ProPublica

by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico, and Byard Duncan, ProPublica

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

If an arsonist or a construction company had ignited the fire that destroyed Meg Sandoval’s home and nearly everything she owned, New Mexico law would have allowed her to seek compensation for the stress of being forced to flee, the anguish of losing cherished belongings and the depression that set in as she remained in exile hundreds of miles away.

With few possessions to her name before the fire, that money would be a monumental help as she starts over.

But because the wildfire was accidentally triggered by two planned burns set by the U.S. Forest Service, Sandoval and other victims can seek compensation from a federal claims office only for things that have a price tag, like cars, houses and cattle.

That is the predicament facing many residents of northern New Mexico a year and a half after the biggest wildfire in state history drove them from their land and destroyed more than 430 of their homes. Despite what New Mexico law allows, the federal government claims it cannot follow it.

Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency say a federal law establishing a $4 billion fund to compensate wildfire victims limits those payments to tangible expenses like destroyed property, lost business and medical expenses.

FEMA officials have said that they “consulted with” the New Mexico attorney general’s office about their conclusion that the law does not permit them to pay for what’s called noneconomic damages. But the attorney general’s office told Source New Mexico and ProPublica it doesn’t agree with FEMA’s conclusion. A year ago, the attorney general’s office filed a public comment on FEMA’s proposed rules, saying victims of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire should be paid for noneconomic damages.

Now FEMA is being sued by victims who claim the agency is improperly denying them the money they deserve for the federal government’s mistake.

People with high-dollar ranches and some residents of a hard-hit subdivision with a golf course have already received substantial checks for their losses. Other residents, particularly renters and those who lived on familial homesteads, stand to get small checks because they didn’t own their homes or cannot prove to FEMA’s satisfaction that they did.

Many low-income victims of the fire lived sparely, counting the beauty and bounty of their land among their greatest assets. Payment for intangible losses could add up to more than they will get for the loss of their possessions.

“FEMA is punishing poor and middle-class people, the very people who need help the most,” said Gerald Singleton, a California lawyer representing more than 1,000 fire victims. “It will not have any effect on the wealthy, but it will be crippling to the poor and middle class.”

Some said they feel particularly betrayed because President Joe Biden promised the government would “fully compensate” victims for the Forest Service’s mistake.

A FEMA spokesperson declined to comment on Singleton’s criticism because of pending litigation. But she said the agency strives to treat everyone equally regardless of their income.

“One of the Claims Office’s cornerstone values is equity,” FEMA spokesperson Danielle Stomberg wrote in an email. “The Claims Office is required to compensate all claimants for their losses consistent with the law, and we encourage all claimants to submit their claims and all their documentation.”

At least 25,000 people were ordered to evacuate after the Forest Service’s botched burns escaped and raced across the mountains in April 2022. Many fled more than once over the two months that it took to bring the blaze under control. Some like Sandoval had nothing to return to.

Six years ago, she moved to a ranch in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that has been in her family since the 1840s. Her elderly parents needed someone to help take care of them and their home, so she moved in with them and remained even as they spent less time there in the past few years.

She had no lease, no rent, no mortgage — no paperwork at all to formalize the arrangement. But between the old mobile home on her family’s land and her Social Security check, the 67-year-old expected to live comfortably for the rest of her life. Then the wildfire came, eventually taking her home, her possessions and her cat, Jinx. She still hasn’t returned to the ranch.

Hermits Peak, not far from where one of the U.S. Forest Service’s prescribed burns escaped and grew into a wildfire, is visible from Sandoval’s family property. She said flames were more than 100 feet high the day the fire ripped through her family’s ranch, burning so hot that glass in her house melted and guardrails on the nearby road “melted into metal ribbons.” (Adria Malcolm for ProPublica)

Though Sandoval was forced to live in Colorado for more than a year after the fire, she expects to get nothing from FEMA other than several thousand dollars for a few possessions and the cost of relocating. Her parents owned the mobile home and have filed a claim for it, but her father, Moises Sandoval, said he and his wife don’t plan to rebuild. The family corporation that controls the land is considering other options, including a guesthouse only for short-term stays, he said.

Living arrangements like Meg Sandoval’s are common in the area. Families that have owned land for generations offer spots to relatives without transferring deeds or subdividing the land.

“In northern New Mexico, they haven’t really had a real good incentive to put title in the names of whoever the new, current owners are,” said Scott Aaron, a former lawyer for the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, who now represents residents in land disputes. “There was never a reason to until the fire hit and FEMA came in with millions of dollars.”

Sandoval’s living situation was her version of a pension. “My retirement plan is destroyed, and I can’t get that back again,” she said. “And now with the prospect of having that taken away from me for good, all I have is the pain and suffering.”

FEMA Makes the Case to Limit Payments

On May 11, 2022, as the wildfire ignited by the Forest Service was still spreading, U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez and U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, two Democrats representing New Mexico, introduced legislation spelling out how a $4 billion compensation fund would be spent.

“While we don’t know the full extent of damage from this catastrophic fire, I’m introducing legislation that would require FEMA to fully compensate New Mexico residents and business owners who’ve been impacted,” Luján said in a press release.

Smoke plumes from the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire rise above a mountain ridge near Las Vegas, New Mexico, in May 2022. (Adria Malcolm)

That bill, sponsors said, would provide victims with a quick and efficient way to be paid for what they lost. Without it, victims’ only recourse would be to sue the federal government — a long, uncertain process. The bill was wrapped into a larger measure that passed Congress in September 2022.

Leger Fernandez and Luján modeled the Hermits Peak Fire Assistance Act after legislation that followed another wildfire, the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, that also was accidentally started by a federal agency. Like the Cerro Grande Fire Assistance Act, the Hermits Peak bill said payments would be “limited to actual compensatory damages.”

But the law didn’t define what that phrase means. The most generous interpretation — the one adopted by the state’s attorney general and lawyers representing thousands of victims — is that FEMA is required to evaluate and pay for various kinds of hard-to-quantify losses. Plaintiffs’ lawyers say they include things like the mental health toll of not just the fire, but of being displaced from home for weeks or months, as well as the lost enjoyment of land that is now scarred. FEMA’s reading of the law is much narrower: Intangible losses don’t count.

For victims of the fire two decades earlier, many of whom worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, narrower criteria for compensation was less meaningful. They were wealthier and most had property insurance, so they didn’t have to rely on the compensation fund. Few victims of the Hermits Peak fire, however, had insurance or sizable nest eggs; most are relying on the compensation fund to help them rebuild.

FEMA has refused to publicly explain how it came to its interpretation of what it can pay for, aside from a PowerPoint slide shown at public meetings. But an agency memo lays it out. The memo, bearing logos of the agency and its claims office, says “Do not distribute” on every page. Source and ProPublica got it from the New Mexico attorney general’s office through a public records request.

The memo says the federal law establishing the compensation fund bars noneconomic damages through that phrase: “limited to actual compensatory damages.” It notes that noneconomic damages weren’t paid after the Cerro Grande Fire.

FEMA’s memo also asserts that even if the federal law didn’t bar payments for noneconomic damages, New Mexico law allows them in just a few narrow circumstances.

Victims’ lawyers and elected officials in New Mexico contend that FEMA is wrong. “We believe that there is a strong argument that noneconomic damages are authorized under the act and New Mexico law,” said Lauren Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the state attorney general’s office. She declined to elaborate.

Victims’ lawyers argue that if Congress wanted to exclude payments for distress or hardship, the law would say so. Without a clear exclusion, they say, the federal law directs FEMA to make payments in accordance with New Mexico law — which does allow payments for intangible harm in circumstances like the fire.

The dispute over intangible losses from the wildfire centers on the wording of a federal law that established a fund to compensate victims. Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency have pointed to language saying payments must be “limited to actual compensatory damages” (yellow highlighting). Victims’ lawyers and New Mexico officials point to language saying New Mexico law should apply and note that the law doesn’t exclude intangible losses (red highlighting). (Obtained by Source New Mexico and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Source and ProPublica spoke to three lawyers and a former judge, all of whom are well-versed in wildfire litigation and New Mexico law and none of whom have ties to the legal battle. They all said New Mexico case law clearly allows victims of a wildfire to be paid for noneconomic damages resulting from what is legally called a “nuisance,” especially a wildfire that reduced property values for a large number of people.

New Mexico has some of the most expansive legal precedents in the country for paying noneconomic damages, according to Alan Malott, a retired state judge who handled such cases, and Levi Monagle, a plaintiffs’ lawyer who has sought such damages on behalf of clergy sex abuse victims and others.

“Our law is very comfortable with trying to quantify what everyone agrees is unquantifiable,” Monagle said.

Plaintiffs in a lawsuit now pending in state court are seeking noneconomic damages for a different wildfire. They blame a power company for triggering a blaze that destroyed more than 200 homes and burned 10 square miles of forest. (The company declined to comment, apart from denying that it was to blame for the fire.)

Singleton Schreiber, a San Diego-based law firm representing those plaintiffs, is handling one of the suits against FEMA over the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. Its complaint argues victims will be deprived of “hundreds of millions of dollars” unless the claims office pays noneconomic damages.

If that suit and a similar one don’t succeed, victims could forgo the claims process and seek damages in federal court. Exactly how much money each could get would be up to a judge and jury, legal experts told Source and ProPublica. It would vary based on their circumstances — how long they were displaced, how much of a toll that took on them, perhaps how strong their connection to their land was.

After a power company caused a series of wildfires in California from 2015 to 2018, victims received payments for noneconomic damages. People with addresses within the boundaries of many of those wildfires were eligible for initial checks of at least $5,000 for unmet needs.

Jon Givens, a lawyer with the San Antonio-based firm Watts Guerra, represented many of the victims of those fires. The average payment for noneconomic damages was $125,000, he said, which is one reason he argues that such payments for the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire could be substantial.

“The losses are staggering and real and should be paid,” Givens said.

Due to the lawsuits, FEMA declined to say whether it has estimated the potential cost of noneconomic damages across the burn scar. In a March letter to New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, Angela Gladwell, the head of the claims office, wrote that “outside influencers” were spreading disinformation that “has convinced many New Mexicans that they will be eligible for substantial noneconomic damages.”

The Cost of Being Forced From Home

FEMA has paid victims $276 million as of Dec. 21, about 7% of the $3.95 billion allocation, mostly in recent months. While that money has helped to replace homes and vehicles and to address erosion from post-fire flooding, lawyers say it leaves a whole world of harm unaddressed.

Singleton Schreiber said it anticipates that 1,125 of its 1,214 clients from the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire would qualify for some form of noneconomic damages under New Mexico law.

Source and ProPublica heard from at least 24 fire victims who described circumstances similar to what experts said would justify payments for noneconomic damages under state law. All told us they had been displaced from their homes — some for a short time, others to this day. The three lawyers and judge we interviewed said intangible harm tied to displacement is a particularly strong argument for compensation.

In May 2022, the fire devoured a cabin that had been in Loma Hembree’s family since 1967. She and her husband, David Hembree, spent the next several months on the run, “chasing decent weather” in an RV. They housesat for friends across Nevada for half a year before finally settling in an RV park in Santa Fe. They don’t anticipate returning to their property for at least another year.

“It’ll never be the same, ever,” Loma Hembree said. “My grandchildren might be able to enjoy it. But it will never be the same. It will never be like what we had.”

Charlie Paynter, the manager of a ranch in Gallinas Canyon, is suing FEMA to force it to pay for the toll that the fire and recovery has taken on him. “We were looking at the fire for a month before it came down the canyon,” he said in an interview. “It was a month of stress before we had to evacuate.”

When he returned to the property, he was overwhelmed by the work that confronted him: Half of the ranch’s roughly 800 acres of forest were burned, and 6,000 feet of water lines had to be replaced. When a small fire broke out nearby a few weeks later, he stayed up all night on his porch, ready to leave again at a moment’s notice.

“You get edgy,” he said. “You get a little short with people that you normally wouldn’t get short with.”

Although the White House supports FEMA’s stance, it noted that the claims office is paying for mental health treatment for “conditions worsened by the fire.” The office recognizes “that individuals are suffering emotionally and psychologically as a result of the fire,” White House spokesperson Jeremy Edwards told Source and ProPublica in an email.

Without payments for noneconomic damages, some victims stand to get little from the claims office.

Many are renters whose homes were destroyed. Their landlords will be reimbursed for the loss of property, but tenants will get nothing for being forced to move — sometimes far away because rental properties are scarce in the burn scar.

And then there are people like Sandoval, who had no legal claim to the place they called home. In a letter submitted for her case, she described fleeing the fire three times before ultimately finding refuge at a friend’s house 340 miles away. “I have gained weight, become depressed and experienced staggering loneliness,” she wrote.

Sandoval was too traumatized to visit the burned remains of her home until December. The last time she had been there, a year and a half before, the fire was still burning. Since then, a layer of ash had been blown away, revealing the remains of items she once held dear: a shattered teapot her grandmother gave her, melted glass souvenirs, a niece’s tiny bicycle coated in rust.

Source and ProPublica asked FEMA whether its requirements to prove ownership are making it harder for people with informal living arrangements, like Sandoval, to get paid. Stomberg, the FEMA spokesperson, wrote that the claims office recognizes “that each claim is unique and represents the individualized needs of the claimant.” The office is identifying what combination of readily available and informal documentation could “help establish ownership or legal responsibility for damaged property.”

Sandoval said a check from FEMA for the costs of relocation and the replacement value of her possessions won’t enable her to rebuild. “This ranch is the soul of our family,” she wrote in her letter to the claims office. “And our soul has been ripped away by the negligence of the U.S. Forest Service.”

First and second image: debris and the burned remains of Sandoval’s home. Third image: Sandoval shows a photograph of her and her dog, Osa, at her home before the fire. She escaped with her dog, but her cat, Jinx, died. (Adria Malcolm for ProPublica) The remains of Sandoval’s home (Adria Malcolm for ProPublica) Delivering on a Promise

The two suits against FEMA argue that the agency’s decision not to pay noneconomic damages was an “arbitrary and capricious” abuse of its discretion. FEMA has not responded in court and declined to comment on the litigation.

Legal experts say the dispute could come down to what a federal judge determines congressional intent was.

The bill’s sponsors won’t say. In a joint statement to Source and ProPublica, Leger Fernandez, Luján and U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat who also represents New Mexico, did not answer questions about whether they intended FEMA to cover noneconomic damages. Instead, they repeated their praise of the claims process and said victims are free to sue if they’re not satisfied.

Meanwhile, an effort is underway to remove Gladwell, a longtime FEMA employee from Washington, D.C., as head of the claims office. In early December, a group including 11 elected officials asked the Biden administration to replace her with someone who understands New Mexico culture and law and would compensate all victims fairly — including payments for noneconomic damages.

A FEMA spokesperson said the agency was preparing a response to the letter. (Malott was among the six former judges the group suggested; he spoke with Source and ProPublica before the group offered his name.)

The group reminded Biden that the federal government caused the wildfire and that he had pledged to help these communities recover.

“The United States Government has a long record of making promises to New Mexicans that are never kept,” they wrote. It started with the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War and ceded present-day New Mexico to the United States, they wrote, and continues today with shortcomings in the wildfire claims process.

Over the years, land belonging to communities that predated the United States has made its way into the hands of the Forest Service — a fact residents are quick to mention when describing what the fire took from them.

On top of that, this wildfire started in part because the Forest Service didn’t have enough backup staff to respond in case its prescribed burn got out of control, an outside review later found. One reason officials with the Forest Service decided they didn’t need more staff was that it considered the nearby land, communities and historic sites to be only of “moderate” value.

Leger Fernandez said at the time that this finding was a surprise to her — another sign, she said, that the Forest Service didn’t appreciate the unique way of life in the area. Using the Spanish word for “my people,” she said, “They undervalued mi gente.”

Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica contributed research.

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.

If you talk to town officials — the supervisor, the elected board members, the chief of police — they will tell you that mayhem has arrived in Pleasantville.

A quiet, leafy village in the town of Mount Pleasant, less than 20 miles north of New York City, Pleasantville feels like the movie-set version of an affluent Northeastern suburb. Five-bedroom homes overlook tranquil cul-de-sacs and freshly mowed lawns. Kids really do ride their bikes in the street after school. The village is less than two square miles, so if you hit an errant ball at the Pleasantville Tennis Club, you could almost smack a neighbor teeing off at the Pleasantville Country Club.

For more than 100 years, the village has coexisted, more or less peacefully, with the Pleasantville Cottage Campus — a residential program that, in its current iteration, houses about 160 young people with behavioral challenges. Nearly all its residents are in foster care; most are from New York City. While Pleasantville is 87% white, almost all of the youth on the campus are Black or Latino. The majority have histories of severe trauma, according to staff at JCCA, the nonprofit foster care provider that runs the campus. Many were sexually trafficked. Some had multiple psychiatric hospitalizations or lived in five, six or seven foster homes before landing here.

Like other residential foster care programs (there are just over 200 “congregate care” facilities in New York state, with about 3,600 beds), the Pleasantville campus has periodically been the target of complaints from local residents. Young people leave the grounds without permission. They get into fights and shoplift from stores, neighbors and police say.

But during the past several years, those complaints have grown incendiary, erupting last summer into a bitter public battle that threatens to shut the campus down.

The escalating tensions have been well documented in town Facebook groups and the local paper: In 2022, neighbors were aghast when a resident from the Pleasantville campus stole a chicken from a coop in a nearby backyard and bit its head off. Later that year, a video made the rounds of a young man from the campus standing shirtless in front of a car, blocking the road. When the driver demanded that he move, he begged her to kill him.

Meanwhile, the frequency with which local police are called out to the campus climbed from several times a month in 2018 to several times each week in early 2023, according to Mount Pleasant Police Department records. Most of the contact between JCCA and the police involves missing persons: young people who run away from the campus, usually returning on their own after a few days. But disastrous things happen, too. In 2019, for instance, a young man on campus was paralyzed after being restrained by program staff and died a year later, according to Mount Pleasant Police Chief Paul Oliva. (JCCA officials declined to comment on the incident, citing privacy concerns.) Residents also regularly get into fights, break windows, assault staff and threaten to hurt themselves or someone else, police records show.

Town leaders place the blame squarely on JCCA, which has run the campus since 1940, for losing control of its kids.

The Edenwald School is one of two schools on the Pleasantville Cottage Campus. (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

But, in fact, what’s been happening in Pleasantville in recent years is an extreme and very public version of something that’s occurring at foster care programs across New York state, an investigation by THE CITY and ProPublica found: Government child welfare authorities are placing kids with acute mental health challenges on campuses that are ill-equipped to handle them — largely because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

As THE CITY and ProPublica have reported, New York has shut down one-third of its beds for youth in state-run psychiatric hospitals since 2014 under a cost-capping “transformation plan” rolled out by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The state has also greenlit the closure of more than half of the beds in residential mental health programs during the past decade — all while failing to deliver on promises to expand home- and community-based mental health services to hundreds of thousands of young people. Suicidal foster children sit for months on waitlists for therapy and home-based treatment they are entitled to by law.

Among the consequences: The shortage of mental health care is creating chaos at foster care programs like the Pleasantville campus.

Since the Cuomo reform, the Pleasantville campus has had between 16 and 20 residents at a time with very aggressive or self-destructive behaviors, which is beyond the program’s capacity to manage, said Trevor John, JCCA’s senior vice president of campus services. That number used to be just two or three, he said.

Trevor John, senior vice president of campus services at JCCA, the organization that runs the Pleasantville Cottage Campus (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

“We’re equipped to handle behavioral problems — that’s what we’re for,” John said. But with the shutdown of psychiatric beds, kids are frequently discharged to the campus from hospitals before they’re stable, he said.

(JCCA officials said they had brought the young man who killed the chicken to an emergency room twice shortly before the incident happened, but ER staff sent him away without admitting or even evaluating him.)

Once kids are placed on campuses, it’s very hard for facilities to move them off. Program staff can submit a “15-day notice” asking foster care authorities to find a new placement for a child who needs a different setting, said William Gettman, the CEO of Northern Rivers, a social service agency in upstate New York that has seen a similar influx of youth with acute mental health challenges. But he said the process often takes six to nine months. “The system is in crisis,” Gettman said.

When foster care programs can’t manage residents’ needs, there are “more AWOLs, more assaults on other children and staff, more suicidal and self-harming behaviors,” said Maria Cristalli, the president of Hillside, which runs residential programs in central and western New York.

New York’s foster care programs have had serious problems since before Cuomo began downsizing state psychiatric facilities. A January 2023 report by the advocacy group Children’s Rights described group homes and foster care campuses as “punitive, carceral, isolating, and dehumanizing,” citing former foster youth who said they lived in fear of violence from staff and other residents. (The report did not name individual programs or agencies.)

Add in more chaotic environments, with more fights and more running away, and foster care programs become a pipeline directly to the juvenile justice system for some youth.

Meanwhile, those with the most difficult behaviors — often the ones who’ve experienced the most extraordinary trauma — get pushed into a growing cohort of what the foster care system calls “hard to place” youth: children nobody wants. Foster care providers say they can’t handle them. Mental health programs are full or have insurmountable barriers to getting in. And at least in Pleasantville, the neighbors want them gone yesterday.

In July, Mount Pleasant officials held a press conference demanding that New York state shut the Pleasantville campus down. During the following three months, state child welfare officials granted JCCA’s request to remove 12 residents who staff contended were too unstable for the Pleasantville campus. The move was a win for town leaders, and it took pressure off JCCA, where incidents on campus have dropped sharply since the residents were moved.

Downtown Pleasantville (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica) A neighborhood of Pleasantville adjacent to the campus (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

But shuffling 12 residents around does not change the fact that “there are not good options” for foster youth with acute mental health challenges, said Ronald Richter, JCCA’s CEO and the former head of New York City’s child welfare administration. The systemic problem “is not solved,” he said.

In fact, only four of the 12 ended up in beds in mental health programs. Some of the others were sent to different foster care campuses or to a temporary shelter for foster children in New York City. And three are now in either the criminal or juvenile justice systems.

“That’s not a positive outcome,” Richter said.

Karen Male, a spokesperson for the state Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees New York’s foster care agencies, wrote in an email: “OCFS continues to work closely with JCCA to support the agency in effectively providing comprehensive, supportive programming for youth in foster care.”

Male added: “The health and safety of these young people, as well as that of the surrounding community, remain a top priority for our agency.”

But if officials hoped that moving the 12 youth would make town leaders back off from their campaign to shut down the Pleasantville campus, it seems unlikely to pan out that way. “Let it be known, we are still watching and still demanding accountability of this facility at every turn,” Mount Pleasant Supervisor Carl Fulgenzi wrote in an October memo posted on Facebook. “Our substantiated facts and statistics continue to overwhelmingly confirm that the situation at JCCA is worsening and wholly unsafe.”

It’s 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, and 16 teenage girls sit on vinyl-covered sofas in a common room on the Pleasantville campus. A few hug teddy bears on their laps. Two pass a watermelon-flavored lip gloss back and forth. Around them, paper butterflies and unicorns hang from baby pink walls, along with inspirational sayings like “Take time to be kind” and “Be your own kind of beautiful.” The TV is behind plexiglass so that no one can smash it.

At this meeting, the girls’ assignment is to discuss emotional regulation: essentially, how do you do the opposite of the destructive thing you really, really feel like doing? They take turns, offering examples of times they were angry or depressed: “When I went into foster care and my mom didn’t fight to get me back.” “When my dad died.” “When I wasn’t allowed to see my father for five years and my mom kept telling me it was my fault.”

What’s most noticeable is the gravitational pull of the counselor who’s running the meeting — a longtime staff member who oversees this particular cottage. Girls drift toward her, sitting on the floor at her feet or standing behind her chair. One, an older girl who came into the room rolling her eyes and muttering, “Oh, hell no,” ends up with her hands on the counselor’s shoulders, chin resting for a few seconds on top of her head.

Meetings like this are designed to teach kids coping skills: how to understand their trauma, identify their triggers and respond in new ways. The experience of being shuffled from place to place — the accumulated sense of being discarded — can drive foster youth to act out with extreme behaviors, said Jeremy Kohomban, president of The Children’s Village, which runs foster care and juvenile justice programs in Dobbs Ferry, a dozen miles south of Pleasantville. Often, he said, those behaviors are ways of “communicating hopelessness and frustration at a system that took them away from their parents and gave them nothing in return.”

First image: A student in her room in one of the cottages. Second image: A student’s bedroom. (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

Reversing that takes time and trust, foster care providers say: Kids need to see that adults care about them and will stick around. And it can’t happen when staff are overwhelmed by residents in acute crisis.

Part of the challenge stems from limitations on what foster care campuses like Pleasantville are allowed to do. They provide clinical services like therapy and psychiatry, but unlike psychiatric hospitals or residential programs licensed by the state’s mental health department, they cannot lock kids into rooms or physically stop them from walking off of campuses. Nor can they force them to take psychiatric medications or inject them with sedatives or antipsychotics to control their behavior.

Faced with the influx of youth with acute mental health challenges, some foster care providers say those rules need to change — they need to be able to isolate or sedate kids for their own safety.

Almost universally, foster care providers also say they need more money. At the state’s current rates, they can’t attract the clinical staff they need to work with acutely ill youth, said Kathleen Brady-Stepien, the president of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, which represents New York foster care nonprofits in negotiations with the state. Jobs for psychiatrists and social workers often go unfilled for months.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo, wrote that the former governor’s transformation plan, which included psychiatric bed closures, was part of a movement to shift funds into outpatient care. If there are problems with the implementation now, “the current administration and the legislature — who are about to begin negotiations on their third budget together — should address it,” Azzopardi wrote in an email.

Under Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York has allocated $14 million to a program to recruit and retain mental health care workers and has promised to increase outpatient care in communities and schools. But those initiatives don’t touch foster care campuses, where turnover among frontline staff is up to almost 60% each year, Brady-Stepien said.

Hochul’s office declined to comment for this story.

The consequence is that foster care programs increasingly rely on inexperienced, minimally trained employees to manage volatile situations with residents in acute crisis. As a result, foster care providers say, they’re less able to do the most basic part of their job: keeping all their kids safe until they can return to homes.

On the Pleasantville campus, one of those kids was a 15-year-old named Janemarie.

In 2022, Janemarie was arrested and put on probation for assaulting an older girl. Her adoptive mom, Michelle, was sure that she couldn’t keep Janemarie out of trouble at home, so she asked her school district to find a residential program. (We’re identifying Michelle by her first name and Janemarie by her middle name in order to protect Janemarie’s privacy.)

When Janemarie’s school district suggested the Pleasantville campus, Michelle thought it might finally be the place to give her daughter the help she needed. Janemarie’s biological brothers were attending the day school on the campus, and Michelle thought maybe they could all get therapy together. She also liked that the program had a specialty in working with kids who’d been sexually abused, since she believed that many of Janemarie’s problems started after she was molested at a babysitter’s house when she was 7.

But that was January 2023, when the Pleasantville campus was calling on police to respond to emergencies more than five times a week. “I had no idea what was going on there,” Michelle said.

First image: Michelle, whose daughter Janemarie lived on the Pleasantville Cottage Campus. Second image: A childhood photo of Janemarie with Michelle. (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

Almost as soon as she got to the campus, Janemarie felt scared, she told THE CITY and ProPublica. Staff couldn’t control the residents, she said.

At the time, Janemarie told Michelle that girls were threatening to jump her. She started running away — hopping the Metro-North commuter train to New York City, where she’d couch surf or sleep on the street. Even when Janemarie was on the campus, she wasn’t going to school or to her therapy appointments. Staff “will walk in the room and say, ‘OK, it’s time for therapy,’ and she’ll say, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and they’ll walk away,” Michelle said. Janemarie carved messages like “Fuck my life” into her arms and texted pictures to Michelle.

Then, in June, Janemarie sent Michelle a video that showed three other girls attacking her in her bedroom on the Pleasantville campus and beating her head with a metal pot until she bled. For the duration of the video — about 30 seconds — there was no adult in sight. Janemarie told Michelle that two program counselors were in the building while she was being assaulted, but the girls left the room on their own before anyone intervened. “They’re understaffed and they’re scared of the kids,” Michelle said. “No one wants to jump in and get hurt.”

JCCA declined to comment on Janemarie’s experience, citing privacy and confidentiality concerns, despite the fact that Michelle gave the agency permission to share information about her daughter with THE CITY and ProPublica. In an emailed statement, Richter wrote that under state regulations, campus staff “cannot engage in disciplinary measures, confinement, or utilize forceful restraints. Altercations can occur suddenly, before staff is able to engage or separate people. However, safety measures are taken when risks are known, including placing children in separate cottages and increasing staff coverage and monitoring.”

