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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGMicrosoft Says It Has Stopped Using China-Based Engineers to Support Defense Department Computer Systemsby Renee Dudley ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Microsoft says it has stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems after ProPublica revealed the practice in an investigation this week.In response to concerns raised earlier this week about US-supervised foreign engineers, Microsoft has made changes to our support for US Government customers to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services, the companys chief communications officer, Frank Shaw, announced on X Friday afternoon.Microsofts announcement came hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said his agency would look into Microsofts use of foreign-based engineers to help maintain the highly sensitive cloud systems.Foreign engineers from any country, including of course China should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems, Hegseth wrote in a post on X Friday.In its investigation, ProPublica detailed how Microsoft uses engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Departments computer systems with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel leaving some of the nations most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking or spying from its leading cyber adversary. The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal governments cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.But these workers, known as digital escorts, often lack the technical expertise to police the work of foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found.Earlier Friday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, cited ProPublica in a letter to Hegseth asking for details about which DOD contractors use Chinese personnel to maintain the departments information and computing systems.China poses one of the most aggressive and dangerous threats to the United States, as evidenced by its infiltrations of our critical infrastructure, telecommunications networks and supply chains, Cotton wrote in the letter, which he posted on X. DOD must guard against all potential threats within its supply chain, including those from subcontractors. Since 2011, cloud computing companies like Microsoft that wanted to sell their services to the U.S. government had to establish how they would ensure that personnel working with federal data would have the requisite access authorizations and background screenings. Additionally, the Defense Department requires that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.This presented an issue for Microsoft, which relies on a vast global workforce with significant operations in India, China and the European Union.So the tech giant enlisted staffing companies to hire U.S.-based digital escorts, who had security clearances that authorized them to access sensitive information, to take direction from the overseas experts. An engineer might briefly describe the job to be completed for instance, updating a firewall, installing an update to fix a bug or reviewing logs to troubleshoot a problem. Then, with little review, an escort would copy and paste the engineers commands into the federal cloud.Were trusting that what theyre doing isnt malicious, but we really cant tell, one escort told ProPublica.In an earlier statement in response to ProPublicas investigation, Microsoft said that its personnel and contractors operate in a manner consistent with US Government requirements and processes.The companys global workers have no direct access to customer data or customer systems, the statement said. Escorts with the appropriate clearances and training provide direct support. These personnel are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data, preventing harm, and use of the specific commands/controls within the environment.In addition, Microsoft said it has an internal review process known as Lockbox to make sure the request is deemed safe or has any cause for concern.Insight Global a contractor that provides digital escorts to Microsoft said it evaluates the technical capabilities of each resource throughout the interview process to ensure they possess the technical skills required for the job and provides training. Doris Burke contributed research.0 Comments 0 Shares 12 Views 0 ReviewsPlease log in to like, share and comment!
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGTrump Administration Prepares to Drop Seven Major Housing Discrimination Casesby Jesse Coburn ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is preparing to shut down seven major investigations and cases concerning alleged housing discrimination and segregation, including some where the agency already found civil rights violations, according to HUD records obtained by ProPublica.The high-profile cases involve allegations that state and local governments across the South and Midwest illegally discriminated against people of color by placing industrial plants or low-income housing in their neighborhoods, and by steering similar facilities away from white neighborhoods, among other allegations. HUD has been pursuing these cases which range from instances where the agency has issued a formal charge of discrimination to newer investigations for as many as seven years. In three of them, HUD officials had determined that the defendants had violated the Fair Housing Act or related civil rights laws. A HUD staffer familiar with the other four investigations believes civil rights violations occurred in each, the official told ProPublica. Under President Donald Trump, the agency now plans to abruptly end all of them, regardless of prior findings of wrongdoing.Four HUD officials said they could recall no precedent for the plan, which they said signals an acceleration of the administrations retreat from fair housing enforcement. No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community, one of the officials said. The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society. In the short term, closing the cases would allow the local governments in question to continue allegedly mistreating minority communities, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. In the long term, they said, it could embolden local politicians and developers elsewhere to take actions that entrench segregation, without fear of punishment from the federal government.HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett declined to answer questions, saying HUD does not comment on active Fair Housing matters or individual personnel.Three of the cases involve accusations that local governments clustered polluting industrial facilities in minority neighborhoods. One concerned a protracted dispute over a scrap metal shredding plant in Chicago. The facility had operated for years in the largely white neighborhood of Lincoln Park. But residents complained ceaselessly of the fumes, debris, noise and, occasionally, smoke emanating from the plant. So the city allegedly pressured the recycling company to close the old facility and open a new one in a minority neighborhood in southeast Chicago. In 2022, HUD found that relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic. Chicagos mayor called allegations of discrimination preposterous, then settled the case and agreed to reforms in 2023. (The new plant has not opened; its owner has sued the city.)In another case, a predominantly white Michigan township allowed an asphalt plant to open on its outskirts, away from its population centers but near subsidized housing complexes in the neighboring poor, mostly Black city of Flint. The township did not respond to a ProPublica inquiry about the case.Still another case involved a plan pushed by the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, to build a water desalination plant in a historically Black neighborhood already fringed by oil refineries and other industrial facilities. (Rates of cancer and birth defects in the area are disproportionately high, and average life expectancy is 15 years lower than elsewhere in the city, researchers found.) The city denied the allegations. Construction of the plant is expected to conclude in 2028.Three other cases involve allegations of discrimination in municipal land use decisions. In Memphis, Tennessee, the city and its utility allegedly coerced residents of a poor Black neighborhood to sell their homes so that it could build a new facility there. In Cincinnati, the city has allegedly concentrated low-income housing in poor Black neighborhoods and kept it out of white neighborhoods. And in Chicago, the city has given local politicians veto power over development proposals in their districts, resulting in little new affordable housing in white neighborhoods. (Memphis, its utility and Chicago have disputed the allegations; Cincinnati declined to comment on them.)The last case involved a Texas state agency allegedly diverting $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and other communities of color hit hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and toward more rural, white communities less damaged by the storm. The agency has disputed the allegations.All of the investigations and cases are now slated to be closed. HUD is also planning to stop enforcing the settlement it reached in the Chicago recycling case, the records show.The move to drop the cases is being directed by Brian Hawkins, a recent Trump administration hire at HUD who serves as a senior adviser in the Fair Housing Office, two agency officials said. Hawkins has no law degree or prior experience in housing, according to his LinkedIn profile. But this month, he circulated a list within HUD of the seven cases that indicated the agencys plans for them. In the cases that involve Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, Flint and Houston, the agency would find no cause on [the] merits, the list reads. In the two Chicago cases and the one involving Memphis, HUD would rescind letters documenting the agencys prior findings. Hawkins did not respond to a request for comment.The list does not offer a legal justification for dropping the cases. But Hawkins also circulated a memo that indicates the reasoning behind dropping one the Chicago recycling case. The memo cites an executive order issued by Trump in April eliminating federal enforcement of disparate-impact liability, the doctrine that seemingly neutral policies or practices could have a discriminatory effect. Hawkins memo stated that the Department will not interpret environmental impacts as violations of fair housing law absent a showing of intentional discrimination. Four HUD officials said such a position would be a stark departure from prior department policy and relevant case law.The reversal on the Chicago recycling case also follows behind-the-scenes pressure on HUD from Sen. Jim Banks. In June, Banks, a Republican from Indiana, wrote a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in which he criticized the administration of President Joe Bidens handling of the case as brazen overreach. Noting that the Chicago plant would supply metal to Indiana steel mills, Banks asked the Trump appointees to take any actions you deem necessary to remedy the situation. Banks did not respond to a request for comment.That case and others among the seven had also received scrutiny from other federal and state agencies, including the EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice. The EPA declined to say whether it was still pursuing any of the cases. The DOJ did not respond to the same inquiry.The case closures at HUD would be the latest stage in a broad rollback of fair housing enforcement under the Trump administration, which ProPublica reported on previously. That rollback has continued in other ways as well. The agency recently initiated a plan to transfer more than half of its fair housing attorneys in the office of general counsel into unrelated roles, compounding prior staff losses since the beginning of the year, four HUD officials told ProPublica.The officials fear long-lasting ramifications from the changes. Fair housing laws shape our cities, shape where housing gets built, where pollution occurs, where disaster money goes, one official said. Without them, we have a different country.0 Comments 0 Shares 17 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGThe USDA Wouldnt Let Her Give Up Her House When She Couldnt Pay Her Mortgage. Instead, It Crushed Her With Debt.by Sawyer Loftus, Bangor Daily News This article was produced for ProPublicas Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Bangor Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Off a two-lane stretch of U.S. Route 1 in rural Caribou, