-reporter, who shared them with his fish-savvy colleagues at OPB. One suggested the jaw of the Chinook should be more hooked. “I’m doing the females,” Irena fired back, putting that issue to rest.

The colors were perhaps the biggest trouble of all. The source image Irena had worked off of for the Chinook was taken in a sunny area of a river, resulting in a fish that was a bit more golden in tone than most anglers might recognize. Photoshop helped bring it into a more recognizable olive-brown tone.

And then there were the total misfires. Irena mentioned that there had been an earlier steelhead painting, entirely different from the one we published. She had struggled with it because mature steelheads have intense colors, but the source image she was working off of was full of colors that Irena worried would combine into a muddy mess. In an attempt to avoid a drab fish, she chose paint colors that emphasized the highlights — and ended up with one that was too bright.

I wanted to see it. So she sent me this message over Slack: “was this even a steelhead? It’s unclear in hindsight.”

She included a little grimacing emoji and then the photo of her earlier painting.

The steelhead painting OPB and ProPublica published is on the left; the abandoned one is on the right. (Irena Hwang/ProPublica)

Steelhead or not, I honestly would not have known. As I wrote back to Irena: “It’s very beautiful. Just a different cast of light, in my opinion...”

I asked Irena about painting as a journalist. “It was definitely fun. It was also stressful because I had never painted on deadline,” she said. On the other hand, it was clear there was something to her concept of doing art within structures: Before this, “I walked around thinking I was too much of an engineer to be an artist, and too much of an artist to be an engineer,” she reflected. The fish project seemed to bring those two different sides of her brain closer together. “That’s why I love journalism so much.”

by Jeremy Kohler

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In the final days of Missouri’s legislative session in May 2019, lawmakers turned their focus to a bill that would outlaw abortion in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The abortion ban passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Mike Parson remains in limbo, at least for now. A leaked draft opinion suggests the high court is preparing to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling, which would trigger bans in Missouri and about a dozen other states.

But another piece of the same Missouri bill that has garnered far less attention has already taken effect. It has funneled millions of tax dollars to fight abortion, and it may well move tens of millions of dollars more to that battle — a drain on state revenues that legislative oversight officials failed to forecast.

That provision beefed up tax credits for Missouri taxpayers who donate money to pregnancy resource centers, or crisis pregnancy centers. Abortion foes praise the nonprofit centers for supporting women and presenting alternatives to ending pregnancies, but supporters of abortion say the facilities mislead women by appearing to offer clinical services and unbiased advice.

An analysis by ProPublica found the measure is proving costly for the state. Until an expansion took effect last year, Missouri residents who donated to the centers were able to claim a credit of 50% for their donations, meaning for every $1,000 in donations, a taxpayer’s bill dropped by $500. The law increased the credit to 70% in 2021, further shifting the cost of those contributions to the state.

Because the centers are nonprofit, donors can deduct the remaining $300 of a $1,000 donation from their federal income taxes. (A deduction is worth less than a credit because it only reduces taxable income. A credit reduces dollar-for-dollar what a person owes in taxes.) Ultimately, a donor can end up recouping close to 80% of their gift in credits and deductions.

Lawmakers also removed the limit to how many pregnancy resource tax credits the state could issue in a given year starting in July 2021. And they removed the program’s previous end date of 2024; the tax credit program will continue unless the law is changed.

The cost analysis of the bill, authored by nonpartisan legislative oversight directors, concluded the changes would carry a nominal cost to taxpayers. Increasing the tax credit to 70% from 50% meant the same donations that resulted in $3.5 million in tax credits a year — the maximum for the program before the increase took effect — would now result in $4.9 million, a jump of $1.4 million a year. But that was only if donations did not increase.

The authors acknowledged that without a cap, the impact could be greater if the increased tax credit led to more giving. And that’s exactly what happened. In the quarter ending March 31, the state authorized more than $7 million in pregnancy resource tax credits, more than three times higher than in any previous quarter.

Pregnancy Resource Tax Credits See a Huge Jump in 2022 (Source: Missouri Department of Revenue)

Bigger tax incentives for giving to the crisis pregnancy centers brought out more donors than in previous years.

“We definitely did see an increase in big donations,” said Deb Beussink, assistant director of Birthright of Cape Girardeau, one of the 76 pregnancy resource centers across the state authorized to participate in the program.

“And these were from donors who had already been donating well to us,” she added. “But they wanted to take advantage of that tax credit, so they enlarged their donation.”

Until recently, Missouri has been the only state to issue tax credits for donations to pregnancy resource centers. In April, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law a program offering a maximum of $3.5 million per year in tax credits. Ohio considered a similar measure, but it did not advance.

Missouri’s tax credits for pregnancy resource centers come on top of the record $8 million in funding for the centers that lawmakers allocated for the fiscal year starting July 1. Those funds go to centers for the social services they provide. Missouri has long been one of the nation’s leading suppliers of tax dollars for pregnancy resource centers. An Associated Press analysis this year estimated the state had issued more than $44 million to centers since 2010, third most of any state behind Texas and Pennsylvania.

The tax credit’s impact on state revenues, and the potential for that impact to deepen, has one Missouri budget analyst concerned.

“It does make me nervous,” said Amy Blouin, the president and CEO of the Missouri Budget Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that studies the state’s spending and public policy decisions.

Legislators and advocates on both sides of the abortion debate said they were surprised by the increase in the tax credits that were issued. Even the bill’s sponsor in the state Senate said he was unaware of the $7 million in tax credits for one quarter. “I would have expected that for an annual number,” said Sen. Andrew Koenig, a Republican from St. Louis’ western suburbs.

Taxpayers can only redeem tax credits up to the amount of their tax bill, but what’s left over can be used the next year. Businesses also can take advantage. The maximum tax credit per taxpayer per year is $50,000.

The recipients of Missouri’s pregnancy resource tax credits are confidential — unlike other types of state tax credits that are reported on the Missouri Accountability Portal.

Kyle Rieman, who was the oversight director and lead author of the cost analysis of the tax credit expansion, said lawmakers gave his staff only an hour to analyze the financial impact before they voted. And he said state agencies provided him with little data to help make an estimate of more than the program’s minimum cost.

“It pretty much didn’t matter what the cost was,” he said in a text, “they were going to pass the bill.”

But Koenig said he provided Rieman’s office with the tax credit proposal weeks before the vote and asked for — and received — a confidential financial analysis. He said that if the research had pointed to major costs ahead, “it could give pause.”

Rieman said such requests are common but “not official or required, so they are not a priority.”

The analysis sent to legislators before the vote said Rieman’s staff wanted more information to update their analysis. But Parson signed the measure before Rieman could publish a more complete review.

The final analysis, published nearly a month after the governor’s signature, still did not fully explore the potential cost. It said the Department of Social Services, which issues the tax credit, indicated there would be “no fiscal impact” on the agency. Asked how there could be none, a Social Services spokesperson told ProPublica that the department meant the program did not affect its own budget and the “impact is on the state’s general revenue.”

Rieman said the Office of Administration, which coordinates management of the state, did not provide information about how much the program’s cost could exceed the minimum estimate or consider the costs of removing the program’s end date. The office did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Rieman said the experience was “a clear example of a policy that was passed by the General Assembly and Governor without any real public process or consideration of what the fiscal impact would be to the state.”

A spokesperson for Parson did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Koenig said he did not consider the amount of revenue diverted for the pregnancy resource tax credit to be significant next to the state’s $48 billion budget.

“If we’re going to put this ban on abortions in place, I wanted to make sure we support women who are going to be having these babies, and the way to do that was increasing the pregnancy resource tax credit,” Koenig said.

Mallory Schwarz, the executive director of Pro-Choice Missouri, said abortion foes knew exactly what they were doing when they expanded the tax credit.

“Crisis pregnancy centers or pregnancy resource centers are unregulated, unlicensed fronts designed to look like legitimate medical clinics, run by people who are anti-abortion, and intentionally mislead and coerce pregnant people to try to scare them out of having abortions or delay their care to the point where they can no longer have an abortion,” she said. “But at the same time, we’re lining the pockets of these pregnancy centers and incentivizing (people) to give against their own self-interest and their own well-being.”

Jill Schupp, a Democratic senator from St. Louis County who voted against the bill, said she was “shocked” by the amount of tax credits being issued: “These numbers are huge.” While the budget is flush with federal stimulus, she said, the cost “might not look like it’s hurting other programs. But that will change.”

And even a Republican who voted for the bill said the new numbers are concerning. “I wasn’t aware it was that much money. You just brought it to my attention,” said Rep. John Wiemann, a St. Charles County Republican. “If it’s outside what the fiscal note said, someone needs to explain why it’s that high.”

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by Perla Trevizo and Jeremy Schwartz

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Federal prosecutors reached a settlement agreement this week with the construction company that built a troubled private border fence along the Rio Grande in South Texas.

The settlement caps off two and a half years of legal wrangling after the federal government sued Fisher Industries and its subsidiaries, alleging that the 18-foot-tall and 3-mile-long fence led to erosion so significant that it threatened to shift the border and could cause the structure to collapse into the river, impacting a major dam.

Under the agreement, the company must conduct quarterly inspections, maintain an existing gate that allows for the release of floodwaters and keep a $3 million bond, a type of insurance, for 15 years, or until the property is transferred to the government, to cover any expenses in case the structure fails.

Experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that the settlement provides insufficient protection to the Rio Grande’s shoreline and leaves too much discretion to the builder when it comes to maintaining and inspecting the bollard fence.

“They’re putting Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids to fix the initial problem that they caused,” said Adriana E. Martinez, a Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor who studies river systems. She said the settlement does not require enough from the company to prevent additional flooding or damage from the fence.

The settlement lets Fisher Industries select the places along the fence to inspect for damage, decide what triggers some repairs and reject any proposed changes to the maintenance plan suggested by the government. It also allows the company to police itself instead of requiring a third-party inspector, said Amy Patrick, a Houston forensic structural and civil engineer and court-recognized expert on wall construction.

“It appears as though they are trusting the contractor far more than I have seen other contractors trusted,” she said.

As part of the settlement, Fisher and its subsidiary must destroy copies of an engineering report, commissioned by the Department of Justice, that studied the project’s soundness. Federal officials said the report contains “proprietary information.”

ProPublica and the Tribune requested copies of the report in August, months before the settlement, but the DOJ refused to provide the records, citing a confidentiality order in the ongoing lawsuit.

Ryan Patrick, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said that his office first filed the lawsuit to stop the construction of the project because it violated the law and it was too close to the river. “We always knew it was a joke, but it was a dangerous joke,” said Patrick, now a partner at a law firm in Houston.

Patrick said he still thinks the fence should be removed, but he declined to discuss the settlement, saying there might be information related to the difficulty or cost of taking it down that he doesn’t know since he left office in February 2021. “But I am still concerned for the surrounding towns if a big storm hits that thing.”

Neither the builder, Tommy Fisher, nor his company’s attorney responded to requests for comment. DOJ officials declined to comment, saying they did not have additional information besides what was available in court documents.

Fisher Industries started building the bollard fence along the banks of the Rio Grande in 2019 as part of a wider effort of We Build the Wall, a nonprofit organization founded by Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran. The nonprofit raised more than $25 million, Kolfage said, to help former President Donald Trump build his “big, beautiful wall” along the border. In April, Kolfage pleaded guilty to federal charges of defrauding donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to the wall effort.

The government filed a lawsuit soon after Fisher started construction of the project. It alleged the fence violated a treaty with Mexico that requires both countries to approve any development that can affect the international boundary. A state district judge in Hidalgo County granted the government a temporary restraining order to stop construction, but a federal judge reversed it a month later.

By February 2020, Fisher completed the 3-mile fence along the river’s edge.

Later that year, ProPublica and the Tribune reported that severe erosion at the base of the fence outside of Mission, Texas, could result in the structure toppling into the Rio Grande if not fixed. Following the reporting, Trump attempted to distance himself from the project, saying on Twitter that it had been constructed to make him look bad, despite some members of his family and top advisers previously vouching for it.

Two engineering reports, commissioned by the nearby National Butterfly Center, a nonprofit that opposed the project because of flooding concerns, later confirmed the news organizations’ findings.

In the summer of 2020, Hurricane Hanna dumped about 15 inches of rain into the area, leaving waist-deep cracks on the banks of the Rio Grande along parts of the fence, which threatened the structural integrity of the project, experts told ProPublica and the Tribune at the time. Fisher, the CEO who put more than $40 million of his own money into the project, told ProPublica and the Tribune that erosion was expected given the amount of rainfall.

He said his company had fixed the erosion, in part by adding a 10-foot-wide road made out of rocks for the Border Patrol to drive over. “I feel very comfortable with what we’ve done,” he said a month after the hurricane.

But Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, said she worries that the hurricane season, which began Wednesday and is expected to be more active than usual, could cause the structure to fail, potentially flooding communities and properties on both sides of the border and damaging the Anzalduas Dam, which provides irrigation water in the Rio Grande Valley.

Treviño-Wright called the settlement agreement a “total miscarriage of justice.”

Sally Spener, a spokesperson for the International Boundary and Water Commission, which will be in charge of oversight as part of the settlement, expressed support for the agreement and said she believed it addressed previous concerns. The binational commission is now responsible for ensuring the owners comply with the inspections and address any issues that arise.

Patrick, the former prosecutor, called the fence “a mess” that will have long-term implications.

“Looks like the builders of this thing are going to have to feed and care for this white elephant for quite some time and will in the end be far more expensive and a pain to deal with than they ever envisioned,” he said.

by J. David McSwane

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Unlike the countless inexperienced middlemen and outright swindlers who jumped into the mask market at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tim Morgan knew what he was doing. In the 1990s he taught English in Japan and later traveled throughout Asia, scouting factories that produced Nike watches and shades for Sunglass Hut, before he returned to Cleveland in 2000 to form his own import business, International Sourcing Group.

Two decades of navigating supply chains and negotiating with far-flung manufacturers taught Morgan it was best to steer his firm clear of the mask frenzy, which was rife with fraud and confusion. In the summer of 2020, though, he was inundated with requests for a similarly cheap but tough-to-get commodity: nitrile gloves. Hospitals and businesses were burning through them faster than they could be shipped from Asia, home to most of the world's protective equipment production.

“There was this explosion around gloves when they were trying to reopen the economy,” Morgan said. Companies were “just so desperate to be able to reopen and keep their workers safe.”