Danielle Zaino is the kind of person who shows up for the school dropoff line looking the same as she does for a campaign headshot: two coats of mascara, hair freshly blown out, wedges or heels because she’s only 5-foot-2 and doesn’t like to be towered over. Zaino grew up in Mount Pleasant, meeting her now-husband when she was 10 years old. They moved away for a while, but she wanted to raise her kids back home. “It’s a nice small-town feel,” she said. “You feel safe.”

Zaino is also the kind of person who prides herself on telling the truth and taking care of business, regardless of who gets mad about it. “One of my pet peeves is people complaining about things without doing anything about them,” she said.

Mount Pleasant Council Member Danielle Zaino in her home in Valhalla, New York (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

So, in 2016, when she heard about trouble with the foster children in town, Zaino called up a friend and started a group called the Coalition for a Safe Mount Pleasant. Cuomo’s transformation plan had been underway for two years, and foster care providers across the state were seeing an increase in residents with acute mental health challenges. At the time, there were two foster care campuses in Mount Pleasant: Three miles down the road from Pleasantville, in a hamlet called Hawthorne, the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services ran a campus with a special unit for kids who’d been commercially sexually exploited. Town residents reported seeing men pull up in black sedans at midnight or 1 a.m. “Barely dressed” girls would run off the campus and jump in, Zaino said. Residents assumed the men were sex traffickers — a suspicion that was later confirmed in federal court, where a ring of adult men were charged with trafficking teen girls, including some from the Jewish Board campus. (The Jewish Board was not implicated in the criminal case.)

Meanwhile, Zaino said, neighbors were seeing a spike in incidents around the Pleasantville campus, including youth breaking into cars and stealing from local stores. People were “afraid to be home alone or to let their kids be home alone. They’re afraid to go into the Mobil, afraid to go into the ShopRite,” Zaino said.

The coalition started organizing local residents, sponsoring public town halls for people to air their complaints and holding regular meetings with JCCA, the Jewish Board and state officials, getting politicians involved. Zaino ran for a seat on the Mount Pleasant town board and won.

But while foster care providers acknowledge that some of the coalition’s concerns are understandable, they say residents have gone too far. People follow foster youth around in stores and videotape them on the street, foster care providers say. Residents call police on kids who are taking a walk or heading to a job in town.

JCCA leaders said kids on campus feel explicitly targeted because of their race. Not infrequently, people in town will call the campus just because someone sees Black kids on the street, even if they have nothing to do with JCCA, John said. Last year, the town started enforcing an ordinance that allows it to fine JCCA $250 every time a resident leaves the campus without supervision. JCCA residents call the fine “the Black tax.”

“For our kids, just being outside is a problem. They too are part of this community. For some kids, this is their only residence,” John said. “When did Mount Pleasant become a sundown town?”

Zaino declined to respond to allegations that kids are targeted based on race. Oliva, the police chief, says that race isn’t a factor in the department’s enforcement. “If we get a call, we investigate it,” he told THE CITY and ProPublica. “If there’s nothing to it, we leave it alone.”

Other Mount Pleasant residents argue that the coalition’s complaints are overblown. “The claim that we are not safe, that’s just not true. This is not a hotbed of crime,” said Francesca Hagadus, who was the first Democrat on record to win a seat on the Mount Pleasant Town Board — which she then lost to Zaino in 2019. “Do the JCCA kids shoplift and get in trouble sometimes? Yeah. But guess what, our high school kids who were born here get in trouble sometimes too. The difference is that they have a home to go to at night.”

Eventually, the Jewish Board shut down its Hawthorne campus. The organization’s leaders never said that the decision was made because of pushback from the town — the agency has invested in programs that keep kids in New York City, closer to their families.

But now, town officials use the closure to threaten JCCA, John said. “They hang it over us like the sword of Damocles: ‘We did it to them. We can do it to you too.’”

If town leaders succeed, John continued, “Where do these kids go? I have youth who are languishing here for a year because their counties don’t have a place to put them. Where would they go?”

A student in music class in the Edenwald School (Natalie Keyssar, special to ProPublica)

By the time Janemarie had been on the Pleasantville campus for a few months early last year, Michelle found herself feeling sick every time she heard a text notification. Janemarie would run away for days at a time, sending Michelle oblique, crazy-making messages about where she was and what she was doing.

In June, she took off for Connecticut with a group of girls from the Pleasantville campus. As far as Michelle could tell, they were crashing at an apartment with some grown men. She was pretty sure they were trading sex for money and a place to stay.

At night, Michelle would have excruciating visions: Janemarie eating a peanut and going into anaphylactic shock without an EpiPen; Janemarie gasping for air with an asthma attack while no one called 911. She couldn’t bring herself to think about the men, though she’d later find a video on Janemarie’s phone of her performing a sex act on what looked like an adult. It made her throw up, so she didn’t look through the phone again.

To Michelle, it felt like a disaster. The whole point of sending Janemarie to Pleasantville was to keep her out of serious trouble. But now, she had “completely unraveled,” Michelle said.

JCCA officials say that in order to focus on young people like Janemarie — those who could, in theory, succeed on their campus — they need more freedom to manage others who are in acute crisis. In 2022, in response to a call for proposals from New York state, JCCA submitted a plan for two “intensive” units on the Pleasantville campus, with eight beds for residents with serious psychiatric challenges and a history of dangerous behavior like running away or being physically or sexually aggressive. If the proposal is approved, staff would be able to lock young people in their units and use injectable sedatives. The model would also come with more staff and more money, via increased reimbursement rates per resident.

JCCA would only use this model in “the most unusual circumstances,” Richter said, to care for residents who would otherwise be eligible for psychiatric hospitals or mental health residences.

But advocates for foster youth say that putting young people in more restrictive environments is not the answer. Foster care programs are not supposed to be juvenile jails or psychiatric hospitals, said Shereen White, the director of advocacy and policy at Children’s Rights. “How about we look at the quality of care these kids are getting in the first place? Did they get the services they’re entitled to in the community?” she said. “Are they getting proper, comprehensive treatment” on the foster care campus?

What everyone agrees on is that when foster care fails to keep young people safe, there is another system that always has room and can’t turn them away: juvenile justice.

In July, Michelle filed a petition in family court, requesting that a judge send Janemarie to a more controlled setting. Janemarie wasn’t safe, she said. But what Janemarie got was not a residential mental health program: The judge sent her to a juvenile lockup, saying that all the fighting, the running away, the refusing to go to school were violations of her probation.

The day Michelle watched Janemarie walk into court in handcuffs, “that was a heartbreak,” she said. “She’s a child who on every level has been failed.”

But there’s also comfort in knowing where Janemarie is and that she can’t run away. “I can sleep at night,” Michelle said. “And maybe she’ll finally get the help she needs. This child suffers so greatly. If they’re smart and they get the right people in there, they’ll see through her antics and behaviors. She needs all systems go, red lights flashing. Hopefully they’ll see that.”

by Anna Clark, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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After his murder conviction was overturned in 2020, Marvin Cotton Jr. checked into a Comfort Inn outside Detroit, ready to begin a new life after nearly two decades in prison.

Freedom, however, was frightening. Night after night, he awoke every 15 minutes or so, wrestling with the covers, wondering if he’d hallucinated it all. He kept the television on to remind himself he wasn’t in prison anymore. Its noise broke the first complete silence he’d experienced in half a lifetime, he said, which “scared the hell out of me.”

More than a month living at the hotel ate up his modest savings, Cotton said. His conviction still showed up in background searches, he said, so when he found a landlord willing to rent to him, he had to pay extra. Finding a job seemed impossible. To keep up with expenses, he took out high-interest loans.

But there was hope: Michigan offers $50,000 for each year a person is wrongfully imprisoned, thanks to the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act, which took effect in 2017. For Cotton, it seemed to promise nearly a million dollars.

The conviction integrity unit in a prosecutor’s office had recommended Cotton’s release after finding that his trial was fundamentally unfair, marred by police misconduct that resulted in key evidence being withheld. His case represented a clear injustice, Cotton believed, and he quickly filed a claim in civil court, the first step in the WICA process.

That first year of freedom saw him celebrated in some quarters: The Detroit City Council gave him the Spirit of Detroit award, calling him a “wrongfully convicted hero,” and a state legislator issued a special tribute for his perseverance and dignity in the face of injustice.

But in court, rather than agreeing to Cotton’s compensation claim, the Michigan attorney general’s office exercised its right to challenge it. It urged the court to reject the claim because it did not fit neatly into the parameters set out by WICA.

“You fight for years to prove your wrongful conviction was actually wrong,” Cotton said. “And then immediately, when you step out, you pick up this new war, and you’re constantly trying to prove yourself again.”

As Cotton learned, WICA’s benefits are aimed at a narrow set of circumstances. Wrongfully convicted people qualify only if their cases are overturned based on “new evidence” showing that the person was not the perpetrator or an accomplice. And this new evidence must be “clear and convincing” — a higher standard of proof than for other civil claims. In practice, that can mean excluding cases undermined by suppressed or insufficient evidence, inadequate legal counsel, official misconduct, shifting science or other reasons why someone can be convicted of a crime they didn’t commit.

The first photograph taken of Cotton after being released from prison was of him and his daughter Jhai-Yon Jones, now 25.

Michigan has the fifth-most exonerations in the country, according to the National Registry of Exonerations: 169 wrongful convictions in state courts since 1989, with an average of nearly 11 years of incarceration. Passed with bipartisan support, WICA was intended as a lifeline for former prisoners who were wrongfully convicted and to account, in part, for the harm done to them.

Of the 103 people who filed claims between 2017 and late 2023, about 68% received compensation, according to Jeffrey S. Gutman, a clinical law professor at George Washington University who researches compensation statutes across the country.

Advocates and people who were wrongfully imprisoned have said that the money often makes a huge difference at an impossibly vulnerable time. Many are rebuilding with no family, no home, no job prospects, no driver’s license, no resources to navigate trauma.

But in many ways, WICA has fallen short of early expectations, causing conflict in the courts while creating further uncertainty for people in the aftermath of a grave injustice.

“I did not imagine how actually harmful this law was going to be,” said Marla Mitchell-Cichon, counsel to the Innocence Project at Thomas M. Cooley Law School, who was part of the long campaign to pass WICA.

Advocates have urged the Legislature to update and clarify the law. And when disputes over compensation have come before the state Supreme Court, two justices, in sometimes pointed language, have expressed frustration with WICA.

“I don’t like administering legal rules that I can’t explain to the people they impact,” wrote one of the justices in a concurring statement in a 2022 case in which a wrongfully imprisoned man was shut out entirely. “Please fix it, legislators.”

Citing another case in which compensation was denied, a state commission has also flagged the law for review.

But, under the leadership of both parties, the Legislature has yet to do so.

Rep. Bryan Posthumus, the Republican floor leader, said in a statement emailed to ProPublica that he believes the state should compensate wrongfully imprisoned people for their lost freedom. “While the legislature has not taken up a formal review of WICA,” he said, “it is important that continuing reviews take place to ensure that the program works as intended. Ultimately, a review of WICA will be up to the Speaker of the House.”

Speaker Joe Tate and Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, both Democrats, did not respond to requests for comment. Sen. Stephanie Chang, a Democrat who worked to pass WICA and sits on the commission that recommended its review two years ago, told ProPublica in an email that she and Democratic Rep. Joey Andrews are going to partner on legislation to address gaps in WICA.

The Michigan attorney general’s office said it evaluates claims and challenges them when it doesn’t believe they meet the law’s criteria. At any point, the attorney general’s office can offer a settlement as a compromise: a portion of what the law seemed to promise.

The Legislature drew lines based on “clear and convincing new evidence of innocence,” said Robyn Frankel, an assistant attorney general who directs the office’s conviction integrity unit and head of the section responding to WICA claims.

“Sometimes, personally, we may not agree with it or like it,” she said. “But that’s our job: to just apply the statute.”

Cotton, left, and his childhood friend Myron “Scooby” Agee look toward the house where Cotton grew up. “I just want to make my life worth it. When I first got out, I felt behind. I felt like I was running from something and I really had to change my perspective,” said Cotton, who said he is working with a program to lower crime in the neighborhood. “I wanted to run for something positive.”

Dennis Tomasik knows there’s no getting back the lost years of his life.

In 2007, at age 43, he was sent to prison for sexual abuse of a minor. Tomasik had worked as a tool and die engineer at an automotive equipment supplier outside Grand Rapids, the sole breadwinner for his wife and two children. Without his wages, the family barely skirted financial disaster.

His wife, Kim, went to work, first stocking shelves and then running machinery for a company that builds buses. Neighbors pitched in, she said, quietly passing along enough cash to make a mortgage payment. Dennis’ old co-workers slipped gift cards in her hands. When the family could no longer afford the legal costs, his appellate lawyers, believing in Tomasik’s innocence, continued on pro bono, winning a reversal from the state Supreme Court. To pay the bond before the second trial, Kim Tomasik said, the family and two relatives leveraged their houses.

At Tomasik’s retrial, his new trial lawyers focused on unraveling the story told by his accuser, who made the allegations after being arrested for larceny and acknowledged that he hoped his claims would help him avoid jail. New testimony, counseling records, work schedules and receipts upended the prosecution’s case. The second jury acquitted Tomasik in less than 30 minutes.

Dennis Tomasik outside of his home near Grand Rapids

Tomasik had been incarcerated for about nine years — nearly a decade of lost wages and retirement savings, as well as missed opportunities to keep pace with advancing technology in his field. In 2017, he filed a WICA claim.

But state officials contested it, and the courts backed them up. That included the state Supreme Court, which, in reversing his conviction earlier, had cited evidentiary errors at trial rather than the newly uncovered evidence.

Chief Justice Bridget McCormack, in a concurring statement on the compensation case denial in 2020, noted, “Had he brought only the new-evidence questions to this Court, and not the other trial errors, he’d likely be eligible for WICA compensation.”

McCormack previously served as co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan. Her statement, joined by Justice Megan Cavanagh, questioned “whether this result is consistent with the Legislature’s intent” and urged lawmakers to consider whether it intended the statute to exclude people like Tomasik.

Now 60, Tomasik said he has nothing saved for retirement. He and his wife are on Medicaid, and he earns money by doing repair jobs on snowmobiles and dirt bikes. “I live at the lowest means I can possibly live on and survive,” he said.

Compensation wouldn’t make up for the terror he experienced in prison, Tomasik said, or for missing his children’s graduations, his son’s wedding and his mother’s deathbed. But, he said, “I’d love to get compensated at least something so I don’t got to worry about what I have to sell to pay my property taxes every year.”

Tomasik moves a lawn roller outside of his home. “I could be retired right now and not have to worry about anything,” said Tomasik, who worked at an automotive equipment supplier before being wrongfully convicted. “At my age, no one is going to hire me. I’ve tried. It just isn’t really promising anymore for the work I did.” First image: Tomasik’s cracked fingertips are damaged from the odd jobs he does at his home. Second image: Pencil-drawn height measurements are seen on a wall inside the Tomasik family’s kitchen. “The worst part is I didn’t get to see my kids grow up,” Tomasik said.

Across the country, despite broad acknowledgement that wrongfully convicted people are entitled to some financial help, there is no uniform standard for how governments should compensate them.

Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have compensation statutes for people who were wrongfully imprisoned, offering varying amounts of money with a range of qualifying criteria.

Wisconsin passed one of the earliest statutes, in 1913, but it has one of the stingiest policies, typically allowing claims of no more than $5,000 per year and no more than $25,000 in total, regardless of the number of years served. Conversely, Texas offers $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, plus additional compensation for any years spent on parole or registered as a sex offender. But the law also sets up impediments to filing federal lawsuits — legal efforts that can result in large judgments. (Other states have similar provisions that limit the ability to receive both statutory compensation and money from civil suits.)

Some states have severe restrictions, excluding people who pleaded guilty, for example, or those with previous felony convictions. In Missouri, only DNA-based exonerations are eligible.

In Michigan, Steven Bieda, WICA’s lead sponsor, hoped the Legislature could create one of the nation’s more supportive statutes.

But it was narrower than originally envisioned, with the strict “new evidence” requirement and a high standard of proof. Bieda, now a district judge, said WICA was a compromise with lawmakers who were concerned that claims would relitigate cases based on facts and evidence that had already been assessed by courts. Many worried that someone who was actually guilty would benefit from it. The requirements were meant to tailor the law to people with clearly exculpatory cases, he said.

The law, which took more than a decade to pass, was a “decent start,” but it’s “poorly written,” said Wolf Mueller, an attorney who said he’s represented at least 20 WICA claims.

“It’s leaving a lot of folks out who are wrongfully convicted, and they are not going to get compensation under the statute the way it’s written,” Mueller said.

A few years ago, the Michigan Legislature passed bills that extended WICA’s filing window for people exonerated before the law passed and exempted WICA claims from the standard notification deadlines and statute of limitations.

But it has never reviewed the substance of the law’s eligibility requirements. That leaves the courts to wrestle with how to apply them.

Tomasik, left, and his wife, Kim Tomasik

Two years ago, the Michigan Law Revision Commission, which advises the Legislature on potential defects and anachronisms in state law, called attention to the lack of clarity in WICA. Quoting from McCormack’s statement in Tomasik’s case in its annual report, it encouraged the Legislature to review WICA but didn’t recommend specific changes.

In 2022, Charles Perry, who’d been exonerated for sexual assault, was shut out entirely after he filed for compensation. Judges acknowledged that there was in fact new evidence of innocence: testimony from witnesses Perry’s lawyer never called in his criminal trial. But because the official basis of his overturned conviction was prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective counsel, not the new evidence, an appeals court said its hands were tied. The state Supreme Court declined to take his case. Perry got nothing.

In one of her last acts before retiring from the court, McCormack again exhorted the Legislature to take action.

In Tomasik’s case, ”I asked the Legislature to ‘consider whether it intended to exclude individuals such as the plaintiff—call them ‘new evidence plus-ers,’—from the WICA,” McCormack wrote in a concurring statement, again joined by Cavanagh. “Had it done so, Mr. Perry wouldn’t be here.”

The fact that Perry doesn’t qualify “because he suffered legal error in addition to the undiscovered evidence of his innocence is a rule of decision I would be hard pressed to justify," she wrote.

Her words meant something to Perry. “She literally put it on the record,” he said from his home in Florida. “She agreed with our case, but because of the way the law was structured, she had no alternative other than to rule against me, even though she felt in her heart that I was wronged.”

Had his claim gone through, Perry said, he would’ve saved the money for his two daughters. “They’re the ones that lost,” he said.

At the start of 2024, the Legislature still hasn’t acted, and yet another case is before Michigan’s Supreme Court — the fifth in six years. Besides Tomasik’s and Perry’s claims, there was a case that established that WICA won’t cover time spent in pretrial detention. Another found that “new evidence” need not be “newly discovered.” And in the pending case, lawyers are again arguing about what kind of evidence the law requires.

A recent analysis by Gutman found that 71 compensation claims in Michigan have been granted, 24 have been denied and eight are pending. Three people who were wrongfully imprisoned haven’t yet filed claims but are within the three-year window to do so. According to a recent report from the attorney general’s office, the state has paid out about $50 million through WICA as of late 2023.

For Gilbert Poole, money from the compensation fund was life-changing. In 2021, at age 56, he was freed from prison after serving nearly 32 years of a life sentence for murder. His conviction was overturned after his case was investigated by the Cooley Innocence Project and the attorney general’s conviction integrity unit.

Poole’s claim was approved within weeks of his filing, and he said he received the money — nearly $1.6 million — within six months. “Without anybody opposing me, it went through pretty quick,” he said.

That mattered because Poole was starting from scratch. He’d spent most of his life behind bars. He’d never used a cellphone. His parents had died. The only people he knew outside prison were lawyers and clergy who supported his case. But, Poole said, “you can’t really call them at 3 a.m. and say, ‘Hey, I can’t sleep,’ or ‘I’m having a panic attack,’ you know?”

Gilbert Poole in his home in Holt, Michigan. “I was in there longer than I was out here. A couple years of adulthood and then the rest in prison,” said Poole, who spent nearly 32 years wrongfully imprisoned. “When I came out, I had to learn everything.” Poole shares a self-portrait from his time in prison. He often used painting to imagine himself outside prison walls. “The best I can do is paint myself in there,” he said. “I couldn’t go there because I was in prison.”

Poole bought a house outside Lansing that he’s renovating himself. He built a pole barn for tinkering, maybe even a place to start his own business. He bought a GMC Acadia. He meets with a therapist. And he’s saving and investing as best he can, he said, in hopes of making up for decades of lost wages, retirement savings and Social Security.

Poole’s case moved unusually quickly. The time between the filing of a claim and the conclusion of their case ranges between one month and 52 months, according to a 2023 study by Gutman. The average is 16.7 months.

For people trying to rebuild their lives, every day counts.

“It’s just heartbreaking to know that it can be so difficult to get even the most basic necessities when you come home from a wrongful conviction,” said Kenneth Nixon, who spent nearly 16 years in prison for murder before his conviction was overturned in 2021. Less than a year after he filed his WICA claim, the court of claims ordered the state to pay him about $515,000 in compensation, less than he had sought.

Kenneth Nixon, who was wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 16 years, is renovating property he purchased in Detroit into an adult foster care home. First image: Nixon and his girlfriend, Chastity Youngblood, laugh while gathering signatures for Youngblood’s campaign for third circuit court judge. Second image: Nixon plays with his dog Karlie and her puppies that Nixon breeds at his home. “The space itself is very comfortable,” said Nixon, who purchased his home after being compensated for his wrongful imprisonment. “It’s peaceful.”

Today, Nixon is the president of the Organization of Exonerees, a nonprofit that helps fill the gaps for other wrongfully convicted people by providing everyday essentials like transportation, T-shirts and toothpaste.

Cotton’s compensation case, filed while he was still at the hotel, took three years.

In seeking to block his claim, the attorney general’s office argued that Cotton could not show that clear and convincing new evidence established his innocence of the crime, and that he wasn’t an accomplice or an accessory. It noted that he was at the scene, a house where drug dealing took place.

Last July, a court of claims judge sided with Cotton in rejecting the state’s argument. No physical evidence tied Cotton to the crime, the judge wrote, and witnesses had changed or disavowed their earlier testimony.

“The WICA does not require that a plaintiff show that he was innocent of all crimes; he only must show that he was innocent of the crimes actually charged or for which he was convicted,” wrote Judge Douglas Shapiro.

Before long, the state offered Cotton a settlement: about $630,000, Frankel said.

Addressing the state’s approach to settlements, Frankel said, “We’re trying to follow the statute, but we’re also trying to do the right thing.”

While Cotton felt he had a good case for the full amount, he said, more years fighting could “rip my life apart.” He agreed to the settlement.

Cotton, left, and his wife, Saquanda, discuss Christmas decorations inside their new home. “Even through all the chaos, it was peaceful and harmonious because we were together,” Saquanda Cotton said. “I just feel better knowing there’s a home.”

He puts a premium on stability. He has a home now in suburban Oakland County. He got married. His wife works as a banker, and he gets paid for speaking events about his experience. To bring in another stream of income, he published a book, “Better, Not Broken.”

Much of the compensation money, he said, will go toward the high-interest debt he racked up over the last three years. And all the money in the world won’t take away the fear that still wakes him up at night. He wonders, could it happen again? Will someone try to set him up?

Just in case, he said, he keeps “bags of receipts” that document his whereabouts. It might seem paranoid, he knows. But if he ever faces another accusation, one of those little pieces of paper just might prove his innocence.

From left: Anthony Legion, Eric Anderson, Marvin Cotton Jr., Ronnell Johnson and Alexandre Ansari listen as Organization of Exonerees President Kenneth Nixon introduces them during the group’s gala and fundraiser.

by ProPublica’s Visual Storytelling Department

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Illustration by Tara Anand, art direction by Andrea Wise for “What ProPublica Is Doing About Diversity in 2023” Photography by Natalie Keyssar and Nitashia Johnson, photo editing by Peter DiCampo for “What You Need to Know About Stillbirths” Short documentary by Liz Moughon, executive produced by Almudena Toral with additional editing by Margaret Cheatham Williams and graphics and animations by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, for “‘With Every Breath’ Captures the Human Toll of Philips’ Failure to Disclose Dangerous Defects of Its CPAP Devices”

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Development by Ash Ngu, illustrations by Ana Galvañ, art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker for “Claim File Helper: Find Out Why Your Health Insurer Denied Your Claim” Illustration by Regan Dunnick, art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker for “Local Newspapers Are Vanishing. How Should We Remember Them?” Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker, portrait illustrations by Brian Lutz, photos by Andrew Dolph for “A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline” Animation by Kolin Pope for “A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline”

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Photography by Philip Cheung, photo editing by Alex Bandoni for “Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement” Illustration by Max Erwin, art direction by Andrea Wise for “The Ugly Truth: Inside the ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ Company” Video by Nadia Sussman for “In the Child’s Best Interest”

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Photography by Annie Flanagan, photo editing by Peter DiCampo for “‘Where Is There to Go?’ He Needs Gender-Affirming Surgery, but His State Is Fighting to Deny Coverage.” Graphics by Lucas Waldron for “Erasing the ‘Black Spot’: How a Virginia College Expanded by Uprooting a Black Neighborhood”

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Design and development by Ash Ngu and Andrea Suozzo for “Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?” Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni for “Is the Metropolitan Museum of Art Displaying Objects That Belong to Native American Tribes?” Animation by Irene Suosalo, art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker for “How a Top Mutual Fund Executive Made Millions for Himself Trading the Same Stocks His Giant Fund Was Trading”

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Illustrations by Katherine Lam, art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker and Anna Donlan, development by Anna Donlan for “The Scientist and the Bats”

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Graphics by Lucas Waldron for “A Top Mutual Fund Executive Made Millions for Himself Trading the Same Stocks His Giant Fund Was Trading”

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Photo illustrations by Mark Harris for ProPublica, art direction by Alex Bandoni, Max Herman and Lisa Larson-Walker for “Chaos at the School Board” Design and development by Lucas Waldron for “How School Board Meetings Became Flashpoints for Anger and Chaos Across the Country”

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Photography by Russel Albert Daniels, photo editing by Alex Bandoni and Jillian Kumagai for “A Scientist Said Her Research Could Help With Repatriation. Instead, It Destroyed Native Remains.” Illustration by Nolan Pelletier, art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker for “How the Ultrawealthy Use Private Foundations to Bank Millions in Tax Deductions While Giving the Public Little in Return” Design and development by Ash Ngu and Nat Lash for “Las Vegas Needs to Save Water. It Won’t Find it in Lawns.”

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Photography by Russel Albert Daniels for “Waiting for Water: Tribes’ Fight for a Promised Resource” Illustration by Micha Huigen, art direction by Anna Donlan for “The EPA Has Found More Than a Dozen Contaminants in Drinking Water but Hasn’t Set Safety Limits on Them” Photography by Sylvia Jarrus, photo editing by Max Herman for “Could a Michigan School Shooting Have Been Prevented? Families Still Waiting for a Full Accounting of What Happened.” Photography by Kriston Jae Bethel, photo editing by Alex Bandoni for “Unstoppable: This Doctor Has Been Investigated at Every Level of Government. How Is He Still Practicing? Photo illustrations by Justin Metz, development by Lena Groeger, art direction by Andrea Wise for “The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the ‘Little Crappy Ship’”

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Illustrations by Matt Huynh, art direction by Max Herman and Lisa Larson-Walker for “Minnesota Lets Nurses Practice While Disciplinary Investigations Drag On. Patients Keep Getting Hurt.” Photo illustration by Peter DiCampo, photography by Tara Rice for “Maine Rarely Sanctions Residential Care Facilities Even After Severe Abuse or Neglect Incidents” Photography by Sebastián Hidalgo, photo editing by Max Herman for “Can Community Programs Help Slow the Rise in Violence?” Photography by Kitra Cahana, photo editing by Andrea Wise for “Here’s What Can Happen When Kids Age Out of Foster Care” Cinematography by Katie Campbell and Mayeta Clark for “Silver Dollar Road,” a feature documentary directed by Raoul Peck and co-produced with Velvet Film and Amazon Studios Illustration by Chantal Jahchan, art direction by Peter DiCampo for “A Lab Test That Experts Liken to a Witch Trial Is Helping Send Women to Prison for Murder” Design and development by Sergio Hernandez for “Supreme Risk” Interview by John Harwood, production and cinematography by Katie Campbell, Gerardo del Valle, Bruce Liffiton and Sean Healey for “The Biden Interview: The President Talks About the Supreme Court, Threats to Democracy and Trump’s Vow to Exact Retribution”

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Illustration by Klaus Kremmerz, art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker for “The FCC Is Supposed to Protect the Environment. It Doesn’t.” Illustration by George Wylesol, art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker and Peter DiCampo for “How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits” Illustrations by Nate Sweitzer, art direction by Alex Bandoni, Anna Donlan, Lisa Larson-Walker and Zisiga Mukulu for “We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority” Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni for “Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel” News app design and development by Sergio Hernandez, Al Shaw, Jeff Frankl, Nat Lash and Alec Glassford, illustration by Nate Sweitzer, art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker for “Supreme Connections” Illustration by Simon Bailly, art direction by Peter DiCampo and Lisa Larson-Walker for “The U.S. Banned Farmers From Using a Brain-Harming Pesticide on Food. Why Has It Slowed a Global Ban?” Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker for “How Verified Accounts on X Thrive While Spreading Misinformation About the Israel-Hamas Conflict

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Illustrations by Nash Weerasekera, art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker for “Arterial Motives” Illustration by Alvaro Bernis, art direction by Alex Bandoni for “The Hidden Fee Costing Doctors Millions Every Year” Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker for “How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them”

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Illustrations by Laila Milevski, art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker for “What to Know About the Risks of Gas Stoves and Appliances” Art direction by Peter DiCampo and Anna Donlan, design and development by Anna Donlan for “Falling Apart”

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Illustrations by Pia Guerra, art direction by Peter DiCampo and Anna Donlan for “Falling Apart” Photography by William DeShazer, photo editing by Peter DiCampo for “How Tennessee’s Justice System Allows Dangerous People to Keep Guns — With Deadly Outcomes” William DeShazer for ProPublica, Photo editing by Peter DiCampo “How Tennessee’s Justice System Allows Dangerous People to Keep Guns — With Deadly Outcomes” Illustration by Zeke Peña, art direction by Peter DiCampo for “Mississippi Says Poor Defendants Must Always Have a Lawyer. Few Courts Are Ready to Deliver.” Design and development by Jason Kao for “Bodycam Videos of Police Killings Remain Out of Public View”

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Illustrations by Cuauhtémoc Wetzka, art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker for “Dairy Workers on Wisconsin’s Small Farms Are Dying. Many of Those Deaths Are Never Investigated. ” Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker, based on an original daguerreotype of an enslaved African named Renty, for “A Racist Harvard Scientist Commissioned Photos of Enslaved People. One Possible Descendant Wants to Reclaim Their Story.” Graphics and animation by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, producing and reporting by Brandi Kellam, Lisa Riordan Seville, Christopher Tyree and Louis Hansen for “Uprooted”

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Photography by Sebastián Hidalgo, photo editing by Alex Bandoni, design by Anna Donlan for “Death on a Dairy Farm”

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Illustrations by James Lee Chiahan, art direction by Alex Bandoni, Lisa Larson-Walker and Anna Donlan, design and development by Jason Kao for “The Scandal that Never Happened” Photography by Adria Malcolm, photo editing by Peter DiCampo for “The Federal Government Accidentally Burned Down Their Houses, Then Made It Hard to Come Home” Photo illustration by Vanessa Saba, art direction by Peter DiCampo for “Committed to Jail: How Mississippi Jails People for Mental Illness” Design and development by Nat Lash and Al Shaw for "The 20 Farming Families Who Use More Water From the Colorado River Than Some Western States"

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Illustrations by Zeke Peña, art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker for “‘Once You’re No Good to Them, They Get Rid of You’” Photography by Kathleen Flynn, photo editing by Peter DiCampo and Anna Donlan for “Seeding Hope” Illustrations by Dominic Bodden, art direction by Andrea Wise for “This Pharmacist Said Prisoners Wouldn’t Feel Pain During Lethal Injection. Then Some Shook and Gasped for Air.”

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Photography by Rachel Woolf, photo editing by Peter DiCampo for “When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby” Photography by Liz Moughon for “With Every Breath: Millions of Breathing Machines. One Dangerous Defect.” Illustrations by Clay Rodery, art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker for “How a Maine Businessman Made the AR-15 Into America’s Best-Selling Rifle” Photography by Taylor Glascock, photo editing by Alex Bandoni for “Years After Being Ticketed at School for a Theft She Said Never Happened, Former Student Prevails in Court” Visual Storytelling Department

• Boyzell Hosey, senior editor, visual storytelling

Visuals

• Lisa Larson-Walker, art director
• Andrea Wise, visual strategy editor
• Alex Bandoni, visuals editor
• Peter DiCampo, visuals editor
• Max Herman, temporary visuals editor

Graphics

• Lena V. Groeger, graphics director
• Anna Donlan, interactive story designer, interim graphics director
• Zisiga Mukulu, interactive story designer
• Jason Kao, graphics editor
• Lucas Waldron, graphics editor

Video

• Almudena Toral, executive producer
• Lisa Riordan Seville, senior producer
• Katie Campbell, video journalist and filmmaker
• Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, video journalist and filmmaker
• Nadia Sussman, video journalist and filmmaker
• Margaret Cheatham Williams, video and film editor
• Gerardo del Valle, video and film fellow
• Liz Moughon, video and film fellow

Design & Product

• David Sleight, senior director, design & product
• Jeff Frankl, editorial experience designer
• Allen Tan, editorial experience designer
• Emenike Godfreey-Igwe, associate product developer
• Artemis Sparks, principal engineer, devops

News Apps

• Ken Schwencke, news apps editor
• Al Shaw, deputy editor
• Alec Glassford, news apps developer
• Sergio Hernandez, news apps developer
• Nat Lash, news apps developer
• Ash Ngu, news apps developer
• Andrea Suozzo, news apps developer
• Ruth Talbot, news apps developer

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by ProPublica

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

ProPublica has been producing and delivering the news digitally for 15 years, and while it has never been easy, 2023 was particularly challenging. Audience attention continues to fragment. Many readers find the news depressing and distressing — particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic and the tumultuous political environment of the last few years — and some tune out entirely.

That said, ProPublica’s audience increased meaningfully in 2023, thanks to groundbreaking investigative stories across a variety of subjects and geographies. By the time the year ends, we will have published nearly 600 stories. Our work examining the Supreme Court and its ethical lapses attracted significant attention around the world, though many of our most-read pieces were produced by our regional offices around the country.

Below is the list of the 25 most-read stories published by ProPublica in 2023 as measured by the total amount of time spent reading them across several of our publishing platforms. We’ve also included a list of documentaries and podcasts that you may have missed.

1. Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From GOP Donor By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

For more than 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. He’s been on cruises in far-flung locales on Crow’s yacht, has flown on the real estate magnate’s private jet, and has kept company with Crow’s powerful friends at Crow’s private resort. Until the publication of our story, the extent of Crow’s largesse had not been revealed.

2. The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses” By Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon

HomeVestors of America, the self-proclaimed “largest homebuyer in the U.S.,” trains its nearly 1,150 franchisees to zero in on homeowners’ desperation. Our investigation found HomeVestors franchisees that used deception and targeted the elderly, the infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling.

3. UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. He Fought Back, Exposing the Insurer’s Inner Workings By David Armstrong, ProPublica; Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum; and Maya Miller, ProPublica

After college student Christopher McNaughton finally found a treatment that worked, the insurance giant decided it wouldn’t pay for the costly drugs, determining that the treatment “was not medically necessary.” His fight to get coverage wound up exposing the insurer’s hidden procedures for rejecting claims.

4. A Grad Student Found the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. By Jennifer Berry Hawes; photography by Gavin McIntyre for ProPublica

Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction that was larger than any a historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction.

5. Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement By Ava Kofman; photography by Philip Cheung

An exploration of how a doctor’s two-decade quest to grow the penis is leaving some men desperate and disfigured.

6. The Columbia OB-GYN Who Sexually Assaulted Patients for More Than 20 Years By Bianca Fortis, ProPublica, and Laura Beil, photography by Hannah Whitaker for New York Magazine

For decades, patients warned Columbia University about the behavior of obstetrician Robert Hadden. One even called 911 and had him arrested. Columbia let him keep working anyway.

7. Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel By Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski

The fullest accounting of Thomas’ travel yet shows how the Supreme Court justice has secretly reaped the benefits of a network of wealthy and well-connected patrons that is far more extensive than previously understood.

8. Barricaded Siblings Turn to TikTok While Defying Court Order to Return to Father They Say Abused Them By Hannah Dreyfus

A judge concluded the children were victims of parental alienation, a theory that continues to influence family courts despite being rejected by mainstream scientific groups, and authorized police to use “reasonable force” to remove them from their mother.

9. Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition. By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

Republican megadonor Harlan Crow paid for private school for a relative of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Thomas said he was raising “as a son.”

10. Big Insurance Met Its Match When It Turned Down a Top Trial Lawyer’s Request for Cancer Treatment By T. Christian Miller

Blue Cross and Blue Shield denied payment for the proton therapy Robert “Skeeter” Salim’s doctor ordered to fight his throat cancer. But he was no ordinary patient. He was a celebrated litigator. And he was ready to fight.

11. Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

In the years after the undisclosed trip to Alaska on a private jet, Republican megadonor Paul Singer’s hedge fund has repeatedly had business before the Supreme Court. Alito has never recused himself.

12. Why It’s So Hard to Sue Doctors for Sexual Assault in Utah By Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune

When dozens of women sued their OB-GYN for sexual assault, a judge said the case falls under Utah’s medical malpractice law. This story was part of a partnership through our Local Reporting Network.

13. How the Navy Spent Billions on Failed Littoral Combat Ship Program By Joaquin Sapien

Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future. Instead they broke down across the globe, and many of their weapons never worked. Now the Navy is scrapping them. One is less than five years old. How did the program fail to live up to its promise?

14. Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal. By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

The transaction was the first known instance of money flowing from Crow to the Supreme Court justice. The sale netted the GOP megadonor two vacant lots and the house where Thomas’ mother was living.

15. Facing a Life-Threatening Pregnancy Under Tennessee’s Abortion Ban By Kavitha Surana, photography by Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica

Mayron Michelle Hollis stood to lose her bladder, her uterus and her life. She was desperate to end her high-risk pregnancy. Two doctors agreed that abortion was the best path forward, but doctors in Tennessee feared prosecution after the fall of Roe v. Wade.

16. Behind the Scenes of a Deal With a “We Buy Ugly Houses” Franchise By Anjeanette Damon

Royanne McNair believed she had canceled her contract with a “We Buy Ugly Houses” franchise, so she pursued another offer on her house — this one for $100,000 more. Then an anonymous envelope froze the deal.

17. How Liberty HealthShare Left Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire By Ryan Gabrielson and J. David McSwane, graphics by Kolin Pope

Despite a history of fraud, one family has thrived in the regulatory no man’s land of health care sharing ministries, where insurance commissioners can’t investigate, federal agencies turn a blind eye and prosecutors reach paltry settlements.

18. Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski and Brett Murphy

Interviews and newly unearthed documents reveal that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, facing financial strain, privately pushed for a higher salary and to allow Supreme Court justices to take speaking fees.

19. Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has attended at least two Koch donor summits, putting him in the extraordinary position of having helped a political network that has brought multiple cases before the Supreme Court.

20. How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them By Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum, and Maya Miller and David Armstrong, ProPublica

Internal documents and former company executives reveal how Cigna doctors reject patients’ claims without opening their files. “We literally click and submit,” one former company doctor said.

21. What Happened to Jefferson Rodríguez By Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

When an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy was run over on a Wisconsin dairy farm, authorities blamed his father and closed the case. Meanwhile, the community of immigrant workers knows a completely different story.

22. Two Women Died on an Alaska Mayor’s Property. No One Has Ever Been Charged. By Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

Before they died, Jennifer Kirk and Sue Sue Norton were both victims of domestic violence, but the men involved — the ex-mayor’s sons — faced few consequences despite a long history of similar allegations. This story was part of a partnership through our Local Reporting Network.

23. How One Chicago Cop Got Out of 44 Traffic Tickets By Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune

Chicago police officer Jeffrey Kriv used the same alibi to contest dozens of traffic tickets over the years. A deeper look at his career sheds light on Chicago’s troubled history of police accountability. This story was part of a partnership through our Local Reporting Network.

24. This Pennsylvania Doctor Has Been Investigated at Every Level. How Is He Still Practicing? By Annie Waldman

Medical boards, a health department and even federal investigators have scrutinized Dr. James McGuckin’s vascular clinics. Today he still practices, despite a decadelong string of sanctions, fines and lawsuits.

25. People Who Used Recalled Philips Breathing Machines Face Painful Choices By Margaret Fleming, Monica Sager, Nicole Tan, Susanti Sarkar, Evan Robinson-Johnson and Claire Gardner, Medill Investigative Lab; photography by Liz Moughon, ProPublica

The devices at their bedsides were lifelines, until they learned the foam inside could break down and make them sick. Now, they’re plagued by illness, lost sleep and worry.

Documentaries You May Have Missed

1. Inside the Uvalde Response Co-published with FRONTLINE and the Texas Tribune

The May 2022 gun massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 children and two teachers dead. It was one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. More than a year and a half later, findings from a state-led investigation into the chaotic response — in which officers took more than an hour to take down the shooter — have yet to be released. Most of the officers involved in the response have declined to talk publicly about what happened that day. But FRONTLINE, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica gained access to a trove of the materials from the Uvalde investigation and were able to review the accounts of almost 150 responding officers, as well as hours of body camera footage and 911 call recordings.

2. The Night Doctrine: The Truth About Afghanistan’s Zero Unit Night Raids

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

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

3. The Human Toll of Philips’ Massive CPAP Recall: With Every Breath

“With Every Breath,” a documentary from ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is an intimate glimpse into what happens when people learn that a Philips Respironics CPAP machine may be causing harm.

The film braids together the stories of three people, who face the unanswerable question of how their health has been impacted, and a sleep doctor who leads her patients through the chaotic recall. The film humanizes a public health crisis that has affected millions and whose full scope may not be known for years, if ever.

This 20-minute film is directed by Liz Moughon and produced by Almudena Toral. It accompanies the investigative series also called “With Every Breath,” published by ProPublica in partnership with the Post-Gazette.

4. Uprooted: What a Black Community Lost When a Virginia University Grew

This short documentary reveals a Black community’s decadeslong battle to hold onto their land as officials in Newport News, Virginia, used eminent domain to establish and expand Christopher Newport University.

“Uprooted” is directed by Brandi Kellam, who grew up in the area and has spent more than two years investigating this story. She reported the story with Louis Hansen of the Virginia Center for Investigative Reporting at WHRO. It is produced by ProPublica’s Lisa Riordan Seville, with cinematography, editing and post-production by VCIJ’s Christopher Tyree and graphics by ProPublica’s Mauricio Rodríguez Pons. The work was part of a series from ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

5. America’s Dangerous Trucks Co-published with FRONTLINE

An average of about 5,000 people a year are killed in crashes involving large trucks, a death toll that has soared by almost 50% since 2011, according to the most recent federal data. Tens of thousands more have been injured.

“America’s Dangerous Trucks,” a joint investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica, examines one particularly gruesome kind of truck accident — underride crashes — and why they keep happening. Underride crashes occur when a car slides beneath the trailer of a big truck. Trucks can also crush pedestrians, motorcyclists and bicyclists. Hundreds of people die in such accidents every year.

There is a simple solution for reducing these deaths and injuries: build barriers that hang from the sides of the trucks to help prevent vehicles and people from slipping underneath. In the face of opposition from the industry, the federal government has failed for decades to take simple steps to limit the danger.

Podcasts You May Have Missed

1. We Don’t Talk About Leonard by Andrea Bernstein, Andy Kroll and Ilya Marritz This podcast series withWNYC’s “On The Media” explores the web of money, influence and power behind the conservative takeover of America’s courts — and the man at the center of it all: Leonard Leo.

2. The Kids of Rutherford County Co-produced with Serial Productions, the New York Times and Nashville Public Radio When a video surfaced of an after-school scuffle, 11 Black children were arrested. Their crime: not stepping in to stop a fight. The arrests set off a firestorm of controversy — and an investigation into the juvenile justice practices in one Tennessee county.

Reporters Meribah Knight with Nashville Public Radio and Ken Armstrong with ProPublica obtained years’ worth of personnel files, state inspection reports, emails, depositions and other records, and reports from all 98 juvenile courts in the state.

They discovered that for more than a decade, Rutherford County had arrested and illegally jailed hundreds of children. And behind those decisions was a powerful judge, Donna Scott Davenport, who went unchecked by higher authorities in Tennessee. The work was part of a series from ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica; Michael D. Sallah and Evan Robinson-Johnson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and Margaret Fleming, Medill Investigative Lab

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

On the morning of June 14, 2021, Dr. Radhika Breaden hurried to a computer in her hushed sleep disorders clinic and tried not to panic.

The 52-year-old physician treated patients with heart conditions, cancer and neurological diseases. She cared for veterans with compromised lungs and a woman with Down syndrome. In more than a dozen years of helping people breathe through the night, she had never confronted an emergency that jeopardized nearly all of her patients at once.

Global device maker Philips Respironics was pulling its popular sleep apnea machines and ventilators off the shelves after discovering that an industrial foam built into the devices to reduce noise could release toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients.

Breaden scoured the internet for details, certain that Philips had a plan to quickly ship new, safe machines to the thousands of people under her care at the Portland, Oregon, clinic. “It’s a multibillion-dollar, multinational company,” she recalled telling her staff.

But as Philips publicly pledged to send out replacements, supervisors inside the company’s headquarters near Pittsburgh were quietly racing to manage a new crisis that threatened the massive recall and posed risks to patients all over again.

Tests by independent laboratories retained by Philips had found that a different foam used by the company — material fitted inside the millions of replacement machines — was also emitting dangerous chemicals, including formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.

Though Philips has said the machines are safe, ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained test results and other internal records that reveal for the first time how scientists working for the company grew increasingly alarmed and how infighting broke out as the new threat reached the highest levels of the Pittsburgh operation.

The findings also underscore an unchecked pattern of corporate secrecy that began long before Philips decided to use the new foam.

The company had previously failed to disclose complaints about the original foam in its profitable breathing machines, a polyester-based polyurethane material that was found to degrade in heat and humidity. Former patients and others have described hundreds of deaths and thousands of cases of cancer in government reports.

After the introduction of the new foam in 2021, this one made of silicone, the company again held back details about the problem from the public even as it sent out replacement machines with the new material to customers around the world.

One of the devices was the DreamStation 2, a newly released continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine promoted as one of the company’s primary replacements.

A Philips Respironics manufacturing facility near Pittsburgh (Benjamin B. Braun/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Federal regulators were alerted to the concern more than two years ago but said in a news release at the time that the company was carrying out additional tests on the foam and that patients should keep using their replacements until more details were available. The Food and Drug Administration has not provided new information on the test results since then, and it is still unclear whether the material is safe.

That leaves millions of people in the United States alone caught in the middle, including those with sleep apnea, which causes breathing to stop and start through the night and can lead to heart attacks, strokes and sudden death.

Philips “let me down all this time and now they’re just doing it again,” said 56-year-old retired nuclear engineer Richard Callender, who recently started using one of the replacement devices in his home near Pittsburgh.

Public health experts interviewed by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette said it’s critical that patients using the machines are told about the potential risks.

“It’s a question of providing the facts,” said Dr. Robert Steinbrook, director of the health research group at the nonprofit Public Citizen and an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Medicine. “The assumption is the new machines and the refitted ones are OK, that the foam issue has been 100% resolved. That’s not the case.”

The new foam isn’t the only problem: An internal investigation at Philips launched in the months after the recall found that water was condensing in the circuitry of the DreamStation 2, creating a new series of safety risks.

“Loss of therapy, thermal events, and shock hazards,” the investigation concluded.

The FDA issued an alert about overheating last month, warning that the devices could produce “fire, smoke, burns, and other signs of overheating” and advising patients to keep the machines away from carpet, fabric and “other flammable materials.”

Philips has said that customers could continue using the devices if they followed safety instructions.

In response to concerns about the silicone foam, the company said the material was tested against safety limits recognized by the FDA and the World Health Organization and did not emit chemicals at unsafe levels. Philips said formaldehyde, found in common household items, only becomes a risk at high exposure.

“The repaired and new replacement devices with the silicone sound abatement foam are safe,” and findings that conclude otherwise are “inaccurate,” the company said in a statement.

Philips said additional test results were submitted last year to the FDA, but the agency has not yet provided a response.

In a statement, the FDA said more tests are needed on the foam before determining if the devices pose “risks to patients.”

Experts who reviewed the test results for the news organizations said the findings revealed troubling markers, including the presence of formaldehyde at levels that exceed safety thresholds established by multiple organizations. Thresholds vary, they said, and those cited by Philips allow for far higher formaldehyde levels than others.

Safety thresholds also do not take into account patients who are already suffering from chronic illnesses and breathing from devices that emit fumes directly into the lungs.

The experts said that one of the most vexing concerns is that formaldehyde — linked to respiratory problems and certain cancers — showed up in multiple tests and at varying levels, at times low and at others higher.

“Who knows what a patient could be exposed to?” said an engineer familiar with the testing who still works in the industry and did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals. “If you had grenades and you’re not sure where they’re going to go off, that’s a problem.”

After questions from ProPublica and the Post-Gazette — and more than two years after the problem surfaced — the company put out a more detailed explanation about the issue late last week.

Documents related to the company’s testing have been turned over to the Department of Justice, which launched an investigation of the recall last year, according to sources familiar with the probe.

Philips has said that it is cooperating with investigators and that the company initially did not believe that complaints dating back more than a decade about the recalled machines needed to be reported. The company said it took action as soon as it learned of the significance of the problem.

Dr. Radhika Breaden, a sleep medicine doctor in Portland, Oregon, said most of her 20,000 patients were using Philips machines when the company announced a recall in 2021. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Breaden, the Portland physician, said she had no idea that new problems have emerged and now worries that doctors and patients have been once again left to fend for themselves.

“There’s just a lot of things that we’re all being kept in the dark about,” she said.

“Compounds of Concern”

The trouble with the replacement machines surfaced shortly after the June 2021 recall, which sent the company’s stock prices tumbling and led to hundreds of lawsuits by Philips customers.

An FDA inspection of the firm’s manufacturing plant near Pittsburgh turned up a surprise discovery: a copy of a test that an independent lab conducted on a CPAP machine with the new foam showing results that the agency had not previously seen, public records show.

An inspector later noted in a report that the machine failed emissions testing because it produced “compounds of concern” with carcinogenic properties and that pediatric patients who use the machines could be especially vulnerable.

At the time, the FDA said it carried out a “benefit-risk assessment” and decided that until more information became available, not using the devices at all “may be more harmful to a patient’s health.”

One of the chemicals that turned up in the testing was formaldehyde, which also showed up on a second set of test results from another lab in August, records and interviews show.

That fall, the company opened an internal investigation after receiving complaints about the DreamStation 2. Engineers evaluated 97 devices and found that about 1 in 5 showed evidence of moisture and that nine had experienced “thermal events,” according to the company’s report.

Though the investigation concluded the problem could cause the machines to stop working or shock patients while in use, Philips deemed the risk “acceptable” and said “containment activities” were unnecessary, the records show.

In the months that followed, Philips forged ahead. With pressure mounting to meet the needs of customers, the company promised that everyone affected by the recall would get a replacement machine or a repaired one within a year.

At the time, hospitals and medical practices were waiting on the devices. So was the Department of Veterans Affairs, where an urgent alert in late 2021 warned that the supply of CPAPs was “critically low.”

“Warehouses are currently out,” the agency said in an internal email. “Level red.”

The wait forced some sleep apnea patients to place a dangerous bet. In suburban Pittsburgh, Callender continued to use his recalled CPAP for months. He said he couldn’t get a new one from Philips even though he had a double lung transplant in 2015 and a kidney transplant in 2021.

“I told them I was in dire need,” said Callender, a former mayor of Lower Burrell, Pennsylvania, who eventually started using an old machine that he had stashed in a bedroom closet. “Never heard back from Philips.”

Callender said he had no idea he was waiting on a machine that was fitted with a foam still under review by federal regulators.

Richard Callender, who underwent a double lung transplant and a kidney transplant, waited months for a replacement machine. (Benjamin B. Braun/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

“They failed me on so many levels,” said Callender, who received a replacement machine from Philips several weeks ago.

In the spring of 2022, as Philips continued to ship out replacements filled with the new foam, the company had a series of meetings with the FDA to discuss the ongoing testing.

Jeff Shuren, the agency’s chief regulator of medical devices, was directly involved, writing to Philips in May about test results that the company had promised but not yet delivered to the agency, according to emails obtained through a public records lawsuit filed against the FDA by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette.

“This is especially important,” Shuren emailed the company.

The records do not make clear what transpired in those meetings, but more than a year later, the FDA has continued to advise patients that the agency will provide information on the testing when it becomes available.

While the FDA was meeting with Philips, tensions flared among the company’s scientists and managers responsible for handling the crisis, interviews and internal communications show.

Philips “didn’t believe the results,” said the engineer familiar with the testing. “The Philips folks gnashed their teeth at it and they went to test more devices.”

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette obtained communications sent by a scientist at Philips who was alarmed about test results showing formaldehyde over the “threshold for safe exposure.” “FDA has the data. Are they just waiting for the final report from Philips? How is this sustainable?”

Though the chemical tends to quickly dissipate, experts say that even brief exposure at high levels can pose serious risk to patients who are already vulnerable, including infants, the elderly and others with chronic illnesses.

In June 2022, then-Philips biological safety engineer Adam Majka sent an email to several colleagues, writing, “We need to start finalizing reports where we have acceptable results and we do not expect further changes.”

One of the recipients was Denver Faulk, a senior safety engineer at Philips who was charged with helping to lead the company’s response, according to interviews and emails.

That same month, Philips put out an update saying that draft test reports on the foam had “not identified any safety issues.”

Around that time, Faulk sent an internal message about a safety threshold for formaldehyde proposed by Philips to one of the independent labs brought on by the company.

Toxicologists can assess the level of cancer risk against different thresholds used by scientists, governments and others; the same device can pass one test but fail another depending on the threshold. In his message, Faulk said the lab had accepted the benchmark proposed by Philips.

“Great news. … They are updating all of their reports accordingly,” Faulk wrote. “A big win for the team!”

In its statement, Philips said it proposed a limit used by the World Health Organization to provide a “harmonized” threshold at the company’s testing labs.

That threshold allows for far higher formaldehyde emissions than benchmarks used by other organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency.

Neither Faulk nor Majka responded to requests for comment.

Pleas for Help

As lawmakers call on federal investigators to hold Philips accountable, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said he wants the FDA, not the company, to oversee the testing.

“People are suffering,” said Tong, who, along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., wrote to the agency last year urging aggressive enforcement against Philips. “We don’t know enough about what’s happening with the silicone to make a judgment about it and so we’re still very concerned.”

Patients say they have received little or no information about the issue. Hundreds have reported other concerns to the government, including the delivery of refurbished devices that were missing parts or had foul odors.

“Completely unusable,” one customer wrote last year. “It emitted an extremely … nauseating smell. I was so sick I got up and did not sleep the rest of the night.”

Others described long waits for their replacements. Hundreds of thousands of people were still waiting on their machines in April, nearly two years after the recall, according to the company’s website.

“I wanted to go there and throw the machine right through the window,” said David Campano, 71, a former steelworker who continued to use his recalled CPAP for months while he waited on a replacement from the sprawling Philips factory only miles from his home near Pittsburgh.

Campano, a former steelworker, said he was frustrated by the recall and the response from Philips. (Benjamin B. Braun/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

In the suburbs of Atlanta, retired elementary school teacher Debra Miller emailed Philips last year after endless rounds of automated responses as she tried to figure out when she would get a new machine.

A few days later, she said, a package arrived at her home containing the motor of a new machine, but no electrical cord, explanation or instructions for use.

“Dumped in a box,” said Miller, 70, who taught for 30 years. “I literally got … half of an old machine.”

Miller said she had no idea that the machine she was waiting on came with its own risks.

Debra Miller, a retired schoolteacher, said the replacement machine that she received from Philips was missing an electrical cord and instructions. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Philips said the recall required the company to reach millions of patients and was complicated by supply chain challenges. In some cases, CPAP motors were delivered without other parts to “enable the easiest and most familiar replacement option,” the company said, adding that the replacement plan for sleep apnea machines is nearly complete in the United States.

