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Speaker 1: Today on Question Everything from KCRW and Placement Theory, we have four badass local journalists on the ways they're keeping pressure on powerful people in towns and states across the country. What are local reporters doing on the ground that stops politicians and the like from behaving badly? Makes them hesitate for a second and say, you know, I was considering doing something corrupt today, but now I'm going to think twice about that.
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Speaker 2: He paused.
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Speaker 3: For longer than I've ever witnessed a pause in an interview. And I actually sat there very calm and was going to let that pause just totally play out.
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Speaker 1: Stick around. So last week, we flew four local reporters from all corners of the country, San Diego, Baltimore, Jackson, Mississippi, and Austin, Texas, to drink. After hours at the wine shop we take over from time to time, Bibber and Bell in New York. And we're going to jump right into that conversation. But just real quick before that, I want to share a fact I learned not long ago that I found really helpful to have in mind as I was hanging out with these local journalists. And that fact is when a local newspaper vanishes, that directly causes corruption to go up in that area. Two academics recently did a study where they were able to prove this. They looked at 65 communities that have lost their local newspaper and used a statistical method that showed that it was the loss of the newspaper specifically and not other factors that led to public officials being more corrupt. When people talk about the importance of local reporting, they tend to throw around these terms like accountability and watchdog journalism. It's all kind of high-minded and abstract.
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Speaker 4: The U.S.
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Speaker 1: Has lost a third of its total newspapers in the last 20 years, more than 3,300 of them. And what I wanted from this conversation in the wine store, besides just good shop talk and war stories, is to get a concrete picture of what exactly local journalists are doing day to day, big things and small, that has such a direct impact. So joining Question Everything executive producer Robin Simien and me at the bar.
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Speaker 3: Hello, hello.
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Speaker 5: Hello.
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Speaker 1: We have Tony Plohetsky from the Austin American Statesman and the TV station KVUE in Texas. Lisa Halverstadt, who reports on homelessness for the nonprofit outlet Voice of San Diego. Elisa Zhu with the Baltimore Banner. And last but not least, Anna Wolfe from Mississippi Today, also a nonprofit based in Jackson. And I wanted to ask you, what is your beat? Would you say you have a beat in Mississippi?
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Speaker 3: Well, so right now, I just recently took over as an editor of a new team covering Jackson. And that just means that we're covering all of the beats that exist just in the confines of the city of Jackson. But for years before that, I had kind of created for myself the.
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Speaker 2: Poverty beat at Mississippi Today. And that spanned a lot of things and intersected.
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Speaker 6: With a lot of other beats.
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Speaker 1: Two years ago, Anna won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories she did, seven, showing how former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant had used his office to redirect millions of dollars of welfare funds to his family and friends, including, interestingly, to a drug company that former NFL quarterback Brett Favre was involved in. Anna exposed that corruption. She fought off a lawsuit by the former governor. The reporting she wanted to talk about tonight, though, was a series of stories she's been covering recently, about how district attorneys in Mississippi were charging women who used drugs while pregnant with serious crimes like child endangerment, child abuse, and sometimes even aggravated assault against an unborn child. The prosecutors were doing this even when there was no discernible harm to the child. They would just somehow get notified that a child had tested positive for drugs at birth.
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Speaker 3: They go as far in testing the child's first bowel movement which detects drug use as early as like four months in the pregnancy, at which point a woman could potentially not even know she was pregnant. So we did kind of a statewide analysis of this and found dozens of cases across the state.
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Speaker 2: You know, this is serious. This is sensitive.
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Speaker 3: Like, it's hard to find someone that's willing to talk candidly about this situation. And so we wrote our first story mostly kind of centered on the sheriff's investigator and his thought process around bringing these cases. And because we reported that, a woman who was going through the same thing found that story and reached out to us in the middle of last year.
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Speaker 1: What was her name?
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Speaker 2: Brandy Moore. Okay.
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Speaker 1: Do you remember when you first heard from Brandy? Can you tell that story?
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was in May of 2024, and she had just been arrested. And I got this email, and I was so confused because she said that she had a five-year-old.
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Speaker 7: Child.
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Speaker 3: And she had just been arrested for, you know, something that happened during her pregnancy five years earlier.
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Speaker 7: Whoa. Right.
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Speaker 1: And what was she wanting from you? What did she say?
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Speaker 2: She wanted to tell her story.
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Speaker 3: And she had read the stories that we had done previously and wanted, you know, I think for me to help try to identify an explanation.
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Speaker 2: For why this was happening.
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Speaker 3: You know, her case was very similar to many of the cases that I'd identified. And except for the fact of how long it took for her to be arrested. I called her immediately. We set up some time to speak. She lived about an hour plus away from my house. Went up there to interview her in a place I had never been to before called Sebastopol, Mississippi. And she just presented like so many of the people that I interview in this job, just like hardworking mama of three, trying to do her best and take care of her kids and, you know, in rough circumstances and not making a lot of money and trying to support her kids.
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Speaker 1: And so what was her story from when she was pregnant?
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Speaker 3: The father of the child, after she found out she was pregnant, didn't want anything to do with her. And she just was in a really dark place. And she had agreed to let her cousin who was a drug user live with her. And she ended up using drugs in her mind. I think she thinks of it as like she wasn't addicted. She was considering having an abortion. And three to four months into her pregnancy, she went to a revival at a church. And she felt the Spirit move through her. And after that moment was like, no, God wants me to have this baby. And I'm going.
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Speaker 2: To kick the drugs. And she did.
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Speaker 1: What drugs?
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Speaker 2: Because she's awesome. Meth. And, you know, she had her little girl, Remy. who's five, close to six now.
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Speaker 3: And in May of last year, she ended up in a jail cell.
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Speaker 1: What was she charged with?
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Speaker 2: Aggravated assault. She was facing 20 years in prison.
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Speaker 8: Wow.
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Speaker 1: And she has three kids.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: And this was unique among cases you'd seen, or was it?
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Speaker 3: Yes, because I had never seen a case where the charge was aggravated assault. It was always child abuse or child endangerment. Some of those charges can carry hefty sentences as well, but 20 years is like the worst that I've seen in this situation. And so my next step was to have a conversation with the district attorney who was bringing these cases.
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Speaker 2: And I met with him up in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
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Speaker 3: And we sat down and had a really nice conversation about like why he was doing this, what his intentions were. And I was super genuine about just trying to level with him and figure out like what was going on here.
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Speaker 1: Take me inside of that. First of all, what was nice about the conversation?
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Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that he was very adamant that his goal was to prevent women who are pregnant from using drugs and any harm that that causes. And in his mind, if he can help a woman get clean, that that will prevent it from happening again. And so instead of sending women to prison, his solution was to charge them with a crime like this that would compel them to go into drug court. get drug treatment, you know, all under the threat of going to prison, that, you know, maybe that's the only way that she will become clean.
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Speaker 1: And this was like a theory of his or he was basing this on some.
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Speaker 2: Kind of evidence or experience?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I don't think there was like any.
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Speaker 2: Like, metrics or... Okay.
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Speaker 1: But it was sincere?
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Speaker 3: Well, I just don't know if it's my job to say that.
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Speaker 1: I think that it's my job to.
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Speaker 3: I mean, I think that it's nice to sit down and have a conversation with someone who's willing to go there with you and then listen to you. And when you have a conversation that goes on that long and you're both trying to kind of meet each other where you are, you kind of end up at the same location at the end.
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Speaker 1: So what were you saying to him, though?
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Speaker 2: I was saying things like, well.
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Speaker 8: I was.
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Speaker 4: Got it.
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Speaker 3: Well, you know, have you thought about the impacts of your practices on reproductive rights? Have you thought about the fact that this crime that you're charging these women with can only be committed by a woman and that a man could never be charged with this?
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Speaker 1: You said that to him?
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Speaker 7: Yeah.
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Speaker 4: Had he?
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Speaker 1: Had he thought about it?
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Speaker 3: When I asked him if he had thought about the implications on reproductive rights... He paused for longer than I've ever witnessed a pause.
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Speaker 2: In an interview.
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Speaker 3: And I actually sat there very calm and was going to let that pause just totally play out.
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Speaker 6: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: And he said, you know, that wasn't my intention, but I do see how it does. And he also said, if something that we're doing isn't working... We intend to correct it. So by the end of that conversation, I was feeling pretty good. He told me, you know, that it was never his intention to send any women to prison. He was only getting them into drug court so that they could get clean. And, you know, that he literally would never want a woman to go to prison for this crime.
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Speaker 1: Like Brandy was facing prison?
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Speaker 3: She was facing 20 years in prison, but, you know, there were plea agreements.
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Speaker 2: That he expected to have.
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Speaker 1: So that was true then? Like in practice, they were being.
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Speaker 3: Well, that's what I understood when I left his office that day. And I went around to the three courthouses in the, you know, surrounding three counties because their records aren't online like everywhere else in the state. And was Xeroxing these, you know, court files. And I was doing it so fast I wasn't even reading them.
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Speaker 2: Until I got home. You both are just nodding your heads very, very fast.
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Speaker 9: Everybody's nodding here.
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Speaker 7: Yep, yep.
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Speaker 2: That's what you do.
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Speaker 9: Got to get in in the court hours. Yeah, exactly.
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Speaker 1: 11 to 4 or something.
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Speaker 3: Just driving as fast as I can to get it all done in one day.
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Speaker 1: This is not branding, to be clear.
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Speaker 3: No, this is another one of the cases that he told me that he had prosecuted.
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Speaker 2: I think it was 11.
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Speaker 3: Total cases that he gave me that I drove around to copy the files for. And then I get home and I start reading them. It's like pretty late by the time I'm home and like sitting down and reading. I'm reading the first case. You know, I got like the indictment. I've got the transcript from the, you know, hearing. And then I flipped the page and my heart just sank. And I went online and I looked up on the NDOC inmate search, typed in her name, and there was her mugshot.
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Speaker 2: With a 20-year prison sentence.
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Speaker 8: Whoa.
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Speaker 2: And a release date of 2039.
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Speaker 1: So she was a current inmate.
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Speaker 7: Yes.
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Speaker 2: How long had that woman been in jail?
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Speaker 5: Do you remember? Three years.
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Speaker 9: Wow.
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Speaker 3: And, you know, I called him the next day and we had a conversation. And I think it was two days later that he called me back.
00:12:30
Speaker 1: The DA.
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Speaker 7: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: And I was like, hey, so, you know, we talked about these cases, how they're handled. And I was like, We just spoke. And you told me that you never wanted to see a woman sent to prison for this offense. And there are four women currently incarcerated on sentences of up to 20 years.
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Speaker 1: Four out of the 11 that he gave you?
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Speaker 3: Almost all of them had failed out of drug court and gone to prison at one time or another. You know, again, a long pause and told me that he tried to look into it. On that same phone call, told me that he was dropping the charges against Brandy. So fast forward, write the story in December. Within a month, all four women are released from prison.
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Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 7: Wow.
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Speaker 8: Whoa.
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Speaker 1: That's really cool. Wow.
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Speaker 2: Did you call Brandy to tell her?
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Speaker 3: So I did not call Brandy to tell her that her charges had been dropped, even though I think I was the one who found out. I wanted to let the process play out. I didn't want to ruin anything. But I waited until the first instance that I knew that it was all settled and that she knew, oh man, we like cried on the phone, you know?
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Speaker 2: And I think that when.
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Speaker 3: I called her to tell her about the four women that were released, it was like double the emotion.
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Speaker 2: I mean, it was pretty incredible.
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Speaker 3: She told me that she felt like through this process, she found a, you know, a purpose in life. And I think that's really special to, you know, go through such hardship and then decide that you're going to take the brave act of telling your story to a reporter that she knew could result in a lot of scrutiny towards herself.
00:14:18
Speaker 2: And she chose to do it anyway.
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Speaker 3: And to know that, like, the only reason that I knew about those four women, the only reason they were released is because Brandy came to me and was brave enough to.
00:14:29
Speaker 5: Tell her story.
00:14:30
Speaker 1: Do you think the DA was lying or he didn't know that the women had gone to prison? Do you have any evidence, like, kind of pointing in either direction on that one?
00:14:42
Speaker 2: Your face. Well, it's because you're making an interesting case.
00:14:46
Speaker 8: I know.
00:14:47
Speaker 2: I actually think that it's that.
00:14:50
Speaker 3: A reporter who doesn't live in Mississippi and, you know, might have preconceived notions about, like, an official who would take these actions— would just think he was full of shit.
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Speaker 2: And I just don't.
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Speaker 1: Why not?
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Speaker 2: I don't know why you would sit there and talk to me for that long.
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Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:15:09
Speaker 1: I will say from reading your story, that's the impression I got, is that you don't think he's full of shit. He sits with you. He talks. You give him information that he's saying is new to him. So if you take him at his word, he's taking it on and changing his policy. I mean, what more could you want, honestly, from like a polling official, really?
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Speaker 8: Right.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: You know, in certain ways.
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Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:15:28
Speaker 2: The correction was made.
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:15:31
Speaker 9: Wow, and I'm having emotions as he's telling her story.
00:15:34
Speaker 6: That was with his knee.
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Speaker 2: Oh my God.
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Speaker 8: I feel like so much happens, though, in those pregnant pauses in interviews. You know that you've got something when there's that pause and you have to restrain.
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Speaker 2: Yourself from interrupting. And then you just stare at them.
00:15:55
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in this kind of like relationship, just the connection between you guys as reporters locally and then just people like your neighbors, people who live nearby and just how Brandy like wielded you in that situation, you know, towards this outcome.
00:16:09
Speaker 9: Person wielding you.
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Speaker 8: I can't help but think about Natalie.
00:16:16
Speaker 1: This is Lisa Halverstadt. She works for Voice of San Diego, where she's covered homelessness for a decade. She was named San Diego's Journalist of the Year in 2024. Lisa's reporting has literally saved lives. Back in 2017, there was a hepatitis A outbreak overtaking the city and especially the homeless population. Many people had died. The city lacked an adequate number of handwashing stations for the homeless. So Lisa reported some stories on it and got the problem fixed overnight, basically. And the death toll in the city dropped. This was before COVID, too. So just imagine if COVID had hit without those handwashing locations. And then Lisa did this other story. about a woman named Natalie. Who's Natalie?
00:16:58
Speaker 9: Natalie is, her name is Natalie Raschke.
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Speaker 8: She is a mom of four and she and her husband were living in an RV and that RV ended up getting towed. And then they became homeless in a totally different way. And Natalie emailed me. I guess she had heard me on a podcast, had been Googling around a lot. And she literally says, like, she felt called to, like, reach out to me. She sent me this picture of her family and just said, like, people, yes, and said, people need to see my family.
00:17:36
Speaker 9: They need to see my kids.
00:17:39
Speaker 1: And they need to see my family because?
00:17:41
Speaker 9: Because this is not okay.
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Speaker 8: And she had been reaching out, emailing the mayor and saying, you know, you guys confiscated my family's home.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: How many kids and what ages?
00:17:53
Speaker 8: So I believe at the time it would have been 14, 12, 8.
00:17:59
Speaker 2: And 4.
00:18:00
Speaker 9: When was this?
00:18:03
Speaker 2: This was in 2022.
00:18:04
Speaker 8: And it was complicated because when the RV got towed, it's completely disheveled. And the family snake literally goes missing in this RV forever. And they were like pretty neat.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: There's a loose snake in the story.
00:18:17
Speaker 8: Well, and I went into this RV at one point and you best believe I was like, if that snake even shows up, I might have.
00:18:23
Speaker 9: To run out. You know, I will run out.
00:18:26
Speaker 8: But Natalie reached out and just felt like, I need somebody to tell this story.
00:18:34
Speaker 9: Will you tell my story?
00:18:36
Speaker 8: And we ended up following Natalie and her family for a few months.
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Speaker 5: They were perfect.
00:18:42
Speaker 9: Bopping around when they could in hotels.
00:18:45
Speaker 8: They had a small little van that they got that they were sleeping in. How poverty and homelessness work is that most people don't just land on the street. It's a process. You know, people start by couch surfing. And then a lot of times they have a car and they're sleeping in that car. Then the car gets towed. And then it becomes a balancing act when you have a family of four. Like, okay, are we going to pay for food for the kids? Or are we going to get this RV back? And the kids are all in school. And the RV has like, you know, it costs a lot to gas up that thing. You know, like it's a lot. And so they let me follow them. And the story published. Initially, there was just this huge outpouring when the story published. I got an email from, you know, the top labor leaders in the state of California. A city councilman reached out to me. He was the council president at the time. And he said, I'd really like to talk to Natalie. And so I connected the two of them. And he actually had her come and testify at city council. They were voting on safe parking lots. for people living in vehicles.
00:19:52
Speaker 9: And he wanted.
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Speaker 8: Natalie to talk about what families need. And then, you know, because there was this outpouring, like powerful people were saying, okay, city, what are you going to do? What are we going to do for these people? And so they were put up in a hotel fairly quickly after the story, and they are now housed. Natalie and her family got housed with an emergency housing voucher. Interestingly, though, there's a story for me to now follow for Natalie. The housing agency that helped Natalie's family get that voucher, now that funding source for.
00:20:27
Speaker 9: This is being cut off.
00:20:29
Speaker 8: They thought they had about five years or so before they would have to pay for that voucher on their own. Now there's like a year before that voucher is going to run out. And so Natalie's now advocating that somebody pay attention. She goes to city council now and she brings her kids and she gets up at that mic and she says, this thing is going to affect my family or here's what I think about programs for families that live in vehicles.
00:20:57
Speaker 3: Just the, nature of like giving them the platform and the empowerment that that causes.
00:21:05
Speaker 2: I just, it's.
00:21:07
Speaker 6: They found a voice. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
00:21:09
Speaker 8: I mean, it's still like that whole, honestly, I'm going to cry because I think it's really important. And I'm sure like all of us can relate to this is that family got chosen. I wrote about that family. There are lots of other families and I feel like a little bit of guilt.
00:21:25
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:21:27
Speaker 1: Have you ever talked to her about that decision to reach out to a reporter, to you? There's so much distrust in the media. There's so much distrust in reporters. And I'm interested in the moments when people turn to reporters and have a good experience.
00:21:40
Speaker 8: Basically, what she said is she heard me on a podcast. And she heard how, like, in her describing, like, how genuine I was. Like, how much I cared. And I think sometimes as journalists, like we're taught to like be like robots.
00:21:58
Speaker 9: And not care.
00:21:58
Speaker 8: Like when Anna was talking about having the conversation with somebody, like people might have preconceived notions about that DA, right?
00:22:05
Speaker 9: Like the humanity is what made that interview.
00:22:09
Speaker 8: The fact that you two were talking person to person and he felt like you were looking each other in the eye and it was genuine.
00:22:15
Speaker 9: And, like, our sources, whether they're future or past.
00:22:18
Speaker 2: It also sounds like he was really listening to you.
00:22:19
Speaker 9: Exactly.
00:22:20
Speaker 8: Yes.
00:22:21
Speaker 2: Because I was.
00:22:21
Speaker 5: Listening to him.
00:22:22
Speaker 1: You were listening.
00:22:22
Speaker 8: Yes.
00:22:23
Speaker 1: You weren't just there to get him.
00:22:24
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:22:25
Speaker 1: You weren't just there to get him.
00:22:26
Speaker 2: It wasn't just a, like, trap.
00:22:27
Speaker 4: And I think it's probably helped that you reached out to him early on in that process.
00:22:32
Speaker 1: This is Elisa Zhu, by the way, from the Baltimore Banner. And you're also going to hear Tony Plahetsky chiming in, too, from the Austin American-Statesman.
00:22:39
Speaker 4: This was sitting down to have, like, a genuine conversation, trying to understand what's going on. As opposed to later on in the reporting, maybe after you found the court.
00:22:49
Speaker 2: Cases where it is a little bit, he.
00:22:51
Speaker 5: Would be more on the defensive in that case, right?
00:22:53
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly.
00:22:54
Speaker 3: Or just like going with Brandy's story without like trying to understand how we got here.
00:22:58
Speaker 1: I feel like that is a calculation that's sometimes tough. It's like, do I gather more and gather more and then go to the person responsible or do I go early? Always a calculation. Yeah, when do you guys make that calculation or do you have thoughts about that? Do you have like best practices there?
00:23:11
Speaker 6: Oh, I generally think early is better. I agree. I'm always a fan for earlier is better.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: I feel like when I'm making this calculation, but I'm not in a local setting, so I do think there might be differences here. There's a couple things that I'm thinking of that often weigh in the other direction of holding off until later. It's like, I doubt this person's even going to talk to me anyway. Maybe I'll get one shot with them. I want to know as much as I can before. Yes, yes. And there might be situations where if they know early, they could scare other people from talking that I need to talk to me.
00:23:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:23:44
Speaker 1: So you do have those calculations, too.
00:23:45
Speaker 2: I think it matters, like, what kind of person you're dealing with and what you know about their motivation.
00:23:50
Speaker 6: And that's one of the great things about, frankly, local reporting is that you know who these people are.
00:23:56
Speaker 1: You know who you were covering.
00:23:57
Speaker 6: They can't hide as easily.
00:23:58
Speaker 2: They can't hide.
00:23:58
Speaker 6: But also, you've interacted with them previously.
00:24:02
Speaker 1: You know people.
00:24:03
Speaker 6: Their truthfulness or not. Or if not, their ability to spin or not. You know, you have sort of a gauge and hopefully a pre-existing relationship with them.
00:24:16
Speaker 1: Up next, one of the hardest ethical decisions I've ever heard a reporter having to make. We'll be back with that in a minute. Welcome back to Question Everything. We're sitting in the wine shop with four local reporters from around the country talking about the different times they've taken the stories of people in their communities who don't have means or access and then have used them to confront people in charge, try to force some change. There's another Pulitzer winner here, Elisa Zhu. Elisa works for the Baltimore Banner, where she and a small team of reporters did a groundbreaking series on the opioid crisis in Baltimore. They discovered a staggering acceleration in deadly overdoses. which put Baltimore as the city with the most drug overdoses in the country. Elisa and her team collaborated with the New York Times on this, and they won the Pulitzer for it. And while she was doing that reporting, Elisa started hearing talk from sources, people who'd been in or worked in drug treatment in the city, about this one particularly shadowy drug treatment and housing provider called PHA Healthcare that was getting millions of dollars a year from Medicaid.
00:25:30
Speaker 4: The very first thing I heard about PHA was that there were videos of people who had overdosed, died of overdoses in their housing, and those.
00:25:43
Speaker 5: Bodies being carried out.
00:25:44
Speaker 1: In PHA housing?
00:25:46
Speaker 5: Correct. And I never found those videos.
00:25:48
Speaker 4: This is just something I heard through the grapevine. And I was like, wow, that's kind of crazy. Like, I got to learn more.
00:25:54
Speaker 1: So people who are in a facility or a program that's supposed to be helping them kick their addiction or actually dying of overdoses in that housing.
00:26:02
Speaker 6: Right.
00:26:02
Speaker 4: Their official name was PHA Healthcare. But there's very little information online under that.