Now, two years later, Morgan leads a group of American businesses who’ve banded together to reclaim an estimated $100 million lost to scammers, who seized advantage of the country’s mad scramble for supplies. Members of the PPE Fraud Coalition say the pandemic exposed weaknesses in the international trade system and left many legitimate importers in shambles.

“These kinds of stories have affected so many American businesses who thought it was safe to operate in Vietnam — and I thought it was safe to operate in China,” Morgan said. “Ever since the pandemic, all the flaws in the system have come out.”

Morgan’s story began when an American expat he knew in Vietnam connected him to what he believed was a legitimate glove factory. In normal times, Morgan would have packed his bags and checked out the factory or hired a third-party inspector, but with lockdowns and travel restrictions, this wasn’t an option. Instead, Morgan set up deals by phone and video conference.

Bank records show that International Sourcing Group wired $1.5 million on July 15, 2020, to an account in Ho Chi Minh City as a deposit for nine shipping containers of gloves. About $1.4 million dropped into another company’s foreign account, followed by $1.65 million into a different account.

“I sent money — about $7 million of other people’s money — to Asia over a very quick period of time,” Morgan said. “We had to kind of trust the process and hope that everything would move quickly. It didn’t.”

Emails Morgan would later share with the Justice and Commerce departments show the sellers began to offer excuses. First, it was the holidays. Then, they just stopped responding. Finally in September, his Chinese seller sent a shipping container, which arrived with just a fraction of the gloves Morgan had purchased. The Vietnamese sellers vanished altogether; he wondered if their glove factory had ever existed.

Unable to fly abroad, Morgan couldn’t do anything. His customers demanded refunds, so he took out loans and entered repayment plans to return what he could. It wasn’t until the summer of 2021, as his company teetered near bankruptcy, that Morgan cut through several layers of red tape involving three countries and flew to Vietnam, where he was required to quarantine for three weeks in a rundown motel overlooking the bank he believed had his millions of dollars.

He fashioned a desk out of water bottles and boxes and kept a diary, which included photos of the streetscape below and musings about televised sumo wrestling, his only distraction. Finally, he was released only to find law enforcement had frozen the accounts of his alleged supplier. Law enforcement, Morgan claimed, offered to help him get his money out but only if he paid them a portion of what he collected. He refused. As Morgan told it, a fixer he hired informed him that his saying “no” had upset a high-ranking officer, so he’d better leave. He returned to the United States with a rich knowledge of sumo wrestling, none of his money and legal and travel costs creeping toward half a million dollars.

Unlike the many fly-by-night brokers who entered the PPE market to get rich quick, Morgan knew international trade — or, at least, he thought he did. But his faith was now shaken. Stateside, he reached out to the Commerce Department, which a spokesperson said does try to help business owners in such a bind by making phone calls and sending emails. He wrote to his congressmen, who he hopes will pressure the Justice Department to do something, though it’s unclear what.

As his frustration grew, and as it appeared he might not have much recourse, Morgan began to hear from other businesses with similar stories. They, too, had years of experience in Asia and had lost millions. Their customers also demanded answers. Amid the countless accounts of profiteers who had made money on masks or went to prison trying, the companies felt no one would listen to them unless they banded together and got interest from lawmakers and industry groups. Late last year, they formed the PPE Fraud Coalition, which says it represents scores of U.S. businesses who got fleeced in deals rooted in Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, China, Vietnam and Russia.

Rob Williams, president of R.L. Williams Company in Conover, North Carolina, said he wants to draw more attention to legitimate companies that stepped in to address unprecedented demand for PPE supplies, which the U.S. neither manufactured nor stockpiled in anywhere near sufficient quantities. These smaller importers were crucial to the pandemic response, Williams said, and did all they could to fulfill orders, only to be left holding the bag.

“I had big companies call on me and wire me money like that,” Williams said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “So everybody is screaming to get product for front-line workers, health care. The rush of demand was unbelievable.”

Bjorn Chay, who runs a natural supplement company in Greenville, South Carolina, has built a large network in Asia from his decades working in international trade. That didn’t keep him from getting hoodwinked, he said. He shared documents and receipts showing $3 million in payments to companies in Thailand and Vietnam, much of which is now tied up in frozen accounts and bureaucratic tangles. After a year of waiting, he traveled to Thailand and went to the factory that was supposed to ship gloves to him. “I get there. Guess what? There’s nothing,” Choy said. “It was just an empty building.”

These businessmen and others “should have done more due diligence,” said William Reinsch, an international trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If we had better trade rules, and if these businesses were dealing with rule-of-law countries, which is one of their problems — they’re not — they’d at least have more recourse.”

Reinsch said that COVID-19 produced a lot of this kind of international fraud, and that it’s likely going to continue even as the pandemic wanes. “We’re in an era of whack-a-mole supply chain crises,” he said, and scammers are going to take advantage. But, he pointed out, COVID-19 also created huge opportunities for fraud in the United States.

“No country has a monopoly on criminals,” he said.

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by Alison Burdo, The Press of Atlantic City

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

Last fall, amid the second year of the pandemic, Atlantic City’s casino executives painted a dire picture for New Jersey’s Legislature. Their brick-and-mortar properties were struggling. And despite thriving online gaming businesses, casinos said they were losing most of that revenue to companies that operate the internet gambling sites.

If policymakers didn’t cut casinos’ tax burdens, industry leaders forecast “grave danger” ahead. The state Senate president went further, warning that four of the city’s nine casinos could close.

The pitch worked. Fearing closures and layoffs, legislators moved quickly to deliver tax relief, few questions asked. “All good by me,” said Gov. Phil Murphy, who signed it on Dec. 21, one day after both chambers passed it.

The legislation altered the formula that determines how much casinos pay the city, its school district and the county to operate. And under the changes, companies will collectively pay those entities $55 million less than they otherwise would have this year — cuts that will disproportionately impact Atlantic City, the distressed capital of the state’s gaming industry.

The problem? Although the casinos cried poor, business is back.

As they pushed for tax relief, gaming companies were already on the rebound from the pandemic slump, recording profits above 2019 levels. The casinos’ parent companies were also spending billions of dollars to purchase online gaming companies, acquisitions that will help assure them more revenue from online wagers, according to a Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica review of state and federal financial filings, as well as public statements by casino representatives.

The industry in Atlantic City reported roughly $767 million in gross operating profit in 2021, its best year in more than a decade. But, as a result of the change in the law, it will pay $110 million in a key local tax — the smallest amount in the history of the five-year-old levy and $20 million less than the year before. (See how we calculated casinos' tax burden.)

“How do you do a tax decrease of that magnitude while they’re registering those kinds of profits on their books?” said Jim Kennedy, former executive director of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, the state agency that oversees the investment of gaming tax revenue for economic development projects.

The debate centers around a taxing program known as PILOT, or payment in lieu of property taxes. The plan was adopted in 2016 to resolve the costly fights that casinos waged with Atlantic City to dispute their property assessments, battles that nearly bankrupted the city. Instead, each casino now pays a share of an industrywide assessment calculated based on the prior year’s total gaming revenue. Since the system was implemented, Atlantic City has received the largest share of PILOT, with payments making up about a third of the city’s annual budget. But this year, the casino companies didn’t want to see their PILOT levies rise, in part because a separate tax break was simultaneously expiring.

The upturn in business for the casinos contrasts sharply with the reality of Atlantic City, which has been struggling to emerge from near financial ruin since 2016, when New Jersey imposed a state takeover. This year, at a time of high inflation and rising costs, the city of 38,000 estimates it will get $91.7 million from local taxes on casinos, $5 million less than it did last year. That might not sound like a lot of money for a city, but leaders had expected this year’s casino tax revenues to rise compared to last year. In fact, had lawmakers not changed the tax law, Atlantic City would have seen $133 million this year — $41 million more than the city is actually getting, according to state and city projections.

Casino PILOT Payments Are a Big Part of Atlantic City’s Budget Source: City of Atlantic City, Revenue and Finance Department

And by most metrics, Atlantic City needs the cash.

More than a third of its residents, who are mostly Black and Hispanic, live in poverty. Its infant mortality rate is alarmingly high, and its children have higher levels of lead in their blood than kids almost anywhere else in New Jersey, according to the most recent state reports. In the shadow of the gleaming casino towers that dot its famous four-mile boardwalk lies a single full-service grocery store.

Atlantic County, which has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation, could also feel the pinch. The new tax formula will result in approximately $19.3 million less than expected coming to the jurisdiction over the next five years, county estimates show. County officials, who are suing the state to maintain their share of tax revenue, say the reduction will hinder several public health programs and services for veterans, seniors and disabled residents.

For its part, the industry defends the new law.

Joe Lupo, head of the Casino Association of New Jersey and president of Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City (Edward Lea/The Press of Atlantic City)

In response to our reporting, Joe Lupo, head of the Casino Association of New Jersey and president of Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City, said the soaring revenue figures give a distorted picture of the industry’s health because its online partners get a large chunk of the money from internet gaming. “Failing to adjust the PILOT would have resulted in egregious, inappropriate, and inequitable taxes for any industry, let alone an industry that is still fighting to recover from COVID-19,” the group said in a statement.

The industry’s most recent financial reports, released by state regulators last month, show revenue from in-person gambling has surpassed pre-pandemic levels.

MGM Resorts International, the parent company of the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, the market leader in Atlantic City, also defended the changes to PILOT. “We take our position as a large employer and community leader seriously and have devoted significant efforts and resources to Atlantic City’s economic success and future,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Our priority when it comes to taxation is ensuring it’s structured so that each operator is contributing its fair share.”

Former state Sen. Steve Sweeney, the South Jersey lawmaker who led the legislative push last year, stood by his actions. “Casinos would have closed,” he said in an interview. “We did the best we could in a bad situation. We saved Atlantic City, we got it back on its feet.”

Murphy, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

For local and state officials, though, the new PILOT law has renewed questions in a long-running debate about whether Atlantic City is being shortchanged, despite policymakers’ promises from more than four decades ago that legalized gambling would help revitalize the beleaguered community.

“There is a difference between being a good partner and getting taken advantage of,” said City Councilman Jesse Kurtz, a Republican representing the 6th Ward, who opposed the legislation.

A New Tax System for Atlantic City A vacant lot. Atlantic City has seen limited investment in infrastructure and services while casinos have sought to reduce taxes owed to the city. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

Since the first New Jersey casino opened in Atlantic City in 1978, the city’s fortunes have been tied to gaming. The industry expanded rapidly, growing to a dozen properties, nearly all along the city’s world-famous boardwalk, and recording year-over-year gains for nearly 30 years. Taxes on casino operations, as well as related fees, sent billions to the state. Money also flowed directly to Atlantic City in two other forms: property taxes, which became the single largest source of municipal revenue, and another tax dedicated to financing community projects. The latter levy, known as the investment alternative tax, or IAT, was created in 1984 to ensure the industry invested in Atlantic City amid concerns that casinos were bilking the city.

But, over the past decade and a half, a slew of challenges upended the industry’s growth: the global financial crisis in 2008, Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and the expansion of legalized gambling in nearby states. As casino revenues dropped, gaming companies began successfully challenging their property tax bills. County records show their collective property valuation plunged from a high of $13.7 billion in 2008 — when 11 casinos were open — to $3.2 billion in 2016 — when only seven properties were operating. As a result, local tax revenue plummeted and municipal debt ballooned, mostly to cover the costs of property tax refunds owed to casinos. (Today, about two-thirds of Atlantic City’s $456 million debt burden comes from bonds sold to cover those refunds.)

That debt limited the city’s ability to invest in infrastructure and services, including its fire department, which has been borrowing neighboring communities’ trucks while awaiting new equipment. The city also reduced the size of its police force, cutting dozens of officers.

With the city on the brink of insolvency, gaming companies hatched an alternative tax plan, pitching it for several years before it gained enough support in Trenton to pass in 2016. For the next decade, instead of paying traditional property taxes, casinos would make payments based on other factors, including how many hotel rooms they have and their gross gaming revenue.

A billboard for Caesars Sportsbook, a gaming app, sits atop a corner market. More than a third of Atlantic City’s residents live in poverty. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

The legislation, drafted in part by the Casino Association of New Jersey, set the collective amount due in 2017 at $120 million, and for each of the remaining nine years, it tied the total PILOT payment to industry performance: If the industry saw a drop in revenue, payments would also decline.

For the businesses and Atlantic City, the new system held clear advantages. Casinos would no longer challenge their property taxes in court, saving both sides time and money. And they could bank on predictability, penciling in the amounts owed for each of the next 10 years.

The 2016 legislation also included a separate tax break for gaming companies, an incentive to convince all the casinos to participate in the PILOT system. It gave casinos a discount on the investment alternative tax that they paid to finance community projects. The change would hurt Atlantic City in the short term, but lawmakers ensured that the cuts wouldn’t last forever: The tax break would expire halfway through the PILOT program, with the city seeing the full tax benefit again in 2022.

Then-Gov. Chris Christie signed the PILOT bill into law in 2016. Seeking to avert New Jersey’s first local government bankruptcy since 1938, he also placed Atlantic City under state control — a move that gave the state authority over large parts of local government, including its budget.

But the bad times didn’t last for the casinos. Two shuttered properties, the Trump Taj Mahal and the Revel Casino Hotel, changed ownership and then reopened in mid-2018 as the Hard Rock and the Ocean Casino Resort, respectively. Meanwhile, online gaming blossomed, injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the industry. Legalized in 2013 — with the requirement that computer servers be based in Atlantic City — the sector nearly quadrupled its revenues in New Jersey in just six years, growing from $123 million to $483 million in 2019. The climb accelerated in the back half of 2018, aided by the legalization of sports betting in the state.

Rolling carts outside Bally’s Casino, whose parent company has spent billions since 2020 to build out its online gaming business. The success of online gaming has injected hundreds of millions into the industry. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

As a result, gross gaming revenue climbed in 2018, and then again in 2019. So did the PILOT payments, which reached $152 million in 2020, far more than the initial $120 million, which the industry had expected to be a kind of ceiling.

At the same time, the temporary break on the investment alternative tax was scheduled to expire, meaning companies would have to begin paying their full share again in 2022.

To some industry leaders, the PILOT program was starting to look like a bad bet.

They turned to a key ally.

Gaming Industry Pushes for Change

For more than a decade, Steve Sweeney lorded over New Jersey politics as the president of the state Senate. Long considered the second-most-powerful person in the state, behind the governor, the South Jersey Democrat brokered deals on everything from schools to public pensions to renewable energy.

But last year, amid a Republican wave, he met his political end in a stunning upset, falling in the November election to a little-known truck driver with no political experience. With only months left in his post, he returned to Trenton to address unfinished business. On his agenda: tax relief for the gaming industry.

Specifically, Sweeney had sponsored legislation to exempt all online gaming revenue from the PILOT formula.

Then-state Sen. Steve Sweeney at a news conference in Trenton on Nov. 10, 2021. Before he left office, he pushed for tax breaks for casinos. (Matt Rourke/AP Photo)

The bill was a response to industry leaders, who had spent months publicly downplaying their online windfall. Hard Rock’s Lupo led the effort, making a key claim: that casinos’ technology partners were gobbling up the bulk of online wagers.

In general, a spokesperson for the Casino Association of New Jersey said, just 20% to 25% of the total online revenue in New Jersey was attributable to casinos’ own platforms. But, according to the Press of Atlantic City/ProPublica review, that number is poised to rise over the course of the PILOT program, as gaming companies increasingly make moves to reduce or eliminate third-party costs.

At a press conference in late November, Mayor Marty Small of Atlantic City backed the industry’s push to change PILOT.

“We’re guaranteed to be in no worse position than any previous year,” Small said.

At his side was his adviser, Steven P. Perskie, a former judge and onetime state lawmaker who authored the Casino Control Act legalizing gaming in Atlantic City. Perskie cited what he called a “comprehensive” financial analysis of PILOT taxes conducted by the state. “The impact of the increases that would take place in 2022 would put a significant portion of the industry in extreme financial distress,” he told reporters.

The new PILOT bill would help prevent that, Perskie said.

To be sure, the change would mean less in PILOT funds for Atlantic City. But the mayor reasoned that the loss would be offset by an increase in investment alternative taxes; the break that casinos had received on the levy would sunset as planned in 2022. But Small’s prediction would ultimately turn out to be wrong. The city’s proposed annual budget shows that this year, the two revenue streams combined are expected to total $5 million less than in the prior year.

Small did not respond to a request for comment, and Perskie declined to answer written questions from the news organizations. Neither provided evidence of the PILOT analysis they cited.

But as the legislation moved through the statehouse, other local officials, like Dennis Levinson, Atlantic County’s executive, took notice of the new financial reports being released by the Division of Gaming Enforcement, the state agency responsible for regulating casinos.

While the city’s nine casinos saw a 5% drop in in-person wagers through the first 10 months of 2021 compared with the same period in 2019, online gaming had pushed their gross revenue to $3.5 billion. In terms of gross operating profit — which regulators describe as “a widely-accepted measure of profitability” — the industry reported $592 million through the first three quarters of 2021, putting it on pace for its best year in at least a decade.

Revenue Has Jumped in the Atlantic City Casino Industry

While in-person gambling declined dramatically when COVID-19 hit, online gaming has been booming. It now accounts for a growing portion of total revenue for the casino industry.

Note: Revenue in 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars. Source: New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.

Citing the gaming reports, Levinson asked Murphy to oppose the PILOT legislation.

“It is confounding that the casinos can claim they are suffering while all reports indicate they are setting revenue records,” Levinson wrote in a Dec. 2 letter. That same day, Moody’s Investors Service issued a credit opinion of Atlantic City that said, “City management is not aware of any plans to close further casinos.”

In his letter, Levinson also said changing the tax formula would violate a previous settlement agreement with the state that spelled out how much PILOT tax revenue Atlantic County would receive through 2026 — and he threatened to sue if the bill became law.

Levinson said the governor never responded. Murphy, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

Big Action, Few Questions in the Legislature New Jersey’s Democrat-controlled legislature moved quickly to cut casinos’ taxes. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

The legislation gained momentum in early December when Sweeney made his case to the state Senate’s Budget and Appropriations Committee.

“We are risking four casinos closing,” he told his colleagues. “And that’s why this bill was proposed.”

The casino industry is the largest employer in Atlantic County, with more than 19,000 workers, and such a downturn would shutter roughly half the gaming properties. Some senators worried aloud about losing jobs; when four casinos closed in 2014, nearly 9,000 employees were laid off. None of the lawmakers, however, pressed Sweeney for evidence, and the bill sailed through the statehouse with little debate.

Indeed, the General Assembly committee spent less than four minutes on the bill to change PILOT during its Dec. 13 hearing. Nearly half that time was used by Sue Altman, state director of New Jersey Working Families Party, a progressive coalition that opposed the bill.

“We are sick and tired of watching big and successful and profitable industries like casinos pay less than their fair share in taxes,” she said.

Ocean Casino Resort looms in the distance across town from low-slung homes. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

Peter Chen, an analyst with left-leaning think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective, agreed. “The formula adopted by lawmakers in 2016 takes into account the possibility of adverse financial conditions,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers. “It’s unclear why new changes are needed to reduce the amount casinos pay, beyond what current law provides.”

The committee members did not address the criticisms in the hearing, and just one spoke before voting. “I do have concerns about this bill,” the vice chair said, without detailing those worries. Nevertheless, he and eight other committee members approved the bill, which went before the Democrat-controlled Legislature a week later.

In the end, just four Democrats opposed the legislation, including state Assembly members Vince Mazzeo and John Armato, both of whom represented Atlantic City and a large part of Atlantic County. Armato’s defection was especially notable because he had been the sponsor of the Assembly version of the PILOT bill. In an unusual move, he had his name removed from the legislation before the final vote. “For me to move forward, I needed a lot more information, and I wasn’t getting it, which made me very uncomfortable,” he told The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica.

“When Are We Going to Get Our Fair Share”

Today, New Jersey is reckoning with the fallout from the new law.

Levinson, the Atlantic County executive, made good on his threats to sue the state, alleging that the new PILOT formula could put several county programs at risk, including its opioid response, flu and COVID-19 vaccination initiative, and transportation services for senior citizens, disabled residents and veterans.

A judge in late February ruled in favor of Atlantic County, finding that the state violated the terms of its previous settlement agreement — a ruling that was upheld by the municipal court last month. The state, however, has not conceded, and plans to appeal.

Atlantic City has seen few improvements since the alternative property tax system began. Its budget remains flat, comparable to past years, as chronically high poverty and unemployment rates persist.

In March, Small, who supported the PILOT law despite the loss of revenue, was in Trenton, seeking more gaming money for his city. He asked lawmakers to back legislation that would send a sports wagering tax to Atlantic City instead of a state agency. The money would then be used to provide property tax relief to local residents, who have seen their tax rates rise over the past decade.

“We redid the PILOT bill, which I supported,” he told lawmakers. “But people are looking at when are we going to get our fair share of the pie.”

The Atlantic City Boardwalk as seen through the windows of The Playground mall. (Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica)

Indeed, the fallout from the legislation is now driving a larger debate about New Jersey’s gaming taxes, nearly all of which flow directly to the state, not Atlantic City.

Republican state Assembly member Don Guardian, a former Atlantic City mayor now in his first term representing Atlantic City and Atlantic County in the statehouse, said he plans to convene representatives from the city, county and state, as well as the gaming industry, to study the casino tax structure. Industry observers consider New Jersey the country’s most casino-friendly state after Nevada. “Let’s start taking into account that the world has changed,” Guardian said. “You need to go back and look at the whole issue.”

Meanwhile, some of the state lawmakers who initially supported the PILOT change are now questioning why it was necessary. “As more and more data started coming in on the health and vitality of the industry, it became clear to me that the idea the casinos were going to close was more talking point than truth,” said Democratic state Sen. Troy Singleton, chair of the Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee.

During a Senate committee hearing in March, state Sen. Vince Polistina, a Republican representing Atlantic City and Atlantic County who voted against the bill in December, was more pointed with his colleagues. The new law, he said, “was done based on the premise of a charade.”

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Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

by Alison Burdo, The Press of Atlantic City

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

When New Jersey officials passed sweeping tax cuts for Atlantic City’s casinos last year, they offered broad claims but little evidence.

At issue, they said, was just how much the industry’s taxes were going to rise under the system that determines how much casinos pay in lieu of property taxes.

“We are risking four casinos closing,” said then-state Senate President Steve Sweeney, without providing specifics.

Likewise, former Judge Steven P. Perskie, an Atlantic City adviser and the former state lawmaker who authored the Casino Control Act legalizing gaming, predicted dire consequences. “The impact of the increases that would take place in 2022 would put a significant portion of the industry in extreme financial distress,” he said, citing a “comprehensive” financial analysis conducted by the state.

But when The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica sought that financial analysis from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, which is tasked with direct oversight of Atlantic City, the agency would not produce it. In an interview, Sweeney also declined to provide evidence of potential closures, saying it would be clear “if you do your homework and you look at the increase that some of these casinos were facing.”

So that’s what we did.

Over the past few months, The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica filed a series of public records requests with local and state agencies to help calculate the casino tax liabilities that the state refused to reveal.

Our analysis centered on two taxes, one called PILOT, which stands for payment in lieu of taxes, and the other called the investment alternative tax.

PILOT was designed to replace typical property taxes beginning in 2017, after casinos repeatedly challenged those annual assessments, and the money collected under that system was distributed to the city, its school district and the county. And the investment alternative tax was a longstanding levy, devoted to community investment in Atlantic City and elsewhere in the state, that casinos had received a temporary break on. Each was set to rise in 2022, largely because casino revenues were up.

To determine what the industry would have paid under the original PILOT system, before the law was changed last year, the news organizations collected three key data points on each casino: gross gaming revenue, including money from online gaming; number of hotel rooms; and acreage. We then plugged those figures into the formula outlined in the 13-page tax law and confirmed the results with the state. What we found cast doubt on officials’ claims of financial ruin. (For a detailed methodology, see the last section of this story.)

According to our analysis, the gaming industry’s nine properties would have collectively owed $165 million in PILOT in 2022, a $35 million hike compared to 2021. Two of the city’s nine casinos would have actually seen a decrease in their PILOT.

Casinos Will Pay Millions Less in PILOT Under New Legislation !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

by Alec MacGillis

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By the end of our first afternoon of deliberations in the jury room up the narrow stairs from the courtroom, the water cooler was running low, the lock on the bathroom door kept sticking and the wheezing HVAC system was making it even harder to make out the audio in a crucial jailhouse phone recording. We were also nowhere close to a consensus on whether or not Domonic White was guilty of attempted murder and lesser charges in the 2021 shooting of Chris Clanton in the presence of Clanton’s 5-year-old son.

It was hardly unusual for a jury to struggle to come to an agreement. What made this case unusual was the context provided by the victim’s identity. Clanton was an actor on “The Wire” and is now appearing on “We Own This City,” the new HBO miniseries produced by the creators of “The Wire” and based on Baltimore journalist Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book about an eye-popping police corruption scandal exposed five years ago.

At the heart of the new series, which began airing one week before the trial, was the profound damage that police corruption had done to community trust in law enforcement. “Now, even if you find the witnesses and have a case,” says one cop in the second episode, “now when you need to get 12 people together to make a jury, 12 people to believe that you aren’t lying on the witness stand about who shot Tater or who robbed the Rite Aid, they look at you and remember when some other cop lied on them about their son or brother. The lawyers will tell you that you lost the city juries on that stuff.”

We were now those 12 people, charged with assessing testimony by members of that same Police Department to decide who had shot an actor from the television show that was dramatizing this corruption.

It was more than I had bargained for when I had reported for jury duty at the Circuit Court for Baltimore City two days earlier. I had never been selected for a panel, likely in part because I am a journalist, which is often enough to prompt a lawyer’s request for dismissal. This time, I had been chosen, and I had not minded. I was overdue to serve that basic civic duty, and it happened that I’m in the midst of reporting on the nationwide resurgence in gun violence. It could only help to get perspective from within the jury box, a corner of the criminal justice system that we hear far less about than other aspects of the system.

But now, at the end of the first day of deliberations, I had a more pressing concern. By the luck of the draw, I had been seated first on the jury and had thus been appointed foreman. I had no idea what exactly that role entailed, beyond reading out an eventual verdict, but a hung jury sure sounded like failing at the job, however it was defined. And after more than three hours of inconclusive deliberations, that seemed like where we were headed.

Clanton, 36, had come to testify on the second day of the trial. He entered with the bearing of a man distinctly displeased to be there. He made his way across the high-ceilinged courtroom in torn gray jeans and a beige jacket over a lavender hoodie, with a thick beard, passing in front of his alleged assailant, who sat placidly in rimless glasses, cleanshaven in a tie and white shirt.

Even before Clanton identified himself and disclosed his TV roles, the mere fact of his presence was notable. In Baltimore and many other cities around the country, it is not at all uncommon for shooting survivors to refuse to identify their attackers to the authorities. It’s the most extreme manifestation of the no-snitching ethic — don’t tell the cops who the shooter was even if you’re the one who was shot — and it’s a big reason why the closure rate for nonfatal shootings is even lower than it is for homicides. But here was Clanton, come to testify against a man he had once considered a close friend.

We jurors had already heard from one of the two officers who responded to the shooting just before 7 p.m. on April 29, 2021. Kaivon Stewart and his partner had just shared a pizza at a 7-Eleven on Belair Road, in a mostly Black working-class section of northeast Baltimore, when they heard a gunshot close by. Stewart, who was at the wheel, headed southwest down Belair and, on a small side street called Eierman Avenue, the officers saw a man with a gun standing over another man lying on the ground, as if poised to shoot. They were not close enough to identify the shooter, beyond the fact that he was a Black man dressed all in black.

They pulled into Eierman and jumped out of the cruiser. The shooter ran off into an alley to the right, heading northeast. Stewart ministered to Clanton, who had been shot in the left ear. He was bleeding heavily but was conscious.

Parked on the street close to where the victim was found, Stewart said, was a blue 2007 Pontiac G6 with the engine still running. Inside the car was a cellphone with a lock screen photo of a couple that, police would later determine, was the woman to whom the car was registered and her fiance, White, who is 39. Not among the items recovered: a gun or any shell casings.

Then came Clanton’s testimony. Glowering, he related what had happened on the evening in question. He had been visiting his mother’s house nearby with his five-year-old son. He had walked down Belair with his son to get him a drink at the 7-Eleven. On the way, someone Clanton knew had called out from a porch on Eierman to let him know that he soon wanted another haircut from Clanton, who does occasional barbering on the side.

Clanton and his son had walked up to the porch, where a small group of men was gathering, among them White. White, whom Clanton called Nick, had been a good friend of Clanton’s when they were young men, Clanton testified, but they had barely seen each other in the decade since a friend of theirs had been killed. Clanton said he was “genuinely happy” to see White after so long but felt an immediate “tension” from him.

Not understanding why he was getting “the cold shoulder,” Clanton said, according to my notes, he followed White down from the porch toward the running car. “I figured if I could get him by himself, he would open up.”

“Whassup?” he said he kept asking White. “I ain’t seen you in a minute.”

“You know what’s up,” White responded, according to Clanton.

They came down to the side of the Pontiac, Clanton testified, with his son trailing, behind the car’s trunk. Clanton pressed again for an explanation of what was bothering White. Then, Clanton said, White pulled a handgun out of his waistband.

“I turned real fast because I thought, if this guy is going to kill me, my mother got to see something,” Clanton said, referring mordantly to his desire to preserve his face for an open-casket funeral.

Lying on the ground after being shot, with White standing over him, Clanton said he heard the siren of the arriving cruiser. “I ain’t never been so happy to see police in my life,” he said. Everyone had scattered. All Clanton was thinking about, he said, was his son, who had been pulled to safety by a neighbor.

A day or two later, after he was released from the hospital, detectives came to his home and he identified White as the shooter. Clanton described the medical fallout: Doctors had made his ear whole again, but he still had bullet fragments in his head that they decided were too risky to remove, and he suffered occasional seizures.

It was time for the cross-examination from White’s attorney, Roland Brown, a veteran defense lawyer with a bearish build and assured manner. After a few perfunctory niceties toward the shooting victim, he needled Clanton, asking whether he had been drunk or high when the shooting occurred, asking if he was really sure it was White whom he had followed off the porch.

Clanton bridled. “I know exactly who shot me,” he said. “I have to deal with this every day. We were all best friends. I didn’t know he was feeling some kind of way toward me.”

As a kid growing up in Baltimore, Clanton’s eighth-grade social-studies teacher was Ed Burns, the homicide detective-turned-teacher who was a co-creator of “The Wire,” alongside David Simon. On “The Wire,” Clanton played Savino Bratton, who appeared in Season One as an enforcer for drug kingpin Avon Barksdale and then in Season Five working for successor kingpin Marlo Stanfield. In that season, Savino joined others in the Stanfield crew in hunting for legendary stick-up man Omar Little, before being fatally shot by Little.

On “We Own This City,” Clanton has switched sides. He’s now playing a police officer, Brian Hairston, who is not shy about challenging untoward behavior by fellow officers. In the first episode, he is with Danny Hersl, a notoriously rough officer, when Hersl gratuitously beats up a suspect. “Look, I’m canceling that jail wagon and calling for a fucking ambulance,” Hairston tells Hersl angrily.

“What the fuck?” Hersl says. “Throw a Band-Aid on him in Central Booking. He’s all right.”

“You banged him, Hersl,” Hairston says. “Fuck if I’m going to have him dumped in a jail van bleeding and have Marilyn Mosby indict my ass.”

Mosby is the Baltimore state’s attorney who, in May 2015, brought charges against six of the officers involved in the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray. (Gray died, his spinal cord nearly severed, seven days after being moved, shackled and unbuckled, in a police van.) None of those charges resulted in conviction, but they loom over the events portrayed in “We Own This City.” They are cited repeatedly as the excuse used by many cops in deciding to hang back on the job, even as violence surged to unprecedented levels following the riots after Gray’s death.

That general apathy, in turn, is cited as the reason why the officers of the unit at the heart of the corruption scandal, the Gun Trace Task Force, were given such a long leash. “Simply put, Hersl and guys like him get out of their cars and they make arrests,” a judge says in the first episode. “And that’s more than you can say about too many police in this city who are collecting a paycheck.” Or as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the head of the corrupt unit when it reached its apex of depravity — stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars, planting drugs and guns on suspects, filing wildly fraudulent overtime claims — puts it in the fourth episode: “As long as we produce, as long as we put those numbers up, they don’t fucking give a shit about what we do. We can do whatever the fuck we want.”

That aura of haplessness around the Police Department has lingered since the scandal was exposed, as the city’s homicide rate has remained elevated at the levels it spiked to after the protests over Gray’s death. So it was hardly surprising that Brown, White’s defense lawyer, tried to capitalize on that perception of the police in trying to bring us jurors over to his side. He wasn’t trying to get us to disbelieve the police because they were untrustworthy; rather he was trying to get us to dismiss the evidence because it was the result of inadequate effort.

He grilled the lead detective on the case, Anthony Forbes, over his failure to find witnesses to the shooting. Why had he not tried harder to canvass that block of Eierman? Was it because he was too “starstruck” by Clanton and thus willing to go simply on his word?

Brown also took that tack to try to dismiss a seemingly damning piece of evidence that came up during the prosecutor’s questioning of the detective, a phone call on a recorded jailhouse line one day after the shooting from an incarcerated 20-year-old man named Darian White to the man that the detective said was his father, Domonic White. Why, Brown asked, had he not gone to the Division of Vital Records to confirm that Darian was the son of Domonic? Brown did not offer evidence to suggest that the two Whites were not related. The intent was simply to raise doubt and to underscore that Forbes and his fellow officers were lazy clock-punchers.

We got to hear the phone call the next day. It was scratchy, but I could make out a father telling his incarcerated son that “shit got ugly yesterday,” which is why he was going to have to “turn myself in” or let the police come get him. He also expressed affection and concern for his son and told him that “I was getting ready to go a different route” the day before but that his son had been “on my mind.” “That’s the only reason I didn’t do it,” the father said.

It was the defense’s turn to call its only witness, Mark Pratt. (Domonic White himself would not testify in his own defense.) Pratt was a longtime friend of White’s and a cousin of his fiancee. Pratt was hanging out with White at a small shopping plaza before the shooting, as security camera footage showed, and then drove behind him to Eierman to buy marijuana for an NFL draft-watching gathering.

He offered a completely different account than had Clanton. There was no tension between Clanton and White, he testified. Instead, what happened was this: As the group on Eierman was getting ready to split up, two young men in black face masks appeared from the alley to the left, coming from the southwest, and approached Clanton. One of them shot him, and when the police came, the pair ran back the way they had come, down the alley to the southwest.

The prosecutor, Veronica Colson, challenged Pratt over why he had not mentioned these two young men when asked by the police at the scene if he had seen anything, and why he had also not come forward about them after he heard that his good friend had been charged in the shooting a month later. She did not challenge a factual contradiction between his account and that of Stewart, the responding officer: that the man with the gun had run up the alley to the right, to the northeast, in the opposite direction of what Pratt was now offering.

The details of the gunman’s alley escape became more relevant in Colson’s closing argument, when she played for the first time some additional security-camera footage showing White emerging (with no gun visible), about 30 seconds after the shooting, from the other end of the alley — consistent with the police account — and strolling off across Belair Road.

In his closing argument, Brown began by reminding us that Clanton was an actor, seeking to raise doubts about the veracity of his testimony. And he zeroed in again on the corner-cutting in the police investigation. “Were you impressed by the shooting detective?” he said.

There is a moment in jury selection in Baltimore where the judge asks the assembled citizens if any of them has been a victim of gun violence or has an immediate family member who has been a victim of it, or has a family member who has been charged with gun violence. Invariably, more than a third of the people stand up.

I’ve been stunned by this moment every time I’ve seen it, even though I shouldn’t have been, because the response is in line with what you would expect from the numbers. Since the start of 2013, when I returned to Baltimore for my second stint living in the city, there have been 2,916 people murdered there, and more than twice as many have been wounded in nonfatal shootings. This is in a city whose population has fallen from 621,000 to 585,000 over that time. The toll is even more concentrated if considered through the lens of neighborhoods and race. The Black share of Baltimore’s population is 63%; the Black share of the city’s homicide victims is typically over 90%.

So overwhelming is the response to that question that answering yes is not disqualifying for service. Instead, Judge Charles Blomquist called each person who answered in the affirmative up to the bench to talk with him and the lawyers about how the experience might inform their perspective as jurors. The same went for another screening question, about whether our views of the police would keep us from being impartial in weighing their testimony.

The jury selected for White’s trial was not racially proportionate to the city, as is often the case in a city where so many Black citizens are disqualified from service for past criminal history. Eight of the 12 of us were white, alongside three Black women and one Puerto Rican woman. This stood in contrast to the major players in the trial: the defendant, victim, both lawyers and three police officers called to the stand were all Black.

It did not take long after we ascended to start our deliberations, though, to discover that there was a whole different level of diversity when it came to a task like this. Baltimore is an overwhelmingly progressive Democratic city, a place that voted 87% for Joe Biden in 2020. But perspectives range widely when it comes to the local issue that most consumes public attention — public safety — and that range does not break down neatly along racial or class lines.

Soon after we got started, five jurors made clear that they had serious doubts about the prosecution’s case. They didn’t find Clanton credible. Several noted that he was, after all, an actor, while several others said that he wasn’t being candid about whatever beef had fueled White’s anger, or that they simply didn’t like how he had come across. “He was arrogant and braggadocious,” said one of three young white women on the jury. “I didn’t buy his act.”

Above all, though, they wanted more evidence, and for this these jurors blamed the police. Why had the police been unable to recover a gun? Why had the detective not tried harder to find other witnesses? Heck, why had the police not tried harder to catch the shooter in the first place? “If I’m going to be involved in sending someone to jail for a long time, I’m going to need hard evidence,” said the one Black woman who was inclined to acquit.

The skeptical jurors were not suggesting they did not trust what the police were saying. Rather, they were adopting the critique offered by the defense: They were criticizing the police for not having done their job better. It was a striking dynamic, given that this may have been one of the rare cases where the presence of cops likely saved a man’s life. But it fit with the dynamic described on “We Own This City” — a department succumbing to indifference and thus lackluster at doing its job, whether for reasons of self-pity or self-protection.

This was the local context for the jurors’ reluctance to convict White. But it nonetheless startled several members of the jury who were convinced of his guilt, a group that included the two other Black women on the panel. Members of this group kept coming back to the main pieces of evidence: the victim’s testimony, which was seemingly corroborated by the responding officer’s account of the gunman’s flight into the alley; the camera footage of White emerging from that alley; and the recorded jailhouse phone call. Wasn’t that enough?

By day’s end, it wasn’t, and we headed home.

Never had I been more depressed in my work as a reporter than when covering the Gun Trace Task Force trial, in 2018, for an article that examined the broader unraveling of order in Baltimore. The cause of the despair was the impunity that the trial had laid bare, that the officers had for years been able to operate in a world where nothing mattered, in a moral void.

I was thinking again about impunity at home after our inconclusive deliberations. A man had been shot in the ear in the presence of his 5-year-old son, one of 728 nonfatal shootings in the city in 2021. Baltimore police generally solve only a fifth to a quarter of nonfatal shootings, and the state prosecutes only a subset of that subset. In this case, though, the person who had very nearly been killed in the shooting had decided to give a name to the police. This was not an easy thing to do in this city, and even more difficult was then having to come to court with the former longtime friend whom he had identified as his attacker sitting just a few feet away, and tell the story again, to an appraising jury and aggressive defense lawyer.

The next morning, back in the jury room, I tried, haltingly, to articulate my thoughts about Clanton’s decision to testify and the weight it seemed to deserve, given the difficulty in taking that step and the other evidence that corroborated his account.

But the jury was still stuck in the same divide it had been in the previous day. With seemingly little to gain from more discussion, we watched more of the camera footage from along Belair Road, which served the purpose of raising additional questions about the account provided by Mark Pratt, which did not match up with it in several respects.

Still, several jurors were reluctant to accept Clanton’s version. The Black woman inclined to acquit offered personal background to explain why she was not willing to take Clanton’s account at face value: When she had tried to break up with a boyfriend, he had cut himself badly and told the police that his girlfriend did it to him; she had been charged in the incident, she said, and exonerated only after she taped a call from him admitting to the ruse.

A young white man inclined to acquit pushed back at a couple of the jurors favoring conviction who thought it was suspicious that White had not returned for his phone and his fiancee’s car after the shooting. If you’re a Black man in Baltimore with a history of encounters with the police, he said, you may decide to stay away even if you were not involved. And the Puerto Rican woman on the jury kept coming back to the failure of the police to provide additional evidence to buttress Clanton. “The police need to step it up,” she said. “The police had a job to do.”

The insistent demand for more evidence, particularly more witness testimony, provoked one of the two Black women who were inclined toward conviction. Speaking up for the first time, she related her own story: Nearly three decades ago, she had been shot in the back on the street by two stray bullets fired by a 14-year-old boy. She had barely survived, and the effects of her injuries lingered to this day. But no one on the crowded street had been willing to identify the shooter, she said. The whole experience left her with a visceral grasp of why no one else from Eierman had come forward to back up Clanton. “No one would come testify for me,” she said.

By noon, I sent a note to the judge asking what to do if we couldn’t reach a decision. He summoned us to the courtroom and told us to keep going. After lunch, we did. Even more talked-out by this point, we decided to play the recording of the jailhouse call one more time.

With each replaying, we were able to make out more of the scratchy exchange. We heard the father on the call accepting that he would have to face some consequences for what had happened the day before. “What comes out of that, it is what it is,” he said. “I know I’m going to have to sit for a little bit.” We heard him elaborating on why he had not gone a “different route” during the incident, out of a desire not to spend many more years separated from his son. “I’m going to keep it a thousand with you,” he said.

Somehow, hearing the call yet again, and being able to make out more of it, had an effect on several of the jurors who had been inclined to acquit. The conversation drifted to the various charges and the distinctions between them: In addition to attempted murder, White was also charged with first-degree assault, reckless endangerment and various firearm-related offences. It became clear that several of the jurors inclined to acquit White for attempted murder were more willing to entertain his guilt for first-degree assault. As they saw it, there were still enough questions about what transpired between the two men that they couldn’t conclude that White had actually been trying to kill Clanton. But they could accept that he had done him great harm.

One by one, the five jurors who had started out with major doubts about the prosecution’s case came around to conviction for first-degree assault and the lesser charges. At about 4 p.m., we let the judge know we had reached a verdict. As we waited to be called down, there was sudden levity in the room, an unspoken sense that after veering close to a rupture, we had managed to come together.

We filed downstairs, to a courtroom that was fuller than it had been at any point in the trial, though there was no sign of Clanton himself. I gave the verdict on each of the charges. White and his lawyer, Brown, reacted with restrained displeasure. We dispersed with barely a word; the camaraderie was left upstairs. But out on the street, I saw the juror who said she had been framed by her boyfriend, sitting on a bench awaiting a westbound bus. I got her attention, and we exchanged a nod and smile.

And that was it. It was early May in Baltimore, the most beautiful time of year in the city. There had by that point been 116 homicides so far in 2022, up 15% from the year before. The following week, a man with an assault rifle would fire 60 rounds on a block in East Baltimore while killing another man and injuring three others. A couple days after that, a pregnant woman would be killed along with the father-to-be; their baby, delivered from the dying woman, was left in critical condition. A day after that, a high school junior would be fatally shot at an after-prom party.

And two weeks after that, a man accused of fatally shooting the widely admired co-founder of the city’s violence-interrupter program, Safe Streets, would be acquitted of murder, despite having been found with the gun used in the killing and despite cellphone data putting him in the area. “Not enough evidence,” said one juror afterward.

It was a refrain I had heard on the White jury, too. But our jury had something that the latest jury did not: a victim alive and willing to testify.

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Correction

June 1, 2022: This story originally misstated the fatalities of a shooting. A father-to-be was killed, not left in critical condition.

by Richard A. Webster, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, and David Hammer, WWL-TV

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

The state of Louisiana is pausing efforts to collect money from thousands of homeowners who accepted hurricane recovery grants and used them for repairs rather than elevating their houses. The decision comes after news outlets presented the state with evidence showing that its lawyers have stepped up the pace of court filings even as the state hopes to wipe away the lawsuits entirely.

Jay Dardenne, the head of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ Division of Administration, said Monday that the state has agreed to settle a related lawsuit against a company that ran the recovery program after Hurricane Katrina. If the federal government approves that agreement, he said, the state would drop the suits against homeowners who didn’t follow the rules on how they spent elevation grants.

An investigation by ProPublica, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, and WWL-TV found evidence that some of those people were told they could use the $30,000 grants on repairs instead. Years later, the state sued about 3,500 families — roughly 1 in 9 grantees — demanding the money back.

Dardenne said he was troubled by evidence gathered by the news organizations showing that the law firm Shows, Cali & Walsh, which represents the state, has accelerated its efforts to collect tens of thousands of dollars from each homeowner.

With the state on the cusp of a solution, “there’s no reason to try and take any more cases to judgment,” Dardenne said.

He said the state is waiting for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to approve a proposed settlement between the state and the company it hired to manage the federally funded Road Home recovery program from 2006 to 2009.

In 2016 the state sued that firm, ICF Emergency Management Services, accusing it of mismanagement. A mediator helped the two sides come to an agreement in late 2020.

The state wants to send the money it expects from that settlement to HUD to satisfy its obligations for Road Home grants that weren’t spent according to the rules. If HUD agrees, the state will drop its lawsuits against homeowners and cease collection efforts in cases that have gone to judgment, Dardenne said.

“I think we’re inching very close to that happening,” Dardenne said.

Dardenne said he and Edwards have spoken with HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge about accepting the proposed ICF settlement. When asked if he believes Fudge is in favor of dropping the suits, Dardenne said, “I do.”

A HUD spokesperson declined to comment on that characterization, but said, “HUD continues to work with the state.”

Meanwhile, the litigation continues.

In New Orleans, home to almost half of the elevation lawsuits, lawyers filed almost as many motions for judgment in a recent six-week span as they had in the first three and a half months of the year.

Lawyers with Shows, Cali & Walsh filed 42 motions for judgment from January to mid-April, according to court records. Over the following six weeks, they filed 38 motions seeking roughly the same amount — $1.2 million.

About half of the filings in both periods were for default judgments, a ruling that can be imposed when a defendant fails to respond in court. Such judgments result in liens on the properties, preventing them from being sold until the debt is paid.

Dardenne said the state has not sought to speed up recovery efforts. He said any increase in court filings likely reflects the timeline of individual cases.

Among those targeted was New Orleans homeowner Celeste Matthews. The same day she was featured in news stories by ProPublica, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune and WWL-TV that detailed the lawsuits, the law firm notified her that it would pursue a default judgment against her.

Celeste Matthews shows the siding she had installed after Hurricane Katrina. Matthews received a Road Home grant to elevate her Gert Town home in New Orleans but used the money for repairs instead. (Sophia Germer/The Advocate | The Times-Picayune)

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Democrat whose district includes much of New Orleans, where many of the lawsuits have been filed, said last week the state should put such filings on hold.

“Conversations are getting more frequent and focused in these past few weeks in the work to end the injustices of the Road Home program,” Carter said. “The state should not continue, and is not required to, keep exacting these punishing actions against my constituents.”

Louisiana Seeking $103 Million From Homeowners

The lawsuits stem from Road Home elevation grants that were awarded to about 32,000 homeowners whose houses were damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. A majority lived in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

The money, typically $30,000, was supposed to be used to raise homes off the ground to prevent future flooding.

An investigation by the news organizations found that the state Office of Community Development and its contractor, ICF, mismanaged the program. They distributed grants without verifying that people were eligible, according to the testimony of a top state official. Some homeowners said Road Home representatives told them they could use the money to rebuild.

HUD, which funded the program, found widespread noncompliance with grant requirements. The agency told the state to recover any misspent funds, leading to the lawsuits.

The state is seeking $103 million in the elevation lawsuits. So far, it has recovered about 5% of that from 425 families. Any money recovered would be returned to HUD.

The news organizations’ investigation sparked anger and calls from housing advocates and politicians to end the lawsuits. The New Orleans City Council passed a resolution calling on the state to drop the lawsuits.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Russel Honoré, who led federal troops into New Orleans after Katrina and is now an environmental advocate, called the state’s legal actions against its own residents a “travesty.”

“The house-raising issue after Katrina was a mess from the day it started,” he said.

Watch the Report

WWL-TV reports on Louisiana pausing collection efforts in elevation grant lawsuits.

State “Anxiously Awaiting” HUD Response

The state and HUD have been talking for years about what to do about people who didn’t elevate their homes. Documents provided by the state to the news outlets show the solution hinges on the resolution of the state’s lawsuit against ICF.

In its lawsuit, the state alleges ICF committed “numerous breaches” of its contract, citing errors in handling files, deciding who was eligible, calculating grants and handing out the money. At one point, the state estimated ICF handed out more than $137 million in grants that were either miscalculated or paid to ineligible homeowners, though Dardenne said that figure has decreased.

ICF has denied those allegations in court. Spokesperson Lauren Dyke has said the firm “worked within the policies put in place by the state.”

Shortly after the state sued ICF, the two sides entered settlement talks and eventually came to an agreement, documents show. The amount of the settlement was redacted in documents provided by the state.

Pat Forbes, executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development, which oversaw the Road Home program, wrote HUD in May 2021, asking if the proposed settlement would end the state’s liability for ineligible grants. A HUD official responded with steps the state must take to close out the program. Four months later, Forbes asked for an update. HUD said it should have an answer by March.

When that deadline passed, Dardenne wrote Fudge and Carter, saying the state and ICF were “anxiously awaiting” HUD’s answer.

In an April letter to Dardenne, a HUD official said issues with the state’s recordkeeping system had delayed the agency’s response. However, the official said the agency was analyzing the data and its analysis would be provided to HUD’s Office of Inspector General. After that, the letter said, HUD would be able to provide “sound guidance” on the proposed settlement.

HUD’s decision will determine what happens with the suits, Dardenne said.

When the ICF case is settled and HUD closes out the Road Home program, “all the pending cases are going to be dismissed,” he said. “The judgments are not going to be pursued. I mean, this would end everything.”

Homeowners Say They Were Pressured to Agree to Payment Plans

Two homeowners and an attorney representing two others said lawyers representing the state tried to strong-arm them into agreeing to payment plans. None of their accounts stem from efforts to collect this year.

Alice Sanders, who lives on Social Security, said Mary Cali, a senior partner at Shows, Cali & Walsh, “badgered” her into signing a $200 monthly payment plan last May and said Sanders would lose her home if she didn’t. Sanders did not have an attorney.

“It leaves me with no money. I can’t even buy my own groceries or medicine,” said Sanders, an associate minister who lives in Baton Rouge. “It’s a sin, what they’ve done against their own residents.”

Cali said that claims she pressured homeowners are “patently false. I have never threatened a homeowner with the loss of their home, and I find such allegations offensive.”

Forbes said he has “no reason to believe” the state’s attorneys threatened anyone or insinuated the state would take their home. The state will not foreclose on homeowners to collect these debts, he said.

Attorney Jennifer Jones said two families being sued by the state told her John Walsh, another senior partner in the firm, pressured them to sign agreements, called consent judgments, to repay the money. Jones, who only took on the families as clients later, said neither had a lawyer at the time.

“That’s a disgrace, for a plaintiff’s lawyer to be doing that to someone who is unrepresented,” Jones said. “They don’t know what the lawyer is telling them.”

Walsh did not respond to a request for comment.

Donna Hilliard, who contacted the news organizations after the investigation was published, said she, too, was a victim of the law firm’s aggressive tactics.

Left: Hilliard at her home in New Orleans. Right: Hilliard has filled her home with sculptures of turtles, which she says she loves because they symbolize patience and longevity. (Sophia Germer/The Advocate | The Times-Picayune)

A tree pierced her roof during Hurricane Katrina, but the home never flooded. The house was already a couple feet off the ground, so when she and her husband, Honoray, were offered Road Home money in 2007, they checked a box saying they didn’t want an elevation grant.

And yet, two years later, the Road Home program awarded them the elevation money. Hilliard said she never planned to raise her house, but a Road Home representative told her not to fret.

The state sued the Hilliards in 2021 because they had not raised their home.

Hilliard said she was “bullied” last year by three attorneys, including Cali, who told her she should agree to a payment plan.

A longtime hospice nurse, Hilliard was having her own health problems at the time. She was undergoing chemotherapy, and she and her husband couldn’t afford a lawyer.

So they signed an agreement in February to pay the state $250 a month for five years, with a $15,000 balloon payment due at the end. Now 56 and using a cane, she doesn’t know how she’ll afford it.

“I just want them to stop it now, so that I could be able to live whatever time I have left without that hanging over my head,” Hilliard said. “I don’t look for nobody to do nothing for me. When you do me wrong, just fix it.”

Did You Get the Help You Needed After a Hurricane or Tropical Storm? We’re Investigating Disaster Relief.

by Jenny Deam

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When a Texas law enforcement official last week laid out how police waited in the halls of Robb Elementary School while children trapped with the gunman pleaded for help, my mind went back to 23 years ago.

April 20, 1999. I remember it all too clearly. Two teenagers methodically murdered 12 classmates and a teacher inside Columbine High School in Colorado, and even though police swarmed to the scene quickly, they stayed outside, waiting. Those within hung a sign in a window to alert officers below: “1 bleeding to death.” The SWAT team ignored it. When officers finally searched the building, they found the body of Dave Sanders, a teacher shot hours before.

Patrick Ireland also was waiting for help as he dragged himself 50 feet across broken glass in the school library after being shot three times, including twice in the head. The then-17-year-old propelled himself out a second-story window, captured on live television by news crews in helicopters. He became known as the “boy in the window.”

Law enforcement response to mass shootings was supposedly overhauled after Columbine to no longer wait before storming a building. Society, too, supposedly turned introspective, drawing a line of demarcation. Lots of talk of never again. Back then it was my solace — as a reporter, a mother, a human. The image of terrified children with their arms raised was surely part of never again.

But in the more than two decades since that promise has turned into an American myth.

In a journalism career that has taken me from Colorado to Texas to Washington, D.C., I have covered seven of these shootings, some in the chaos of the moment, some in their aftermath.

Columbine. Platte Canyon High School. Virginia Tech. Deer Creek Middle School. Aurora movie theater. Arapahoe High School. Santa Fe High School.

I have written thousands of words about them over the years, searching for ways to convey the massive damage to a public who thinks it could never happen in their community. None of my words ever came close.

I carry with me the anguished faces and voices, a kind of personal shrapnel that can never be dislodged. I suspect every reporter on this duty does.

I think of the carful of teenage boys who circled the parking lot of Gateway High School in Aurora, Colorado, five times throughout the day July 20, 2012. They hung from open car windows shouting to anyone who would listen: “Where’s A.J.?” “Has anyone heard from A.J.?”

They had been chasing social media rumors all day to find their friend in the hours after a gunman sprayed bullets into a packed movie theater. They knew A.J. had gone there to see the midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

They called hospital after hospital and continued to return to the high school, now set up as a gathering place for the family members of the missing. The last time I saw them it was starting to get dark, 20 hours after the shooting. The hope I saw earlier had been replaced with dread.

Alexander Jonathan Boik, 18, an aspiring artist, was among the 12 people who died in the massacre.

I think of Reagan Weber, the seventh grader who lived just a few blocks away from me. She was shot and wounded Feb. 23, 2010, when a man opened fire on students at Deer Creek Middle School in Jefferson County, Colorado. All three of my kids went to Deer Creek, not that year but the year before and after.

I sat with Reagan’s father, Craig Weber, in their living room the day after the Aurora theater shooting. He quietly talked about how worried he was about her, watching closely for signs of reignited trauma. He spoke of feeling helpless. Earlier that day, Reagan’s older sister texted “I love you” to her as word spread across Denver of the massacre. By coincidence, Reagan was in a midmorning showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Reagan texted back, “I’m terrified.”

I think, too, of Whitney Riley matter-of-factly rattling off the questions she asked herself after hearing the first gunshots at Arapahoe High School on Dec. 13, 2013. Riley, along with six other students and two teachers, had crammed into a tiny sprinkler supply room, no bigger than a closet. She wondered if she should confront the gunman? Should she run, and if she did, would she stop to help the wounded even if it meant sacrificing her own life?

I watched Whitney’s father stiffen as his 15-year-old daughter talked about how this had simply become part of her adolescence. It was Whitney’s second school shooting in three years. She had been at Deer Creek.

I think of Andrew Goddard sitting in a darkened hospital room at the bedside of his son, Colin, who had been shot four times in a Virginia Tech classroom. Andrew described how blood seeped out of bullet holes in Colin’s shattered body and spread across the sheets and pillowcases. The face of the shooter seemed to glare down from the television above his son’s bed. Goddard said he made a silent pact with the universe in that moment that if Colin were allowed to survive, he would do everything he could to make sure no other parent had to feel what he was feeling.

I also remember the Aurora movie theater 911 calls, played in a courtroom. In the background of those frantic calls was an odd thumping boom like the bass of a rap song turned up too high. I remember the collective gasp as everyone, including me, realized the sound was the rhythmic blasts of semiautomatic weaponry picking off people inside the theater.

The language and way mass shootings are reported has evolved in my time of writing about them. Mostly gone is the “thoughts and prayers” cliché. In the Aurora aftermath, parents of the victims started the “No Notoriety” campaign, chiding the news media to stop writing more about the gunman (and they are almost always male) than the victims, elevating murderers to the celebrity status they craved. That has stuck.

Now there is a new discussion making the rounds of newsrooms. Have we sanitized the carnage? Last week, Vanity Fair posed the question of whether it is time to post images of what gunfire actually does to bodies. I understand the impulse to shake the nation’s conscience, and maybe that is what we now need. But the reality of those pictures would be horrifying. In the hours after the Columbine shootings, parents still waiting for word about their children were asked to bring dental records to help identify the dead.

When my editor first suggested I write this piece, I was hesitant. Anything I have felt pales to the lifelong grief of the survivors, witnesses and families of the slain. And other reporters have covered more and seen worse. Some say our part of this now familiar dance is ghoulish. I cannot disagree. But I think, too, it is crucial.

Two decades in, though, I am no longer naïve. I no longer believe in never again.

by Robert Faturechi

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

The South Dakota attorney general has closed its investigation into billionaire T. Denny Sanford for possession of child pornography and is not filing charges, according to a notice the office sent to a judge Friday.

The office “has completed its investigation” and “has determined that there are no prosecutable offenses within the jurisdiction of the State of South Dakota,” deputy attorney general Brent Kempema wrote.

The attorney general’s office provided no details on how that decision was made or whether Sanford is being investigated in any other jurisdictions or by federal authorities.

“Mr. Sanford appreciates the public acknowledgement by the SD Attorney General’s office” that the office’s Division of Criminal Investigation “has concluded its investigation and they have found no prosecutable crime,” one of Sanford’s attorneys, former South Dakota attorney general Marty Jackley, told ProPublica.

In 2020, ProPublica first reported that South Dakota authorities had started investigating the state’s richest man and had referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Earlier this year, South Dakota officials acknowledged Sanford was still being actively investigated by federal and state authorities.

The Department of Justice declined to comment about whether its probe was still open.

The investigation of Sanford started with a tip from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, court records show. The center is a private nonprofit that operates a tip line where people and companies can report images of suspected child sex trafficking and abuse. The organization’s staff reviews the tips and refers them to law enforcement.

Investigators obtained five search warrants in 2019 and 2020 for Sanford’s email, phone and internet data. It’s unclear what, if anything, investigators found in the searches.

ProPublica won access to the search warrants after more than a year of litigation that reached the state’s highest court. Sanford unsuccessfully asked the courts to conceal the search warrants, which are supposed to be publicly accessible under state law, and to block ProPublica’s reporting.

ProPublica is continuing a legal effort to obtain other records filed with the court that detailed why there was cause for those warrants. Sanford is fighting to keep those records private.

Sanford’s attorney has previously said that Sanford’s email account was hacked and being used by someone else.

In a new filing Friday, another of Sanford’s lawyers said a forensic examination of Sanford’s email account “uncovered the specific name of an individual other than the Implicated Individual having gained access.”

“Further evidence includes corroborating evidence of hacking,” Sanford’s attorney wrote, without providing any details.

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by Irena Hwang

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

When I was assigned to a ProPublica collaboration with Oregon Public Broadcasting last year, I was excited to dive into a topic that was totally new to me: fish hatcheries. Over the past two centuries, development has decimated wild salmon and steelhead trout populations in the Pacific Northwest. First overfishing, then hydropower development, destroyed a key component of the local ecosystem, and with it the traditional ways of life for some of the Northwest’s Indigenous people. To address plummeting fish stocks, the U.S. government has poured billions into a network of hatcheries to literally mass-produce fish.

My task was to perform a first-of-its-kind comprehensive analysis of these publicly funded salmon and steelhead trout hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest. As someone who, for years, kept a faithful inventory of my freezer using Google Sheets, I thought this sounded like a reasonable goal. Heck, maybe even a good time. (In hindsight, this may explain why I have so much trouble making friends.)

It was not a good time.

Our investigation ultimately found that the hatchery system built to prop up vulnerable fish populations was failing.

We didn’t find this out with a comprehensive, hatchery-by-hatchery analysis. Our initial idea for how to start the analysis turned out to be impossible. But in the process of discovering that, I learned a little more about how data reporting and science can be tightly intertwined, and about the importance of recognizing the difference between the two. When I missed that distinction, I ended up with a project that spun out of control.

Tag, You’re (Not) It

Like many data reporting projects, this one started with publicly available data. My co-reporter, Tony Schick at Oregon Public Broadcasting, part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, sent over a link to a database of tiny metal tags that had been embedded in millions of juvenile salmon and steelhead trout in the Columbia River Basin. The database contains tons of detail about hatchery fish, including the hatchery where they were produced and where they were released into rivers. You can also use the database to get details about the fates of those fish, whether they ended up in a commercial fishing net in the ocean or in a tribe’s ceremonial catch, or, for the lucky few, back at a hatchery spawning ground. (Congratulations on attaining your biological imperative, fish!)

Grouped by production year and hatchery, the data seemed perfect for revealing how well each of the 29 publicly funded facilities was doing in its goal of breeding fish that could make it to the ocean, where they finish maturing, and then survive the trip back upriver to breed again. I thought it would tell us who the winners and losers were in the hatchery Olympics.

My next step was to interview as many fish data experts as I could. I was a little overwhelmed with the details that had initially excited me, and I wanted some guidance on what data fields and criteria I should use to assess each of the 29 facilities. Within months, I went from knowing zero fish biologists to a whole school of them, and I ran my idea of building this comprehensive database past them.

It should have been a red flag that none of my interviewees immediately said, “Oh yes, what a great idea, please do.” Instead, I got a lot of cautionary looks.

Approximately 873 pages into a pile of reports the experts had shared with me, I began to understand why. I realized that in the world of hatcheries, there is no one metric for success. Each hatchery seemed to have a different target for the number of juveniles it released. Each also seemed interested in measuring different characteristics of spawning adults. And some hatcheries counted fish who were caught in the ocean as a success while others were only concerned with fish who survived long enough to return to the river. A few hatcheries I researched were analyzing fish genetics, which helps scientists keep tabs on the trajectory of a certain population through time and geography.

(Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

This lack of standardization was frustrating, but it also made sense because individual hatcheries and programs often have different goals. A hatchery charged with rehabilitating an endangered salmon population will want to count something different than a hatchery that’s creating a supply for sport fishing.

That fact helped explain another thing I noticed in the reports: Some of them didn’t seem to be about a single hatchery. Instead, they referred to programs that the hatchery participated in. Brood stock might be collected at one location, their eggs fertilized at a different place, with juveniles moved to yet another facility to mature, and finally transported to a fourth site for release. The hatchery analysis idea had gone bust.

One Fish, Two Fish, Trends Across Entire Groups of Fish

With some serious holes now poked in my initial idea, I decided to revisit a data portal that various hatcheries staffers had mentioned. Maintained by the Columbia Basin Research center at the University of Washington, the portal reports data about a different type of tag than the ones I was initially looking into. The first group of tags, called coded wire tags, are relatively low-tech and can be embedded in a lot of fish; this sounds like a good thing, except the tags have to be removed from the fish’s snout in order to be read, a process that the fish will not survive. This means that tags are typically collected from fish that have died naturally or after being caught. The data from Columbia Basin Research, by contrast, is based on a type of microchip known as a passive integrated transponder, or PIT, which can be easily detected by a sensor as the fish pass by. If you’ve ever paid a highway toll using an EZPass, you and a fish swimming through a dam in Oregon have more in common than you think.

I’d initially dismissed PIT tag data because I knew that far fewer fish are being tagged with those tags than with coded wires. But the research center’s PIT tag data had two main advantages. For one thing, the fish were grouped by population, defined by species, geography, migration season and history. (Over the decades, dams have had a profound effect on fish populations: Out of nine historic groups of sockeye previously recorded around the Snake River, only one group has survived the building of the dams.) Now that my hatchery-focused approach had imploded, populations seemed like an ideal way to look at how fish were doing.

The research center’s data was also grouped by the location where the tags were scanned, which made it easy to pick a single place and then compare multiple fish populations that passed that spot, even if they’d been grown or released in different parts of the Columbia River Basin. Choosing a point near the mouth of the Columbia River would allow us to see how many of the fish who made it down to the ocean survived to adulthood and began the journey back upstream.

This estimate of ocean survival is by no means comprehensive. But it is a quantity that one of the University of Washington researchers described to me as a snapshot of the “return on investment” of hatchery activities.

This, at last, was the tag data we were looking for.

Angling for Answers

As helpful as the Columbia Basin Research portal was, questions remained, like what counts as success.

There was one figure that kept popping up in large-scale reviews of the hatcheries system. In 2003, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a federal agency developed to help balance hydropower and conservation priorities in the Pacific Northwest, determined that adult fish would have to return at an average rate of at least 4% to rebuild salmon and steelhead populations. In other words, for every 100 juvenile fish sent to the ocean, four would have to return to fresh water and get a fair shake at spawning. That benchmark has been reviewed and affirmed by independent panels of experts multiple times since its adoption, and it has been cited numerous times by fish biologists in peer-reviewed publications.

But even if we had a benchmark, we still had to decide what time period to look at. When we talked to experts, time and again they mentioned that, like anything in nature, fish survival is extremely volatile. For the same reason that I base decisions about socializing on rolling averages of COVID-19 data, rather than on the statistics reported for a single day, it makes sense to consider fish population survival over multiple years, rather than comparing one year’s survival rates to another’s. So what time span should we look at, and why?

Climate and ocean conditions, which matter a lot for these fish, have tended to follow yearslong trends. On the advice of researchers, we chose two time periods to analyze: The years 2008-2013 represent some of the best Pacific climate conditions seen in recent history, while 2014-2018 were some of the worst, and, conveniently, the most recent complete data available for our fish.

So we went with it. Instead of the database of hatchery-by-hatchery performance we’d initially envisioned, I ended up with just 16 numbers: two for each of the eight salmon or trout populations we focused on, with each number representing how things have been for the fish in a recent good period and in the most recent available period, which was bad.

The Once and Future Fish

It was a bit disappointing to report just 16 numbers after months of work. There is so much more to fish biology that I learned from my chats with all those experts.

But the numbers I reported were important: They showed that between 2014 and 2018, none of the fish populations met the 4% population-restoration benchmark. Even when conditions were good, between 2008 and 2013, only two out of the eight populations managed to have more than 4% of their members make it back to fresh water as adults.

Simple as they are, these numbers are an important way to get the conversation started and to raise hard questions about hatcheries. Were these facilities, intended to out-game nature, working? Would they be effective in the changing climate? And if not, how can we keep generating power through dams on the Columbia River and still fulfill U.S. treaties that guaranteed fish to the Indigenous people of the Northwest?

(Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

The more work I did to get that handful of numbers, the more I realized that the comprehensive study of hatcheries we’d initially envisioned sounded suspiciously like a Ph.D. thesis on wildlife ecology. Tempting as it might be to start another doctorate, I backed away from that initial goal, and in hindsight it was the right decision.

Because sometimes the best thing a data reporter should do isn’t a super-ambitious, large-scale analysis. More detail doesn’t always mean more insight, or give you the best takeaway from a story. Sometimes data reporting means slogging through thousands of pages of reports and connecting the dots on existing research about a topic so you can present just a handful of telling numbers.

This project reminded me that the second word in my job title, reporter, is just as important as the first.

Correction

June 6, 2022: This story originally gave a mistaken impression of the circumstances under which coded wire tags are removed from fish. The tags are taken from fish that are already dead, not from living fish that are killed by the process.

by Kyle Hopkins, 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.

A special prosecutor has charged Alaska’s former acting attorney general with three counts of sexual abuse of a minor for having sex with a 17-year-old girl he coached on a high school mock trial team in May 1991.

The charges were filed Friday in Alaska state court in Anchorage against Clyde “Ed” Sniffen, who served as acting attorney general from August 2020 to January 2021. Gov. Mike Dunleavy asked the Department of Law to appoint an independent investigator to review the case after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica first reported in January 2021 that a woman had accused Sniffen of sexual misconduct.

Sniffen resigned as the newsrooms were preparing the article. In his resignation letter, Sniffen wrote that he had decided to step aside “after discussions with family, and for personal reasons.” Sniffen’s attorney declined comment and said he would not make his client available for an interview.

Dunleavy had appointed Sniffen as his permanent attorney general, subject to confirmation by the Legislature, days before his resignation. At that time, the governor said Sniffen “has a long and proven record of leadership within the Department of Law and I am proud to appoint him to serve as our state’s next Attorney General.”

Sniffen replaced former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson, who resigned after the Daily News and ProPublica reported he had sent hundreds of questionable texts to a female colleague. In his resignation letter, Clarkson wrote, “I regret that my actions and errors in judgment in interacting with a state employee have become a distraction to the good work and good people working in the state’s and your service.”

Former Acting Alaska Attorney General Ed Sniffen (National Association of Attorneys General)

Nikki Dougherty White, now 48, told the news organizations that Sniffen first had sex with her during a mock trial team competition in New Orleans and continued their sexual relationship upon returning to Anchorage. Those allegations form the basis for the felony charges filed Friday.

White had come forward publicly for the first time after learning that Sniffen had been appointed attorney general.

Reached by phone Friday, special prosecutor Gregg Olson declined to discuss the details of the charges. White also declined to comment.

The Department of Law, in a statement issued late Friday, said: “Within 24 hours of learning of the allegations against Mr. Sniffen, this office acted to appoint a special prosecutor in the interest of justice, fairness, and transparency. Now that the charges have been filed, the special prosecutor will continue to make decisions independent from the Department of Law to bring the case to resolution.”

The Law Department statement continued: “The allegation that Mr. Sniffen took advantage of his authority to engage in sexual acts with the victim is disturbing and disappointing. As attorneys who work on behalf of the State to hold people accountable, we expect to be held to the same level of accountability. This further compels us to be advocates for victims, and more importantly, clearly emphasize our role is to ensure justice for every Alaskan.”

Anchorage police investigated the case, interviewing White and other former members of the mock trial team who joined Sniffen on the trip to New Orleans.

Friday’s criminal complaint, which was first reported by the Alaska Beacon, focuses on Sniffen’s alleged actions in Alaska, following the New Orleans trip. Sniffen is accused of having sex with White, who is identified by her initials in the complaint, three times between May 13 and May 28, 1991.

The complaint says the offenses took place at the homes of Sniffen’s friends and at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. Sniffen was 27 years old at the time.

Under an Alaska law enacted in 1990, months before Sniffen and White traveled to New Orleans, it was illegal for an adult to have sex with a 16- or 17-year-old whom he or she was teaching, counseling or coaching. (In many other instances, the age of consent in Alaska is 16.)

Olson said the charges carry a maximum of five years in prison each. Because of the timing of the alleged offense, Sniffen would not be required to register as a sex offender if convicted, he said.

by Megan O’Matz

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Cole Wist was a Republican state House member in Colorado with an A grade from the NRA. Then, in 2018, he supported a red flag law, sponsoring a bill to allow guns to be taken away — temporarily — from people who pose an immediate threat to themselves or others.

Wist lost his seat in the legislature that year in the face of an intense backlash from Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a gun rights organization in Colorado that boasts it accepts “no compromise” as it battles “the gun grabbers.” The group campaigned against him, distributing flyers and referring to him on social media as “Cole the Mole.”

Wist, an attorney, doesn’t regret trying to enact what he considered a measured response to an epidemic of gun violence in the United States. He acted after a mentally ill man in his Denver suburb killed a sheriff’s deputy. The bill didn’t pass until after Wist was out of office and his successor, Tom Sullivan, shepherded it through. Sullivan is a Democrat who lost his son in the Aurora theater massacre.

Wist left the Republican Party this year, citing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as the reason, and is now unaffiliated with any political party. Days after the slaughter of 19 children and 2 adults in an elementary school in Texas, ProPublica talked to Wist about the challenges ahead as proponents once again work to enact gun reforms.

Colorado is one of 19 states, including Illinois, Florida and Indiana, that have red flag laws, sometimes called extreme risk protection orders. Texas does not. After the Robb Elementary School murders on Tuesday, a bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate agreed to negotiate over possible anti-violence measures, including expanding red flag laws.

In Colorado, a spokesperson for the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners called Wist “a sellout” on Friday and said the organization had no choice but to work against him. “At the end of the day, my goal is to hold politicians accountable regardless of whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat,” said RMGO’s Executive Director Taylor Rhodes.

Rhodes called the assault on the elementary school a “massive terrorist attack” but said gun control is not the answer.

“We protect everything in our nation that’s valuable with guns. We protect our banks with guns, courthouses … our homes. We protect them with guns.” The group’s logo includes an image of a firearm that resembles an assault rifle.

This interview with Wist has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about why you introduced the legislation in Colorado.

Every time we have an incident like this, people tend to go into their camps. We’ve got some folks who say we should ban certain kinds of guns or expand universal background checks or any other number of policy proposals to try to eliminate guns from society. On the other hand, you have folks who say no, these are mental health issues, this is an indication of a larger mental health crisis in the country. But you know, I don’t really hear a whole lot of policy solutions from those folks. So in an effort to try to pair concerns about mental health and the combination of mental health crisis with access to firearms and weapons, I started investigating extreme risk protection orders and how they’ve been passed in other states. And one of the first states in the country to do this was Indiana. And I don’t think you’d really think that Indiana is a hard left state, by any means. … And ultimately, I decided to sponsor legislation relating to extreme risk protection orders.

When you served in the state legislature, the Republicans controlled the state Senate and Democrats had the House. What was the makeup of your district?

I represented a district that at that time was predominantly Republican. It had historically elected Republican legislators, but it was a suburban district becoming more purple. And, you know, look, when you’re elected to represent a district in the legislature, you’re not just elected by the people that voted for you, you’re elected to represent everyone in the district, and that includes unaffiliated and Democratic voters.

Who opposed you when you ran for reelection in 2018?

So there’s a group called the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a very active gun rights organization. They targeted me or targeted my race for campaign activity and actively worked against me. … They put flyers on people’s doors, including my own door, and used their resources to campaign against me.

An image from the “Rocky Mountain Gun Owners - Official Page” on Facebook. (Screenshot taken by ProPublica)

Are the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners similar to the National Rifle Association?

I think they characterize themselves as being the no-compromise gun rights organization. So I would characterize them as certainly more aggressive on gun rights issues than the NRA, and the NRA is the more well-known organization, the one with more resources. But in Colorado, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners is the gun rights group that seems to have the most sway. They’ve been successful in recalling a couple of legislators here.

Did it seem like they sacrificed your seat to send a message to other lawmakers to stay in line?

I guess that’s a fair interpretation, that you either stay in line and vote the party line on this issue, or they will remove you. And that’s what they did. I mean, there were other factors in play in 2018. That was also the midterm election of Donald Trump’s first term in office or his only term in office. … So there were more issues in play than gun policy. But it was certainly a group that worked against my reelection and didn’t help. … It might have been enough to suppress turnout on the Republican side for me.

What was the reaction from the GOP leadership to your sponsorship of the red flag bill?

I was the assistant minority leader in the state House at that point. There was an effort to strip me of that leadership post. That effort failed. I think there’s some reluctance in Republican circles here to take on groups like the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners for fear of getting primaried, for fear of having them work against you. And I suppose people may look at my experience as being something that deters them from even having conversations. I introduced a bill that was very controversial. In those circles, even being open to conversations about gun policy or gun safety legislation creates risk for folks in Republican circles here. So, if your objective is to stay in office for a long time and continue to get reelected … you don’t cross that line.

In the aftermath of Uvalde, what does your experience suggest about the likelihood of our politicians enacting some measures to prevent future atrocities?

I see some of the same signs happening again, in the aftermath of this event, where everyone sort of retreats to the corners. And some people are calling for banning certain kinds of guns and changing the purchase age for certain kinds of guns. If you try to ban AR-15s, I think that’s a policy solution that some people think is something we should do. I don’t agree with that. We’ve got millions of guns already in the possession of gun owners across the country. How much of an impact are you going to have if you ban certain kinds of guns at this point? I think a better discussion is to talk about why people commit these kinds of violent acts with guns and other weapons. … And so I think red flag laws and legislation that focuses on trying to reduce risk and talking about why these kinds of events happen is the most productive conversation for us to have. Let’s give law enforcement and families tools that they can use.

But one of the things that’s lost in this conversation is that — I’ll talk specifically about Colorado — we have one of the highest suicide rates in the country. We also have one of the highest percentages of gun ownership in the country, and the highest percentage of suicides here are committed by guns. So when folks are going through a severe mental crisis, yes, there’s a risk that they might go commit a homicide, but there’s probably a greater risk that they’re going to hurt themselves. So I think there’s this way of characterizing red flag laws as confiscating guns and trying to hurt someone’s constitutional rights. But instead, I think it’s something that’s being used to help protect that person, to prevent them from harming themselves and prevent them from harming family members.

Can you describe the toll this experience took on you and your family?

I received threats as a result of going through that process. And that was very stressful for my family. I don’t miss that part of public life. And, you know, social media and other things have made being in office very difficult. And folks can say just about anything and do say just about anything. So I can choose to do a couple of things. As a private citizen, I can kind of retreat from this and not talk about it, or try to do what I can to raise awareness and just try to encourage folks to come together. I don’t know that you’re ever going to change everyone’s minds. But we don’t solve problems unless we talk to each other and not talk past each other. And every time we have an incident like what happened in Texas this week, there’s sort of the initial, let’s talk, let’s come together, let’s talk about this. But I’m just amazed at how quickly everyone just sort of retreats to the same old political position. I hope this time is different.

by Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

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

When Hawaii lawmakers moved this month to pump $600 million into the state’s Native Hawaiian homesteading program, they said they wanted to help those who are most in need. The problem: They didn’t say whom, exactly, they had in mind.

Now, the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the agency that oversees the long-troubled program, faces the difficult task of setting priorities and crafting a plan for how to spend the single largest injection of funds in the history of the century-old initiative. Under the program, anyone who is at least 50% Native Hawaiian is entitled to lease land for $1 a year and to either build or buy a home there. DHHL officials could use the new appropriation for a variety of measures, from developing residential lots to acquiring land to offering mortgage and rental subsidies.

At issue is how to help two different groups languishing on a waitlist of nearly 29,000 people. One is made up of Native Hawaiians who can afford a home but face a long line for DHHL housing. The other is made up of those who can’t.

In 2020, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found that the homesteading program was leaving behind thousands of low-income beneficiaries in that second category, in part because DHHL was developing new subdivision housing that was too expensive for them to afford. The average price was $300,000 to $400,000.

In positioning the $600 million bill for final passage, legislators amended it to give DHHL greater flexibility in deciding how to spend the money, including deleting a provision that allocated the bulk of funding to 17 planned projects totaling about 3,000 lots — a provision that would have helped those ready to purchase units that had yet to be built.

Legislators said they gave the agency more latitude so it could better address the wide range of needs and preferences of people on the waitlist. “DHHL is in a better position to do that, not the Legislature,” House Speaker Scott Saiki said.

For its part, DHHL said it is reviewing legislative reports and testimony, including written comments from beneficiaries. “Our goal is to signal to the community what implementation will look like as soon as possible,” department spokesperson Cedric Duarte said.

Gov. David Ige is expected to sign the $600 million legislation, and the department has until Dec. 10 to submit a spending plan. But because Ige’s term ends in December, implementation will fall to the next administration.

Native Hawaiians are not waiting though.

Leaders of the two largest beneficiary organizations said they do not trust the department, which has been blasted by federal and state watchdogs for mismanagement over the years, to craft an effective plan. Those groups, the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations and the Association of Hawaiians for Homestead Lands, have teamed up to develop their own. The spending roadmap, those leaders say, must be developed by the people who own the land trust, have suffered from the long waits for homesteads and will be directly affected by how the money is used.

“It’s time for nonbeneficiaries to mind their manners and sit down,” Robin Danner, chair of the council, said in an interview. “We beneficiaries are taking responsibility.”

This month, the two groups held the first of a series of meetings to gather feedback from beneficiaries. And if early conversations are any indication, the organizations will have to reconcile divergent views among Native Hawaiians. Some say any financial aid should first go to those on the waitlist who otherwise cannot afford to purchase a home.

Oahu beneficiary Gregory Ah Yat, who turns 70 in August, has been a renter all his adult life. He has been on the waitlist since the late 1980s and passed on several potential lease offerings over the years because he couldn’t afford them. He favors DHHL providing need-based aid. “I know some people will still grumble, but that’s the purpose of the help,” he said.

The legislation does permit DHHL to use an applicant’s income to set priorities on who to help, and it authorizes the department to provide down-payment, mortgage and rental subsidies to waitlisters, though the department must first establish guidelines for such assistance.

But others think help should be offered uniformly, based strictly on an applicant’s position on the waitlist. They want to see the money used to develop more housing, which typically costs the program’s beneficiaries roughly half the market price because they are not paying for the land — a valuable benefit in a state with one of the hottest real estate markets in the country.

Liberta Hussey-Albao, 78, said she first applied for a homestead in the 1970s and remains on the Kauai waitlist even though she owns a home there. Hussey-Albao wants the homestead for her adult son, who also lives on Kauai but is not a homeowner and doesn’t meet the blood-level requirement to be on the waitlist; beneficiaries must be at least 50% Native Hawaiian.

If DHHL bases financial assistance on need, some applicants who have waited decades for a homestead will be passed over, depriving them of something they are entitled to, according to Hussey-Albao. “Let’s be fair,” she said. “Those on the top of the list are old and dying.”

Either way, policymakers have another key factor to consider: a tight deadline. The legislation requires DHHL to allocate the $600 million by June 30, 2025; any remaining money must be returned to the state’s general fund. “If even $1 of this lapses because it went unused, I think that will be a disaster,” said state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, co-chair of the Legislature’s Native Hawaiian caucus. “Maybe there's some hyperbole there, but you get what I’m trying to say.”

by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan

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

For nearly a decade, U.S. officials watched with alarm as a shadowy network of Russian mercenaries connected to the Kremlin wreaked havoc in Africa, the Middle East and most recently Ukraine.

A number of them now say they wish the U.S. government had done more.

President Vladimir Putin has increasingly relied on the Wagner Group as a private and unaccountable army that enables Russia to pursue its foreign policy objectives at low cost and without the political backlash that can come from foreign military intervention, U.S. officials and national security experts said.

In recent years, governments in the Middle East and Africa hired the fighters to crush insurgencies, protect natural resources and provide security — committing grave human rights abuses in the process, according to U.S. officials and international watchdogs.

In Syria, Wagner fighters were filmed gleefully beating a Syrian army deserter with a sledgehammer before cutting off his head. In the Central African Republic, United Nations investigators received reports that the mercenaries raped, tortured and murdered civilians. In Libya, Wagner allegedly booby-trapped civilian homes with explosives attached to toilet seats and teddy bears. Last month, German intelligence officials linked Wagner mercenaries to indiscriminate killings in Ukraine.

The U.S. was slow to respond to the danger, and it now finds itself struggling to restrain the use of the mercenaries across the globe, according to interviews with more than 15 current and former diplomatic, military and intelligence officials. Unilateral sanctions have done little to deter the group. Diplomacy has stumbled.

“There was no unified or systematic U.S. policy toward the group,” said Tibor Nagy, who served the State Department for nearly three decades, most recently as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs until 2021.

Tibor Nagy (Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images)

The Kremlin officially denies any connection with the activities of Russian mercenaries abroad, and much about Wagner’s structure and leadership remains unclear. But experts say that Wagner’s top officers have participated in meetings between foreign leaders and top Russian officials. They also say the Russian air force has transported Wagner fighters to launch the group’s international missions.

Wagner has spread around the world, particularly in Africa, because it presents an enticing package to leaders of embattled nations, experts said. It offers to quash terrorism and rebel threats with brutal military crackdowns, while rallying public support for their government clients through disinformation campaigns.

U.S. officials said they have felt underequipped in trying to curtail the mercenaries’ incursions, in part because American diplomacy in Africa has been gradually stripped of resources over the past three decades. Some also said the U.S. was slow to appreciate the severity of the Wagner threat before it became a formidable weapon in the Kremlin’s arsenal.

In Africa, American efforts to persuade governments not to work with Wagner have generally been late and ineffectual, the officials said. U.S. diplomats have been surprised when Wagner arrives in a faltering country, leaving them scrambling to counter the group’s influence with limited tools and incentives.

During the Cold War, America’s policy of containing the spread of Soviet communism led to a substantial investment in courting African leaders, offering developmental aid, university exchange programs, even concerts. But when the Berlin Wall fell, so too did the U.S. government’s interest in the African continent, the officials told ProPublica. Embassy staffs shrank; programs shriveled.

“America’s soft power is unbeatable, but it needs to be deployed,” Nagy told ProPublica. “The quiver is empty.”

Nagy and other current and former high-level State Department officials said embassies in Africa tend to employ few public diplomacy officers, with barebones staff that must juggle everything from routine visa issues to terrorist threats.

“That doesn’t leave a lot of time for a thin staff to develop the expertise or the relationships necessary to have or pursue a robust engagement strategy,” one senior State Department official said about efforts to steer foreign officials away from Wagner. “The ability of a fairly junior diplomatic officer to build a relationship with the Cabinet member who’s going to be making the decision — that is just not realistic in most cases.”

The State Department declined to comment. The Pentagon and the Kremlin did not respond to questions for this story.

The most visible U.S. effort to keep Wagner out of a specific country transpired in Mali, where the mercenaries arrived last December to fight jihadists rampaging in the north. Malian President Assimi Goïta had recently come to power in the latest of a series of coups that prompted international sanctions.

Before Wagner landed, Gen. Stephen Townsend, the head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, traveled to Mali to meet with Goïta. “I explained that I thought it was a bad idea to invite Wagner,” Townsend told Congress in March. “Wagner obeys no rules. They won’t follow the direction of the government.”

But the entreaties from Townsend and other U.S. officials were unsuccessful. Former diplomats say the effort was part of a troubling pattern where American officials parachute into complex situations equipped with little more than talking points. Africa Command declined to comment.

The Americans were telling the Malians not to work with the Wagner group but offering no meaningful alternatives, said J. Peter Pham, who served as the first-ever U.S. special envoy to the Sahel region until last year and maintains close contact with Malian and other African officials.

“You either have concrete programs of assistance, or you have personal relationships and diplomatic capital built up over the years that you can call upon,” Pham said. “Many American officials, often of middling rank, are often dispatched with neither.”

In March, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that Wagner mercenaries had participated in the torture of civilians, including by electrocution, while working with Malian soldiers. Last month, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report accusing Russian fighters of participating in a massacre of roughly 300 civilians during a military operation. The killing began at a crowded cattle market on March 27 and continued for several days. In a statement, State Department spokesman Ned Price said, “We are concerned that many reports suggest that the perpetrators were unaccountable forces from the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group.”

The Malian government has said that the Russians are helping their military as formal instructors, and that their army killed 203 “terrorists” and arrested 51 more during the operation. The Malian Embassy in the U.S. did not respond to requests for comment.

The Wagner group first attracted public notice in 2014, during the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. Its mercenaries fought alongside Russian federation forces, attacking Ukrainian forces in the still-contested Donbas region.

Gary Motsek, then a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, was alarmed by the emergence of what seemed to be a new breed of Russian mercenary.

For years, the Pentagon had been aware of Russian military contractors disregarding international law, Motsek said in an interview with ProPublica. But the contractors had mostly been consigned to securing oil tankers and other Russian assets. Now the Wagner Group was in combat, like a private army.

“Looking at the growth of the Wagner Group, it was clearly a missed opportunity” from roughly 2008 to 2010, Motsek said. “We should have made it a priority.”

At the time, Motsek led a Pentagon office that helped create international standards for private military contractors. He said the office focused on voluntary compliance and companies active in American warzones. When the Russians chose not to sign on to the standards, he was not aware of any effort to rein them in.

“It was probably my fault, more than anyone else, because I was the only one working on this on an almost daily basis,” Motsek told ProPublica. “We never went and said, ‘Let’s control these guys.’ I didn’t have the mandate to do that. And I guess I didn’t have the vision.”

American officials say Wagner operates through a web of shell companies controlled by the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, a food industry magnate with close ties to Putin, sardonically referred to as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin has vehemently denied his involvement in the group, supposedly named after the German composer — a favorite of one of the mercenaries’ alleged commanders. Efforts to reach Prigozhin were not successful.

Yevgeny Prigozhin (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

The U.S. sanctioned Prigozhin in 2016 and the Wagner Group in 2017 in response to their role in the Ukrainian conflict. Prigozhin was subsequently indicted for his alleged involvement in meddling with the 2016 U.S. presidential election through the troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

Experts say the Wagner Group appears to be paid in proceeds from natural resources like oil, gold and diamonds in countries where they are fighting. The Kremlin has used them as a cheap alternative to Russian armed forces.

“Russia has opened up military operations in two continents, for the first time since the 1980s,” said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University. “The tip of the spear is the Wagner Group.”

In 2015, Russia sent its military to fight in the Syrian civil war on behalf of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. It was the Kremlin’s first armed intervention outside former Soviet territories since the end of the Cold War. Soon, Russian Federation forces and fighters from Wagner and other mercenary groups helped tilt the war in Assad’s favor.

On Feb. 7, 2018, Wagner mercenaries and Syrian soldiers carried out an assault on a U.S. special forces outpost near the town of Khasham, hammering the American position with artillery rounds as the Russians and Syrians advanced. Americans responded with airstrikes in a four-hour battle, killing an estimated 200 combatants. No Americans died.

Joseph Votel, a retired four-star general, was then the head of U.S. Central Command. In an interview, he told ProPublica that he believes the assault was financially motivated, and that Wagner sought control of an oil field near an ongoing U.S.-led counterterror operation.

But Votel said U.S. commanders regarded the fight as an isolated incident rather than a significant development in souring relations between the two nations.

“I didn’t particularly dwell on it,” Votel said. “I wasn’t pressed on it. What happened, happened.”

Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said Russian military successes in the Syrian conflict represented an “inflection point for Russia.”

“They saw how quickly they could gain influence in a region where they’d had relatively little influence,” Siegle said.

In 2019, Wagner began to fight in the Libyan civil war, supporting a campaign by the warlord Khalifa Haftar to overthrow the country’s internationally recognized government. Haftar had appeared to be faltering, but, together, Wagner and rebel fighters launched a new offensive that brought their combined forces to the outskirts of Tripoli.

At the top levels of American foreign policy agencies, alarm bells were beginning to sound.

“We were watching it change the course of the war,” David Schenker, then assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said in an interview with ProPublica. “This was the beachhead. Wagner was the landing party.” Haftar’s attempt to retake Tripoli ultimately stalled after Turkey intervened on the opposing side. But if Haftar had succeeded, Schenker worried, Russia could have been rewarded with “a base on NATO’s southern flank.”

Schenker said he believed the most immediate potential countermeasure was to push the European Union to impose sanctions on Wagner and crack down on its finances. But he said many of his colleagues in the U.S. government and in Europe didn’t view that as realistic.

“I really pressed hard for a designation from the E.U. What’s complicated is that Russia routinely goes and assassinates dissidents in foreign countries,” he said. “People weren’t interested in angering Putin. Putin for these guys is like Voldemort.”

The E.U. did not impose sanctions on Wagner until December 2021.

In response to questions for this story, E.U. spokesperson Nabila Massrali said the E.U. aggressively sanctioned Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine and sanctioned Wagner “to take tangible action against those threatening international peace and security and breaching international law,” noting that all sanctions require unanimity among member countries.

As the Ukrainian conflict drags on and the Kremlin becomes further isolated from the global economy, experts say that Wagner is likely to play an increasingly important role in Russian foreign policy. The Wagner Group’s expansion could help Russia evade the impact of sanctions, entice governments to support it in the U.N. General Assembly and secure strategic positions in its fight against the NATO alliance.

Economically, Russia pales in comparison to superpowers like China and the United States. But in the Wagner group, officials said, Russia has found a cheap and novel foreign policy tool that America has yet to find a way to address. Client governments appear to absorb most of the cost.

“The Russians don’t have a blank checkbook,” said Nagy, the former top U.S. diplomat for Africa. “They are playing a fairly weak hand extremely, extremely well.”

ProPublica will continue to report on the Wagner group and the power struggle between the U.S. and Russia as it plays out around the globe. We are especially interested in relationships between Western companies and Russian mercenaries.

If you know about these issues, please contact reporters Joaquin Sapien at joaquin.sapien@propublica.org or Joshua Kaplan at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org. We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

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Doris Burke and Lynn Dombek contributed research.

by Kiah Collier and Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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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.

The fact that the gunman responsible for this week’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas, was able to buy two AR-15s days after his 18th birthday highlights how much easier it is for Americans to purchase rifles than handguns.

Under federal law, Americans buying handguns from licensed dealers must be at least 21, which would have precluded Salvador Ramos from buying that type of weapon. That trumps Texas law, which only requires buyers of any type of firearm to be 18 or older.

Following Tuesday’s massacre at Robb Elementary School, which killed 19 children and two adults, a growing number of lawmakers in Texas and beyond are calling for the minimum age to purchase assault rifles to be raised to 21 from 18. Doing so would require undoing nearly two centuries of more permissive regulations on so-called long guns.

“It’s something that could happen at either the state or federal level, but I don’t see movement on either front,” said Sandra Guerra Thompson, a criminal law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Only six states — Florida, Washington, Vermont, California, Illinois and Hawaii — have increased the minimum purchase age for long guns to 21, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The majority did so following the 2018 massacre in Parkland, Florida, where a then-19-year-old assailant killed 17 people at a high school.

Several states have since faced legal challenges.

The National Rifle Association sought to repeal the Florida law.

“The ban infringes the right of all 18-to-20-year-olds to purchase firearms for the exercise of their Second Amendment rights, even for self-defense in the home,” the NRA argued in a court filing, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “The ban does not just limit the right, it obliterates it.”

Government attorneys, however, argued that because “18-to-20-year-olds are uniquely likely to engage in impulsive, emotional, and risky behaviors that offer immediate or short-term rewards, drawing the line for legal purchase of firearms at 21 is a reasonable method of addressing the Legislature’s public safety concerns.”

A federal judge upheld the law last year; the NRA is appealing.

A U.S. Court of Appeals recently ruled that California’s version of the law was unconstitutional, though it did uphold a provision that requires adults under 21 to obtain a hunting license before buying a rifle or shotgun.

After the shooting in Uvalde this week, lawmakers in New York and Utah also called on their states to raise the age limit for long gun purchases to 21. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced federal legislation earlier this month — less than a week before the Uvalde shooting — that would raise the minimum age to purchase assault weapons to 21 from 18; the California Democrat said in a statement that it was in response to a shooting that killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket. That gunman also was 18 years old.

“It makes no sense that it’s illegal for someone under 21 to buy a handgun or even a beer, yet can legally buy an assault weapon,” she said.

Small rifles meant for children, including a miniature AR-15, for sale at a gun store in Austin. (Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune)

Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that increasing the age requirement at the federal level may be more effective because federal authorities can inspect and discipline licensed firearm sellers.

“State authorities often don’t have a system in place for enforcing the laws governing” licensed dealers, Nichols said.

In the hours after the shooting in Uvalde, there was some confusion about what types of firearms Ramos had used. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott initially said that Ramos had a handgun and possibly a rifle. That prompted some to speculate that Ramos had been able to get hold of the weapons more easily because of recent changes to the gun laws in Texas, including a bill passed last year that allows Texans to carry handguns without a permit or training. But those early reports turned out to be inaccurate.

After it became clear that the weapon used was a rifle, Texas Democrats questioned why Ramos was able to purchase one at the age of 18.

“Why do we accept a government that allows an 18 year old to buy an assault rifle, but not tobacco products?” state Rep. Nicole Collier, a Fort Worth Democrat who chairs the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, said in a statement. “The hypocrisy of government is deafening. We can develop gun policy that does not infringe upon one’s constitutional right, while preserving and protecting life; that’s called multitasking and we can do that.”

State Rep. Jarvis Johnson, a Houston Democrat, called on Abbott to convene a special session of the Legislature so lawmakers could “pass real gun reforms,” including raising the minimum age to purchase long guns.

“Enough is enough,” he said.

Such a move would reverse a decades-old Texas system that treats handguns differently from long guns, which have long been exempted from state rules on open carry.

The disparate rules date back to the post-Civil War era, when the state — counter to its modern-day reputation — adopted some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.

“Despite its stereotype of being a state where cowboys promiscuously tote six-shooters, Texas is one of the few states that absolutely prohibits the bearing of pistols by private individuals,” wrote firearms attorney Stephen Halbrook in a 1989 Baylor Law Review article, six years before former Texas Gov. George W. Bush relaxed rules on handguns considerably.

Following spasms of violence that were then plaguing the young state in the 19th century, lawmakers “started specifically targeting weapons that they equated with crime,” said Texas historian Brennan Rivas, who is writing a book about the state’s early gun laws. “They equated bowie knives, daggers and pistols with interpersonal violence and crime.”

Muskets, rifles and shotguns, by comparison, were excluded because they were used for hunting or participating in a militia.

“They didn’t consider long guns to be deadly weapons,” Rivas said. “Those had valuable uses. Whereas these other weapons were kind of like a plague on polite society.”

Lawmakers of that time could not have envisioned that long guns would evolve from lumbering hunting rifles into AR-15s capable of firing dozens of rounds per minute, Rivas added.

But any tighter requirements appear unlikely to pass in Texas.

Just last year, following high-profile massacres in El Paso and in Midland and Odessa in 2019, lawmakers approved a variety of measures that loosened gun regulations. In addition to authorizing the carrying of handguns in public without a permit or training, the laws ban the governor from limiting gun sales during an emergency and allow gun owners to bring their weapons into hotel rooms.

During a Wednesday press conference at Uvalde High School, Abbott repeated a claim he and other Republican state leaders have often made, that mental health issues are to blame for the streak of mass shootings, not lax gun regulations. Officials conceded that they were not aware that the gunman had any criminal or mental health issues.

“The ability of an 18-year-old to buy a long gun has been in place in the state of Texas for more than 60 years,” Abbott said. “And why is it that for the majority of those 60 years we did not have school shootings? And why is it that we do now?”