In the early days of the recall, Breaden and her team at the sleep clinic in Portland were focused only on getting new machines to the thousands of patients who used them night after night.

Just beyond a waiting room with a framed message, “Healthy people get their sleep,” Breaden said she now worries about an entirely new set of problems.

Breaden, the sleep doctor in Portland, said she is still trying to provide answers for her patients. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

After learning about the test results on the new foam from ProPublica and the Post-Gazette, the sleep medicine doctor who had been personally using a DreamStation 2 said she needs more information from the company and the government.

“I’m prescribing air. It’s wonderful to prescribe something that has no side effects and can help with your sleep,” she said. “It’s sad not to be able to say that anymore.”

Michael Korsh of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Nicole Tan, Bridgette Adu-Wadier and Susanti Sarkar of the Medill Investigative Lab contributed reporting.

by Umar Farooq

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It was early morning on July 8, 2018, when Joseph Pettaway’s family was told by a neighbor that he had been badly injured by a police dog overnight and taken to the hospital.

He’d been rehabbing a home a block away from where he lived with his mother. His sister, Nancy, set off to see what had happened at the blighted house on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama.

She came upon a grisly scene. Blood was pooled on the pavement, and police officers were hosing it down. The front door was open, and Nancy Pettaway peeked at the hallway inside. “I seen blood, like they had dragged him,” she said. “One of the police told me to get back, and I said I ain’t going nowhere, cause that’s my brother, that’s my brother’s blood, and you gotta tell me what’s going on.”

But the Montgomery police refused to give her any information and later that day confirmed to the news media only that a suspected burglar had died on the scene.

A relative who worked as a paramedic told the family he had been called to the scene that night and found officers standing over Pettaway’s body, hands cuffed behind his back. Four days after the killing, staff from the medical examiner finally confirmed it was Pettaway who was killed, listing the cause as “accidental.” They told the family someone from the police department would come by soon to talk to them. No one ever did.

“We tried to get more detail and kept asking why the dog had to kill him,” said Walter Pettaway, Joseph’s brother. “And they wasn’t giving us no information. They wasn’t talking to us.”

It was a telling sign of the wall of silence the Pettaway family says they faced in the coming years.

Five months after the killing, the officers involved were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing. But it would take two years for the family to see for themselves the horror of what had really happened that night, and come to a starkly different conclusion about the officers’ culpability. The police who were there when Pettaway was killed wore body cameras that recorded what happened, but Montgomery’s department repeatedly refused to show the footage to the Pettaways, saying the video was “confidential,” and under Alabama law, the family had no right to access the video.

“They weren’t giving us nothing, cause they didn’t care,” Nancy Pettaway told ProPublica.

Over at the state capital, Juandalynn Givan, a Birmingham attorney and lawmaker in the Alabama House of Representatives, was as frustrated as Nancy Pettaway because the body-camera footage from a recent police shooting in her area was also being withheld.

“Why should any family have to wait two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, a month, a year to know why someone was shot or killed?” she said in an interview.

Alabama state Rep. Juandalynn Givan has proposed legislation to provide for the release of police bodycam video. “If you didn’t do anything, if you didn’t make a misstep, there shouldn’t be an issue. Don’t make it an issue,” she said. (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

The killings at the hands of Alabama police set off parallel yearslong efforts by Givan and the Pettaway family to pry loose body-camera video of fatal police encounters. Five years later, those efforts have had little success. The state has created a process for families to file official requests to see the footage, but there is no guarantee they, or the public, will ever get to view it.

Showing the public what happens in police encounters was the original purpose of body cameras, introduced in the wake of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, in Ferguson, Missouri. They were the centerpiece of reforms pushed by then-President Barack Obama at the national level, as well as by elected leaders and law enforcement across the country, including in Alabama. Video from the perspective of police, it was hoped, would expose bad officers, inspire reforms in police practices and serve as a restraint against inappropriate escalations to deadly violence.

But as a series of ProPublica stories this year has shown, nearly a decade after Brown’s death, the cameras have failed to live up to that promise. More often than not, police are able to keep footage of the most violent police encounters out of public view.

In places like Alabama, that secrecy runs deepest. Alabama is among a handful of states where decisions by policymakers and judges have reduced access to body-camera footage so much that even families of the deceased are regularly barred from seeing what happened to their loved ones. To access the video, families must first navigate a maze of bureaucracy, often by petitioning a court or filing a lawsuit. And when they are successful, they often cannot share the footage with the public.

A week after Pettaway’s death, his family finally got to see his body, as they prepared for his funeral. They took pictures of the gruesome wounds the dog had left on his groin and thigh. They still had no satisfactory explanation from police about why the 53-year-old Black man was killed, and they decided it was time to find a lawyer to get answers.

His death was being investigated by both the Montgomery Police Department and the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which often assists local police in examining officer-involved deaths. They interviewed witnesses and officers and reviewed the body-camera footage and other evidence. But by the end of 2018, even after a grand jury decided not to indict the officers, neither agency would share any evidence, including the body-camera footage, with the Pettaways.

The Pettaways filed a lawsuit a month later accusing the city of Montgomery, the chief of police and 15 unnamed officers of violating Pettaway’s constitutional rights. The city and the state law enforcement agency continued to refuse to share their investigative files with his family.

Four months after Pettaway’s death, police in the town of Hoover, just outside Birmingham, shot and killed Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr., a 21-year-old Black man, at a crowded shopping mall.

Someone had opened fire and injured two people in the rush of holiday shopping. Officers saw Bradford with a gun, shot him in the back and killed him. Police officials initially said Bradford was the shooter but later changed their story. It turned out Bradford, on leave from military duty, had pulled out his licensed gun and was trying to stop what he probably thought was a mass shooting.

As police had in Montgomery, department officials in Hoover refused to allow anyone to see the footage from the officers’ body-worn cameras.

Bradford’s killing drew national attention and ignited weeks of protests calling for the release of the video. “We will have the tape made public,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said at Bradford’s funeral. “We want transparency, not cover-up. Tell the whole story; tell it now.”

April Pipkins shows a photograph of her son, Emantic “EJ” Bradford Jr., who was killed by police in Hoover, Alabama, near Birmingham. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves, File)

Givan, the state lawmaker, was herself a frequent shopper at that mall and imagined what it was like for Bradford’s family to be kept in the dark.

As in the Pettaway case, police involved in the Bradford shooting were also cleared of criminal wrongdoing without any public viewing of the crucial body-camera video. The Bradford family, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union jointly called for the footage to be released. Authorities refused, claiming it was a confidential investigative record, and said releasing it could jeopardize the safety of the officers involved and was not in the public’s interest.

To Givan, Birmingham authorities were inviting needless criticism by not sharing the video with the public, just as police in Montgomery had done after the Pettaway killing. If the police officers who killed Bradford really made an honest mistake, a heat-of-the-moment decision, the video would show that to the public.

“There was just a lot of speculation as to what happened, and I was like, why don’t they just release the freaking bodycam?” she told ProPublica. “If you didn’t do anything, if you didn’t make a misstep, there shouldn’t be an issue. Don’t make it an issue.”

In the state House, Givan, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would, for the first time, codify the right of families to see the video even before an investigation is concluded and allow police departments to release footage to the public.

The Alabama Legislature was controlled by Republicans, so Givan needed the support of a powerful Republican, Allen Treadaway, chair of the Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security and a former police officer. Givan and Treadaway were longtime friends: While he had served as assistant police chief in Birmingham, Givan had also worked for the city. But Treadaway soon got calls from police chiefs, sheriffs and district attorneys across the state asking him to stop the legislation.

“The major concern was not to jeopardize ongoing investigations,” Treadaway said. “The bill was really too loosely written in the early stages. … Law enforcement didn’t really want to touch it.” Amid the barrage of criticism from police lobbyists, Treadaway didn’t even bring Givan’s bill up for discussion.

The city of Montgomery and the Montgomery Police Department declined to comment for this story, saying they could not speak because of ongoing litigation.

By the fall of 2020, nearly two years had passed since authorities ended their investigation of the Pettaway case. Yet the family — a tight-knit group that included Pettaway’s mother, Lizzie, and his 11 siblings — still had not seen any of the body-camera footage. Then, in late August, the state law enforcement agency agreed to hand it over, under the condition that the family not show it to others.

The Pettaway family gathered at their attorney’s office to see what police had fought so long to hide. Some, like Joseph’s mother and his brother Walter, decided they could not handle the trauma and waited outside. Others, including sisters Nancy and Yvonne, sat in the office and made themselves watch, stomachs churning at what they saw as the officers’ callous disregard for their younger brother’s life.

“I see it in my head every night. I hear him begging for his life,” Nancy Pettaway told ProPublica.

From left, Walter Pettaway, Yvonne Frazier, Annie Pettaway, James Pettaway, Jacqueline Pettaway and Nancy Pettaway, family members of Joseph Pettaway, gather for a portrait. (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

The family says the video, along with depositions from police officers and witnesses, buttresses a case that the department’s canine handler not only used unnecessary force that caused grave injury, but also that the officers, with appalling casualness, did nothing to help save Pettaway’s life in the aftermath of the attack.

According to the video and witness statements gathered by the family as part of their civil suit against the police, early on the morning of July 8, 2018, police had received a 911 call from Gary Dickson, one of the men hired along with Pettaway to work on the dilapidated house. The day before, Dickson, Pettaway and their boss, James Jones, had fitted a new window in the back bedroom. They had a barbeque in the backyard that evening, and by 11 p.m. everyone had left. The men planned to put in hardwood flooring the next day.

Dickson returned later that night to sleep in the house, as the workers sometimes did. Dickson did not know that Pettaway was also planning to return, he said in a deposition. Pettaway knocked on the front door and didn’t get an answer, so he climbed into the house from the back window he had helped install earlier in the day. In the darkened home, Dickson saw someone in the back bedroom he could not identify and left to call police.

At least half a dozen officers showed up around 3 a.m. Dickson called Jones, who told police when he arrived that there was not much valuable in the house. But police decided to summon the department’s K-9 handler Nicholas Barber to deploy a dog to search the house. Until then, police had made no effort to communicate with whoever was inside the house, according to officers’ depositions.

Barber, a white man and a former soldier who had joined the police department five years earlier, had deployed the dog nearly 10 times in the seven months he had been working as its handler. In a deposition, Barber said his dog had never bitten a person under his supervision before and acknowledged that having a dog get its first bite was a rite of passage for the animal and its handler.

Department policy required the consent of the homeowner for police to send a dog into a residence, and for officers to give three loud warnings to anyone inside before doing so. According to a transcript of the body-camera video entered into the court record, Barber stood in front of the door and said something in quick, slurred words that was unintelligible to those around him. Less than one second later, he unleashed the dog into the house.

Pettaway’s family says he had a deep fear of dogs and insists that if he had been given proper warning, he would have come out. “He wouldn't have stayed in that house and let that dog bite him like that,” Yvonne Pettaway said.

But Barber, according to the transcript, followed the dog into the home as it searched for Pettaway, shouting “voran,” a German-language command telling a dog to apprehend a suspect. In seconds, the dog found Pettaway cowering under a bed.

“It was like he [Barber] was determined to find him in that house,” Yvonne Pettaway recalled from the body-camera video she watched. “The dog started chewing him, and I heard him holler, ‘Please get the dog out my stomach.’” Barber, she said, “just let him continue to bite him, didn’t try to pull him off or nothing.”

“The dog was just moving its head and he was just standing there, eating my brother up,” Nancy Pettaway said. “I don’t like to talk about it cause it make me wanna cry. And he said, ‘Please, please get the dog off me.’ He was still standing there, letting that dog kill my brother.”

For two minutes, according to the transcript, the police dog was allowed to tear into Pettaway under the bed. Barber repeatedly shouted “yaya” and “good boy,” praising the dog. To end the frenzied attack, he was forced to choke the dog until it passed out. With Pettaway still on the floor, Barber took the dog back to his police car outside. A minute later, he told another officer in front of the house that Pettaway “is not very happy right now.”

Six minutes after the dog attack began, police decided they should bring Pettaway outside. The transcript of the tape shows that Barber asked the other officers to wait so he could go and take a photo of the scene first. Inside, according to the transcript, Barber snapped a photo of an unconscious Pettaway with his cellphone and said “awesome” to himself.

Outside, according to the court record, another officer asked Barber about what happened:

“Policeman: ‘Did ya’ get a bite?’

“Barber: ‘Sure did, heh, heh (chuckling).’

“Policeman: ‘Are you serious?’

“Barber: ‘Fuck yeah.’”

According to court documents, police officers then went inside and dragged Pettaway through the home to lay him face down on the sidewalk outside. They turned him over and handcuffed him, and then five officers stood over his body, their flashlights illuminating the blood pouring out of the wounds on his upper legs, soaking his clothes and pooling onto the ground.

“Policeman: ‘He’s good.’

“Barber: ‘Well I mean “good” is a relative term. Let’s get that clear. He’s breathing.’”

Under department policy, officers were not allowed to render first aid, even though it was clear Pettaway’s bleeding needed to be stopped. “They didn’t care,” Nancy Pettaway said. “They were standing around and joking the whole time my brother laid there dying.”

Nearly five minutes later, a paramedic arrived and made the first attempt by anyone on the scene to offer medical aid. But it was too late.

The home in Montgomery, Alabama, where Joseph Pettaway was killed has since been damaged in a fire and torn down. (Umar Farooq/ProPublica)

For many of Pettaway’s siblings, the police officers’ behavior captured on the video is reminiscent of how authorities in Alabama and other states used police dogs to attack Black civil rights activists. “What they did to him put me in the mind of the stuff they did back in the day when they put them dogs on people,” Yvonne Pettaway said. “They still do the same thing to black people they did back in the day, the system hasn't changed.”

The Pettaway family says if police had been called out to a white neighborhood, they doubt a dog would have been used to search a home in the first place. “They would have gone in there and walked him out,” Walter said.

Montgomery police never took disciplinary action against Barber or the other officers involved. In July 2020, he resigned from the department and joined the department in nearby Tallassee, Alabama. According to Barber’s deposition, his resignation stemmed from an unrelated disciplinary issue: The department accused him of improperly using police databases to stalk the boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend, then arresting the boyfriend during a trumped-up traffic stop.

Barber did not respond to messages left at two publicly listed phone numbers, and his attorneys did not respond to questions sent via email.

The Montgomery Police Department headquarters (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

That summer, Givan watched as enraged people took to the streets across the country over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, which was captured on video by an onlooker. In Birmingham, protesters marched through the city center and tried to pull down a Confederate monument. The city declared a state of emergency and put a curfew in place.

It was clear to Givan that police in Alabama needed to be more transparent. In Madison, a suburb of Huntsville, residents protested when police blocked the release of video that showed officers shooting and killing Dana Fletcher, a Black man who was also attacked by a police dog in a Planet Fitness parking lot. In Huntsville, an officer was on trial for the murder of Jeff Parker, a suicidal white man killed in his home after a 911 call, sparking demonstrations. Neither the public nor the City Council — which was paying the officer’s legal bills — was allowed to see video. The officer was convicted of murder, but an appeals court ordered a retrial, and in October the officer pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

If authorities showed the public what had happened, Givan remembered thinking, cities might avoid the unrest that followed. “This is not rocket science,” Givan said. “I’m sitting there saying, ‘All y’all had to do was release the footage. Then the city now doesn’t have to pay $10 million to restore downtown. All y’all had to do was be transparent.’”

In Birmingham, Givan organized workshops to teach young people and police how to keep routine interactions like traffic stops from escalating.

And in the state House, she approached Treadaway again to see how her bill on body-camera video transparency could be made more agreeable to critics. They consulted with the attorney general, the Alabama Sheriffs Association, the Alabama State Fraternal Order of Police and the Alabama District Attorneys Association. But there was still no support for the bill as long as it offered a path for media and the public to obtain footage.

Many state lawmakers were also opposed to allowing the public to see video. Alabama’s Legislature included serving police officers on crucial committees like Judiciary and Public Safety. Among these lawmakers was Shane Stringer, who had killed a person while on duty just outside Mobile in 2018, according to the Mobile County Sheriff's Office. Stringer, who didn’t respond to interview requests from ProPublica, pushed for a series of pro-police bills, including one that made it easier to redact the names of officers involved in controversial incidents from public records. He was also the lead sponsor of a law that this year made Alabama one of the only states where anyone over the age of 19 can carry a gun without a license.

“You actually had a bill passed that opens up the wild wild west, that puts guns in the hands of people,” Givan said. “But yet you don’t want to pass legislation that allows for transparency.”

Givan’s bill failed in committee in 2021.

The debate however, hit a turning point in January 2023. The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police in neighboring Tennessee finally ignited support in Alabama for allowing some access to police body-camera footage. Authorities in Memphis showed the family the video of his beating by officers, and the district attorney quickly took action to charge the officers with a crime.

National news media positioned reporters to cover what many thought would be violent protests once the body-camera video was released. There were protests in Memphis and other cities, but they were largely peaceful, something Givan and Treadaway credit to the transparency Memphis showed in the weeks after Nichols was killed.

Even Treadaway, despite his previous reluctance, saw the need for it in cases like that of Nichols. “It was shocking,” Treadaway said in an interview, “to see that type of treatment of a citizen. … It was very disturbing and shocking that that would happen. I’ve never seen that in my career in the city of Birmingham.” The way authorities handled the release of the video, Treadaway told ProPublica, was a model for what could happen in Alabama the next time such an incident occurred.

But when Alabama lawmakers finally approved a watered-down version of Givan’s bill this June, it left the police in control of body-camera footage. Families of victims can make a formal request to see video of an incident, but they can be denied without any detailed explanation. There was no provision to allow the news media or the public to see the footage.

The shortcomings of the new law have been showcased in a number of recent cases since its passage.

In July, for example, Jawan Dallas, a 36-year-old Black man, was stopped by officers in Mobile, Alabama, who were seeking a burglary suspect. Police said Dallas was shocked with a stun gun when he resisted and died from a “medical emergency.” His family, which was allowed to see the video only after a grand jury cleared the officers of criminal wrongdoing, said in a press conference this November that Dallas was cooperative in the video. The officers pinned him to the ground, they said, and shocked him more than a dozen times. As he struggled for his life, Dallas can be heard saying, “I cannot breathe, help me,” and “I don’t want to be George Floyd.”

Like the Pettaways, Dallas’ family, which has sued the Mobile Police Department, is barred from showing the video of his death to the public. The case has prompted one lawmaker, state Sen. Merika Coleman, to introduce a new bill that would make video from body cameras or dashboard cameras a public record and lay out a procedure for the media and the public to request access to it — the same kind of reforms that Givan’s bills failed to make. The Mobile Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The changes to state law have done little for Pettaway’s family members, who have been fighting since 2020 to make the footage of his death public. They have pictures of Joseph and his mother adorning everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs. “Gone but not forgotten,” one T-shirt says, with a photo of Pettaway taken at a Christmas barbecue their mother hosted in happier times.

“The defendants and the city would prefer that their blatantly egregious, inhumane violation of Mr. Pettaway’s rights remain unseen and unknown and unexposed to public scrutiny,” the family’s attorney said in a petition to the court as part of their lawsuit against Barber and the city.

The city of Montgomery, which continues to provide Barber’s legal defense, has argued successfully that releasing the video would prejudice any future jury. And if released, the city told the court, the “the graphic images presented in the recording could lead to civil unrest.”

ProPublica’s request for the body-camera footage of the events surrounding Pettaway’s death was rejected in September by the city of Montgomery, which said the video is not a public record under Alabama law and therefore “not subject to disclosure under the Alabama Open Records Act.”

Givan said authorities in Alabama have failed to understand that withholding the footage fomented the public outrage they are trying to prevent. “The unrest comes because you deny, you deny, you deny, and then the general public begins to suspect you,” she said. “The longer you wait, the more the public distrusts you.”

Givan at her office in Birmingham, Alabama

In December 2022, a judge refused a request from a coalition of news outlets to release the video of Pettaway’s killing. The trial against Barber and the city was supposed to begin within months, the court said, and the public could see the footage of Pettaway’s death then. A year later, though, that trial has yet to begin, and the Pettaways must wait for a higher court to rule on whether Barber can be tried at all.

While he understands the court’s concern about the potential for public unrest, Pettaway’s brother Walter says it cannot outweigh the need to show what happened, and the small measure of justice making the video public might bring to the family. Pettaway’s mother, Lizzie, died earlier this year, and the family says the grief of knowing what happened to her son was a heavy burden on her last years.

Walter Pettaway is one of Joseph Pettaway’s 11 siblings. (Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica)

“I can understand what the judge is saying, but at the same time, it happened, and there ain’t no police officer or nothin’ came by and said nothing to mom before she left,” Walter Pettaway said. “That’s the hurting part, too. It hurts.”

by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel

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This article is produced in collaboration with The Texas Tribune and the PBS series FRONTLINE. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and from FRONTLINE.

During an October conference to prepare law enforcement for dealing with an active shooter, Nevada State Police department Lt. Jacob Fisher played body camera footage that showed what he believed was a key misstep during the country’s deadliest mass shooting.

The footage from the 2017 massacre at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino showed a veteran Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer and his trainee waiting on the floor below the shooter instead of confronting him as he spewed gunfire into the crowd of concertgoers outside. Six years later, Fisher told the room full of law enforcement officers and firefighters at the conference in Grapevine, Texas, that he had trained the veteran officer and felt like he had failed.

Sixty people died, including Fisher’s best friend, and more than 850 others were injured.

“I failed, and because of that I had to carry my best friend’s casket nine days later,” Fisher said. “I failed his kids. I failed his wife. I failed that organization because, for whatever reason, I couldn’t break through and find a way to convey a message to that cop to where he would run 800 yards toward active gunfire.”

While stressing the importance of training and leadership, Fisher made a stunning admission. He said he sends his children to school with bulletproof backpacks and tourniquet kits because he doesn’t trust that law enforcement officers would save them in the event of a mass shooting.

“Why do I as a parent have to arm my children at the ages of 8 and 10 and teach them those things?” said Fisher, who spoke with a reporter at the conference but could not later be reached for comment. “Because the cops in my jurisdiction, I don’t trust to go save them.”

The Nevada Supreme Court ordered the release of the video Fisher played six months after the October 2017 massacre, siding with news organizations who had sued the Las Vegas police department to make the records public. The veteran officer was fired after its release but was later reinstated, according to what the union president told newsrooms at the time.

The concerns that Fisher raised about the officer’s inaction were not mentioned in the after-action report, nor was the fact that the officer was fired for his behavior that day. The nearly 200-page accounting of the police response simply stated that 10 minutes after two officers arrived on the hotel floor below the shooter, they moved to the same level as his locked room, where they waited in the stairwell. They then remained there because their radios didn’t work and they were “unsure of what was taking place,” the report stated.

ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE found that active shooter training varies widely across the country and that law enforcement officers make similar mistakes in mass shooting after mass shooting. Yet those failures are not always clearly identified in reports dissecting the incidents, adding to the difficulty of learning from past missteps.

Communities often rely on after-action reviews of mass shootings for a comprehensive and independent assessment of what happened. In the Las Vegas case, the body camera footage allowed the public to see what the report did not address, but the failure to release records, video and other evidence after mass shootings can leave many in the dark even when these analyses are issued.

Despite the U.S. facing more than 120 mass shootings in the past two-and-a-half decades, ProPublica, the Tribune and FRONTLINE found that there is no agreed-upon national standard for who conducts after-action assessments of law enforcement’s response, what they should examine or whether the resulting findings should be released.

Reports were never publicly issued in many cases, such as the 2018 shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, that resulted in the deaths of 10 people and the 2019 El Paso, Texas, shooting in which 23 died. And when they were made public, there was wide variability in what they contained. The news organizations analyzed more than three dozen publicly available after-action reports, finding that some excluded key details about officers’ actions or failed to fully explore other missteps, including individual delays in engaging the shooter.

Some reviews have “really important chunks that are missing,” said Louis Klarevas, a mass shooting expert and research professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who argues that more records should be made public. “That raises a red flag.”

“Why did they focus on just this one aspect, or these two aspects? And what about everything else?” he added.

While the after-action reviews often focused on identifying broader issues, such as breakdowns in communication, incident command and multi-agency coordination, the newsrooms found that some did not evaluate whether significant delays in confronting shooters were justified.

In 2009, officers in Binghamton, New York, responded within three minutes to calls of an active shooter at the American Civic Association, a nonprofit that provides immigration services. Not hearing gunfire, officers waited 40 minutes for specialized teams to arrive and enter the building. They found the shooter had killed himself, according to an after-action report conducted by the county. The review of law enforcement’s actions during the shooting, in which 13 people died, called the police response “timely.”

In 2018, police in Thousand Oaks, California, initially approached the restaurant where the gunman shot patrons but retreated after he fired at them. Law enforcement did not reenter for more than 40 minutes, and ultimately did so only after SWAT arrived. A dozen people died in the shooting, including a responding officer who was accidentally struck by bullets from another police officer’s gun. The after-action report, conducted by the sheriff’s department, mentioned the delay but did not draw a conclusion about whether it was justified, stating, “While a request for the SWAT team was appropriate, the question of a second entry by patrol, prior to SWAT’s arrival, remains.”

In another case in 2016, a shooter unleashed hundreds of rounds of gunfire into a crowd at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, while the first officer on scene waited outside for backup. Officers then attempted to negotiate with the shooter after he barricaded himself in a bathroom despite 911 calls indicating hostages had been shot. It took three hours to take him down. An after-action report determined that law enforcement had followed best practices and agency protocol, but stated that those policies and training needed to be reexamined.

Authors of the Las Vegas and Binghamton reports did not respond to the newsrooms’ questions. Neither did the officer Fisher mentioned or the union that represented him.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, which conducted the after-action review of the shooting in Thousand Oaks, said its report was “an accurate and transparent assessment of what went right, and what could be improved upon.”

Jim Burch, president of the National Policing Institute, a nonprofit that conducted several such reviews, including the one for the Pulse Nightclub shooting, said after-action reports are intended to identify areas of improvement and should not be viewed as the final arbiter of officers’ individual decisions.

Burch said because the reviewers are not conducting a criminal or disciplinary investigation, they must balance transparently describing what went wrong against avoiding assigning individual blame.

He and other experts who conduct such reviews told the newsrooms that their work often unfolds concurrently with litigation, criminal investigations, and internal disciplinary reviews. As a result, they can face limitations that include key personnel declining to speak and an unwillingness or inability, legal or otherwise, to share records. In other cases, the scope of the review may be restricted to a specific aspect of the shooting, such as the medical response, or confined to the role of the agency that requested the report, even if multiple departments responded.

“Some places just aren’t friendly to these things,” Burch said. “Some jurisdictions just don’t buy in. Some leadership doesn’t buy in. So, look, that’s just something we have to work around.”

That’s what happened after the 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan. A nearly 600-page after-action report delivered about two years after the shooting largely condemned a slew of missteps and missed opportunities by school leaders. The report, however, did not reach a conclusion about a critical action by an armed school employee because reviewers could not interview her. The monitor opened the door to the boys’ bathroom where the gunman had cornered two students during his shooting spree, but she did not enter. After she left, the shooter killed one of the students, according to the report. The other, Keegan Gregory, escaped.

The monitor’s reasons for leaving “are unclear and confusing and she is the only one who could provide the clarity that the community desires,” the report found. Without her cooperation, the report said, “we have only her repeated statements that she does not know why she did what she did. Unfortunately, we cannot provide any further insight.”

The employee and the report authors did not respond to a request for comment from the news organizations.

Chad Gregory, Keegan’s father, is frustrated that the report did not provide all of the answers parents were seeking because of a lack of participation from school personnel.

Gregory said that, ideally, there would be a national organization or agency in charge of setting standards for how police respond to mass shootings and how schools should conduct lockdown drills, as well as ensuring that communities receive needed services. After a shooting, such an agency could also put pressure on departments that were involved to ensure accountability and corrective action. Otherwise, Gregory said, the burden falls on parents and survivors who are trying to cope with “war-level” trauma to continue demanding resources and accountability.

“There is no authority. There is no dedicated resources,” Gregory said. “It’s everyone fend for themselves and figure it out.”

If law enforcement wants to maintain the trust of the communities they serve, officials need to be transparent about what transpired, said AJ DeAndrea, one of the SWAT team members who responded to the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.

An after-action report should be “critical about what happened in a way that we can learn from it,” DeAndrea said.

“That is the purpose of an after-action review, to say, ‘This is what we did good. More importantly, this is what we did bad,’” he added.

We reviewed dozens of reports that were issued since the Columbine High School shooting. Of those, only the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, explicitly condemned officers’ inaction to stop a shooter. In both cases, state lawmakers had called for the reviews.

In the Parkland case, a commission established by legislators, which included several Florida police leaders, issued a report that pointed to various missteps by law enforcement, including that the first officer on the scene never entered the building and told others who arrived later to stay away from the school. The report concluded that the officer, Scot Peterson, “failed to act consistently with his training and fled to a position of personal safety” while the shooter killed students and staff.

Several officers were fired after the shooting and Peterson was prosecuted for neglect of a child, culpable negligence and perjury. A jury found him not guilty of the charges in June of this year. Mark Eiglarsh, an attorney who represented Peterson, said the ruling proved that neither the accusations in the report nor the charges were justified. The Florida sheriff who led the commission that produced the report declined an interview with the news organizations.

A report on the Uvalde shooting that was released in July 2022 by a bipartisan committee appointed by Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan concluded that law enforcement at all levels had failed in their response. Nineteen children and two teachers died that May.

Before the report was issued, the only public review of what occurred was a limited assessment published more than a month after the shooting by Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center. The analysis, which was conducted at the request of the Texas Department of Public Safety, was intended to identify gaps in officers’ training. But the report was criticized by some who believed it reinforced the narrative put forth by DPS that local law enforcement was largely to blame, despite hundreds of local, state and federal officers descending upon the scene. Pete Blair, ALERRT’s executive director, declined to comment on the report. He has previously defended it as reflective of the information that was available at the time.

The 77-page report by the speaker-appointed committee was released almost two weeks later. It offered what was at the time the most complete account of the failed response, although it did not publish any of the raw materials that the committee had obtained.

The committee also faced limitations. Most state and local officers complied with the committee’s interview requests, but it was unable to directly speak with more than 180 federal officers who responded, instead relying on comments they were seen making on other officers’ body camera footage and interviews they provided to DPS investigators, said state Rep. Joe Moody, the only Democrat on the committee. Lawmakers also did not have access to medical examiners’ reports for the victims, making it difficult to definitively determine how many might have survived if there had been a faster response.

Jesse Rizo, an uncle to 9-year-old Jackie Cazares, who died that day, said the state committee’s report was a good first step. But since then, he and other families have been waiting for a final review from state investigators; it has yet to be released 19 months after the shooting. A federal review by the Justice Department is also pending.

ProPublica and the Tribune are part of a coalition of news organizations that have sued DPS for records related to the shooting. A state district judge ruled in the news organizations’ favor this month, but DPS is appealing.

Rizo said some families have relied on media reports to fill in the gaps left by officials.

Since the House committee’s report was released, news organizations, including ProPublica and the Tribune, have revealed multiple missteps in the response and published video and audio that had not been released as part of any previous reports. In an investigation published this month, ProPublica, the Tribune and FRONTLINE showed that while the children in Uvalde followed their training when confronted with a mass shooter, many officers did not. Among multiple flaws in the law enforcement response, many officers said that they did not initially realize there were students in the classrooms because they were so silent. The children were following their training.

The lack of transparency regarding law enforcement’s failings, Rizo said, has some families questioning their faith in the democratic process.

“You ask the questions and you think, ‘Man, I pay taxes, I should be getting these answers,’” Rizo said. “And what do you get? Nothing.”

“You begin to acknowledge, to begin to, I guess, accept the fact that those answers may never come,” he said.

Anna Clark contributed reporting.

by Sarah Alvarez, Outlier Media

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

DTE Energy, Michigan’s largest utility, will be required to publicly disclose information about how often it sells struggling customers’ old debt to third-party collectors following revelations that it does so far more often than other utilities in the region.

The Michigan Public Service Commission this month ordered DTE to start reporting information about debt sales every year. The utility, however, fended off an effort to end the practice altogether, according to commission documents.

In response to the decision, Chris Lamphear, DTE’s head of corporate communications, said in an email, “We will share information with the Commission on the timetable they request, though we have no plans for a sale at this time.”

A 2022 investigation by Outlier Media and ProPublica detailed how DTE sold customer debt from closed accounts for pennies on the dollar over a period of nine years. Jefferson Capital Systems, a company that bought the debt, has sued Detroiters, garnished paychecks and income tax returns and put liens on homes. The last time DTE sold debt, Outlier and ProPublica found, was 2017.

The company’s debt sale practices were unusual, our investigation found. We surveyed the 11 other investor-owned electric utilities that each serve at least 400,000 customers in the Great Lakes states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. All of them, including Consumers Energy, Michigan’s second-largest utility company, said they do not sell debt. Five of the utilities also said they do not directly sue their customers over debt. The ones that do said they do so only on rare occasions.

Commissionstaff then explored the issue while weighing a rate increase request from DTE, which provides power for Detroit and southeast Michigan. A brief submitted by commission staff in the rate case said the debt sales resulted in “hardship-inducing collection tactics” affecting the utility’s most financially vulnerable customers and suggested that DTE stop selling uncollectible accounts.

The staff was also concerned that DTE’s debt sales allowed for “double recovery.” In other words, according to the staff, some debt is recovered by the third party that buys it even as the utility factors uncollected debt into its calculations for rate increases affecting all customers.

DTE disputed that debt sales would allow for a double recovery, and an administrative law judge involved in the case only acted on one part of the staff request: the need for DTE to regularly report on any third-party debt collection.

The commission made the final decision and will now require annual reports from DTE on debt sales for the previous five years detailing the number of accounts sold to a third party for collection, the amount of debt associated with those accounts and how much money the company made from the sales.

Commission officials declined to comment. Spokesperson Matt Helms said by email the commission was “letting the order speak for it.”

Jackson Koeppel, the founder of an environmental justice organization called Soulardarity, which often testifies in DTE rate cases that go before the commission, said the reports are a “good start.” But Koeppel wants to see commissioners go further.

“The commission needs to put a nail in the coffin of this cruel practice,” he said. “We also need to talk about what is going to be done to help these people who are still dealing with the effects of the debt that has already been sold,” he said.

Jefferson Capital has not commented on its arrangement with DTE or its collection tactics despite numerous attempts by reporters to contact a spokesperson.

Iris Foster-Ray, a Detroit resident still struggling to pay off debt DTE sold to Jefferson Capital in 2017, is hoping no one else will have to go through the stressful, costly process she experienced.

Iris Foster-Ray is still struggling to pay off debt DTE sold to Jefferson Capital in 2017. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Over the years, she has had her paychecks garnished. She said that she now has a payment plan where she owes Jefferson Capital $150 a month and that her income tax refund was garnished two years ago. There is a lien on her house as well.

“DTE shouldn’t have sold the account,” said Foster-Ray, who failed to pay her utility bill during a time when her family was dealing with high medical bills. “If you are behind on any utilities, there should be help because you need heat, and you need water to live.”

Stephanie Johnson testified in a 2022 DTE rate case about how Jefferson Capital came after her for about $5,000 in old debt she built up years ago when she fell behind on one of the utility’s shut-off protection payment plans. Jefferson Capital sued her during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The case was finally closed in October, according to court records.

“I am so grateful that I was able to lend my voice to this and share my experience and that it had an effect on DTE not selling people’s debt going forward,” Johnson said.

Most months, tens of thousands of DTE customers can’t afford their bills and have their electric accounts shut off by the company.

Some of those accounts remain closed and are written off by DTE as uncollectible debt. The utility disconnected 162,128 electric accounts for nonpayment through the end of September this year, the last month for which data collected by the MPSC is available. That number is about 30,000 less than for the same period last year.

“We perform significant outreach every day to connect our at-risk customers to financial aid and prevent an interruption of service, which is a last resort we always strive to avoid,” Lamphear said.

by Logan Jaffe, Ash Ngu and Mary Hudetz

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American museums and universities repatriated more ancestral remains and sacred objects to tribal nations this year than at any point in the past three decades, transferring ownership of an estimated 18,800 Native American ancestors, institutions reported.

And more repatriations are forthcoming. Museums, universities and government agencies have filed 380 repatriation notices this year — more than the previous two years combined — under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, declaring that they plan to make human remains and burial items available to tribes.

“By every measurement, this has been a record-breaking year,” Melanie O’Brien, manager of the Interior Department’s National NAGPRA Program, said during a recent federal review committee hearing on repatriation. “I’m reminded every day that with each notice that gets published and every inventory that is updated, it means that another ancestor is closer to being respectfully returned.”

The increase follows a ProPublica investigation that revealed how institutions have for decades failed to fully comply with NAGPRA, in some cases exploiting a loophole that allowed them to keep the remains by denying their connections to present-day Indigenous communities. And some institutions, including Harvard University, pursued destructive scientific studies on those remains without the informed consent of descendants.

In response to our reporting — which included a dozen stories and an interactive database that allows the public to see the status of repatriation in their communities — there has been widespread acknowledgment of past failures. More than 70 news outlets cited ProPublica’s database to report the repatriation progress of institutions in their communities. And coming regulatory changes promise to improve the repatriation process, experts said.

At the start of 2023, museums had yet to repatriate more than 110,000 Native American remains, which equated to more than half of what they had reported holding in their collections, despite NAGPRA’s passage 33 years ago. As the year draws to a close, that figure has dropped to about 97,000. To date, about 180 museums that have reported holding ancestral remains have not begun repatriating at all.

“It’s just mind boggling why these entities would have vast large collections of human remains,” said Armand Minthorn, a former council member for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon who now serves on the National NAGPRA Review Committee, a federal advisory board. “The fight goes on, but we’re not going to give up.”

The work of pushing for accountability and repatriation has long been led by Indigenous people. Before the passage of NAGPRA in 1990, tribal citizens and leaders protested the outsized power that institutions had in determining cultural connections that could lead to repatriation. Grassroots efforts have also shaped newly revised NAGPRA regulations that will go into effect next year.

Typically, institutions and agencies file repatriation notices after extensive consultation with tribal representatives. Publication of such notices means legal control of the remains and objects can be transferred to tribal nations named in the document.

(Ash Ngu/ProPublica)

O’Brien said the notices are a barometer of how actively institutions are working to comply with the law. While it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact explanation for the increased repatriation activity, she said, reporting from ProPublica and scores of local news outlets that cited our repatriation database likely contributed to the uptick.

“The attention and awareness due to ProPublica’s reporting is a part of it,” O’Brien said in an interview. “In addition, the significant amount of local reporting that has followed ProPublica’s reporting has increased awareness of repatriation.”

ProPublica’s database incorporated information from Federal Register notices to make the National NAGPRA Program’s repatriation database searchable by tribe for the first time. For many years, the database could only be searched by institution. Identifying which notices tribes had been included in required sifting through the Federal Register.

Gordon Yellowman, a former NAGPRA coordinator for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, said in an email to ProPublica that ready access to these reports had aided his tribe’s repatriation efforts.

Changes Among Institutions With the Most Unrepatriated Native American Remains

ProPublica reported this year that 10 entities — including top universities, a state-run museum and the U.S. Interior Department — hold about half of the remains that have not been repatriated under NAGPRA.

For years, the University of California, Berkeley, held the largest number of ancestral remains — a result of fostering aggressive excavations throughout the state that resulted in the school collecting the remains of at least 12,000 Native American ancestors from the late 1800s to the 1980s. Only about a fourth had been repatriated.

But in late October, the university’s standing changed as a federal notice showed UC Berkeley was preparing to repatriate some 4,400 ancestors and 25,000 items taken from burial sites in the Bay Area, the ancestral and present-day homelands of the Ohlone people.

Now, the Ohio History Connection is the institution that has the nation’s largest number of unrepatriated remains — at least 7,100 in total. The Illinois State Museum is close behind as it works to repatriate the remains of about 1,104 ancestors excavated from burial mounds in Fulton County, Illinois.

Lawmakers in Ohio and Illinois passed legislation this year with the aim of removing barriers to repatriation for the museums and tribes alike, while allowing land to be set aside to rebury the thousands of ancestors in each state.

Both museums have told ProPublica that they are committed to repatriating everything in their collections that was taken from Indigenous graves.

Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the institution with the third largest collection under NAGPRA, has made similar pledges as it has reckoned with its past collection practices.

“We are one of the worst offenders, and that’s why Harvard’s actions, and lack of action, have attracted attention and criticism, and why we will be watched closely in terms of what steps we take next,” Kelli Mosteller, executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program, recently told the Harvard Gazette, a university-sponsored publication.

A Senate Inquiry Into Institutions With the Largest Collections

In April, 13 U.S. senators pressed the five institutions with the most Native American remains to explain why decades later they still hadn’t repatriated their holdings. Citing ProPublica’s reporting, the senators asked how they made decisions and whether they accepted Indigenous knowledge as evidence in determining cultural connections.

Almost all said that they had begun working to establish better relationships with tribes only in the last several years.

The Illinois museum said it frequently initiates contact with tribes on repatriation, marking a change from how it previously approached NAGPRA work. In the past and under different leadership, ProPublica reported, the museum favored scientific and historical evidence despite the law’s requirement that various other forms of information, including oral history, have equal merit.

All five institutions said they value Indigenous knowledge as a form of evidence.

Megan Wood, director of the Ohio History Connection, said museum staff in June were “going through the entire collection box by box as requested” to fulfill a request from tribes to reunite each ancestor with items they were originally buried with. Chief Glenna J. Wallace of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma wrote a letter of support for the museum to the Senate committee, stating that leadership changes had led to “an awakening” at the Ohio History Connection.

“As a former vocal critic and now an advocate of the Ohio History Connection, I am confident you will witness long overdue dramatic changes in the near future,” Wallace wrote.

Federal data shows the museum did not complete any repatriations this year.

Neither did Indiana University. The school’s close tribal partner, the Miami Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, declined to comment to ProPublica. But Julie Olds, the tribe’s cultural resource officer and NAGPRA committee chair, this summer told the National NAGPRA Review Committee during a hearing that the perceived slow pace of repatriation at the university is not reflective of the quality of its relationship with the tribes.

“From the vantage point of the Miami people, meaningful consultation has been going on for [a] significant period of time,” Olds told the committee.

Interior Department Says It Will Prioritize Repatriation

The rise in repatriations this year coincided with an Interior Department review of how NAGPRA should be enforced after tribes and descendants said overwhelmingly that the law was not working. The revamped federal rules will go into effect in January.

As Interior officials worked to finalize the new regulations this fall, they acknowledged in internal memos that the department itself holds one of the largest collections of Native American ancestors, echoing ProPublica’s analysis. In total, federal data shows Interior agencies have repatriated more than three-quarters of the human remains they have reported collecting from Native American gravesites. But the department’s efforts over the decades have still left it with the unrepatriated remains of more than 3,000 ancestors. There may also be more that the department has not yet accounted for, Interior’s chief of staff, Rachael Taylor, said in one memo.

She sent a Sept. 21 directive to agencies — including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service — to prioritize compliance with NAGPRA “with the clear intention” of completing repatriations. She noted that the department has a “critical leadership role” in complying with the law that it also administers and enforces.

A month later, Interior officials said in a follow-up memorandum that the department would centralize its repatriation policies and efforts rather than leave compliance decisions to a patchwork of agencies. These agencies maintain their own inventories of ancestral remains and items, which obscured the breadth of the Interior Department’s holdings under NAGPRA.

The new mandates mark a shift at Interior. Earlier this year, a spokesperson told ProPublica that Interior’s agencies were not required to consult with tribes about the possibility of repatriating human remains for which no tribal connection had been determined unless a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization made a formal request for them.

Now, the Interior Department says it will ensure “proactive compliance” with NAGPRA.

Emily Palus, who leads the Interior Department’s division of Museum and Cultural Resources, told the National NAGPRA Review Committee last month that the proposed new action plan is a “game changer.”

“I am saddened that it has taken this long,” she said.

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

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. This story was co-published with VCIJ and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

More than most public colleges, Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, is the embodiment of one person’s vision.

Paul Trible was CNU’s president from 1996 to 2022, serving almost three times as long as anyone else. He remains a distinguished professor at the school and its highest-paid employee, making more than half a million dollars a year. A former congressman and U.S. senator, Trible took over a young university and transformed it from a commuter school into a residential campus. He boosted the school’s endowment from $300,000 to $64 million. Construction during his presidency included a student union, dormitories, a theater and concert hall, a baseball stadium and a chapel. The CNU library underwent major renovation and was renamed after Trible and his wife.

The longtime Republican politician also left another, less-noted legacy: a decline in the Black presence both on campus and in the adjacent neighborhood. Under his stewardship, the university pursued policies that thinned the ranks of Black students and faculty even as its continuing expansion eradicated a nearby Black community.

“For our area, a school that’s built on land that was taken from Black Americans” should be more diverse, said Audrey Perry Williams, president of the Hampton Roads chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, during a university-sponsored panel discussion on CNU’s history in November. “It’s just amazing that we’ve got all of this technology, we’ve got this outstanding institution here. And we’re not represented.”

Under Trible, CNU prioritized recruiting from affluent, largely white suburban high schools, according to current and former university officials.

In a state that is one-fifth African American and a city that is 44% Black, CNU’s Black enrollment dropped from 17% to 7% during Trible’s administration. It now stands at 8%.

The share of low-income students also decreased. The fifth most expensive of Virginia’s 15 public universities. CNU has the highest average net price — the actual cost of attending after subtracting grants and scholarships — for students from families with incomes under $30,000, according to state data.

Pell Grants, the federal financial aid program for low-income students, demonstrate the shift. From 1996, when Trible became president, to 2017, the last year for which federal data is available, the number of Pell Grant recipients at CNU dropped by 26%. Over the same period, the number of recipients nationally almost doubled. According to state data, the number of CNU students on Pell Grants declined by about one-third, from 1,003 in 1996 to 663 in 2021.

Proportions of Black and Low-Income Students at Christopher Newport University Dropped as Recruiting Efforts Targeted Affluent Suburbs Note: The number of Pell Grant recipients grew nationally from 2008-2010 due to increased federal funding, broader eligibility rules, and an economic recession that reduced incomes and led many people to go to school rather than seek jobs. Source: State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Black representation among professors is even more sparse. Out of CNU’s 286 full-time faculty in the fall of 2021, only seven, or 2.4%, were Black, the lowest percentage since at least 1993 and well below the national average of 6%, according to U.S. Department of Education data. One factor: CNU’s hiring criteria favored candidates from schools that were highly ranked by U.S. News & World Report, putting applicants from historically Black colleges and universities at a disadvantage.

Questions of racial discrimination have plagued Christopher Newport, which has 4,500 students and an annual revenue of about $180 million, since its birth as an all-white branch of the Colleges of William and Mary system in 1960. As ProPublica and Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO previously reported, the city of Newport News seized the core of a middle-class Black community by eminent domain as a site for the new college’s campus, bypassing other, less-expensive locations. Under Trible, the university completed the neighborhood’s erasure by acquiring almost all of the remaining homes.

As CNU president, Trible’s actions and comments on race-related issues sometimes stirred controversy. In 2003, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found reasonable cause for a complaint by two former CNU employees — a Black police officer and a white security guard with an adopted Black daughter — who had quit after two campus officers used racial slurs and made death threats. The EEOC urged CNU to rehire the complainants, pay their lost wages and discipline the offending officers.

Trible refused. He said in an email to faculty and staff that CNU had investigated the case “aggressively and exhaustively” and “determined that these are unfounded allegations of disgruntled former employees.” The Department of Justice, to which the EEOC refers cases when its findings aren’t heeded, decided not to sue the university. The security guard, William Nowinsky, received the department’s approval to file a lawsuit, but couldn’t afford to do so.

After a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, in Minneapolis in May 2020, Trible emailed the CNU community, deploring not only the deaths of Floyd and other victims of police violence, but also the vandalism associated with protests sweeping the country. “My own son’s business,” a luxury clothing store in Richmond, “was ransacked, and all of his merchandise and cash register carried off,” Trible said. In response, 1,700 students and alumni signed a letter criticizing him as “tone deaf” to racism. Trible then apologized, writing, “I hear your cry for change. … Black lives matter to me and always have and always will.” CNU also created a scholarship in Floyd’s memory for undergraduates from underrepresented groups.

That summer, more than 180 CNU faculty members wrote to Trible and members of the school’s board, urging them “to recognize and address our own university’s role in reproducing systemic inequality. … We believe that demographic disparities, alongside a number of university policy decisions, foster an environment that produces a strong anti-Black bias.”

Among other policy changes requested in the letter, the writers urged CNU to make Martin Luther King Day a university holiday. Although Trible voted as a senator in 1983 for a national holiday in King’s honor, a ProPublica-VCIJ survey found that Christopher Newport was the last Virginia state university to recognize it as a holiday, not doing so until 2021. Asked why, CNU and Trible did not respond.

In 2019, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which has almost 300 member colleges, rejected CNU’s request to set up a chapter on campus and encouraged the school to pursue greater diversity. “A diverse faculty, staff, and student body allows ideas to emerge for the benefit of the entire campus community,” Frederick M. Lawrence, the honor society’s secretary and CEO, wrote in a letter explaining the decision. “There are elements that Christopher Newport can point to with pride, especially that the Board of Visitors has affirmed the importance of free inquiry. It is important as well that the campus culture support that commitment.”

In the past, Trible has attributed the drop in Black enrollment to higher admissions standards, but neither he nor CNU answered a detailed list of questions about this and other aspects of his record as president. “We want to learn and understand the University’s full history,” current President William Kelly said in a statement. “As we examine our past, we seek to contribute to the future of Virginia and Newport News, our hometown that we cherish. We welcome local high school students to an innovative, no-cost, pre-college program. We’re offering expanded scholarships and direct admission to first-generation and low-income students. We are recruiting more diverse students and faculty and we are committed to building stronger connections with our neighbors and community.”

In a September message to faculty and staff, Kelly also acknowledged “the impacts on the community from the location and expansion of the campus.” Christopher Newport’s growth “has come at a human cost, and we must continue to learn about and understand our complicated history,” Kelly said.

As the campus expanded, so did Trible’s pay. Between 2010 and 2022, he earned at least $10 million in combined compensation from CNU and its real estate foundation. On average, Trible was paid $772,000 annually during this period, with roughly $425,000 coming from the university and $347,000 coming from the foundation, according to public tax filings. In all but one year between 2010 and 2021, Trible’s pay exceeded that of his counterpart at another state university in Virginia, Old Dominion, that has five times as many students as Christopher Newport, according to compensation data on the most recent tax forms from each school’s real estate foundation.

As a tenured professor in the department of leadership and American studies, Trible’s current salary is $524,000, paid by the real estate foundation, according to a university spokesperson. Trible is not teaching this year. According to his contract, he does not have “any obligations” this year. He may start teaching next year, the spokesperson said. The other former CNU president and distinguished professor, Anthony Santoro, who is teaching this year, is making $200,464. The current president, Kelly, a retired rear admiral and former superintendent of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, earns $400,000.

Trible’s post-presidential pay has become an issue on campus. At an all-faculty meeting in August 2022, James Bogenpohl, an associate professor of biology and neuroscience, asked provost Quentin Kidd how much Trible was making. Kidd said he didn’t know and faculty would have to submit a public records request, Bogenpohl said. They did so. At a similar meeting a year later, which included a discussion of budget cuts to faculty merit awards and research, Bogenpohl stood and read from Trible’s contract, questioning its generous terms in a time of belt-tightening. Some professors applauded, Bogenpohl said, while others looked shocked that he would criticize the revered ex-president. Trible didn’t attend the meeting. Kidd did not respond to a request for comment.

“Trible claims to love the university,” Bogenpohl said in an interview. “You would think if he’s going to take a year of leave, he might find it in his heart to take that year without a half-a-million-dollar bonus.”

Associate professor James Bogenpohl, standing in front of the Trible Library, has questioned Trible’s compensation. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

The 76-year-old Trible descends from an old Virginia family. His roots stretch back centuries in Essex County, Virginia, a rural region of former plantations and small commercial ports along the Rappahannock River, about an hour northeast of Richmond.

One 19th-century ancestor, John Samuel Trible, was a doctor and plantation owner, according to the Essex County Historical Society. John S. Trible enslaved 19 people, including 11 females and 8 males between the ages of 1 and 70, according to the 1850 Federal Census Slave Schedule.

Paul Trible himself owns an antebellum plantation in Kilmarnock, Virginia, called Gascony, which was operated by slave labor in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1950s, his parents acquired the main home and property, which Trible eventually inherited. He has bought adjacent properties over the years, reassembling the original plantation. Gascony was named a Virginia landmark in March, and Trible’s application to the National Park Service to add it to the national register of historic places was pending as of June. A primary benefit of these designations is that owners may qualify for tax credits for renovations.

Trible’s father, Paul Trible Sr., was a business executive, and the family moved frequently. Paul Trible Jr. grew up in Richmond and New Orleans and graduated from high school near Scranton, Pennsylvania.

As an undergraduate at private, all-male Hampden-Sydney College in southwestern Virginia, he made his goal clear. “I want to be president of the United States,” Trible told his adviser, according to “Crazy as Hell: The Story of the Transformation of Christopher Newport University” by Ellen Vaughn, which was copyrighted by the university’s education foundation and is dedicated to Trible and his wife, Rosemary.

Trible attended law school at Washington and Lee University, where Robert E. Lee became president after commanding Confederate forces in the Civil War. He was elected to Congress in 1976, before his 30th birthday. When he sought reelection two years later, his Democratic opponent criticized him for voting against every priority advocated by the Congressional Black Caucus.

Trible “has one of the worst records in the entire Congress when it comes to issues important to blacks,” read a campaign ad by Democrat Lewis Puller. Trible responded that it was ridiculous to characterize his entire record on the basis of 16 votes.

Trible won anyway, and then was elected to the Senate in 1982. A staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan, Trible was viewed as a pragmatist, not a firebrand. Conservative on social issues — he opposed abortion except to save the pregnant person’s life — he worked across the aisle to support public education.

In 1988, during his last full year in the Senate, Trible and Virginia’s other Republican senator, John W. Warner, backed the nomination of a local lawyer to the federal bench. The nomination died in committee after it was revealed that the attorney belonged to the James River Country Club in Newport News, which would not admit its first Black member until 1990. Newport News leaders may have wanted to uproot a middle-class Black community nearby because it was close to the country club, where the city’s business and political elite played golf, according to CNU historian Phillip Hamilton.

Instead of running for reelection, Trible sought the Republican nomination for governor. He lost and returned to practicing law. He also served on CNU’s board of visitors. When CNU’s president, Santoro, announced in 1995 that he would resign, Trible was named to the search committee for a new president. After reviewing dozens of applications,Trible surprised other committee members by offering himself as a candidate.

“I haven’t labored in the academic world,” he told the search committee, according to “Crazy as Hell.” “But I have learned important lessons in government service. I know and love this community and Virginia, and I’ve come to know and love this school.”

Trible brought his conservative politics and values to his presidency. For example, his administration imposed traditional standards of fashion. Students who worked part time for the university had to abide by dress codes. In 2013, the code required student employees to wear “modest” clothes and jewelry “in good taste.” Only women could have fingernail polish, makeup or earrings — and no more than two earrings per earlobe. Visible tattoos were “not acceptable.” By 2020, the policy was less specific, but it still said that tattoos and piercings other than earrings could not be visible.

If Trible was going to be at an event, “you better wear a tie,” Bogenpohl said.

When Trible arrived, the school had a small endowment and an unimposing campus. Trible proved to be an effective fundraiser. After he networked with politicians across the state in 1996, the legislature increased CNU’s funding by 21%, the largest hike of any university that year, according to “Crazy as Hell.”

Trible developed a close relationship with Smithfield Foods in nearby Smithfield, Virginia, the world’s largest pork producer. In 2005, a $5 million donation from Smithfield established a business school at CNU. Two years later, Trible joined Smithfield’s board. The company foundation again donated $5 million in 2011, plus $1 million from its chief executive and his wife for CNU’s chapel, which opened in 2012 and features a marble entranceway, a 60-foot cupola and a main hall seating 325 people.

One of Trible’s early moves as president was to establish a real estate foundation — a common strategy at Virginia public universities to reduce reliance on state financing for major projects. It became a vehicle for Christopher Newport to buy and develop adjacent properties, displacing dozens more Black families and a Black church. It offered Trible six-figure bonuses for fundraising for new construction. The foundation also built a five-bedroom, five-bathroom presidential mansion for Trible on the waterfront, with a library, a reception hall and four fireplaces, according to the local newspaper.

During his presidency, Trible has said, the university underwent a $1 billion renovation and expansion. In 2019, The Princeton Review ranked CNU as the 17th-most-beautiful campus in America.

“Paul Trible was a builder,” former president Santoro said. “Just look at the place.”

A portrait of Trible and his wife hangs in the library named after them. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

Trible’s plans to reshape the student body were equally ambitious. Christopher Newport’s original mission was to serve the rapidly growing student population in the blue-collar Tidewater region. Trible had a different idea. His vision, he told the university alumni magazine in 2006, was to “offer a private school experience at a public university — great teaching, small classes, lots of personal attention and a marvelous sense of community.”

During his tenure, CNU moved away from vocational programs. In the early 2000s, facing state budget cuts, it eliminated a bachelor’s degree program in nursing. Although data on the program’s enrollment by race was unavailable, nationally 11% of nursing graduates are Black. It also planned to scuttle teacher education but compromised, after strong criticism from the local community, by creating a master’s degree program.

CNU also pivoted to recruiting students from the wealthy suburbs of Richmond and northern Virginia. School officials courted high school guidance counselors there and held annual recruiting events at the opulent, late-19th-century Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, according to Vaughn’s book.

Trible himself pitched CNU at the Jefferson Hotel in the fall of 2019, said William Gordon, who attended the session as a prospective student. The event was known at Gordon’s suburban Richmond high school as a way for early admission applicants to make an impression, he said. Gordon, who is Black, said he soon noticed how few other Black students were there. “It was like to the point where, if anybody Black was in that room, you would give a little nod,’ he said.

After Trible’s speech, Gordon and other students lined up to meet him. Trible wrote down many of their names and CNU followed up by immediately accepting some of them, Gordon said. His own acceptance was deferred, but he ultimately enrolled.

William Gordon on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. Gordon transferred there from Christopher Newport. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

In the long term, CNU has struggled to attract enough high-achieving students from outside its home region. In Trible’s first decade as president, the number of CNU applicants soared and its acceptance rate dropped from 82% to about half. The average SAT score of its students rose by more than 200 points, according to media reports, and the graduation rate increased.

But CNU couldn’t sustain this success. Its yield rate — the percentage of admitted students who enroll — has plunged from almost 40% in 2004 and 2005 to 17% in 2021 and 18% in 2022, according to data from the university’s office of institutional research.

CNU accepted at least 85% of applicants in 2021 and 2022. Even so, enrollment has skidded 14% in the past decade, increasing CNU’s reliance on state funding.

CNU was founded to serve the Newport News area. But by 2014, few of its students were local. The proportion of freshmen coming from Newport News and neighboring Hampton, which both have a plurality Black population, had plummeted from 9% as recently as 2005 to 3.5%. The two cities, Newport News sheriff Gabriel Morgan said, weren’t “seen as the pool to draw from.”

As Morgan, who is Black, drove or biked past the campus almost every day, he realized that it didn’t reflect the city’s makeup. He told then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, who agreed that CNU should have more diverse voices in its leadership and appointed Morgan to CNU’s board.

“Trible didn’t have the benefit of people challenging his policies,” Morgan said.

With Morgan’s support, CNU implemented the Community Captains program in 2019. Sophomores at Newport News high schools who have at least a B-plus average and would be the first in their family to go to college are paired with a CNU student mentor and receive academic preparation as well as early admission. Aided by an influx of Community Captains, the number of Black freshmen from Newport News increased to 44 in fall 2021, up from a low of 14 in 2018, but still below levels seen earlier in Trible’s presidency.

In 2018, Trible established a President’s Council on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Two years later, he created the position of chief diversity officer.

Still, Morgan felt that progress was slow and that other board members were more enthusiastic about new buildings than they were about diversity.

“If you’re white, straight and Christian, you’re going to love Christopher Newport,” said Morgan, who left the board in 2022. “If you’re anything other than that, it’s going to be a struggle for you. Unfortunately.”

CNU spokesperson Jim Hanchett said that the university has stepped up its in-person recruiting visits to high schools in the Hampton Roads area, which includes Newport News and Hampton, focusing on underserved communities. It is also offering “immediate, direct admission” to more than 30,000 out-of-state students who come from low-income families, who would be the first in their families to go to college, or who are members of underrepresented groups, Hanchett said.

CNU has a Black student organization and several Black fraternities and sororities. But current and former students told ProPublica that they found it hard to be Black on a predominantly white campus. In 2021, in his second semester at CNU, William Gordon transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University due to a dispute over his financial aid and a campus environment that he felt was unwelcoming to Black students, he said.

Matthew Johnson, a Black CNU senior who is a resident assistant in a dormitory, said that a drunken white student there once called him the N-word. When he objected, the student said that Johnson had misheard. “He told me he said ‘bigger,’” recalled Johnson, who decided not to pursue the matter.

Matthew Johnson, a CNU senior, says people at the school rarely discuss the difficulty of being Black on a predominantly white campus. (Heather Hughes for VCIJ at WHRO)

The Rev. William Spencer, current pastor of a Baptist church that used to be the religious and social center of the Black neighborhood next to campus but has since relocated, said that the school’s diversity efforts are more show than substance. “I’m looking for diversity and inclusion to not just be a word thrown around like a used toothpick but to actually mean something,” Spencer said at the panel discussion in November on the university’s history.

Black faculty members also said they feel isolated. Trible’s predecessor, Santoro, hired about a dozen Black professors over the course of his presidency, including psychology professor Shelia Greenlee and her husband, political scientist Harry Greenlee. The Greenlees soon began hosting a monthly Friday-night dinner for other Black professors, where they discussed topics such as establishing a Black faculty caucus and how to support Black students.

“It was just an opportunity for us to bond, to connect and to feel comfortable that there was someone else here other than you because there are so few of us,” Shelia Greenlee said.

As several Black professors left, the dinners became less frequent. After Trible became president, the Greenlees wanted to revive them, but there weren’t enough Black faculty and some of those that were hired didn’t stay long. With her husband’s retirement two years ago, she said, the number of Black professors at CNU with tenure — lifetime job security — dropped by one-third, from three to two. One of them was Greenlee herself.

One deterrent to hiring Black faculty was a policy adopted at least 15 years ago under Trible. It said that tenure-track candidates should “ideally” have at least one credential, such as a doctorate, from a university ranked as one of the 74 best in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, or a bachelor’s degree from one of the top 50 national universities or top 89 liberal arts colleges. Only one historically Black college or university, Spelman College in Georgia, made any of those lists. Another possible credential was Phi Beta Kappa membership, but only four HBCUs have chapters. In their 2020 letter to Trible, faculty members urged CNU to “immediately abandon” its reliance on these hiring lists, “thus eliminating the implicit and explicit racial bias.” Instead, CNU expanded the criteria to include a degree from one of the top 25 historically Black colleges.

Patricia Hopkins, a Black associate professor of English, realized when she moved to a new office in 2010 just how much of an anomaly she was. While she and her daughter were shelving books in her new office, a white janitorial staffer came to her door. “Faculty are going to be here any second to move into these offices, and you haven’t even dusted yet,” he said, tossing rags and a can of furniture polish at her.

Professor Patricia Hopkins said she was mistaken for a custodian. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

“It never occurred to him that I was actually Dr. Hopkins and this was my office,” she recalled. “The likelihood is, he took an educated guess and on this campus, I’m more likely to be the cleaner than be the professor.”

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

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

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For most workers in Wisconsin who get hurt on the job, the state’s workers’ compensation system is there to cover medical expenses and pay a portion of their wages while they heal.

“One of the bedrock principles of worker’s compensation is universal coverage,” the state’s Department of Workforce Development, which oversees the workers’ compensation system, says on its website. “That means that virtually every employee is covered.”

But the law is different for farms, and many immigrant dairy workers — the backbone of one of the state’s most celebrated yet dangerous industries — don’t get this protection. Wisconsin exempts all kinds of farms with fewer than six employees not related to the owners from the requirement to have workers’ compensation coverage.

No state or federal agency appears to track how many of Wisconsin’s 5,700 or so dairy farms fall into that category — or how many workers go without coverage. Neither does the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, one of the state’s most powerful lobbying groups.

But the number of those farms is likely in the thousands since many employ only one or two workers. According to one national study, more than 23,000 agricultural workers in Wisconsin were exempt from workers’ compensation coverage in 2020; that’s a larger number of excluded agricultural workers than in almost every other state in the country.

The workers’ compensation exemption comes on top of limits on the federal government’s enforcement of occupational health and safety laws on these same small farms, which effectively leaves employers to police themselves.

It’s not just workers on small farms who go unprotected. Many injured workers on large farms said they are too afraid of retaliation from their employers to pursue claims. The problem is exacerbated by immigration status: Most immigrants who work on Wisconsin dairy farms are in the United States illegally and fear getting fired or deported.

“Workers’ compensation really doesn’t work for anyone, not even the workers it’s supposed to work for. It really doesn’t,” said Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers who is studying access to workers’ compensation for immigrant workers in high-risk industries. “That gets increasingly worse the more precarious workers are.”

ProPublica reported this week on how immigrant dairy workers are frequently hurt on the job and often go without medical care. When their injuries are so severe that they can no longer work like they used to, they can get fired and thrown out of the housing many employers provide. Many are left with few legal options.

“The farm owner didn’t want to help me with anything,” said a 47-year-old man who was unable to work for several months this year after the muscles and tendons in his shoulder were ripped from the bones when a cow slammed him against a wall. “They don’t really see us as full humans.”

The man worked with two other workers on a farm that, according to state records, didn’t have workers’ compensation insurance. He said he went without medical care for months until the owner of Latino grocery store in the area put him in touch with a local nonprofit organization that helped him get hospital charity care.

In more than a dozen states, including New York, California and Idaho, farms with as few as one employee are required to have workers’ compensation insurance. Wisconsin’s exemption for small farms is one of many federal and state carve-outs that have historically left farm workers — and dairy workers in particular — with fewer rights and protections than others. Farm workers aren’t entitled to overtime pay, and they don’t have the right to form a union. Dairy farm housing is largely unregulated and uninspected. Workers’ deaths and injuries on small farms are almost never investigated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as ProPublica has previously reported.

A Department of Workforce Development spokesperson said state law does not authorize its Worker’s Compensation Division to provide resources or programs to an injured worker whose employer is not required to have workers’ compensation insurance. “Division staff refer injured workers who contact the division with immediate needs to community-based organizations and other service providers,” the spokesperson said.

The Wisconsin Farm Bureau says in its annual policy book that it supports keeping the threshold for requiring workers’ compensation insurance at farms with six employees. In a statement, Amy Eckelberg, a spokesperson for the Farm Bureau, said farmers from across the state set the organization’s policy priorities.

“Our farmers use every means available to avoid injuries to their employees, family members and themselves through appropriate education, training and physical precautions to mitigate against known safety threats,” she said.

Over the course of the past year, ProPublica has interviewed more than 60 immigrant workers who said they were injured on Wisconsin farms. Workers on small and large farms repeatedly said their supervisors ignored their injuries.

Take the case of Luis, a Nicaraguan man who works on a farm in south-central Wisconsin that, according to state records, has workers’ compensation coverage. He said that one morning in January, a cow kicked his hand. “In that moment, I thought my hand was broken,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do about the pain.” Luis said he told his manager, who said, “It’s fine. Keep working,” and so he did.

Later that day, he stopped by a Latino grocery store to buy painkillers and bandages in the hopes of reducing the swelling. He knew his employer had workers’ compensation insurance, but he didn’t want to press the matter. “It’s better not to say anything,” he said. Luis never got medical care.

Many workers who did get medical treatment said their supervisors pressured them to tell hospital officials their injury wasn’t work-related. One former hospital employee said immigrant dairy workers who came into the emergency room would beg him not to note in their files that they were hurt at work. He said they didn’t want the hospital to call their employer to ask about workers’ compensation coverage; they were afraid their supervisors would get mad and fire them.

Some farms that are large enough to be required to carry workers’ compensation insurance don’t have it. One man whose face was bashed in by a bull last year said at least seven other people worked on the farm. But the farm didn’t have workers’ compensation coverage, according to state records.

More than a half-dozen workers said in interviews that workers’ compensation paid some or all of their medical bills and provided them partial pay as they recuperated. But their bodies are no longer the same.

(Zeke Peña, special to ProPublica)

“My right hand is fucked,” said an Ecuadorian man who lost two fingers and can’t use two others after his hand got caught in a piece of machinery in a milking parlor. “I can’t close my hand; it just stays open. It hurts when I try to use it a lot. And in the cold, the pain is unbearable.”

“I can’t run. I can’t walk more than a half hour. My leg falls asleep,” said a Nicaraguan man whose legs were crushed under a heavy metal gate two years ago. “The farm owner told me I’m lucky to be alive because even cows can be killed there.”

“I kept trying to work, but I couldn’t stand the pain,” said a Nicaraguan man who injured his spinal column when he slipped off a skid steer he was cleaning and fell on concrete. “They laughed at me, saying I was making up the pain, that I didn’t want to work.”

Workers who are injured on small farms that don’t have workers’ compensation insurance have only one legal recourse to compel their employers to pay their medical bills: take them to court. But few immigrant dairy workers do so.

“A lot of folks are afraid that somehow suing will affect their immigration status,” said Douglas Phebus, a lawyer who has represented workers on small dairy farms in personal injury cases. “The whole system is designed to burden these folks. It’s all stacked against them.”

Unlike workers’ compensation claims, for which a worker has to prove only that an injury happened in the course of work, the burden of proof is higher in personal injury lawsuits: Workers must show that their employers were negligent.

And it can be challenging to find an attorney — especially one who speaks Spanish — as well as the time to meet since workers routinely work 70 to 80 hours a week.

Kate McCoy, the occupational health and safety program director for the state’s Department of Health Services, said immigrant dairy workers are at an especially high risk of disability and death.

“From the public health standpoint, you never want to see a population that’s afraid to access medical care and is afraid to speak to health officials, and that’s one of the things we see with this population,” she said.

McCoy’s team is working with Loustaunau and other University of Wisconsin researchers to better understand the occupational health needs of workers in high-risk industries — including immigrant dairy workers — and the challenges they face when they seek workers’ compensation.

The group held its first listening session this month. Every worker who attended, including several dairy workers, said they had been fired after sustaining injuries. Several described how they came to see being hurt, and then getting insulted or humiliated by a supervisor, as part of the job, Loustaunau said. Many talked about depression and the toll injuries took on their families.

“We know that there are fantastic farmers and farm employers who go out of their way to take care of employees,” McCoy said. “But unfortunately the stories we heard last Friday night were [about] the folks that were not upholding what we would want.”

Health department officials hope to use what they learn from the listening sessions to provide workers information they need about occupational safety and the workers’ compensation system. They also plan to conduct sessions to help workers learn how to navigate the claims process.

Among the workers at the listening session was a man who said he was bullied, assaulted and threatened with deportation several years ago after falling more than 10 feet while trying to fix a barn curtain on a dairy farm. The man suffered a concussion, memory loss and damage to his spine, and he had to relearn how to walk and talk. He and his wife drove more than an hour in the snow to attend the session. In an interview with ProPublica, the man, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, said he wanted to share his experience because he doesn’t want that to happen to other dairy workers, especially new immigrants.

“We are not animals,” said the man, who asked to be identified by one of his surnames, Paredes, because he is afraid of retaliation from his former employer. “As human beings, we have rights.”

For several months, Paredes’ medical bills were covered by workers’ compensation, and he received partial pay during the time he was supposed to spend recovering.

But he said he still hadn’t been cleared by a doctor to return to work when the farm owner showed up to the house he provided to Paredes, his wife and four children. According to Paredes and his wife, the farm owner demanded that he return to work.

“Sometimes you don’t have another choice,” he said. “A lot of us don’t want to speak up.”

But Paredes couldn’t do the job anymore. His doctor eventually cleared him to work two hours a day, but the farm owner insisted he work longer shifts. The farm owner taunted him, Paredes said, calling him “cripple man” and “dumb,” and told him to “go back to your pueblo because you’re not good for anything.”

Eventually, Paredes felt he had no option but to quit. His wife got three jobs to make up for the lost income, including milking cows at another farm and cleaning a church. Paredes said he hasn’t been able to hold a regular job since the accident. He has thousands of dollars in medical debt for ongoing care that is no longer covered by workers’ compensation. He picks up odd jobs, such as cutting grass or painting houses, when he can. But when he does physical labor, he said he quickly feels intense pain in his spine. And he said his brain doesn’t work like it used to. He gets motion sickness and feels dizzy when he walks or drives.

“I feel useless,” he said. “Like I’m good for nothing.”

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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 the Biden administration said it had reached a “historic” legal deal with Northwest Indigenous tribes last week to save endangered salmon, no one could agree on what it meant for the tribes’ costliest and most controversial demand: the removal of four hydroelectric dams that hinder fish from their migration out to sea and home to reproduce.

Some said the deal, in promoting renewable energy that can replace hydropower, virtually ensures the dams on Washington’s Snake River will come down. Others said the White House did little for dam removal because it punted the question to Congress.

Largely overlooked in the debate was one seemingly technical provision that is far less open to interpretation and of great importance to the tribes. Not only does the deal offer $1 billion in new funding for Columbia River salmon restoration, but for the first time it also grants states and tribes control — not the Bonneville Power Administration, which sells hydropower from Northwest dams — over how that money gets spent.

The shift, while not flashy, addresses one of the biggest sources of frustration for tribes that ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting highlighted in the investigation “Broken Promises.”

“We don’t need an energy agency to be telling us how this fund should be utilized,” said Yakama Nation council member Jeremy Takala.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which has historically decided how salmon recovery money gets spent, is under a sometimes conflicting mandate: to sell hydropower from federal dams and operate as a for-profit business, but also to save salmon harmed by that hydropower production.

The Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica investigation found that Bonneville time and again prioritized its business interests over efforts to restore salmon populations. It actively pushed back on tribal initiatives and flatlined budgets in ways advocates said starved recovery efforts, even as the agency raked in record revenues.

Under the new agreement, Bonneville will invest $300 million over 10 years into salmon programs, including habitat restoration and much-needed upgrades to fish hatcheries, overseen by tribes and the states of Oregon and Washington. Companies and families that buy power from Bonneville will pay some of the cost in the form of an estimated rate increase averaging 0.7 %, and the agency will recoup the rest by selling more power to California.

That comes on top of a previously announced $200 million that Bonneville agreed to pay for a separate tribal plan to reintroduce salmon in areas blocked by dams. Additional money will come from the federal budget, rather than Bonneville ratepayers. In all, the Biden administration says it expects the government to spend $1 billion on state and tribal salmon recovery in the next decade.

Apart from that $1 billion, the administration also said it would look at doubling total fish and wildlife spending to meet all the needs identified by states and tribes, with the money to come from U.S. taxpayers, via Congress, and not customers of Bonneville’s power.

Plenty of money has already been spent on efforts to remove threats to salmon other than dams — digging new stream channels and placing downed logs in them for example — with little to show for it.

But programs run by the Northwest’s tribes have produced some of the few success stories. State fish and wildlife employees have often worked collaboratively with tribes on those projects.

With the new agreement, Bonneville will pay an annual lump sum that states and tribes will decide independently how they’ll spend.

Corinne Sams, a member of the governing board of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and chair of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, said the tribes have already identified $1 billion in backlogged projects in the Columbia basin.

“For far too long, preventing salmon extinction has been viewed as a cost. Salmon restoration needs to be considered an investment in our shared future,” Sams said.

Sams said she saw an acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty and expertise that she never had before during the negotiations, including visits by several White House staff members to traditional fishing grounds and restoration sites.

“They actually got to see and feel our connection to our first foods and our resources, and how we care for them in our daily lives,” Sams said. “They were able to witness that, and that’s never happened.”

Other provisions in the agreement, such as exploring new sources of energy other than dams in the region, also give priority to projects started by tribes.

Shannon Wheeler, chair of the Nez Perce tribe, said he was disappointed the agreement didn’t assure that the Snake River dams will be breached to help salmon. But he said that in giving tribes control over funding, the agreement is an acknowledgment the U.S. has failed to honor tribal sovereignty in salmon recovery. Government treaties in the 1850s promised that the tribes’ access to salmon, and their way of life, would be preserved.

“It’s an understanding that the tribal position and expertise in this area needs to be considered,” Wheeler said. “I think that’s an important step in the right direction.”

Bonneville officials did not address the move to give tribes and states increased control over salmon spending when asked.

A spokesperson instead provided a statement from the agency’s chief executive officer, John Hairston, praising the agreement as a whole: “BPA sought to provide our ratepayers operational certainty and reliability while avoiding costly, unpredictable litigation in support of our mission to provide a reliable, affordable power supply to the Pacific Northwest.”

The Public Power Council, a coalition of utilities that buys electricity from Bonneville, has been adamantly opposed to the agreement. The council said it’s not concerned about the increased funding for salmon recovery or giving control of the spending to tribes. But it is concerned about other provisions.

“We cannot emphasize enough that this is but one change,” the council said in a statement about the increased salmon funding, “and there is still substantial uncertainty in many key areas.”

Opponents of the legal agreement, including the Public Power Council, are particularly concerned that it leaves supporters of dam removal the option to file new lawsuits if they feel it’s necessary.

In the past, when Bonneville had struck funding agreements with tribes, those deals were contingent on promises that tribes wouldn’t sue over the dam system. Some tribes signed those agreements to pursue habitat restoration while others did not and stayed in court. But under this agreement, the additional funding has no contingencies. It only says the current lawsuit alleging violations of the Endangered Species Act is on hold for five years.

Advocates for keeping the Snake River dams also are unhappy with the Biden administration’s promise to explore future alternatives to hydropower in the Northwest. The industry has said replacing the dams with other sources could drive up electric rates by 40%.

Tribal leaders say the Northwest’s unusually cheap electricity only exists thanks to hydropower, which is generated at the expense of salmon.

For Takala, the agreement with the Biden administration represents an opportunity for tribes to show the federal government the way toward healing the damage 20th-century dam construction inflicted.

“Displaced tribal members, impacted salmon runs — the list goes on of impacts that we’re still seeing to this day in some of the broken promises that haven’t been lived up to,” Takala said. “Yet, this gives us an opportunity to show the region, probably show the country, this could be done in a responsible manner.”

by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main

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

The Los Angeles Housing Department has ordered the owners of four buildings meant to house some of the city’s poorest residents to stop renting rooms to tourists, following a review that was prompted by reporting by Capital & Main and ProPublica.

The news organizations documented how some owners of the buildings, known as residential hotels, were advertising short-term rentals online despite a 2008 law aimed at preserving the rooms as residential. Landlords who convert the buildings to other uses or demolish them must replace the units or pay into a city housing fund.

The new enforcement actions bring the number of residential hotels cited by the Housing Department for violating the residential hotel law to 21. The agency had sent violation notices to 17 residential hotels within weeks of the Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation.

In all, about 750 residential hotel rooms could be turned back into low-cost permanent housing for LA residents who have few other options — if the city’s citations are upheld in court and if the city aggressively enforces the law.

The most recent Housing Department orders to stop renting to tourists were issued earlier this month to the Hollywood Hills Hotel, which offers rooms with city views for up to $200 per night; the Motel 6 San Pedro; the Central Inn Motel near the University of Southern California; and the Royal Hawaiian Motel in Mid City. The Hollywood Hills Hotel is permitted to offer some rooms to tourists, but inspectors found more rooms were rented short-term than is allowed.

Dinesh Vora, one of the Central Inn’s owners, said he plans to appeal the Housing Department orders. “To have someone say you can only rent long-term, that wouldn’t be sufficient for us,” Vora said. Ricky Patel, the registered agent of the Royal Hawaiian, declined to comment on the enforcement or whether the hotel intended to appeal. “It’s a touchy subject,” Patel said. One of the owners of the Hollywood Hills Hotel, Cole Harris, declined to comment on Dec. 12 because, he said, he wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations. And managers didn’t return phone messages left at the hotel. The owner of the Motel 6 didn’t respond to calls or emails.

The Royal Hawaiian Motel in Los Angeles, California (Barbara Davidson for ProPublica)

Sixteen of 17 hotel owners who were cited for failure to comply with the residential hotel law in July appealed their notices to the Housing Department’s general manager and attended hearings conducted by phone between September and November.

A department hearing officer recently denied appeals from eight of those hotels, including the American Hotel in the Arts District and the H Hotel and Hometel Suites in Koreatown, which were highlighted in our initial story for transforming their buildings into boutique hotels. The agency postponed five other appeals involving hotels that have signed contracts to provide temporary homeless housing through the city’s Inside Safe program or that said they were considering participating in the program.

Capital & Main and ProPublica found that the mayor’s marquee homeless initiative has given funding to eight residential hotels, even though they are already meant to provide housing to low-income people. Some residential hotels were awarded contracts despite appearing to violate the residential hotel ordinance.

In evaluating the evidence in the American Hotel case, Housing Department hearing officer Andre Brown noted the city’s declared housing and homelessness emergency and wrote that the residential hotel ordinance had been passed to address “a severe shortage of decent safe and sanitary rental housing in the City resulting from the loss of single room occupancy and residential hotel units.”

None of the hotel owners disputed the city’s allegation that they offered short-term rentals, but they argued that they’d done so legally because they paid hotel taxes to the city. The hearing officers, however, said the hotel owners violated a clear ban on offering their rooms for rent on a nightly or weekly basis, known in city law as transient use.

“It is undisputed that the Residential Hotel Ordinance (RHO) prohibits transient use of units that have been determined to be Residential Units,” Brown wrote in the American case.

Frank Weiser, an attorney who represents all eight hotels, including the American, said the hotels plan to appeal the city’s decisions in federal court. On the one hand, the city has been treating them as residential hotels barred from renting to tourists, he said, but on the other, it has openly accepted tax payments from the hotels for doing just that.

“The city was collecting an enormous amount of tax,” Weiser said. “It’s totally contradictory.”

City housing inspector Jean-Claude Olivier said at the American appeal hearing that payment of hotel taxes doesn’t change the approved building use, and Brown noted in his decision that the ordinance doesn’t address such situations.

Just one hotel, the 25-room Knights Inn near Dodger Stadium, won its case. A hearing officer found the hotel wasn’t given sufficient opportunity to appeal its residential hotel designation and that there wasn’t enough evidence to show the hotel had ever been residential.

Mayor Karen Bass, who recently heralded bringing 21,000 homeless Angelenos into temporary housing in the last year, has signaled that she thinks the residential hotel law might need an overhaul.

In an executive directive in November, she said some of the hotels might not meet current building code standards and ordered the Housing Department to report on the city’s residential hotel supply, the hotels’ occupancy rates and recent enforcement so that city officials could recommend ways to update the law.

The report hadn’t been made public as of Wednesday afternoon California time.

Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research.

by Sergio Hernandez, Alex Mierjeski, Al Shaw and Mollie Simon

Every year, the Supreme Court’s nine justices fill out a form that discloses their financial connections to companies and people. Until now, however, those disclosures and connections haven’t been mapped, aggregated and made searchable. Using our new database, you can now search for organizations and people that have paid the justices, reimbursed them for travel, given them gifts and more.

Access the full database on our website.

by Ruth Talbot

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

The quality of care that residents receive in a nursing home can be profoundly affected by who owns it, studies have shown. It’s not always clear who should be held accountable, though: Many nursing homes are owned by companies that are owned by other companies, obscuring who has the ultimate decision-making power. As more nursing homes are sold, information about an incoming owner’s performance in other homes becomes more relevant, as it may provide insight into how their latest acquisitions will fare.

To help navigate the confusing world of nursing home ownership, ProPublica’s Nursing Home Inspect now publishes detailed ownership information for facilities and an upgraded search to help you sift through the information.

The data comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which publishes “affiliated entities” for nursing homes — lists of people or companies that have an ownership stake in or operational control over multiple nursing homes. CMS’ goal is to provide a better understanding of an owner or operator’s performance across all the nursing homes they are associated with. Some entities are affiliated with only a handful of homes, while others, like Genesis HealthCare or The Ensign Group, are affiliated with hundreds of homes across multiple states. Because CMS does not provide this data in a way that’s easy for most people to use, we’ve added it to our Nursing Home Inspect tool.

Our new affiliated entity pages allow users to easily explore data on each company or person who is responsible for nursing homes, listing all homes associated with that entity and showing recent serious deficiencies —  failure to meet care requirements — found at those homes. You can even view a list of all affiliated entities nationwide.

We also added detailed ownership information to individual nursing home pages, allowing users to see who has an ownership stake in the home, as well as who has managerial control over the facility and how long they have held that position.

To go along with these additions, we’ve also expanded the database’s advanced search capabilities so journalists and others can quickly identify affiliated entities that have a history of serious deficiencies or other problems. For instance, users can search for all serious deficiencies associated with Life Care Centers of America.

Separately, users can also now filter searches by F-tags, which are a system for specifying the types of compliance issues that may be found during a CMS inspection. These tags allow users to narrow their search beyond broad categories such as “infection control deficiencies” to more targeted queries such as deficiencies associated with reporting COVID-19 data to residents and families or ensuring staff are vaccinated against COVID-19.

ProPublica plans to continue enhancing Nursing Home Inspect with new data and features in the coming months. If you write a story using this new information, come across bugs or issues, or have ideas for improvements, please let us know!

by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was co-published with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

“My sisters have died,” the young boy sobbed, chest heaving, as he wailed into the sky. “Oh, my sisters.” As Israel began airstrikes on Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, posts by verified accounts on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, were being transmitted around the world. The heart-wrenching video of the grieving boy, viewed more than 600,000 times, was posted by an account named “#FreePalestine 🇵🇸.” The account had received X’s “verified” badge just hours before posting the tweet that went viral.

Days later, a video posted by an account calling itself “ISRAEL MOSSAD,” another “verified” account, this time bearing the logo of Israel’s national intelligence agency, claimed to show Israel’s advanced air defense technology. The post, viewed nearly 6 million times, showed a volley of rockets exploding in the night sky with the caption: “The New Iron beam in full display.”

And following an explosion on Oct. 14 outside the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza where civilians were killed, the verified account of the Hamas-affiliated news organization Quds News Network posted a screenshot from Facebook claiming to show the Israel Defense Forces declaring their intent to strike the hospital before the explosion. It was seen more than half a million times.

None of these posts depicted real events from the conflict. The video of the grieving boy was from at least nine years ago and was taken in Syria, not Gaza. The clip of rockets exploding was from a military simulation video game. And the Facebook screenshot was from a now-deleted Facebook page not affiliated with Israel or the IDF.

Just days before its viral tweet, the #FreePalestine 🇵🇸 account had a blue verification check under a different name: “Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary.” It changed its name back after the tweet and was reverified within a week. Despite their blue check badges, neither Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary nor ISRAEL MOSSAD (now “Mossad Commentary”) have any real-life connection to either organization. Their posts were eventually annotated by Community Notes, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, but these clarifications garnered about 900,000 views — less than 15% of what the two viral posts totaled. ISRAEL MOSSAD deleted its post in late November. The Facebook screenshot, posted by the account of the Quds News Network, still doesn’t have a clarifying note. Mossad Commentary and the Quds News Network did not respond to direct messages seeking comment; Taliban Public Relations Department, Commentary did not respond to public mentions asking for comment.

An investigation by ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows how false claims based on out-of-context, outdated or manipulated media have proliferated on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The organizations looked at over 200 distinct claims that independent fact-checks determined to be misleading, and searched for posts by verified accounts that perpetuated them, identifying 2,000 total tweets. The tweets, collectively viewed half a billion times, were analyzed alongside account and Community Notes data.

ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism identified more than 2,000 tweets by verified accounts that contained debunked claims based on out-of-context media. Quds News Network made five of those posts and continues to post about the conflict. Some of its English-language accounts on Facebook and Instagram have been suspended. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

The ongoing conflict in Gaza is the biggest test for changes implemented by X owner Elon Musk since his acquisition of Twitter last year. After raising concerns about the power of platforms to determine what speech is appropriate, Musk instituted policies to promote “healthy” debate under the maxim “freedom of speech, not reach,” where certain types of posts that previously would have been removed for violating platform policy now have their visibility restricted.

Within 10 days of taking ownership, Musk cut 15% of Twitter’s trust and safety team. He made further cuts in the following months, including firing the election integrity team, terminating many contracted content moderators and revoking existing misinformation policies on specific topics like COVID-19. In place of these safeguards, Musk expanded Community Notes. The feature, first launched in 2021 as Birdwatch, adds crowdsourced annotations to a tweet when users with diverse perspectives rate them “helpful.”

“The Israel-Hamas war is a classic case of an information crisis on X, in terms of the speed and volume of the misinformation and the harmful consequences of that rhetoric,” said Michael Zimmer, the director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society at Marquette University in Wisconsin, who has studied how social media platforms combat misinformation.

While no social media platform is free of misinformation, critics contend that Musk’s policies, along with his personal statements, have led to a proliferation of misinformation and hate speech on X. Advertisers have fled the platform — U.S. ad revenue is down roughly 60% compared to last year. Last week, Musk reinstated the account of Alex Jones, who was ordered to pay $1.1 billion in defamation damages for repeatedly lying about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Jones appealed the verdict. This week, the European Union opened a formal investigation against X for breaching multiple provisions of the Digital Services Act, including risk management and content moderation, as well as deceptive design in relation to its “so-called Blue checks.”

ProPublica and the Tow Center found that verified blue check accounts that posted misleading media saw their audience grow on X in the first month of the conflict. This included dozens of accounts that posted debunked tweets three or more times and that now have over 100,000 followers each. The false posts appear to violate X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy, which bars all users from sharing media that may deceive or confuse people. Many accounts also appear to breach the eligibility criteria for verification, which state that verified accounts must not be “misleading or deceptive” or engage in “platform manipulation and spam.” Several of the fastest-growing accounts that have posted multiple false claims about the conflict now have more followers than some regional news organizations covering it.

We also found that the Community Notes system, which has been touted by Musk as a way to improve information accuracy on the platform, hasn’t scaled sufficiently. About 80% of the 2,000 debunked posts we reviewed had no Community Note. Of the 200 debunked claims, more than 80 were never clarified with a note.

When clarifying Community Notes did appear, they typically reached a fraction of the views that the original tweet did, though views on Community Notes are significantly undercounted. We also found that in some cases, debunked images or videos were flagged by a Community Note in one tweet but not in others, despite X announcing, partway through the period covered by our dataset, it has improved its media-matching algorithms to address this. For tweets that did receive a Community Note, it typically didn’t become visible until hours after the post.

This last finding expands on a recent report by Bloomberg, which analyzed 400 false posts tagged by Community Notes in the first two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack and found it typically took seven hours for a Community Note to appear.

For the tweets analyzed by ProPublica and the Tow Center, the median time that elapsed before a Community Note became visible decreased to just over five hours in the first week of November after X improved its system. Outliers did exist: Sometimes it still took more than two days for a note to appear, while in other cases, a note appeared almost instantaneously because the tweet used media that the system had already encountered.

Multiple emails sent to X’s press inbox seeking comment on our findings triggered automated replies to “check back later” with no further response. Keith Coleman, who leads the Community Notes team at X, was separately provided with summary findings relevant to Community Notes as well as the dataset containing the compiled claims and tweets.

Via email, Coleman said that the tweets identified in this investigation were a small fraction of those covered by the 1,500 visible Community Notes on X about the conflict from this time period. He also said that many posts with high-visibility notes were deleted after receiving a Community Note, including ones that we did not identify. When asked about the number of claims that did not receive a single note, Coleman said that users might not have thought one was necessary, pointing to examples where images generated by artificial intelligence tools could be interpreted as artistic depictions. AI-generated images accounted for around 7% of the tweets that did not receive a note; none acknowledged that the media was AI-generated. Coleman said that the current system is an upgrade over X’s historic approaches to dealing with misinformation and that it continues to improve; “most importantly,” he said, the Community Notes program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.”

Community Notes were initially meant to complement X’s various trust and safety initiatives, not replace them. “It still makes sense for platforms to keep their trust and safety teams in a breaking-news, viral environment. It’s not going to work to simply fling open the gates,” said Mike Ananny, an associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Southern California, who is skeptical about leaving moderation to the community, particularly after the changes Musk has made.

“I’m not sure any community norm is going to work given all of the signals that have been given about who’s welcome here, what types of opinions are respected and what types of content is allowed,” he said.

ProPublica and the Tow Center compiled a large sample of data from multiple sources to study the effectiveness of Community Notes in labeling debunked claims. We found over 1,300 verified accounts that posted misleading or out-of-context media at least once in the first month of the conflict; 130 accounts did so three or more times. (For more details on how the posts were gathered, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Musk overhauled Twitter’s account verification program soon after acquiring the company. Previously, Twitter gave verified badges to politicians, celebrities, news organizations, government agencies and other vetted notable individuals or organizations. Though the legacy process was criticized as opaque and arbitrary, it provided a signal of authenticity for users. Today, accounts receive the once-coveted blue check in exchange for $8 a month and a cursory identity check. Despite well-documented impersonation and credibility issues, these “verified” accounts are prioritized in search, in replies and across X’s algorithmic feeds.

If an account continuously shares harmful or misleading narratives, X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy states that its visibility may be reduced or the account may be locked or suspended. But the investigation found that prominent verified accounts appeared to face few consequences for broadcasting misleading media to their large follower networks. Of the 40 accounts with more than 100,000 followers that posted debunked tweets three times or more in the first month of the conflict, only seven appeared to have had any action taken against them, according to account history data shared with ProPublica and the Tow Center by Travis Brown. Brown is a software developer who researches extremism and misinformation on X.

Those 40 accounts, a number of which have been identified as the most influential accounts engaging in Hamas-Israel discourse, grew their collective audience by nearly 5 million followers, to around 17 million, in the first month of the conflict alone.

A few of the smaller verified accounts in the dataset received punitive action: About 50 accounts that posted at least one false tweet were suspended. On average, these accounts had 7,000 followers. It is unclear whether the accounts were suspended for manipulated media policy violations or for other reasons, such as bot-like behavior. Around 80 accounts no longer have a blue check badge. It is unclear whether the accounts lost their blue checks because they stopped paying, because they had recently changed their display name (which triggers a temporary removal of the verified status), or because Twitter revoked the status. X has said it removed 3,000 accounts by “violent entities,” including Hamas, in the region.

On Oct. 29, X announced a new policy where verified accounts would no longer be eligible to share in revenue earned from ads that appeared alongside any of their posts that had been corrected by Community Notes. In a tweet, Musk said, “the idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.” Coleman said that this policy has been implemented, but did not provide further details.

False claims that go viral are frequently repeated by multiple accounts and often take the form of decontextualized old footage. One of the most widespread false claims, that Qatar was threatening to stop supplying natural gas to the world unless Israel halted its airstrikes, was repeated by nearly 70 verified accounts. This claim, which was based on a false description of an unrelated 2017 speech by the Qatari emir to bolster its credibility, received over 15 million views collectively, with a single post by Dominick McGee (@dom_lucre) amassing more than 9 million views. McGee is popular in the QAnon community and is an election denier with nearly 800,000 followers who was suspended from X for sharing child exploitation imagery in July 2023. Shortly after, X reversed the suspension. McGee denied that he had shared the image when reached by direct message on X, claiming instead that it was “an article touching it.”

Community Notes like this one appear alongside many false posts claiming Qatar is threatening to cut off its gas supply to the world. This note was seen more than 400,000 times across 159 posts that shared the same video clip, and it appeared on nine out of nearly 70 posts in our dataset that made this claim. (Screenshot of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

Another account, using the pseudonym Sprinter, shared the same false claim about Qatar in a post that was viewed over 80,000 times. These were not the only false posts made by either account. McGee shared six debunked claims about the conflict in our dataset; Sprinter shared 20.

Sprinter posted an image of casualties from the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, most of whom were civilians, and purported that it showed Israeli military losses during the ground war later in the month. Another post mistranslated the words of an injured Israeli soldier. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

Sprinter has tweeted AI-generated images, digitally altered videos and the unsubstantiated claim that Ukraine is providing weapons to Hamas. Each of these posts has received hundreds of thousands of views. The account’s follower count has increased by 60% to about 500,000, rivaling the following of Haaretz and the Times of Israel on X. Sprinter’s profile — which has also used the pseudonyms SprinterTeam, SprinterX and WizardSX, according to historical account data provided by Brown — was “temporarily restricted” by X in mid-November, but it retained its “verified” status. Sprinter’s original profile linked to a backup account. That account — whose name and verification status continues to change — still posts dozens of times a day and has grown to over 25,000 followers. Sprinter did not respond to a request for comment and blocked the reporter after being contacted. The original account appears to no longer exist.

Verification badges were once a critical signal in sifting official accounts from inauthentic ones. But with X’s overhaul of the blue check program, that signal now essentially tells you whether the account pays $8 a month. ISRAEL MOSSAD, the account that posted video game footage falsely claiming it was an Israeli air defense system, had gone from fewer than 1,000 followers, when it first acquired a blue check in September 2023, to more than 230,000 today. In another debunked post, published the same day as the video game footage, the account claimed to show more of the Iron Beam system. That tweet still doesn’t have a Community Note, despite having nearly 400,000 views. The account briefly lost its blue check within a day of the two tweets being posted, but regained it days after changing its display name to Mossad Commentary. Even though it isn’t affiliated with Israel’s national intelligence agency, it continues to use Mossad’s logo in its profile picture.

“The blue check is flipped now. Instead of a sign of authenticity, it’s a sign of suspicion, at least for those of us who study this enough,” said Zimmer, the Marquette University professor.

Verified Accounts That Shared Misinformation Grew Quickly During the Israel-Hamas Conflict

Several of the fastest-growing accounts that have posted multiple false claims about the conflict now have more followers than some regional news organizations actively covering it.

(Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Of the verified accounts we reviewed, the one that grew the fastest during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict was also one of the most prolific posters of misleading claims. Jackson Hinkle, a 24-year-old political commentator and self-described “MAGA communist” has built a large following posting highly partisan tweets. He has been suspended from various platforms in the past, pushed pro-Russian narratives and claimed that YouTube permanently suspended his account for “Ukraine misinformation.” Three days later, he tweeted that YouTube had banned him because it didn’t want him telling the truth about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Currently, he has more than two million followers on X; over 1.5 million of those arrived after Oct. 7. ProPublica and the Tow Center found over 20 tweets by Hinkle using misleading or manipulated media in the first month of the conflict; more than half had been tagged with a Community Note. The tweets amassed 40 million views, while the Community Notes were collectively viewed just under 10 million times. Hinkle did not respond to a request for comment.

All told, debunked tweets with a Community Note in the ProPublica-Tow Center dataset amassed 300 million views in aggregate, about five times the total number of views on the notes, even though Community Notes can appear on multiple tweets and collect views from all of them, including from tweets that were not reviewed by the news organizations.

Hinkle misleadingly claimed that China was sending warships in the direction of Israel, even though the ships had been in routine operation in the region since May. Hinkle also posted footage claiming to show Hezbollah’s anti-ship missiles, but the video is from 2019 and not related to the current conflict. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

X continues to improve the Community Notes system. It announced updates to the feature on Oct. 24, saying notes are appearing more often on viral and high-visibility content, and are appearing faster in general. But ProPublica and Tow Center’s review found that less than a third of debunked tweets created since the update received a Community Note, though the median time for a note to become visible dropped noticeably, from seven hours to just over five hours in the first week of November. The Community Notes team said over email that their data showed that a note typically took around five hours to become visible in the first few days of the conflict.

Aviv Ovadya, an affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society who has worked on social media governance and algorithms similar to the one Community Notes uses, says that any fact-checking process, whether it relies on crowdsourced notes or a third-party fact-checker, is likely to always be playing catch-up to viral claims. “You need to know if the claim is worth even fact-checking,” Ovadya said. “Is it worth my time?” Once a false post is identified, a third-party fact-check may take longer than a Community Note.

Coleman, who leads the Community Notes team, said over email that his team found Community Notes often appeared faster than posts by traditional fact-checkers, and that they are committed to making the notes visible faster.

Our review found that many viral tweets with claims that had been debunked by third-party fact- checkers did not receive a Community Note in the long run. Of the hundreds of tweets in the dataset that gained over 100,000 impressions, only about half had a note. Coleman noted that of those widely viewed tweets, the ones with visible Community Notes attached had nearly twice as many views.

To counter the instances where false claims spread quickly because many accounts post the same misleading media in a short time frame, the company announced in October that it would attach the same Community Note to all posts that share a debunked piece of media. ProPublica and the Tow Center found the system wasn’t always successful.

For example, on and after Oct. 25, multiple accounts tweeted an AI-generated image of a man with five children amid piles of rubble. Community Notes for this image appeared thousands of times on X. However, of the 22 instances we identified in which a verified account tweeted the image, only seven of those were tagged with a Community Note. (One of those tweets was later deleted after garnering more than 200,000 views.)

We found X’s media-matching system to be inconsistent for numerous other claims as well. Coleman pointed to the many automatic matches as a sign that it is working and said that its algorithm prioritizes “high precision” to avoid mistakenly finding matches between pieces of media that are meaningfully different. He also said the Community Notes team plans to further improve its media-matching system.

According to annotations on Community Notes on X that we found, a note for this image was displayed on at least 7,200 posts. We found 22 tweets with this image, but only seven had a Community Note. The second image has been deleted, but not before it garnered more than 200,000 views. (Screenshots of X taken and annotated by ProPublica and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.)

The false claims ProPublica and the Tow Center identified in this analysis were also posted on other platforms, including Instagram and TikTok. On X, having a Community Note added to a post does not affect how it is displayed. Other platforms deprioritize fact-checked posts in their algorithmic feeds to limit their reach. While Ovadya believes that continued investment in Community Notes is important, he says changing X’s core algorithm could be even more impactful.

“If X’s recommendation algorithms were built on the same principles as Community Notes and was actively rewarding content that bridges divides,” he said, “you would have less misinformation and sensationalist content going viral in the first place.”

Methodology

ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism identified and analyzed more than 2,000 tweets by verified accounts that posted clearly debunked images or videos in the first month of the Israel-Hamas war. The posts, which encompassed more than 200 false claims, were published by more than 1,300 verified accounts and collectively received half a billion impressions. We then looked at Community Notes and account data associated with those tweets.

Since the metrics on tweets, accounts and Community Notes were viewed at various points in time, they may not be current; for example, the status of accounts or Community Notes may have changed and the number of impressions on tweets and notes might be different after the time frame of our analysis.

In this review, we focused on claims that could be unambiguously debunked, including those based on generative AI images that aren’t labeled as such, old pictures and videos presented as current, falsified social media posts and documents, footage from video games described as real events, doctored images and mistranslated videos. To compile our list of debunked claims, we reviewed fact checks from multiple news organizations, including BBC Verify, Logically Facts, two stories from The New York Times, The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. We also identified debunked claims by filtering Community Notes data by relevant keywords (Gaza, Palestine/Palestinian, Israel, IDF, Hamas/Hammas, Mossad, Iron Beam, Iron Dome), and verified the note using independent news organizations or reverse image searches to ensure that each was accurate. We did not include claims that could not be independently verified or that were contested under the fog of war.

We compiled tweets using X’s text search functionality and Google’s reverse image search. Reverse image search was able to identify both images and videos (using a frame from the video). The claims and tweets we compiled are a convenience sample, not an exhaustive survey of all media-based misinformation on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas war: The dataset relies heavily on images that Google has indexed as well as tweets that use identical or very similar language, which allows X’s search functionality to surface them. Additionally, the accounts mentioned in the story might have tweeted more false claims than those we identified. Tweets deleted prior to our searches are not captured in our dataset. (In its response, X provided us with 18 examples of Community Notes and tweets that were not in our dataset and could not be located because the tweets were not yet indexed by Google or could not be easily found by X’s search function.)

We also analyzed the accounts that were posting these tweets, using account data collected by researcher Travis Brown from July through November 2023. We used this data to determine account status, follower count, handles and usernames.

For Community Notes, we downloaded X’s open-source datasets and filtered by notes with the above-mentioned keywords. A single tweet can have multiple Community Notes and the same note can appear alongside multiple tweets. Our analysis ensured we took both relationships into account.

X’s Community Notes data contains the current status of a note as well as the time at which that status was set. It also includes when the Community Note was created and the note’s text. For some tweets that use repurposed media (i.e. media from a tweet that’s already been debunked by Community Notes) the note appears immediately due to improvements in X’s media-matching algorithm. This means that occasionally the time of creation or visibility of a note will be before the time the tweet was posted.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Elizabeth Yaboni of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism contributed research.

by Maryam Jameel and Melissa Sanchez

Leer en español.

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

One dairy farm worker said he was fired and thrown out of the house where he lived after he told his boss his hands were frostbitten from working outside in below-zero weather. Another said it took his supervisors nearly an hour to call an ambulance after he was crushed by a metal gate and left lying on a manure-covered barn floor. A third worker said her boss blamed her and refused to pay her medical bills after she was trampled and thrown over a fence by a bull. And yet another said his supervisor told him not to go to the emergency room after he tore open his finger when he fell trying to catch a runaway calf. He was told to call the veterinarian instead.

These are some of the stories immigrant workers will tell you about getting hurt on Wisconsin dairy farms — and what happened afterward.

Others will say everything is fine — “Just the usual” — until you ask the question five or six ways: Have you been kicked? Has a cow stepped on you? Have you fallen? Did you see blood? Do you have chronic pain in your back, arms or hands? Then, almost inevitably, the answer is yes.

Wisconsin’s celebrated dairy industry would almost certainly collapse without the immigrants who do the dirty, dangerous work that farmers across the state say U.S. citizens won’t. But when these workers get hurt — and they get hurt with such frequency that it’s considered a routine part of the job — the laws are stacked against them.

Many, if not most, of the state’s 5,700 or so dairy farms aren’t required to have workers’ compensation insurance because they have too few employees, while at larger farms the supervisors often brush off workers’ injuries. Employers can fire and evict injured workers almost without consequence. And the threat of being deported factors into any decision workers make to assert the limited rights they do have.

As a result, many workers get no medical care for their injuries, compensation or even time off to recuperate. Instead, they are at the farmer’s mercy and have to brace themselves for the possibility of losing their jobs and the roof over their heads.

“Once you’re no good to them, they get rid of you,” said a worker who was fired and, along with his wife and two children, evicted in November after he developed tendonitis in his hand from repetitive motions at work. “I wouldn’t want anybody else to go through this.”

What we know about the frequency of injuries on dairy farms is widely understood to be an undercount. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics relies on farms to self-report injuries, but it only surveys the largest farms. Wisconsin’s workers’ compensation system offers some insight, showing that just over 170 claims were filed in 2021, the most recent year available, according to the state officials. But that figure excludes injuries that occurred on small farms that don’t have workers’ compensation coverage, and those that were never reported. Often, workers say they are so afraid of losing their jobs that they tell hospital staff their injuries happened at home.

Over the course of the past year, ProPublica has interviewed more than 60 current and former workers who said they suffered injuries on Wisconsin dairy farms. All but a handful of them were undocumented immigrants; the others have work permits. Nearly every one asked not to be fully identified because they fear losing their job or being deported. Most asked that the farms where they got hurt not be named either; they or their relatives continue to work and live on those farms, and they are afraid of retaliation.

Few injuries leave a paper trail. Workers don’t always take photos of their broken legs or smashed teeth or torn-off fingers. Sometimes they don’t even know the name of the farm where they were kicked by a 1,500-pound cow. No medical records exist for injuries that go untreated. Farm owners, meanwhile, don’t consistently report injuries to authorities. Law enforcement records offer a glimpse of the worst farm accidents, but only when somebody calls for an ambulance. That rarely happens.

“It’s almost like people are disposable. And it’s horrific,” said Martha Burke, an employment discrimination and workers’ compensation attorney in Milwaukee. “Employers aren’t supposed to fire you for being injured, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”

Excluded from many basic protections that other workers are entitled to, Wisconsin’s immigrant dairy workers are left to fend for themselves. They ask the owners of the nearest Latino-owned grocery store for advice about finding a doctor or a lawyer or even a place to sleep. They buy painkillers one capsule at a time and rub a tingly blue lotion for cow udders on their bruised arms. Most said they work through the pain because they need the paycheck.

Some workers quietly leave their jobs — and Wisconsin altogether — to nurse their wounds with relatives. Some go home to Mexico or Central America.

“It was months of pain,” said a man who dislocated his shoulder when he slipped on a cow’s placenta. “The pain only went away after I left the farm.”

Farmer Andy Lodahl and his wife told their workers to get ready because a storm was coming and they would need to work “a lot of hours” in the cold, wind and snow. “Make sure you all have a lot of warm clothes,” they said they typed into a phone, then translated into Spanish and showed the workers.

It was late December 2022, and Lodahl said he and his wife let the workers end a shift early and gave them an advance on their pay so they could buy winter gear.

Seferino José García, 62, was familiar with Wisconsin’s brutal winters. An immigrant from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, García had worked on dairy farms on and off for about a decade before he was hired about two weeks earlier on this small farm about 45 minutes northwest of Milwaukee. He was one of three workers and, in an arrangement that’s typical on dairy farms, lived in a house on the property.

One morning, García and his co-workers wore thin cotton gloves over latex gloves to do a number of tasks outside, including shoveling snow and feeding calves. García said it was hard to wear gloves at all and maintain his grip. It was below zero with wind gusts of more than 30 miles an hour. García said he felt like the wind was going to carry him away.

Blisters began forming on his hands. At one point, he submerged them in hot water, but that made the blistering worse. Still, he kept working. He finished his first eight-hour shift around 11 a.m. and went back to the house. He said he called the farmers and told them he couldn’t return for his 3 p.m. shift.

“I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore,” García said in an interview. “I couldn’t feel my own body when I touched it.”

The farmers told García he couldn’t take the afternoon off; the cows needed to be milked. But García told his bosses he wasn’t able to work. One of his co-workers couldn’t either; his fingers were frostbitten, too.

Lodahl and his wife told them both to vacate the property immediately. (The third worker also had frostbite but continued working, according to Lodahl.) García grabbed what he could from the house and left.

Most workers we spoke to know somebody who lost their job after an injury or have experienced this themselves. Several also were evicted, including the man who couldn’t use his right hand after he developed tendonitis from the repetitive motions of driving a skid steer. Adding insult to injury: He said his final paychecks bounced, so he’s still owed two weeks of wages.

“I’ve never been treated so badly in all my years working on farms,” said the man, who in mid December was still sleeping in a nephew’s living room along with his wife and two daughters. “Maybe there are laws that protect you, but for people like us, we don’t know where we can turn.”

Most Wisconsin dairy workers are considered at-will employees, which means they can be fired without cause, though employers can’t fire them in retaliation for asserting certain rights such as filing a workers’ compensation claim. Meanwhile, several attorneys said workers’ rights in the face of eviction are gray. Those who can show that there’s a landlord-tenant relationship — if housing costs are deducted from their wages, for example — may get more time to move out. But few workers challenge firings or evictions.

“These folks don’t want problems,” said Gabriel Manzano Nieves, a lawyer who provided García with legal counseling but didn’t file a case. “They don’t want the police called on them. He’s obviously not going to push back too much under those circumstances.”

After he was fired and evicted, García drove to Lupita’s Market & Restaurant in the nearby city of Beaver Dam, where he usually bought his groceries. Meinardo Enriquez, the store owner, said he chided García for not wearing proper gloves. He squeezed the fluid out of some of his blisters to relieve the pain and encouraged García to get medical care.

That night, García slept in the laundromat next door. Before dawn, he headed to South Carolina, where he has a niece. He put a shirt on his lap to catch the blood that dripped from his hands. As he drove, he said he tried to push bad thoughts out of his head and focus on the positive. “I was thinking about my mother. My sisters. My children. My wife,” he said. “Oh, dear Lord, why did this happen to me?”

(Zeke Peña, special to ProPublica)

After he arrived in South Carolina, his niece took him to the hospital despite his protests. He was worried about the cost. García returned a few more times to be examined but stopped going in February when he ran out of money.

By April, he said the feeling had started to return to his fingers. He’d lost six of his nails and had been told the rest would fall off, too. He was giving himself physical therapy he’d been taught at the hospital. He wanted to find a job but didn’t know what he could do since his hands didn't work like they used to.

Lodahl, meanwhile, said that losing two workers unexpectedly put him and his wife under immense pressure right before Christmas. It took several days to replace them — days in which the farm owners had to work around the clock with their one remaining worker to keep everything running.

“The cows do not stop making milk because people made the choice to be insubordinate and not have the ability for self-preservation and not show up to work,” he wrote in an email.

Lodahl said he and his wife were justified in firing and evicting García and the other worker for refusing to do their jobs. The workers, they said, were to blame for not wearing better winter gear and getting frostbite.

(Workers who get frostbite and other injuries related to extreme temperatures can pursue workers’ compensation claims, state officials and attorneys said. But Lodahl’s farm didn’t employ enough workers to be required to have coverage.)

Before winter arrived this year, the Lodahls bought heavy gloves for their employees.

On another dairy farm near Milwaukee, a Nicaraguan woman worked for months without seeking medical care for an injury because she didn’t know how she would pay for it.

Carmen, who is 40, said she felt so much pain in her head, back and arms that she could barely think clearly. She said she didn’t know how she got injured but suspected it was related to the repetitive motions of attaching and detaching milking tubes to cow udders hundreds of times a day.

“I couldn’t even walk straight,” she said. But she felt she had “to keep my head down and swallow” the pain because she needed the money.

Carmen, a single mother, makes $12 an hour and works 10 hours a night, six nights a week. In addition to supporting her young daughter and her ailing mother back home, as of November she still owed $13,000 to the person who loaned her money to immigrate to the U.S. last year.

She said she hasn’t told her employer about the injury because she is afraid he will get upset and fire her. Carmen and her daughter live in a house the farm owners provide their workers.

Across the state, dairy workers face a variety of barriers to getting medical care: limited transportation, the challenges of finding someone to fill their shifts and the high cost of medical care without health insurance.

Many workers said their supervisors dismissed their injuries and told them to get back to work, even when they were unable to walk. Among them: a 52-year-old woman who said she was knocked unconscious by a cow two years ago on a large farm in western Wisconsin. When supervisors refused to take her to the hospital, a co-worker drove her, according to the woman and the co-worker.

Later, a doctor said she could return to work, as long as she took frequent breaks. But the farm owner told her he couldn’t accommodate her needs and fired her, she said. Today, the woman can’t work at all, sleeps in a friend’s trailer and relies on a food pantry. She walks with a cane and can’t afford any additional medical care. She also owes nearly $70,000 for the treatment she has already received.

“They haven’t paid the bills,” she said of her former employers. “They offered me $2,000 to go back to Mexico.”

Other workers said they had been humiliated, insulted or called racial slurs by their supervisors after saying they had been hurt. As a result, they didn’t press the issue and never got medical attention.

“You get scared to say anything because they get mad and start yelling and saying bad words,” said one 54-year-old worker who said a cow kicked him in the chest last year while he was milking it. “I healed on my own. I thought I would die.”

Even when supervisors allow workers to get medical care, they face other barriers. Workers typically make between $11 an hour and $15 an hour. Few get health insurance through their jobs. The state’s public insurance program, BadgerCare Plus, doesn’t cover undocumented adults unless they are pregnant or in labor. If they have a serious medical emergency, undocumented immigrants may qualify for some BadgerCare Plus coverage, but this option is not widely known by workers.

In addition, the state bans undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s licenses, as ProPublica has previously reported, forcing many workers to rely on friends, co-workers and supervisors for rides to the clinic or hospital.

Then workers have to weigh whether they can afford to take unpaid time off to see a doctor. Workers routinely log 70 to 80 hours a week, split among multiple shifts each day, sometimes with no days off. That’s especially true for recent immigrants who want to work more hours to help pay down the debts they owe to people who help them get into the U.S.

And while Wisconsin guarantees workers at least one day of rest each week, the law excludes the dairy industry.

Workers also have to find somebody to cover their shifts, and “the boss has to say that that’s okay,” said Lisa Schiller, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and nurse practitioner who runs a mobile health clinic with county health departments that visits dairy farms. She said she knows of some farmers who help workers get to their appointments or even fill their shifts themselves. But others don’t.

Several workers said they were pressured to return to work before they recovered, including a man who lost part of his finger and worried about getting cow feces in his healing wound. He said he overheard a supervisor tell the doctor not to perform surgery to close the wound because the worker was needed on the farm the next day. The worker said he was so shocked he asked a hospital interpreter if he heard right; she confirmed it, adding that he had the right to be treated without his supervisor present. The worker asked his supervisor to leave and got the surgery.

Others said their jobs got filled by another worker while they recovered.

Federal law allows many workers to take time off for their health needs without losing their jobs. But it applies only to employers with at least 50 workers, and few Wisconsin dairy farms are large enough to qualify. Meanwhile, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for workers whose injuries leave them with a disability or a perceived disability. But the federal agency that enforces the law covers only employers with at least 15 workers.

Workers at smaller farms who believe they were fired because of their disability can lodge a discrimination complaint with a state agency. The state does not track discrimination complaints by industry, though several attorneys said dairy workers rarely file them.

One worker said he needed six weeks to recover after a bull slammed into him, breaking his nose, jaw and several teeth. In that time, the farm hired another man to replace him as the lead worker in the milking parlor. When he returned to the farm, he had to work under his replacement.

He said he got frequent headaches and experienced blurred vision and felt pressured to quit. Eventually, he did. It took him more than four months to find another job.

Some farmers do make sure their workers get the treatment and recovery time they need after they’re injured. Several workers said a farm owner drove them to an emergency room or clinic and paid out of their own pocket for medication. Some said their supervisors didn’t hesitate to file a workers’ compensation claim so their medical care was covered.

One man, an immigrant from Nicaragua, described with awe his boss’ reaction after a cow kicked his hand against a metal post. The owner of the small farm in central Wisconsin, where he is the only employee, took him to a clinic, paid for the visit and gave him a week off to heal at full pay. When the worker tells friends on other farms what happened, he said “they can’t believe it. It’s something that rarely happens.”

For Alicia Fetzer, who is the business office manager for her family’s large farm in western Wisconsin, it’s a matter of basic humanity. She said the farm typically covers the costs related to minor injuries, leaving workers’ compensation claims for serious accidents.

But she knows not all farms can easily afford to do that. “I’m not dumb to the fact that we are very successful; therefore we have the funds to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to take this guy to the ER and we might be paying this bill,’” she said. “That doesn’t put me in a pinch.”

At many farms, the expectation is that workers will pay for their own care after work injuries. One man whose two front teeth were snapped in half after a cow kicked him last month said his employer gave him a piece of paper with the name and number of a dental clinic that treats uninsured residents. He called, scheduled an appointment, and is now waiting to be treated.

In the meantime, the man said he tries to keep his mouth closed when he’s outside so the winter air doesn’t hit his open teeth. “It’s uncomfortable,” said the man, who is 32. “When you’re here illegally, sometimes you just say, ‘Oh well.’ What are you supposed to do?”

Several workers said they have received treatment through free or sliding-scale clinics or hospital charity care programs. Rebecca Steffes, the nurse manager of a free clinic in Dodgeville, in southwest Wisconsin, said she routinely sees dairy workers come in with a range of injuries — from kicks or chemical exposure to lower back pain or carpal tunnel symptoms. The clinic helps workers with more serious injuries get charity care from a local hospital.

“I would really like the farmers to effectively take responsibility for their workers,” said Steffes, who grew up on a dairy farm in the state. “They are bringing them here. They are working here. We’ve got to create a system that also takes care of their workers and their families.”

Sometimes injured workers eventually get connected to medical care by the generosity of somebody outside the farm who happened to notice them. That’s what happened to Carmen, the Nicaraguan woman who is afraid to tell her boss she is hurt.

A few months ago, Carmen was walking with a limp and held her head with such obvious discomfort that the owners of the Mexican store where she cashes her checks convinced her she needed medical care. The owner called his mother and asked her to drive Carmen to a hospital.

Carmen told the doctor only about the pain in her arms and back that made it difficult to do her job. She didn’t mention her constant, throbbing headache or the irritation in her eye from having an iodine solution used to sanitize cow udders splash in her face. She was afraid of asking about too much and being billed for treatment she could not afford.

The doctor told Carmen that her shoulder and back pain were due to the repetitive motions of her job, as she had suspected. He prescribed medication for her pain and told her that the overnight shifts were putting additional stress on her body.

But she is still in severe pain. She said she can’t afford to return for follow-up care.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

by Jessica Lussenhop and Topher Sanders

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Chris Cole lay on his back in the gravel beside the railroad tracks, staring up at the overcast sky above Godfrey, Illinois. He could not see below his waist — a co-worker had thrown himself over Cole’s body to spare him the sight, although the man couldn’t keep himself from repeating: “Oh my god, Chris. Oh my god.” So, instead of looking down where his legs and feet should have been, Cole looked up. What’s going to happen to my family? he remembered thinking.

Moments earlier, Cole — a 45-year-old brakeman, engineer and conductor with over two decades of experience working on the railroads — had attempted a maneuver he’d done many times: hoisting himself onto a locomotive as it moved past him. Although dangerous, Cole’s employer, Kansas City Southern Railway Company, did not prohibit workers from climbing on and off equipment that was moving at a “walking speed.” In fact, the company went from banning the practice in the mid-’90s to steadily increasing the permissible speed at which workers could attempt to climb onboard, a change other freight companies would also adopt in keeping with the spirit of a modern strategy to move cargo as quickly as possible.

As he pulled himself up onto the rolling train, Cole said he felt something strike his right shoulder — a rectangular metal sign close to the tracks that read “DERAIL.” He lost his balance and slipped beneath the wheels of a graffiti-covered boxcar. The train crushed and nearly severed his right foot and his left leg at the knee.

Somehow Cole maintained consciousness, calling his co-workers for help before undoing his belt to tie a tourniquet around one of his legs. As the engineer dialed 911, the conductor ran to Cole’s side and used his own belt to tie a second tourniquet around the other leg. A crew of firefighters arrived within minutes. They loaded him onto a medical helicopter that airlifted Cole to an emergency room in St. Louis, just across the nearby Missouri border.

Cole awoke in the middle of the night alone in a hospital room; it was April 2020, just a month after the surging coronavirus was declared a pandemic. Neither his wife nor his daughter were allowed to visit, and so he was alone when a trauma nurse informed him that he lost both of his legs. Cole, a burly man who once stood 6 feet tall, knew his railroading career was over, as were his hopes of providing enough so that his wife — who’d recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — could stay at home with their 12-year-old daughter.

The next morning, Cole called his manager to tell him that he was alive. Afterward, the manager wrote an email to other members of the company summarizing Cole’s description of the accident: “Upon mounting equipment he stated there was a derail sign that struck him off of the engine and he fell.”

But within days, according to company and court records, Cole’s managers and higher-ups at the rail company began to shape a new narrative — one that erased the role of the sign, leaving Cole solely at fault, entitled to nothing under the railroad industry’s version of workers’ compensation for his devastating injuries.

“The culture of management is that we are going to cover ourselves and cover the railroad and make sure that it doesn’t look bad in the public eye,” Cole said. “And if we got to bury one of our employees, or somebody else, we’re going to do that.”

In many ways, the fight centered on the metal derail sign. Within 48 hours of the accident, before state regulators had a chance to examine it, the sign was gone.

Railroad companies have a long history of hiding injuries, as ProPublica recently reported. But in some catastrophes like Cole’s, in which the injuries are so grievous they can’t be denied, ProPublica found that companies moved almost immediately to cover up their culpability.

Some attempts to deny the causes of accidents obscured safety hazards, such as faulty latches, which could have put more workers at risk, ProPublica found. Others took actions that made worker injuries far worse.

In 2014, after two BNSF workers in Minneapolis breathed in a cloud of highly toxic chemicals that may have vented from passing rail cars, managers claimed that the men were exposed to a far less dangerous substance. One of the workers, Scott Kowalewski, suffered severe, permanent neurological damage. The other later died by suicide, a tragedy that was impossible to incontrovertibly link to the accident.

When Kowalewski sued, BNSF claimed that he didn’t say he was exposed to the more toxic material until three-and-a-half years after the incident and maintained throughout the case that his deteriorating health had nothing to do with the exposure. But a jury sided with Kowalewski in 2018 and awarded him $15.3 million. And a judge concluded that the railroad’s “misrepresentation prevented Kowalewski from receiving appropriate medical treatment that might have remediated his injury.” The judge ordered BNSF to pay an additional $5.8 million penalty for its misconduct, writing that the extent of it was “vast, and spans from the outset of its initial sham investigation.”

Cole’s case wasn’t even the first involving a railroad sign. Bradley Anderson was riding on the side ladder of a rail car in 2019 when he struck his head on a milepost sign that was too close to the tracks. He was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. Officials from his company, BNSF, pulled the sign out of the ground before its position was adequately documented.

This July, the federal judge on Anderson’s case excoriated the company. “Despite receiving multiple court admonitions for destroying and concealing evidence, BNSF engaged in the same type of misconduct here,” U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger wrote in an order, declaring that the company was responsible for Anderson’s injury, and approved sanctions for the damage caused by the “bad faith” removal of the sign. The case eventually settled.

She also said she was forwarding the case to the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board and the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, “in the event either body should see fit to initiate an investigation into an apparent abuse of legal procedure.”

Neither of those bodies would disclose to ProPublica whether they had received the judge’s referral or whether they planned to act on the information.

In civil litigation, it falls on workers’ attorneys to prove companies tampered with evidence. If a judge agrees, they can sanction the companies for millions of dollars or, in an extreme case, even enter a default judgment for the worker. (The judges in Kowalewski’s and Anderson’s cases entered such default judgments against BNSF.) But outside of those repercussions, there is little else in terms of punishment for companies that repeat the behavior. “It comes out in an individual case,” said Daniel Gourash, editor of the American Bar Association book “Spoliation of Evidence.” “The sanction that would be given would not be because of a habitual spoliation activity or conduct or behavior.”

BNSF did not comment on either case but said in a statement that “the safety of our employees always has been and always will be a priority. We believe that’s reflected in our safety culture and record over the last decade, which produced the lowest number of injuries in our railroad’s history.”

In a statement to ProPublica on the Cole case, a Canadian Pacific Kansas City spokesperson denied that any of its actions were an attempt to avoid culpability. (This year, Kansas City Southern Railway Company merged with Canadian Pacific Railway.)

“Through a thorough investigation that lasted several months, Kansas City Southern sought to determine how the incident occurred so appropriate action could be taken to prevent such an incident from happening again,” the company said.

Within hours of Cole’s accident, a bevy of Kansas City Southern supervisors from across the region converged at the scene. They took pictures. They stayed until dark fell.

Early the next morning, Cole called two of his managers from his hospital bed: assistant trainmaster Michael Cline and Chris Knox, general manager of the KCS North Division. Cline sent two emails to several managers at the company: “He stated there was a derail sign that struck him off of the engine and he fell between the engine and cars where the incident took place with the dismemberment of his legs.” Cline told ProPublica he would check with his employer before commenting but then did not respond further. Knox didn’t respond to calls or text messages.

A short time later, four inspectors from the Federal Railroad Administration gathered at the scene along with KCS managers. An FRA operating practices inspector named Larry Piper wrote up his initial findings about what happened to Cole.

“His body struck a derail sign on a metal post adjacent to the pass track, knocking him off the locomotive and to the ground,” the report stated, adding that railroad and FRA officials watched video footage captured on a nearby security camera. “Even though the quality was not perfect, it did substantiate what the employee was saying,” the report said.

Piper communicated those findings to a member of the Illinois Commerce Commission, the agency that performs inspections and enforces state regulations on the railroad, including sign placement.

“It appeared to him that the derail post sign was too close to the rail,” recalled Dennis Mogan, the ICC railroad safety specialist, in a deposition. “The FRA didn’t have any regulations on that, and he thought that the state did and that we should take a look.”

But before that could happen, KCS roadmaster Jeffrey Brickey removed the sign and pulled its pole from the ground entirely. He also covered the hole left behind.

“We’re not supposed to leave any divots or anything like that for trainmen to walk on, so yeah, I cleaned it up,” he testified. Brickey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Photos taken by a KCS representative show the derail sign after Cole’s accident. (Court records)

By the time a railroad safety specialist from the ICC named Troy Fredericks arrived about a week later, the sign was long gone. When Fredericks asked Brickey about it, he said Brickey “couldn’t discuss” the sign and “would not talk about” the injury incident. The company did not comment on whether it had been forthright with Illinois regulators; the ICC told ProPublica that Brickey was “responsive to ICC Staff’s concern in the days after the incident.” Before Fredericks left the accident scene, he made note of a completely different sign not far away that he said was positioned too close to the railroad tracks and then left.

Around the same time that the sign disappeared from the site, it also began to fade from the railroad company’s narrative of the incident, despite the existence of the FRA’s initial report confirming Cole’s account. Wendell Campbell, an assistant division superintendent who was one of the first to arrive in Godfrey after the accident, wrote on an employee injury form that the sign struck Cole. But in subsequent paperwork, Campbell omitted any mention of the sign: “Employee was trying to board moving equipment.” Campbell declined to comment when reached by ProPublica.

In a deposition, Mary Lyn Villanueva, the KCS employee in charge of submitting information to the FRA, said that before she filed her report, she had several conversations with the company’s claim agents, who investigate accidents and injuries on behalf of the railroad. Villanueva, who had access to both versions of the story Campbell submitted, also omitted any mention of the sign. Through a company spokesperson, she declined to comment to ProPublica.

In its statement, Canadian Pacific Kansas City said it “filled out the FRA-required forms properly, noting the cause of the incident was still under investigation at the time.” The company denied that it misled the FRA, saying the sign was measured and photographed in the presence of agency officials and then removed.

But according to Nelson Wolff, Cole’s attorney, leaving the sign out of subsequent paperwork was not a harmless omission. “It was part of an obvious attempt to change the narrative and to conceal evidence that the sign was the actual cause,” he said.

Less than a week after the accident, managers made another decision: They wanted Cole, who in his 11-year career with the company had never been injured, investigated for rule violations. The company issued him a notice, which Cole initially did not receive — he was still in the hospital, going in and out of surgeries to save what remained of his legs.

Cole had 10 surgeries in the six weeks after his accident. (Courtesy of Chris Cole)

Six weeks after the incident, the hospital finally cleared Cole to go home. But there was no home to go to.

The Coles’ previous apartment was on the second floor of a building with no elevator and no way to navigate it in a wheelchair. Instead, Cole checked into an Extended Stay America hotel, where he was finally reunited with his wife, Iris, and his daughter, Lily.

Although grateful to see him in person for the first time in over a month, the meeting was a shock for Iris and Lily — it was the first time they’d seen him without his legs, and his wounds were still fresh. “I gave him the biggest hug, but I looked down at his legs,” recalled Iris, who confessed in court to being squeamish around blood. “He had a wound vac on the right leg, and how I did not pass out, I don’t know.”

Cole’s daughter, Lily (Bryan Birks for ProPublica)

The meeting was emotional but brief. Cole’s wife and daughter left to finish putting their belongings into storage. The family continued living separately for months before finding a wheelchair-accessible apartment. In the process, the Coles racked up over $10,000 in hotel room costs.

A little over a week after Cole got out of the hospital, his union representative wheeled him into a small hotel conference room in East St. Louis, Illinois, to hear the railroad’s case against him. They were joined by Brandi Foulk, the engineer, and Brian Loy, the conductor; it was the first time all three had seen one another since Cole was airlifted away.

In front of a presiding officer from Kansas City Southern, Cole’s manager Campbell made the argument: He said Cole attempted to mount a locomotive going faster than 4 miles per hour, or walking speed, without first notifying Foulk by radio, a violation of a KCS rule. A second KCS manager presented data from the train’s black box recorder, which he said showed that the locomotive reached 8 miles per hour at some point before it stopped, though he acknowledged it was possible Cole tried to board at 4 miles per hour.

Though Campbell knew Cole reported being struck by the sign, he made no mention of it. Both Foulk and Loy tried to speak up for Cole, saying they believed it was possible the train was going closer to 4 miles per hour when he made the attempted boarding.

“Chris is one of the safest people I’ve ever worked with,” Foulk said. “Him not saying something to me on the radio just let me know that he felt safe enough to get on equipment going the speed that it was going.”

The hearing took less than an hour and a half. A week later, the railroad determined Cole broke the rule and gave him a 30-day suspension, despite the obvious fact that he would never be able to return to work on the railroad again. Cole, who was still in acute pain at the time of the investigation, did not raise the issue of the sign at the hearing, which he later regretted. At the same time, he said he knew he’d be found at fault regardless. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the disciplinary proceedings against Cole.

It is a common refrain among rail workers that the companies’ internal investigative hearing process is a “kangaroo court.” Hearings typically run like this: They are presided over by railroad managers, workers are not allowed to have their lawyer represent them and they cannot force the railroad to turn over evidence for their defense. In a case against Norfolk Southern, a railroad manager who served as the presiding officer in about 50 investigative hearings estimated that she found in favor of the employee only once. The hearings are often a precursor to firings, and when Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials have weighed in on subsequent wrongful termination claims, they wrote that hearings were “at best perfunctory” and not “fair and impartial,” and “showed bias.” After employees sue, the rail companies frequently settle with workers they claim to have proven were fully at fault. In other cases, the workers have gone on to huge jury verdict wins.

“If you go to an investigation, you have already been found guilty,” Cole told ProPublica. “My ends were hurting, and I just wanted to get out of there and get it over with.”

Still, he admitted he was surprised that the company was in such a hurry to discipline him.

“That’s when I kind of lost all faith in them,” he said.

Cole stayed at this hotel after being released from the hospital because he couldn’t access his second-floor apartment with a wheelchair. (Bryan Birks for ProPublica)

In the fall of 2022, when Cole’s civil trial against Kansas City Southern Railway Company began in St. Louis County Circuit Court, a central figure in the case reemerged: the derail sign. Almost as mysteriously as it had disappeared, the sign was back.

According to the lawyers for the railroad, there was a third version of events: They now admitted the sign was placed too close to the tracks on the day of the accident, by about 1 1/2 to 2 feet, in violation of Illinois law. But Cole, they argued, never hit the sign. Therefore, the sign and who had placed it too close to the tracks and where it went after the roadmaster removed it and why it went was all moot. They even used the sign to demonstrate to the jury that it was too “flimsy” to knock a 245-pound man off balance. (Although fighting nerves, Cole was amused at one point when one of the lawyers banged loudly into it. Doesn’t sound flimsy to me, he thought.)

Throughout the two-week trial, the railroad’s legal team presented a more robust version of the same case it had made in Cole’s internal hearing in June 2020: that he boarded a moving train when it was going too fast, in violation of company rules and general safety best practices. They added a roster of three expert witnesses who reconstructed the scene using imperfect videos — one from locomotive cameras that missed the fall and one from a nearby warehouse that was grainy and far away; the company’s experts enhanced them with 3D computer modeling to show Cole slipped on his own. The true culprit, they argued, was rule violations. “If you follow the rules, you don’t get hurt,” the lawyer told the jury.

Cole’s attorney, Wolff, countered with his own expert, who argued the same videos plausibly showed Cole hitting something before falling. Wolff also argued that there was no safe speed for getting onto and off of moving trains and that companies like KCS that had once prohibited the activity were now walking the policies back to keep freight moving faster. Brandon Ogden, an expert witness and former BNSF manager, blamed this on the industry’s increasing reliance on precision scheduled railroading, a business philosophy that prioritizes maximum efficiency. “It’s all about moving faster, increasing production and boosting profits,” Ogden testified. “It negatively affects safety of railroad employees.”

Cole’s daughter, Lily, and wife, Iris, testified about the difference the accident made in their lives. His daughter, by then 15, called her dad a “knight in shining armor” who could no longer go swimming or ice skating with her. His wife described how the family was adapting to Cole’s new physical limitations in some ways, while others remained a struggle. “He is quick to get upset over things. I mean, really, really quick,” she said. “We have to tell Chris, don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”

When Cole was called to the stand, he told the jury the story: how he’d felt the sign strike his shoulder before his fall, about his long, ongoing recovery, sometimes feeling “worthless” now that he could not take care of his family. At one point, he removed his prosthetics for the jury, demonstrating the system of liners, pushpins, buckles and Velcro straps.

On cross-examination, the railroad’s lawyer grilled Cole on his understanding of the safety rules about boarding moving trains. He played the videos of the incident again, urging Cole to admit that his memory of hitting the sign was faulty or that his own poor decisions caused the fall. Cole stuck to his version of events.

“While we all do recognize you have suffered a very, very significant injury, you would agree with me that it has allowed you to develop stronger relationships with your wife and daughter?” the lawyer asked Cole at one point. “While you loved your job at the railroad, that took you away from your family, yes?”

On redirect, Wolff turned the line of questioning around.

“It looks like the railroad is asking for you to say thank you,” he said to Cole. “Would you rather be out there working on the railroad, providing for your family like you had been doing for decades … being able to walk on your own two feet?”

“That is correct,” Cole responded. “Yes.”

Wolff left the jury with a succinct explanation for the sign’s appearance, disappearance and reappearance in the railroad company’s narrative: “cover-up.” The railroad vehemently denied it.

After the long, contentious trial, and just under five hours of deliberation, the jury returned with its verdict, agreeing that Kansas City Southern had violated Illinois sign clearance law. It determined that Cole was 21% at fault for his accident, while the railroad company was responsible for 79%. The jury awarded Cole $12 million.

“A big weight lifted off my shoulders,” Cole said of the moment he heard the verdict. “Someday, we’re going to be fine.”

Cole, his daughter, Lily, and his wife, Iris (Byran Birks for ProPublica)

After the verdict, Kansas City Railway filed an appeal, which is ongoing. Company officials reiterated to ProPublica that they still do not believe Cole hit the sign before he fell. Read the full Canadian Pacific Kansas City statement here.

While he awaits the outcome, Cole works part-time during baseball season with Iris, greeting customers at the St. Louis Cardinals team store near the downtown stadium. Cole enjoys it, so long as he can steer clear of the rowdy baseball crowds that jostle his wheelchair. He cringes when fans thank him for his service, replying simply that he got hurt at work.

In the short term, he focuses on becoming more mobile on his prosthetics. Lily is 16 years old now, and Cole figures he still has time to learn to walk before he escorts her down the aisle at her wedding.

Though he said he doesn’t dwell much on the former railroad colleagues who tried to discredit him, he wonders why regulatory agencies don’t do more to discipline managers and companies.

“Instead of maybe a fine, why don’t you put somebody in jail?” he asked. “Maybe they’ll learn better that way and stuff will stop happening like this.”

Both the ICC and the FRA decided Cole’s accident warranted no further investigation. Neither agency issued any kind of penalty or fine.

A spokesperson for the ICC said it has authority to issue fines only after putting the railroad on notice of a violation and then holding a hearing, and that because the company “corrected the violation” — by removing the sign — the commission did not pursue the matter.

Following its practice at the time, the FRA never finalized its initial report concluding that Cole hit the sign and didn’t share it with anyone until ProPublica asked questions about the accident this month. It’s unclear how the report would have changed any element of the legal fight, but Cole finds it disappointing that the regulator didn’t take a more aggressive role in holding the railroad accountable.

“That is what the FRA is supposed to do, it is supposed to monitor and to sanction railroads when they do wrong,” he said. “You go out and you say, ‘Hey, you know, this sign was definitely way too close to the track and you had an employee got hurt, but we’re just going to tuck it in a drawer somewhere, we’re just going to forget about it.’ ... That’s what’s disappointing.”

The regulators, he went on, had nothing to lose, while Cole, in his words, “lost everything, pretty much.”

Dan Schwartz contributed reporting. Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Liz Moughon

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

“With Every Breath,” a new documentary from ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is an intimate glimpse into what happens when patients and a doctor learn that a lifesaving device may be causing harm.

In 2021, Philips Respironics issued a massive recall of as many as 15 million sleep apnea devices and ventilators. This film follows people who use and prescribe the DreamStation, a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine that has a serious defect. The foam the company had chosen for it could crumble in heat and humidity and send potentially carcinogenic material into the noses, mouths, throats and lungs of users.

In statements, the industry giant said it acted as soon as it learned of the “potential significance” of the problem and that the machines are unlikely to cause harm. But an investigation by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette revealed a different story. Over the course of more than a decade, Philips held back from the government thousands of complaints about the machines as stock prices soared. Again and again, previously undisclosed records and interviews with company insiders show Philips suppressed mounting evidence that its profitable breathing machines threatened the health of the people relying on them, in some cases to stay alive.

Weaving personal stories with lush cinematography, “With Every Breath” visualizes the stories of three people, who face the unanswerable question of how their health has been impacted, and a sleep medicine doctor who leads her patients through the chaotic recall. The film humanizes a public health crisis that has affected millions.

Directed by Liz Moughon and produced by Almudena Toral, this 20-minute film accompanies the investigative series about the Philips CPAP recall also called “With Every Breath,” published in partnership with the Post-Gazette.

Debbie Cenziper of ProPublica, Michael D. Sallah and Michael Korsh of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Margaret Fleming, Nicole Tan and Bridgette Adu-Wadier of the Medill Investigative Lab contributed reporting. Benjamin B. Braun of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed cinematography.