00:26:07
Speaker 5: They were basically ghosts.
00:26:09
Speaker 4: I was like, how can a company exist in the year of our Lord, 2024, and we can't find any trace.
00:26:15
Speaker 5: Of them online?
00:26:15
Speaker 1: What were you hearing about them?
00:26:17
Speaker 5: We were just trying to talk to as many people as we could.
00:26:21
Speaker 4: So it was my reporting partners and I Jess, in particular, she was the photographer on the project. She would spend a lot of time out on street corners just saying like, hey, like, we want.
00:26:31
Speaker 5: To write about drug addiction and overdoses. Like, you want to talk to us?
00:26:35
Speaker 4: The folks that we're trying to reach aren't like regular readers of the Times or of the Banner.
00:26:39
Speaker 7: So your photographer is like standing out on the corner just asking whoever she sees and being like, hey, we do reports on overdose and drug addiction.
00:26:49
Speaker 2: Do you want to.
00:26:50
Speaker 5: Talk to us? Yeah, it kind of sounds crazy.
00:26:54
Speaker 9: It does.
00:26:54
Speaker 2: I think most people would say no.
00:26:57
Speaker 5: So many people said no.
00:26:58
Speaker 4: Like almost everyone said no. Sometimes people say, yeah, like let's talk. And so once in a while you'll get someone who says, yeah, let's do it. Eventually, we decided to create like a voice mailbox where people could call in instead of typing something out online and share.
00:27:17
Speaker 5: Their stories that way.
00:27:19
Speaker 4: We also promoted it with a partner broadcast station because a lot of people love to watch the TV news, but not so much reading the news.
00:27:28
Speaker 1: And that worked better.
00:27:29
Speaker 5: That's such a good idea.
00:27:30
Speaker 8: I know.
00:27:31
Speaker 9: I'm like, I'm seriously going to go home and copy that. It's so good.
00:27:35
Speaker 8: It worked.
00:27:35
Speaker 4: But eventually, again, Jess, she was scrolling TikTok or just like on social media for hours looking for folks who have gone through treatment programs in Baltimore.
00:27:48
Speaker 5: And so she found a woman named Faith.
00:27:51
Speaker 4: And in the video, Faith said like, hey, I'm newly in a recovery program.
00:27:58
Speaker 5: But it's kind of lonely.
00:27:59
Speaker 4: Like I want to find other women in recovery in Baltimore.
00:28:02
Speaker 5: To talk to, to go through this experience with.
00:28:05
Speaker 4: And so just reached out, they started talking and Faith says, yeah, actually I was in a program called PHA Healthcare and there I overdosed six times over the course of 10 days. And nobody from that program thought to offer me help.
00:28:22
Speaker 5: I almost died.
00:28:23
Speaker 6: Whoa.
00:28:23
Speaker 1: And that's the first like firsthand account you've got of this?
00:28:25
Speaker 4: That was the first firsthand account where someone didn't ghost us right away. And so I think Faith is just like an extraordinarily brave and open person. And we tried to stay in touch with her, but she would kind of go off the map for months at a time because she was going through cycles of relapse and recovery, but she would always come back to social media. And so that's how we were able to get in touch with her again.
00:28:52
Speaker 1: And then, so then did she hook you up and connect you to other people who'd been in This recovery program, PHA?
00:28:59
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:29:00
Speaker 4: She was kind of like a trusted messenger of sorts, you know? She knew folks that had been through that program with her, and she started putting us in touch.
00:29:09
Speaker 1: What were the most shocking things you were hearing that had happened in this program?
00:29:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the number one most shocking thing, and this came up really early in our conversations with Faith, is that she said, I heard that a baby died in this program. And she said, I heard a mom And a baby died. And coincidentally, the banner had written just like a short sort of brief, like a breaking news story.
00:29:36
Speaker 5: There were two bodies in an apartment. One was the mother. and then the other was the child who had starved.
00:29:43
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:29:43
Speaker 2: Side by side.
00:29:44
Speaker 6: Side by side.
00:29:45
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:29:46
Speaker 4: And like the time period seemed to match up, but we didn't have any other information besides that. So a few months later, when we were able to get the police report, that it confirmed this woman had been a patient of PHA Healthcare. And Stephen Thomas himself had shown up at the scene.
00:30:06
Speaker 1: Just the head of that company, PHA Healthcare.
00:30:08
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:30:08
Speaker 1: That was in the police report that he'd showed up.
00:30:10
Speaker 5: He was named, yeah.
00:30:11
Speaker 4: And that was the first connection that we had verifying that the death of this mother and.
00:30:17
Speaker 5: Her baby were part of the program.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: Did you ask him about that? I sure did. Well, let's talk a little about that interview.
00:30:24
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:30:26
Speaker 5: It was a long conversation. He gave me a lot of time.
00:30:29
Speaker 4: I got more specific with my questions as time went on during the interview. And it was later in the interview when I said, hey, you know, like, here are some of the concerns that I've been hearing from people. One is that people are using drugs in their program and they're not receiving any additional support and or there are no consequences for openly using. Also, I heard that a mother and her baby had died in your program.
00:31:01
Speaker 5: And I was met with a lot of silence.
00:31:05
Speaker 4: I think it was one of those probably 30 seconds of silence before, you know, he acknowledged it. He said it was probably like the worst day of his life when he found out that had happened. He said he thought they had only been dead for a little bit of time before the bodies were found. But The police and the medical examiner's reports indicate that the mother had died from cardiovascular disease unexpectedly.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: Drug overdose? No, no, no.
00:31:36
Speaker 4: It was cardiovascular disease exacerbated by chronic drug use.
00:31:41
Speaker 5: But it was sudden. Nobody expected it.
00:31:43
Speaker 4: And they were in kind of this like one bedroom or studio apartment. And then probably two weeks had passed before anyone thought to check on them. And by that time, her 13-month-old child had died.
00:31:57
Speaker 8: Wow.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: And it mattered to him that he thought it was a little time because that means two weeks passed where she's in this program, the baby is technically under the purview of this program, and no one from the program showed up.
00:32:10
Speaker 5: Right, yeah. He thought it was just a matter of, like, a couple of days.
00:32:15
Speaker 1: Were there any outcomes from doing that story?
00:32:18
Speaker 4: During the last legislative session, some hearings, lawmakers said, hey, you know, we read this really horrific story about what's happening. Like, what are we doing as a state to make sure this never happens again?
00:32:29
Speaker 5: A lawmaker sponsored.
00:32:32
Speaker 4: A bill to get the Maryland Department of Health to report about what they're doing to prevent another situation like PHA health care.
00:32:41
Speaker 5: That law got passed this past session.
00:32:43
Speaker 1: What's up with PHA?
00:32:45
Speaker 4: The state had issued a cease and desist order back in December, just three days after our story published. And they said, you are no longer allowed to see any more patients. We're cutting you off from Medicaid, essentially.
00:32:58
Speaker 1: Does that mean they kicked all the people who were in their housing out? What happened to all of them?
00:33:03
Speaker 4: No, actually, PHA said, fine, we'll stop offering treatment, but the clients can.
00:33:09
Speaker 5: Stay in our housing.
00:33:10
Speaker 4: And so we've been trying to figure out since then, like, what does this mean?
00:33:13
Speaker 5: Have things really changed?
00:33:15
Speaker 7: Got it.
00:33:15
Speaker 1: Are they still just out there running this program or what?
00:33:19
Speaker 2: Yes?
00:33:20
Speaker 9: Yes?
00:33:20
Speaker 8: No? What?
00:33:21
Speaker 9: She gestures.
00:33:23
Speaker 1: What's going on?
00:33:24
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're working on it.
00:33:25
Speaker 1: You're working on what?
00:33:27
Speaker 5: We're working on an upcoming story.
00:33:30
Speaker 9: We're trying to figure out. She's saying stay tuned.
00:33:33
Speaker 5: Stay tuned.
00:33:40
Speaker 4: This whole recording process on overdoses has really taught me the follow-up. can be just as important as the main story. And I think we can do that uniquely as local reporters because we're in the communities and we're paying attention to what's happening. We're not off chasing another big national story. So we can follow sort of the things that happen afterwards. And a big part of that follow-up reporting is Not only reporting on the impact of our stories, but also going to your, you know, elected officials and saying, hey, like, did you read this piece?
00:34:20
Speaker 5: You know, this is horrible. This is outrageous. Like, what do you think? What are you going to do about it?
00:34:26
Speaker 4: And I think that really forces them to engage with your reporting.
00:34:31
Speaker 5: You don't want to just.
00:34:32
Speaker 4: Put your piece out there and expect people to read it because, you know, who knows if they will or won't. But I think you really have to go to them and ask them What are you going to do to solve this problem?
00:34:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you guys all do that? Do you then publish a story that says this was this way, this changed for the better, and it was because there was local reporting?
00:34:51
Speaker 2: I think we should more.
00:34:52
Speaker 3: I think that it's, you know, the tradition is like not to make yourself the story.
00:34:58
Speaker 2: So it gets a little awkward when you're... It's.
00:35:00
Speaker 1: Like, look at me. I did so great. I got someone out of like a bind. Exactly.
00:35:05
Speaker 3: Or like if we're, you know, impacting what happens, like we're a character in the story. But I think that helping people understand what our jobs are and how we, you know, in asking these questions can... produce positive outcomes for folks, I think, you know, would probably help our industry out a little bit.
00:35:26
Speaker 9: Well, we're looking out for them is the bottom line.
00:35:29
Speaker 8: Right.
00:35:29
Speaker 6: That's the thing. We're acting on behalf of the public. Yes.
00:35:31
Speaker 8: Like, when I'm doing a Public Records Act request and I'm filing a lawsuit, I'm doing that because I want you, Joe Public, to be able to get that information. Like, it's your information.
00:35:41
Speaker 9: It's not mine.
00:35:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:35:42
Speaker 1: You know, it's not that government official. Yeah, exactly.
00:35:46
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:35:47
Speaker 1: You've done this You said 25 years? You've been at the statement in Austin? What has changed in local reporting?
00:35:55
Speaker 6: I think in just communities across the country, including in Austin, there are just less reporters, less boots on the ground doing this kind of work. As a result of that, people have less information overall about their communities and what's happening.
00:36:16
Speaker 1: Tony Plahetsky has reported for the Austin American Statesman, the newspaper in Austin, for 25 years. For lots of those, he covered the police beat. He's a Pulitzer Prize finalist. You might not realize how Tony's reporting has reached you. He was crucial in uncovering some of the most important and tragic news surrounding the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. How far is Uvalde from California? from Austin?
00:36:42
Speaker 6: About two and a half hours.
00:36:43
Speaker 1: Is that normally in your coverage area?
00:36:45
Speaker 6: It's not. It became in our coverage area, of course, after May 2022.
00:36:51
Speaker 1: But as soon as the shooting happened there, you went there? Yeah, absolutely.
00:36:57
Speaker 6: I'll never forget that day. I was working from home. And at that point, we were just getting earliest reports about a shooting at an elementary school. And an editor called and knew that I had sources on sort of a statewide level and a statewide law enforcement level. I think I looked on social media and found a confirmation of maybe two injured. And I called a longtime trusted source, and that person really braced me for what he was about to say. And he said, at this point, we are aware of like 14 children who have been killed. We expect the number to go up. It absolutely took my breath away because to have gone from, you know, early reports of a couple of people injured, not even children, the earliest reports, but to go to that level.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: And this is not publicly known. So you're like, this is like that moment where you're the one who knows this.
00:37:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:37:57
Speaker 6: And we became the first to kind of publish that and to say that out loud. And Within minutes, knowing that, I knew this was going to very quickly become a national tragedy. And I'm sure everyone will agree, as a journalist, you go. That's just what happens. Got to the scene, you know, outside Robb Elementary School that first night early on, frankly, before the national media had descended. And so for those first few days... I was a breaking news reporter, you know, going to press conferences and doing community reaction. And I remember my first stop was the town square. And I just remember there were people there who were praying. I think they were singing. It was in the earliest of hours when word was really still just kind of seeping out into the community and people were trying to make sense of it, something that was just unimaginable. Really, it was toward the end of that first week when we started getting those early indications that the law enforcement response had not gone as described by officials and that it had gone horribly awry. I certainly in no way went the thinking this is going to now become this huge story of one of the nation's most flawed law enforcement responses.
00:39:38
Speaker 1: From your perspective, what were the first clues or inklings you got that there are questions to ask about the police?
00:39:45
Speaker 6: It was from the town. It was from the people in Uvalde who had either been in the parking lot of the school or had friends or family members who had been in the parking lot of that school. Keep in mind where there were the earliest reports that there may be a gunman at the school. Parents went there and they wanted to like try to get to their kids or retrieve their kids.
00:40:07
Speaker 2: I totally remember this.
00:40:08
Speaker 8: Do you?
00:40:08
Speaker 2: I just really, I can like, like it was yesterday.
00:40:09
Speaker 6: There were these frankly horrific interactions between parents. The police and parents.
00:40:16
Speaker 7: And parents, I remember vividly seeing this one father on TV just.
00:40:21
Speaker 2: Saying, like, I really, really want to go. Like, trying so hard to go inside and literally just being held back.
00:40:26
Speaker 1: They were utterly, utterly distraught.
00:40:28
Speaker 2: All I want to do is go inside.
00:40:29
Speaker 6: Utterly distraught.
00:40:30
Speaker 2: Yes, those early reports were really.
00:40:32
Speaker 1: The cops were keeping them out.
00:40:34
Speaker 6: Yes, they were. As a result of that. people were saying something was not right. Like it felt like it took forever. Why were we standing in the parking lot for an hour? What was happening? And so by the end of that first week, it really had become apparent that it had not gone the way that authorities originally described. Originally, everyone at the state level Even the federal level were describing this as a heroic police response. Law enforcement, the governor of Texas, all said in unison in a press conference, they told the world that the bravery and courage of responding law enforcement officers had prevented more fatalities inside that elementary school, that more children would have been killed, they would have been murdered, had police not intervened and stopped the gunman. And just sort of the things we were hearing on the street did not match that narrative at all. A turning point, though, came about three weeks after the shooting when a longtime source invited me to watch a hallway video from inside the school. And I'll never forget that day because... The agreement was I could watch the video, I could describe it publicly, but the source said, I'm not going to give you a copy of the video.
00:42:13
Speaker 1: Did this source give you a headline, like, and this is what you're going to see?
00:42:16
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
00:42:16
Speaker 1: What were you told?
00:42:18
Speaker 6: You're going to see a bunch of highly armored cops standing around for an hour.
00:42:22
Speaker 8: Oh.
00:42:24
Speaker 6: So I watched the video with the source on a computer in real time.
00:42:29
Speaker 2: At their house.
00:42:30
Speaker 1: At a location.
00:42:37
Speaker 2: But that's so hard. Are you like furiously taking notes?
00:42:39
Speaker 6: Furiously taking, well, ultimately I was taking notes. I think for the first, like the first round of viewing, I was just trying to take in what I was, it was so shocking. 77 minutes. What I did say to that person, and this was sort of negotiated in the moment was, can I at least take a picture of your computer on my cell phone? He agreed. And that became sort of the first image from inside Rob Element.
00:43:09
Speaker 1: You were able to publish that?
00:43:10
Speaker 6: We were able to publish that.
00:43:12
Speaker 1: And what was in the image?
00:43:14
Speaker 6: It showed a group of highly armored cops inside the hallway with ballistic shields, assault rifles, just standing there.
00:43:27
Speaker 2: Outside the classroom.
00:43:28
Speaker 6: Outside the classroom.
00:43:29
Speaker 1: How long until you published that from when you got it?
00:43:31
Speaker 6: Immediately.
00:43:32
Speaker 2: Was there audio with the video?
00:43:34
Speaker 6: There was audio with the video.
00:43:36
Speaker 2: Oh, you could hear gunshots and you... 100%.
00:43:38
Speaker 6: Oh my God. But seeing that, I think compelled me further to kind of have this belief that the public was deserving of seeing that video the entire footage because unlike many other stories that we do, there's often not video. Or if there is video, it can be argued that, well, if you'd only seen this from this perspective or that perspective. I mean, we live in an age where everybody has video, but sometimes even with that, the video doesn't tell the totality of a story or the full circumstances. But there was something about that video that that was so vivid and so haunting. And so then I embarked on a couple of more weeks of trying to actually obtain a copy of the video.
00:44:38
Speaker 4: I remember there was a video that I watched of that scene where the children screaming had been removed from the audio.
00:44:49
Speaker 5: Yeah, I remember that.
00:44:50
Speaker 1: We put that note on the video.
00:44:53
Speaker 5: What was that conversation like?
00:44:55
Speaker 6: Well, first of all, this was an instance where there were so many journalistically ethical landmines. We were literally trying to figure out, do you air the gunfire? Do you not air the gunfire? You know, you could hear very faintly screaming, do you leave that in the published video? And there were a lot of conversations and a lot of decisions that went into that in a relatively short amount of time. I was able to get the video on a Sunday night we published on a Tuesday afternoon.
00:45:27
Speaker 1: For people who haven't thought about this in a while, what are the arguments for including those sounds and not?
00:45:36
Speaker 6: We ultimately did include the sound of gunfire. One of the things that I think that many people sort of at the table discussing this said is, is that they truly did not fully understand until they heard that what an assault rifle sounds like. And the sound of an assault rifle in an elementary school, it just really brought it home.
00:46:10
Speaker 1: And then juxtaposed with the images of cops milling around, basically.
00:46:14
Speaker 6: Exactly.
00:46:15
Speaker 1: But also.
00:46:17
Speaker 6: The story starts with the gunfire. And so I think to mute that or to edit it out really does not capture the totality of what happened that day. And then the faint sound of screams, the idea was if a person lost a child, lost a loved one that day, would they possibly be able to identify their voice? And we did not want to include that.
00:46:48
Speaker 1: So you put a note? We did.
00:46:51
Speaker 6: It just said that the sound of screaming has been edited.
00:46:58
Speaker 1: What ultimately was the truth that you found?
00:47:02
Speaker 6: What reality was is that the earliest responding officers made some attempt to intervene with the gunman. He shot at them. They retreated, and more than an hour passed before they ultimately reached the door. And in that intervening hour, dozens of heavily armored, highly skilled police officers filled that hallway and stood there waiting.
00:47:29
Speaker 1: Do you feel like you were uniquely positioned being a local reporter to be able to get that video in that way? 100%.
00:47:36
Speaker 6: I think that the ability to have sources who are willing to show it to me, give it to me, was absolutely the result of 20 plus years of reporting in Texas that made them feel as though they could trust me and that we would do the right thing.
00:48:01
Speaker 1: It's the lesson of that story.
00:48:02
Speaker 6: I think the lesson of that story is always question the official narrative. On a reporting level, too, listen to people in the community. They know. They know what is going on. They know what happened. Listen to them. And then just sort of from a journalistic operational procedure, too, Get the video, get the documents, get the recordings, get the records, get everything. Ask for everything.
00:48:32
Speaker 1: I guess I just hear these stories and it's such an argument for local news. Do you ever find yourselves making the argument for local news to people in your areas, like in your cities and towns?
00:48:48
Speaker 2: All the time.
00:48:50
Speaker 1: What do you say?
00:48:51
Speaker 6: The biggest argument in my mind for local news is the work itself. We help kind of educate the public on the importance of local journalism by doing stories that matter to them, that resonate with them, that they can connect to, and that can help shape and frame their opinion about the value of local news.
00:49:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of what I mean. There's something fundamentally different just about doing local reporting. Like you're just part of the ecosystem in just such a more direct way, you know, in such an on-the-ground way. It's just really cool to hear about, you know, just day to day.
00:49:27
Speaker 4: I think there is nothing more meaningful and fun and pure than local journalism. It's just like all of these big journalism questions distilled down to.
00:49:39
Speaker 4: How do I interact with this person who is my neighbor? Yeah.
00:49:44
Speaker 1: And then tell my other neighbors about them.
00:49:46
Speaker 6: Right.
00:49:48
Speaker 4: I love being a local journalist because my job is to learn interesting, meaningful, impactful things about my community. And the hope is by learning it and then putting it in the world that it will also enrich my neighbor's lives the way that it has mine. Yeah.
00:50:10
Speaker 1: Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
00:50:11
Speaker 5: Thank you.
00:50:12
Speaker 1: Thank you, guys. Question Everything is a production of Placement Theory and KCRW. This, by the way, is our last episode for the summer. We're going to be taking a little break and then picking back up with our regular schedule in September. If you haven't yet, please follow the show on Apple or Spotify or your podcast app of choice just so you're ready when we come back And also rate and review us highly, I hope, while you're there. I know it's annoying. I keep asking, but it just really helps people learn about us. We're probably going to drop a few surprises in the feed for you in July and August. And I don't know if this is also a good time to maybe catch up on any episodes you might have missed. Maybe our other episodes at the wine shop. There's one with Hollywood directors. Another that was one of my favorites was with a bunch of reporters who cover billionaires or the series on Jeremy Lafredo's arrest in Israel. Also, I'll be hanging out on Substack during the break. We just moved our newsletter there, and I'll be weighing in and asking you to weigh in on questions that come up around journalism, reporting, truth, the news, free speech. You can sign up at kcrw.com slash question everything, or just search for question everything or me on Substack. This week in our newsletter, I'm going to share more about that study I mentioned, which proved that local newspapers prevent corruption. There are some pretty fascinating and also a little confusing findings in there. and also some of the awesome reporting all our guests have done. For instance, that follow-up story about PHA healthcare that Elisa Zhu from Baltimore was all coy about. What does that mean?
00:51:47
Speaker 2: She's gestured.
00:51:48
Speaker 1: What's going on?
00:51:49
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're working on it.
00:51:51
Speaker 1: It just came out this week. It has some of the answers I wanted that she wasn't ready to divulge. So we'll talk about that. Today's episode was produced by Zach St. Louis and edited by Robin Simeon. Robin and I are Question Everything's executive producers. Sophie Kazis and Emily Malterre also make the program, along with contributing editors Jen Kinney and Neil Drumming. This episode was fact-checked by Annika Robbins and sound designed by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McKinley. Thank you to Biburn Bell Wine Shop and the staff there. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seifel, Tejal Aljamera, Natalie Hill, and Jennifer Farrow. I'm Brian Reed. Follow me on Instagram at brihreed, R-E-E-D, and see you in a bit.
Speaker 1: Today on Question Everything from KCRW and Placement Theory, we have four badass local journalists on the ways they're keeping pressure on powerful people in towns and states across the country. What are local reporters doing on the ground that stops politicians and the like from behaving badly? Makes them hesitate for a second and say, you know, I was considering doing something corrupt today, but now I'm going to think twice about that.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: He paused.
00:00:25
Speaker 3: For longer than I've ever witnessed a pause in an interview. And I actually sat there very calm and was going to let that pause just totally play out.
00:00:35
Speaker 1: Stick around. So last week, we flew four local reporters from all corners of the country, San Diego, Baltimore, Jackson, Mississippi, and Austin, Texas, to drink. After hours at the wine shop we take over from time to time, Bibber and Bell in New York. And we're going to jump right into that conversation. But just real quick before that, I want to share a fact I learned not long ago that I found really helpful to have in mind as I was hanging out with these local journalists. And that fact is when a local newspaper vanishes, that directly causes corruption to go up in that area. Two academics recently did a study where they were able to prove this. They looked at 65 communities that have lost their local newspaper and used a statistical method that showed that it was the loss of the newspaper specifically and not other factors that led to public officials being more corrupt. When people talk about the importance of local reporting, they tend to throw around these terms like accountability and watchdog journalism. It's all kind of high-minded and abstract.
00:01:43
Speaker 4: The U.S.
00:01:44
Speaker 1: Has lost a third of its total newspapers in the last 20 years, more than 3,300 of them. And what I wanted from this conversation in the wine store, besides just good shop talk and war stories, is to get a concrete picture of what exactly local journalists are doing day to day, big things and small, that has such a direct impact. So joining Question Everything executive producer Robin Simien and me at the bar.
00:02:08
Speaker 3: Hello, hello.
00:02:08
Speaker 5: Hello.
00:02:10
Speaker 1: We have Tony Plohetsky from the Austin American Statesman and the TV station KVUE in Texas. Lisa Halverstadt, who reports on homelessness for the nonprofit outlet Voice of San Diego. Elisa Zhu with the Baltimore Banner. And last but not least, Anna Wolfe from Mississippi Today, also a nonprofit based in Jackson. And I wanted to ask you, what is your beat? Would you say you have a beat in Mississippi?
00:02:47
Speaker 3: Well, so right now, I just recently took over as an editor of a new team covering Jackson. And that just means that we're covering all of the beats that exist just in the confines of the city of Jackson. But for years before that, I had kind of created for myself the.
00:03:05
Speaker 2: Poverty beat at Mississippi Today. And that spanned a lot of things and intersected.
00:03:09
Speaker 6: With a lot of other beats.
00:03:13
Speaker 1: Two years ago, Anna won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories she did, seven, showing how former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant had used his office to redirect millions of dollars of welfare funds to his family and friends, including, interestingly, to a drug company that former NFL quarterback Brett Favre was involved in. Anna exposed that corruption. She fought off a lawsuit by the former governor. The reporting she wanted to talk about tonight, though, was a series of stories she's been covering recently, about how district attorneys in Mississippi were charging women who used drugs while pregnant with serious crimes like child endangerment, child abuse, and sometimes even aggravated assault against an unborn child. The prosecutors were doing this even when there was no discernible harm to the child. They would just somehow get notified that a child had tested positive for drugs at birth.
00:04:04
Speaker 3: They go as far in testing the child's first bowel movement which detects drug use as early as like four months in the pregnancy, at which point a woman could potentially not even know she was pregnant. So we did kind of a statewide analysis of this and found dozens of cases across the state.
00:04:25
Speaker 2: You know, this is serious. This is sensitive.
00:04:29
Speaker 3: Like, it's hard to find someone that's willing to talk candidly about this situation. And so we wrote our first story mostly kind of centered on the sheriff's investigator and his thought process around bringing these cases. And because we reported that, a woman who was going through the same thing found that story and reached out to us in the middle of last year.
00:04:52
Speaker 1: What was her name?
00:04:53
Speaker 2: Brandy Moore. Okay.
00:04:55
Speaker 1: Do you remember when you first heard from Brandy? Can you tell that story?
00:04:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was in May of 2024, and she had just been arrested. And I got this email, and I was so confused because she said that she had a five-year-old.
00:05:09
Speaker 7: Child.
00:05:11
Speaker 3: And she had just been arrested for, you know, something that happened during her pregnancy five years earlier.
00:05:18
Speaker 7: Whoa. Right.
00:05:19
Speaker 1: And what was she wanting from you? What did she say?
00:05:21
Speaker 2: She wanted to tell her story.
00:05:23
Speaker 3: And she had read the stories that we had done previously and wanted, you know, I think for me to help try to identify an explanation.
00:05:32
Speaker 2: For why this was happening.
00:05:34
Speaker 3: You know, her case was very similar to many of the cases that I'd identified. And except for the fact of how long it took for her to be arrested. I called her immediately. We set up some time to speak. She lived about an hour plus away from my house. Went up there to interview her in a place I had never been to before called Sebastopol, Mississippi. And she just presented like so many of the people that I interview in this job, just like hardworking mama of three, trying to do her best and take care of her kids and, you know, in rough circumstances and not making a lot of money and trying to support her kids.
00:06:14
Speaker 1: And so what was her story from when she was pregnant?
00:06:17
Speaker 3: The father of the child, after she found out she was pregnant, didn't want anything to do with her. And she just was in a really dark place. And she had agreed to let her cousin who was a drug user live with her. And she ended up using drugs in her mind. I think she thinks of it as like she wasn't addicted. She was considering having an abortion. And three to four months into her pregnancy, she went to a revival at a church. And she felt the Spirit move through her. And after that moment was like, no, God wants me to have this baby. And I'm going.
00:06:53
Speaker 2: To kick the drugs. And she did.
00:06:55
Speaker 1: What drugs?
00:06:56
Speaker 2: Because she's awesome. Meth. And, you know, she had her little girl, Remy. who's five, close to six now.
00:07:06
Speaker 3: And in May of last year, she ended up in a jail cell.
00:07:10
Speaker 1: What was she charged with?
00:07:12
Speaker 2: Aggravated assault. She was facing 20 years in prison.
00:07:15
Speaker 8: Wow.
00:07:16
Speaker 1: And she has three kids.
00:07:17
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:07:17
Speaker 1: And this was unique among cases you'd seen, or was it?
00:07:21
Speaker 3: Yes, because I had never seen a case where the charge was aggravated assault. It was always child abuse or child endangerment. Some of those charges can carry hefty sentences as well, but 20 years is like the worst that I've seen in this situation. And so my next step was to have a conversation with the district attorney who was bringing these cases.
00:07:45
Speaker 2: And I met with him up in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
00:07:49
Speaker 3: And we sat down and had a really nice conversation about like why he was doing this, what his intentions were. And I was super genuine about just trying to level with him and figure out like what was going on here.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: Take me inside of that. First of all, what was nice about the conversation?
00:08:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that he was very adamant that his goal was to prevent women who are pregnant from using drugs and any harm that that causes. And in his mind, if he can help a woman get clean, that that will prevent it from happening again. And so instead of sending women to prison, his solution was to charge them with a crime like this that would compel them to go into drug court. get drug treatment, you know, all under the threat of going to prison, that, you know, maybe that's the only way that she will become clean.
00:08:39
Speaker 1: And this was like a theory of his or he was basing this on some.
00:08:43
Speaker 2: Kind of evidence or experience?
00:08:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I don't think there was like any.
00:08:46
Speaker 2: Like, metrics or... Okay.
00:08:48
Speaker 1: But it was sincere?
00:08:51
Speaker 3: Well, I just don't know if it's my job to say that.
00:08:55
Speaker 1: I think that it's my job to.
00:09:00
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that it's nice to sit down and have a conversation with someone who's willing to go there with you and then listen to you. And when you have a conversation that goes on that long and you're both trying to kind of meet each other where you are, you kind of end up at the same location at the end.
00:09:20
Speaker 1: So what were you saying to him, though?
00:09:21
Speaker 2: I was saying things like, well.
00:09:25
Speaker 8: I was.
00:09:29
Speaker 4: Got it.
00:09:30
Speaker 3: Well, you know, have you thought about the impacts of your practices on reproductive rights? Have you thought about the fact that this crime that you're charging these women with can only be committed by a woman and that a man could never be charged with this?
00:09:48
Speaker 1: You said that to him?
00:09:48
Speaker 7: Yeah.
00:09:49
Speaker 4: Had he?
00:09:50
Speaker 1: Had he thought about it?
00:09:50
Speaker 3: When I asked him if he had thought about the implications on reproductive rights... He paused for longer than I've ever witnessed a pause.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: In an interview.
00:10:00
Speaker 3: And I actually sat there very calm and was going to let that pause just totally play out.
00:10:06
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:10:07
Speaker 3: And he said, you know, that wasn't my intention, but I do see how it does. And he also said, if something that we're doing isn't working... We intend to correct it. So by the end of that conversation, I was feeling pretty good. He told me, you know, that it was never his intention to send any women to prison. He was only getting them into drug court so that they could get clean. And, you know, that he literally would never want a woman to go to prison for this crime.
00:10:38
Speaker 1: Like Brandy was facing prison?
00:10:40
Speaker 3: She was facing 20 years in prison, but, you know, there were plea agreements.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: That he expected to have.
00:10:45
Speaker 1: So that was true then? Like in practice, they were being.
00:10:49
Speaker 3: Well, that's what I understood when I left his office that day. And I went around to the three courthouses in the, you know, surrounding three counties because their records aren't online like everywhere else in the state. And was Xeroxing these, you know, court files. And I was doing it so fast I wasn't even reading them.
00:11:10
Speaker 2: Until I got home. You both are just nodding your heads very, very fast.
00:11:13
Speaker 9: Everybody's nodding here.
00:11:14
Speaker 7: Yep, yep.
00:11:15
Speaker 2: That's what you do.
00:11:16
Speaker 9: Got to get in in the court hours. Yeah, exactly.
00:11:19
Speaker 1: 11 to 4 or something.
00:11:21
Speaker 3: Just driving as fast as I can to get it all done in one day.
00:11:24
Speaker 1: This is not branding, to be clear.
00:11:27
Speaker 3: No, this is another one of the cases that he told me that he had prosecuted.
00:11:32
Speaker 2: I think it was 11.
00:11:33
Speaker 3: Total cases that he gave me that I drove around to copy the files for. And then I get home and I start reading them. It's like pretty late by the time I'm home and like sitting down and reading. I'm reading the first case. You know, I got like the indictment. I've got the transcript from the, you know, hearing. And then I flipped the page and my heart just sank. And I went online and I looked up on the NDOC inmate search, typed in her name, and there was her mugshot.
00:12:08
Speaker 2: With a 20-year prison sentence.
00:12:10
Speaker 8: Whoa.
00:12:11
Speaker 2: And a release date of 2039.
00:12:12
Speaker 1: So she was a current inmate.
00:12:15
Speaker 7: Yes.
00:12:15
Speaker 2: How long had that woman been in jail?
00:12:17
Speaker 5: Do you remember? Three years.
00:12:20
Speaker 9: Wow.
00:12:21
Speaker 3: And, you know, I called him the next day and we had a conversation. And I think it was two days later that he called me back.
00:12:30
Speaker 1: The DA.
00:12:31
Speaker 7: Yeah.
00:12:32
Speaker 3: And I was like, hey, so, you know, we talked about these cases, how they're handled. And I was like, We just spoke. And you told me that you never wanted to see a woman sent to prison for this offense. And there are four women currently incarcerated on sentences of up to 20 years.
00:12:52
Speaker 1: Four out of the 11 that he gave you?
00:12:54
Speaker 3: Almost all of them had failed out of drug court and gone to prison at one time or another. You know, again, a long pause and told me that he tried to look into it. On that same phone call, told me that he was dropping the charges against Brandy. So fast forward, write the story in December. Within a month, all four women are released from prison.
00:13:15
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:13:16
Speaker 7: Wow.
00:13:16
Speaker 8: Whoa.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: That's really cool. Wow.
00:13:19
Speaker 2: Did you call Brandy to tell her?
00:13:22
Speaker 3: So I did not call Brandy to tell her that her charges had been dropped, even though I think I was the one who found out. I wanted to let the process play out. I didn't want to ruin anything. But I waited until the first instance that I knew that it was all settled and that she knew, oh man, we like cried on the phone, you know?
00:13:44
Speaker 2: And I think that when.
00:13:46
Speaker 3: I called her to tell her about the four women that were released, it was like double the emotion.
00:13:52
Speaker 2: I mean, it was pretty incredible.
00:13:56
Speaker 3: She told me that she felt like through this process, she found a, you know, a purpose in life. And I think that's really special to, you know, go through such hardship and then decide that you're going to take the brave act of telling your story to a reporter that she knew could result in a lot of scrutiny towards herself.
00:14:18
Speaker 2: And she chose to do it anyway.
00:14:20
Speaker 3: And to know that, like, the only reason that I knew about those four women, the only reason they were released is because Brandy came to me and was brave enough to.
00:14:29
Speaker 5: Tell her story.
00:14:30
Speaker 1: Do you think the DA was lying or he didn't know that the women had gone to prison? Do you have any evidence, like, kind of pointing in either direction on that one?
00:14:42
Speaker 2: Your face. Well, it's because you're making an interesting case.
00:14:46
Speaker 8: I know.
00:14:47
Speaker 2: I actually think that it's that.
00:14:50
Speaker 3: A reporter who doesn't live in Mississippi and, you know, might have preconceived notions about, like, an official who would take these actions— would just think he was full of shit.
00:15:03
Speaker 2: And I just don't.
00:15:05
Speaker 1: Why not?
00:15:06
Speaker 2: I don't know why you would sit there and talk to me for that long.
00:15:09
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:15:09
Speaker 1: I will say from reading your story, that's the impression I got, is that you don't think he's full of shit. He sits with you. He talks. You give him information that he's saying is new to him. So if you take him at his word, he's taking it on and changing his policy. I mean, what more could you want, honestly, from like a polling official, really?
00:15:26
Speaker 8: Right.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: You know, in certain ways.
00:15:28
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:15:28
Speaker 2: The correction was made.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:15:31
Speaker 9: Wow, and I'm having emotions as he's telling her story.
00:15:34
Speaker 6: That was with his knee.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: Oh my God.
00:15:37
Speaker 8: I feel like so much happens, though, in those pregnant pauses in interviews. You know that you've got something when there's that pause and you have to restrain.
00:15:46
Speaker 2: Yourself from interrupting. And then you just stare at them.
00:15:55
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in this kind of like relationship, just the connection between you guys as reporters locally and then just people like your neighbors, people who live nearby and just how Brandy like wielded you in that situation, you know, towards this outcome.
00:16:09
Speaker 9: Person wielding you.
00:16:11
Speaker 8: I can't help but think about Natalie.
00:16:16
Speaker 1: This is Lisa Halverstadt. She works for Voice of San Diego, where she's covered homelessness for a decade. She was named San Diego's Journalist of the Year in 2024. Lisa's reporting has literally saved lives. Back in 2017, there was a hepatitis A outbreak overtaking the city and especially the homeless population. Many people had died. The city lacked an adequate number of handwashing stations for the homeless. So Lisa reported some stories on it and got the problem fixed overnight, basically. And the death toll in the city dropped. This was before COVID, too. So just imagine if COVID had hit without those handwashing locations. And then Lisa did this other story. about a woman named Natalie. Who's Natalie?
00:16:58
Speaker 9: Natalie is, her name is Natalie Raschke.
00:17:00
Speaker 8: She is a mom of four and she and her husband were living in an RV and that RV ended up getting towed. And then they became homeless in a totally different way. And Natalie emailed me. I guess she had heard me on a podcast, had been Googling around a lot. And she literally says, like, she felt called to, like, reach out to me. She sent me this picture of her family and just said, like, people, yes, and said, people need to see my family.
00:17:36
Speaker 9: They need to see my kids.
00:17:39
Speaker 1: And they need to see my family because?
00:17:41
Speaker 9: Because this is not okay.
00:17:43
Speaker 8: And she had been reaching out, emailing the mayor and saying, you know, you guys confiscated my family's home.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: How many kids and what ages?
00:17:53
Speaker 8: So I believe at the time it would have been 14, 12, 8.
00:17:59
Speaker 2: And 4.
00:18:00
Speaker 9: When was this?
00:18:03
Speaker 2: This was in 2022.
00:18:04
Speaker 8: And it was complicated because when the RV got towed, it's completely disheveled. And the family snake literally goes missing in this RV forever. And they were like pretty neat.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: There's a loose snake in the story.
00:18:17
Speaker 8: Well, and I went into this RV at one point and you best believe I was like, if that snake even shows up, I might have.
00:18:23
Speaker 9: To run out. You know, I will run out.
00:18:26
Speaker 8: But Natalie reached out and just felt like, I need somebody to tell this story.
00:18:34
Speaker 9: Will you tell my story?
00:18:36
Speaker 8: And we ended up following Natalie and her family for a few months.
00:18:41
Speaker 5: They were perfect.
00:18:42
Speaker 9: Bopping around when they could in hotels.
00:18:45
Speaker 8: They had a small little van that they got that they were sleeping in. How poverty and homelessness work is that most people don't just land on the street. It's a process. You know, people start by couch surfing. And then a lot of times they have a car and they're sleeping in that car. Then the car gets towed. And then it becomes a balancing act when you have a family of four. Like, okay, are we going to pay for food for the kids? Or are we going to get this RV back? And the kids are all in school. And the RV has like, you know, it costs a lot to gas up that thing. You know, like it's a lot. And so they let me follow them. And the story published. Initially, there was just this huge outpouring when the story published. I got an email from, you know, the top labor leaders in the state of California. A city councilman reached out to me. He was the council president at the time. And he said, I'd really like to talk to Natalie. And so I connected the two of them. And he actually had her come and testify at city council. They were voting on safe parking lots. for people living in vehicles.
00:19:52
Speaker 9: And he wanted.
00:19:53
Speaker 8: Natalie to talk about what families need. And then, you know, because there was this outpouring, like powerful people were saying, okay, city, what are you going to do? What are we going to do for these people? And so they were put up in a hotel fairly quickly after the story, and they are now housed. Natalie and her family got housed with an emergency housing voucher. Interestingly, though, there's a story for me to now follow for Natalie. The housing agency that helped Natalie's family get that voucher, now that funding source for.
00:20:27
Speaker 9: This is being cut off.
00:20:29
Speaker 8: They thought they had about five years or so before they would have to pay for that voucher on their own. Now there's like a year before that voucher is going to run out. And so Natalie's now advocating that somebody pay attention. She goes to city council now and she brings her kids and she gets up at that mic and she says, this thing is going to affect my family or here's what I think about programs for families that live in vehicles.
00:20:57
Speaker 3: Just the, nature of like giving them the platform and the empowerment that that causes.
00:21:05
Speaker 2: I just, it's.
00:21:07
Speaker 6: They found a voice. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
00:21:09
Speaker 8: I mean, it's still like that whole, honestly, I'm going to cry because I think it's really important. And I'm sure like all of us can relate to this is that family got chosen. I wrote about that family. There are lots of other families and I feel like a little bit of guilt.
00:21:25
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:21:27
Speaker 1: Have you ever talked to her about that decision to reach out to a reporter, to you? There's so much distrust in the media. There's so much distrust in reporters. And I'm interested in the moments when people turn to reporters and have a good experience.
00:21:40
Speaker 8: Basically, what she said is she heard me on a podcast. And she heard how, like, in her describing, like, how genuine I was. Like, how much I cared. And I think sometimes as journalists, like we're taught to like be like robots.
00:21:58
Speaker 9: And not care.
00:21:58
Speaker 8: Like when Anna was talking about having the conversation with somebody, like people might have preconceived notions about that DA, right?
00:22:05
Speaker 9: Like the humanity is what made that interview.
00:22:09
Speaker 8: The fact that you two were talking person to person and he felt like you were looking each other in the eye and it was genuine.
00:22:15
Speaker 9: And, like, our sources, whether they're future or past.
00:22:18
Speaker 2: It also sounds like he was really listening to you.
00:22:19
Speaker 9: Exactly.
00:22:20
Speaker 8: Yes.
00:22:21
Speaker 2: Because I was.
00:22:21
Speaker 5: Listening to him.
00:22:22
Speaker 1: You were listening.
00:22:22
Speaker 8: Yes.
00:22:23
Speaker 1: You weren't just there to get him.
00:22:24
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:22:25
Speaker 1: You weren't just there to get him.
00:22:26
Speaker 2: It wasn't just a, like, trap.
00:22:27
Speaker 4: And I think it's probably helped that you reached out to him early on in that process.
00:22:32
Speaker 1: This is Elisa Zhu, by the way, from the Baltimore Banner. And you're also going to hear Tony Plahetsky chiming in, too, from the Austin American-Statesman.
00:22:39
Speaker 4: This was sitting down to have, like, a genuine conversation, trying to understand what's going on. As opposed to later on in the reporting, maybe after you found the court.
00:22:49
Speaker 2: Cases where it is a little bit, he.
00:22:51
Speaker 5: Would be more on the defensive in that case, right?
00:22:53
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly.
00:22:54
Speaker 3: Or just like going with Brandy's story without like trying to understand how we got here.
00:22:58
Speaker 1: I feel like that is a calculation that's sometimes tough. It's like, do I gather more and gather more and then go to the person responsible or do I go early? Always a calculation. Yeah, when do you guys make that calculation or do you have thoughts about that? Do you have like best practices there?
00:23:11
Speaker 6: Oh, I generally think early is better. I agree. I'm always a fan for earlier is better.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: I feel like when I'm making this calculation, but I'm not in a local setting, so I do think there might be differences here. There's a couple things that I'm thinking of that often weigh in the other direction of holding off until later. It's like, I doubt this person's even going to talk to me anyway. Maybe I'll get one shot with them. I want to know as much as I can before. Yes, yes. And there might be situations where if they know early, they could scare other people from talking that I need to talk to me.
00:23:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:23:44
Speaker 1: So you do have those calculations, too.
00:23:45
Speaker 2: I think it matters, like, what kind of person you're dealing with and what you know about their motivation.
00:23:50
Speaker 6: And that's one of the great things about, frankly, local reporting is that you know who these people are.
00:23:56
Speaker 1: You know who you were covering.
00:23:57
Speaker 6: They can't hide as easily.
00:23:58
Speaker 2: They can't hide.
00:23:58
Speaker 6: But also, you've interacted with them previously.
00:24:02
Speaker 1: You know people.
00:24:03
Speaker 6: Their truthfulness or not. Or if not, their ability to spin or not. You know, you have sort of a gauge and hopefully a pre-existing relationship with them.
00:24:16
Speaker 1: Up next, one of the hardest ethical decisions I've ever heard a reporter having to make. We'll be back with that in a minute. Welcome back to Question Everything. We're sitting in the wine shop with four local reporters from around the country talking about the different times they've taken the stories of people in their communities who don't have means or access and then have used them to confront people in charge, try to force some change. There's another Pulitzer winner here, Elisa Zhu. Elisa works for the Baltimore Banner, where she and a small team of reporters did a groundbreaking series on the opioid crisis in Baltimore. They discovered a staggering acceleration in deadly overdoses. which put Baltimore as the city with the most drug overdoses in the country. Elisa and her team collaborated with the New York Times on this, and they won the Pulitzer for it. And while she was doing that reporting, Elisa started hearing talk from sources, people who'd been in or worked in drug treatment in the city, about this one particularly shadowy drug treatment and housing provider called PHA Healthcare that was getting millions of dollars a year from Medicaid.
00:25:30
Speaker 4: The very first thing I heard about PHA was that there were videos of people who had overdosed, died of overdoses in their housing, and those.
00:25:43
Speaker 5: Bodies being carried out.
00:25:44
Speaker 1: In PHA housing?
00:25:46
Speaker 5: Correct. And I never found those videos.
00:25:48
Speaker 4: This is just something I heard through the grapevine. And I was like, wow, that's kind of crazy. Like, I got to learn more.
00:25:54
Speaker 1: So people who are in a facility or a program that's supposed to be helping them kick their addiction or actually dying of overdoses in that housing.
00:26:02
Speaker 6: Right.
00:26:02
Speaker 4: Their official name was PHA Healthcare. But there's very little information online under that.
00:26:07
Speaker 5: They were basically ghosts.
00:26:09
Speaker 4: I was like, how can a company exist in the year of our Lord, 2024, and we can't find any trace.
00:26:15
Speaker 5: Of them online?
00:26:15
Speaker 1: What were you hearing about them?
00:26:17
Speaker 5: We were just trying to talk to as many people as we could.
00:26:21
Speaker 4: So it was my reporting partners and I Jess, in particular, she was the photographer on the project. She would spend a lot of time out on street corners just saying like, hey, like, we want.
00:26:31
Speaker 5: To write about drug addiction and overdoses. Like, you want to talk to us?
00:26:35
Speaker 4: The folks that we're trying to reach aren't like regular readers of the Times or of the Banner.
00:26:39
Speaker 7: So your photographer is like standing out on the corner just asking whoever she sees and being like, hey, we do reports on overdose and drug addiction.
00:26:49
Speaker 2: Do you want to.
00:26:50
Speaker 5: Talk to us? Yeah, it kind of sounds crazy.
00:26:54
Speaker 9: It does.
00:26:54
Speaker 2: I think most people would say no.
00:26:57
Speaker 5: So many people said no.
00:26:58
Speaker 4: Like almost everyone said no. Sometimes people say, yeah, like let's talk. And so once in a while you'll get someone who says, yeah, let's do it. Eventually, we decided to create like a voice mailbox where people could call in instead of typing something out online and share.
00:27:17
Speaker 5: Their stories that way.
00:27:19
Speaker 4: We also promoted it with a partner broadcast station because a lot of people love to watch the TV news, but not so much reading the news.
00:27:28
Speaker 1: And that worked better.
00:27:29
Speaker 5: That's such a good idea.
00:27:30
Speaker 8: I know.
00:27:31
Speaker 9: I'm like, I'm seriously going to go home and copy that. It's so good.
00:27:35
Speaker 8: It worked.
00:27:35
Speaker 4: But eventually, again, Jess, she was scrolling TikTok or just like on social media for hours looking for folks who have gone through treatment programs in Baltimore.
00:27:48
Speaker 5: And so she found a woman named Faith.
00:27:51
Speaker 4: And in the video, Faith said like, hey, I'm newly in a recovery program.
00:27:58
Speaker 5: But it's kind of lonely.
00:27:59
Speaker 4: Like I want to find other women in recovery in Baltimore.
00:28:02
Speaker 5: To talk to, to go through this experience with.
00:28:05
Speaker 4: And so just reached out, they started talking and Faith says, yeah, actually I was in a program called PHA Healthcare and there I overdosed six times over the course of 10 days. And nobody from that program thought to offer me help.
00:28:22
Speaker 5: I almost died.
00:28:23
Speaker 6: Whoa.
00:28:23
Speaker 1: And that's the first like firsthand account you've got of this?
00:28:25
Speaker 4: That was the first firsthand account where someone didn't ghost us right away. And so I think Faith is just like an extraordinarily brave and open person. And we tried to stay in touch with her, but she would kind of go off the map for months at a time because she was going through cycles of relapse and recovery, but she would always come back to social media. And so that's how we were able to get in touch with her again.
00:28:52
Speaker 1: And then, so then did she hook you up and connect you to other people who'd been in This recovery program, PHA?
00:28:59
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:29:00
Speaker 4: She was kind of like a trusted messenger of sorts, you know? She knew folks that had been through that program with her, and she started putting us in touch.
00:29:09
Speaker 1: What were the most shocking things you were hearing that had happened in this program?
00:29:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the number one most shocking thing, and this came up really early in our conversations with Faith, is that she said, I heard that a baby died in this program. And she said, I heard a mom And a baby died. And coincidentally, the banner had written just like a short sort of brief, like a breaking news story.
00:29:36
Speaker 5: There were two bodies in an apartment. One was the mother. and then the other was the child who had starved.
00:29:43
Speaker 4: Okay.
00:29:43
Speaker 2: Side by side.
00:29:44
Speaker 6: Side by side.
00:29:45
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:29:46
Speaker 4: And like the time period seemed to match up, but we didn't have any other information besides that. So a few months later, when we were able to get the police report, that it confirmed this woman had been a patient of PHA Healthcare. And Stephen Thomas himself had shown up at the scene.
00:30:06
Speaker 1: Just the head of that company, PHA Healthcare.
00:30:08
Speaker 8: Yeah.
00:30:08
Speaker 1: That was in the police report that he'd showed up.
00:30:10
Speaker 5: He was named, yeah.
00:30:11
Speaker 4: And that was the first connection that we had verifying that the death of this mother and.
00:30:17
Speaker 5: Her baby were part of the program.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: Did you ask him about that? I sure did. Well, let's talk a little about that interview.
00:30:24
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:30:26
Speaker 5: It was a long conversation. He gave me a lot of time.
00:30:29
Speaker 4: I got more specific with my questions as time went on during the interview. And it was later in the interview when I said, hey, you know, like, here are some of the concerns that I've been hearing from people. One is that people are using drugs in their program and they're not receiving any additional support and or there are no consequences for openly using. Also, I heard that a mother and her baby had died in your program.
00:31:01
Speaker 5: And I was met with a lot of silence.
00:31:05
Speaker 4: I think it was one of those probably 30 seconds of silence before, you know, he acknowledged it. He said it was probably like the worst day of his life when he found out that had happened. He said he thought they had only been dead for a little bit of time before the bodies were found. But The police and the medical examiner's reports indicate that the mother had died from cardiovascular disease unexpectedly.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: Drug overdose? No, no, no.
00:31:36
Speaker 4: It was cardiovascular disease exacerbated by chronic drug use.
00:31:41
Speaker 5: But it was sudden. Nobody expected it.
00:31:43
Speaker 4: And they were in kind of this like one bedroom or studio apartment. And then probably two weeks had passed before anyone thought to check on them. And by that time, her 13-month-old child had died.
00:31:57
Speaker 8: Wow.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: And it mattered to him that he thought it was a little time because that means two weeks passed where she's in this program, the baby is technically under the purview of this program, and no one from the program showed up.
00:32:10
Speaker 5: Right, yeah. He thought it was just a matter of, like, a couple of days.
00:32:15
Speaker 1: Were there any outcomes from doing that story?
00:32:18
Speaker 4: During the last legislative session, some hearings, lawmakers said, hey, you know, we read this really horrific story about what's happening. Like, what are we doing as a state to make sure this never happens again?
00:32:29
Speaker 5: A lawmaker sponsored.
00:32:32
Speaker 4: A bill to get the Maryland Department of Health to report about what they're doing to prevent another situation like PHA health care.
00:32:41
Speaker 5: That law got passed this past session.
00:32:43
Speaker 1: What's up with PHA?
00:32:45
Speaker 4: The state had issued a cease and desist order back in December, just three days after our story published. And they said, you are no longer allowed to see any more patients. We're cutting you off from Medicaid, essentially.
00:32:58
Speaker 1: Does that mean they kicked all the people who were in their housing out? What happened to all of them?
00:33:03
Speaker 4: No, actually, PHA said, fine, we'll stop offering treatment, but the clients can.
00:33:09
Speaker 5: Stay in our housing.
00:33:10
Speaker 4: And so we've been trying to figure out since then, like, what does this mean?
00:33:13
Speaker 5: Have things really changed?
00:33:15
Speaker 7: Got it.
00:33:15
Speaker 1: Are they still just out there running this program or what?
00:33:19
Speaker 2: Yes?
00:33:20
Speaker 9: Yes?
00:33:20
Speaker 8: No? What?
00:33:21
Speaker 9: She gestures.
00:33:23
Speaker 1: What's going on?
00:33:24
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're working on it.
00:33:25
Speaker 1: You're working on what?
00:33:27
Speaker 5: We're working on an upcoming story.
00:33:30
Speaker 9: We're trying to figure out. She's saying stay tuned.
00:33:33
Speaker 5: Stay tuned.
00:33:40
Speaker 4: This whole recording process on overdoses has really taught me the follow-up. can be just as important as the main story. And I think we can do that uniquely as local reporters because we're in the communities and we're paying attention to what's happening. We're not off chasing another big national story. So we can follow sort of the things that happen afterwards. And a big part of that follow-up reporting is Not only reporting on the impact of our stories, but also going to your, you know, elected officials and saying, hey, like, did you read this piece?
00:34:20
Speaker 5: You know, this is horrible. This is outrageous. Like, what do you think? What are you going to do about it?
00:34:26
Speaker 4: And I think that really forces them to engage with your reporting.
00:34:31
Speaker 5: You don't want to just.
00:34:32
Speaker 4: Put your piece out there and expect people to read it because, you know, who knows if they will or won't. But I think you really have to go to them and ask them What are you going to do to solve this problem?
00:34:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you guys all do that? Do you then publish a story that says this was this way, this changed for the better, and it was because there was local reporting?
00:34:51
Speaker 2: I think we should more.
00:34:52
Speaker 3: I think that it's, you know, the tradition is like not to make yourself the story.
00:34:58
Speaker 2: So it gets a little awkward when you're... It's.
00:35:00
Speaker 1: Like, look at me. I did so great. I got someone out of like a bind. Exactly.
00:35:05
Speaker 3: Or like if we're, you know, impacting what happens, like we're a character in the story. But I think that helping people understand what our jobs are and how we, you know, in asking these questions can... produce positive outcomes for folks, I think, you know, would probably help our industry out a little bit.
00:35:26
Speaker 9: Well, we're looking out for them is the bottom line.
00:35:29
Speaker 8: Right.
00:35:29
Speaker 6: That's the thing. We're acting on behalf of the public. Yes.
00:35:31
Speaker 8: Like, when I'm doing a Public Records Act request and I'm filing a lawsuit, I'm doing that because I want you, Joe Public, to be able to get that information. Like, it's your information.
00:35:41
Speaker 9: It's not mine.
00:35:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:35:42
Speaker 1: You know, it's not that government official. Yeah, exactly.
00:35:46
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:35:47
Speaker 1: You've done this You said 25 years? You've been at the statement in Austin? What has changed in local reporting?
00:35:55
Speaker 6: I think in just communities across the country, including in Austin, there are just less reporters, less boots on the ground doing this kind of work. As a result of that, people have less information overall about their communities and what's happening.
00:36:16
Speaker 1: Tony Plahetsky has reported for the Austin American Statesman, the newspaper in Austin, for 25 years. For lots of those, he covered the police beat. He's a Pulitzer Prize finalist. You might not realize how Tony's reporting has reached you. He was crucial in uncovering some of the most important and tragic news surrounding the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. How far is Uvalde from California? from Austin?
00:36:42
Speaker 6: About two and a half hours.
00:36:43
Speaker 1: Is that normally in your coverage area?
00:36:45
Speaker 6: It's not. It became in our coverage area, of course, after May 2022.
00:36:51
Speaker 1: But as soon as the shooting happened there, you went there? Yeah, absolutely.
00:36:57
Speaker 6: I'll never forget that day. I was working from home. And at that point, we were just getting earliest reports about a shooting at an elementary school. And an editor called and knew that I had sources on sort of a statewide level and a statewide law enforcement level. I think I looked on social media and found a confirmation of maybe two injured. And I called a longtime trusted source, and that person really braced me for what he was about to say. And he said, at this point, we are aware of like 14 children who have been killed. We expect the number to go up. It absolutely took my breath away because to have gone from, you know, early reports of a couple of people injured, not even children, the earliest reports, but to go to that level.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: And this is not publicly known. So you're like, this is like that moment where you're the one who knows this.
00:37:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:37:57
Speaker 6: And we became the first to kind of publish that and to say that out loud. And Within minutes, knowing that, I knew this was going to very quickly become a national tragedy. And I'm sure everyone will agree, as a journalist, you go. That's just what happens. Got to the scene, you know, outside Robb Elementary School that first night early on, frankly, before the national media had descended. And so for those first few days... I was a breaking news reporter, you know, going to press conferences and doing community reaction. And I remember my first stop was the town square. And I just remember there were people there who were praying. I think they were singing. It was in the earliest of hours when word was really still just kind of seeping out into the community and people were trying to make sense of it, something that was just unimaginable. Really, it was toward the end of that first week when we started getting those early indications that the law enforcement response had not gone as described by officials and that it had gone horribly awry. I certainly in no way went the thinking this is going to now become this huge story of one of the nation's most flawed law enforcement responses.
00:39:38
Speaker 1: From your perspective, what were the first clues or inklings you got that there are questions to ask about the police?
00:39:45
Speaker 6: It was from the town. It was from the people in Uvalde who had either been in the parking lot of the school or had friends or family members who had been in the parking lot of that school. Keep in mind where there were the earliest reports that there may be a gunman at the school. Parents went there and they wanted to like try to get to their kids or retrieve their kids.
00:40:07
Speaker 2: I totally remember this.
00:40:08
Speaker 8: Do you?
00:40:08
Speaker 2: I just really, I can like, like it was yesterday.
00:40:09
Speaker 6: There were these frankly horrific interactions between parents. The police and parents.
00:40:16
Speaker 7: And parents, I remember vividly seeing this one father on TV just.
00:40:21
Speaker 2: Saying, like, I really, really want to go. Like, trying so hard to go inside and literally just being held back.
00:40:26
Speaker 1: They were utterly, utterly distraught.
00:40:28
Speaker 2: All I want to do is go inside.
00:40:29
Speaker 6: Utterly distraught.
00:40:30
Speaker 2: Yes, those early reports were really.
00:40:32
Speaker 1: The cops were keeping them out.
00:40:34
Speaker 6: Yes, they were. As a result of that. people were saying something was not right. Like it felt like it took forever. Why were we standing in the parking lot for an hour? What was happening? And so by the end of that first week, it really had become apparent that it had not gone the way that authorities originally described. Originally, everyone at the state level Even the federal level were describing this as a heroic police response. Law enforcement, the governor of Texas, all said in unison in a press conference, they told the world that the bravery and courage of responding law enforcement officers had prevented more fatalities inside that elementary school, that more children would have been killed, they would have been murdered, had police not intervened and stopped the gunman. And just sort of the things we were hearing on the street did not match that narrative at all. A turning point, though, came about three weeks after the shooting when a longtime source invited me to watch a hallway video from inside the school. And I'll never forget that day because... The agreement was I could watch the video, I could describe it publicly, but the source said, I'm not going to give you a copy of the video.
00:42:13
Speaker 1: Did this source give you a headline, like, and this is what you're going to see?
00:42:16
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
00:42:16
Speaker 1: What were you told?
00:42:18
Speaker 6: You're going to see a bunch of highly armored cops standing around for an hour.
00:42:22
Speaker 8: Oh.
00:42:24
Speaker 6: So I watched the video with the source on a computer in real time.
00:42:29
Speaker 2: At their house.
00:42:30
Speaker 1: At a location.
00:42:37
Speaker 2: But that's so hard. Are you like furiously taking notes?
00:42:39
Speaker 6: Furiously taking, well, ultimately I was taking notes. I think for the first, like the first round of viewing, I was just trying to take in what I was, it was so shocking. 77 minutes. What I did say to that person, and this was sort of negotiated in the moment was, can I at least take a picture of your computer on my cell phone? He agreed. And that became sort of the first image from inside Rob Element.
00:43:09
Speaker 1: You were able to publish that?
00:43:10
Speaker 6: We were able to publish that.
00:43:12
Speaker 1: And what was in the image?
00:43:14
Speaker 6: It showed a group of highly armored cops inside the hallway with ballistic shields, assault rifles, just standing there.
00:43:27
Speaker 2: Outside the classroom.
00:43:28
Speaker 6: Outside the classroom.
00:43:29
Speaker 1: How long until you published that from when you got it?
00:43:31
Speaker 6: Immediately.
00:43:32
Speaker 2: Was there audio with the video?
00:43:34
Speaker 6: There was audio with the video.
00:43:36
Speaker 2: Oh, you could hear gunshots and you... 100%.
00:43:38
Speaker 6: Oh my God. But seeing that, I think compelled me further to kind of have this belief that the public was deserving of seeing that video the entire footage because unlike many other stories that we do, there's often not video. Or if there is video, it can be argued that, well, if you'd only seen this from this perspective or that perspective. I mean, we live in an age where everybody has video, but sometimes even with that, the video doesn't tell the totality of a story or the full circumstances. But there was something about that video that that was so vivid and so haunting. And so then I embarked on a couple of more weeks of trying to actually obtain a copy of the video.
00:44:38
Speaker 4: I remember there was a video that I watched of that scene where the children screaming had been removed from the audio.
00:44:49
Speaker 5: Yeah, I remember that.
00:44:50
Speaker 1: We put that note on the video.
00:44:53
Speaker 5: What was that conversation like?
00:44:55
Speaker 6: Well, first of all, this was an instance where there were so many journalistically ethical landmines. We were literally trying to figure out, do you air the gunfire? Do you not air the gunfire? You know, you could hear very faintly screaming, do you leave that in the published video? And there were a lot of conversations and a lot of decisions that went into that in a relatively short amount of time. I was able to get the video on a Sunday night we published on a Tuesday afternoon.
00:45:27
Speaker 1: For people who haven't thought about this in a while, what are the arguments for including those sounds and not?
00:45:36
Speaker 6: We ultimately did include the sound of gunfire. One of the things that I think that many people sort of at the table discussing this said is, is that they truly did not fully understand until they heard that what an assault rifle sounds like. And the sound of an assault rifle in an elementary school, it just really brought it home.
00:46:10
Speaker 1: And then juxtaposed with the images of cops milling around, basically.
00:46:14
Speaker 6: Exactly.
00:46:15
Speaker 1: But also.
00:46:17
Speaker 6: The story starts with the gunfire. And so I think to mute that or to edit it out really does not capture the totality of what happened that day. And then the faint sound of screams, the idea was if a person lost a child, lost a loved one that day, would they possibly be able to identify their voice? And we did not want to include that.
00:46:48
Speaker 1: So you put a note? We did.
00:46:51
Speaker 6: It just said that the sound of screaming has been edited.
00:46:58
Speaker 1: What ultimately was the truth that you found?
00:47:02
Speaker 6: What reality was is that the earliest responding officers made some attempt to intervene with the gunman. He shot at them. They retreated, and more than an hour passed before they ultimately reached the door. And in that intervening hour, dozens of heavily armored, highly skilled police officers filled that hallway and stood there waiting.
00:47:29
Speaker 1: Do you feel like you were uniquely positioned being a local reporter to be able to get that video in that way? 100%.
00:47:36
Speaker 6: I think that the ability to have sources who are willing to show it to me, give it to me, was absolutely the result of 20 plus years of reporting in Texas that made them feel as though they could trust me and that we would do the right thing.
00:48:01
Speaker 1: It's the lesson of that story.
00:48:02
Speaker 6: I think the lesson of that story is always question the official narrative. On a reporting level, too, listen to people in the community. They know. They know what is going on. They know what happened. Listen to them. And then just sort of from a journalistic operational procedure, too, Get the video, get the documents, get the recordings, get the records, get everything. Ask for everything.
00:48:32
Speaker 1: I guess I just hear these stories and it's such an argument for local news. Do you ever find yourselves making the argument for local news to people in your areas, like in your cities and towns?
00:48:48
Speaker 2: All the time.
00:48:50
Speaker 1: What do you say?
00:48:51
Speaker 6: The biggest argument in my mind for local news is the work itself. We help kind of educate the public on the importance of local journalism by doing stories that matter to them, that resonate with them, that they can connect to, and that can help shape and frame their opinion about the value of local news.
00:49:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of what I mean. There's something fundamentally different just about doing local reporting. Like you're just part of the ecosystem in just such a more direct way, you know, in such an on-the-ground way. It's just really cool to hear about, you know, just day to day.
00:49:27
Speaker 4: I think there is nothing more meaningful and fun and pure than local journalism. It's just like all of these big journalism questions distilled down to.
00:49:39
Speaker 4: How do I interact with this person who is my neighbor? Yeah.
00:49:44
Speaker 1: And then tell my other neighbors about them.
00:49:46
Speaker 6: Right.
00:49:48
Speaker 4: I love being a local journalist because my job is to learn interesting, meaningful, impactful things about my community. And the hope is by learning it and then putting it in the world that it will also enrich my neighbor's lives the way that it has mine. Yeah.
00:50:10
Speaker 1: Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
00:50:11
Speaker 5: Thank you.
00:50:12
Speaker 1: Thank you, guys. Question Everything is a production of Placement Theory and KCRW. This, by the way, is our last episode for the summer. We're going to be taking a little break and then picking back up with our regular schedule in September. If you haven't yet, please follow the show on Apple or Spotify or your podcast app of choice just so you're ready when we come back And also rate and review us highly, I hope, while you're there. I know it's annoying. I keep asking, but it just really helps people learn about us. We're probably going to drop a few surprises in the feed for you in July and August. And I don't know if this is also a good time to maybe catch up on any episodes you might have missed. Maybe our other episodes at the wine shop. There's one with Hollywood directors. Another that was one of my favorites was with a bunch of reporters who cover billionaires or the series on Jeremy Lafredo's arrest in Israel. Also, I'll be hanging out on Substack during the break. We just moved our newsletter there, and I'll be weighing in and asking you to weigh in on questions that come up around journalism, reporting, truth, the news, free speech. You can sign up at kcrw.com slash question everything, or just search for question everything or me on Substack. This week in our newsletter, I'm going to share more about that study I mentioned, which proved that local newspapers prevent corruption. There are some pretty fascinating and also a little confusing findings in there. and also some of the awesome reporting all our guests have done. For instance, that follow-up story about PHA healthcare that Elisa Zhu from Baltimore was all coy about. What does that mean?
00:51:47
Speaker 2: She's gestured.
00:51:48
Speaker 1: What's going on?
00:51:49
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're working on it.
00:51:51
Speaker 1: It just came out this week. It has some of the answers I wanted that she wasn't ready to divulge. So we'll talk about that. Today's episode was produced by Zach St. Louis and edited by Robin Simeon. Robin and I are Question Everything's executive producers. Sophie Kazis and Emily Malterre also make the program, along with contributing editors Jen Kinney and Neil Drumming. This episode was fact-checked by Annika Robbins and sound designed by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McKinley. Thank you to Biburn Bell Wine Shop and the staff there. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seifel, Tejal Aljamera, Natalie Hill, and Jennifer Farrow. I'm Brian Reed. Follow me on Instagram at brihreed, R-E-E-D, and see you in a bit.
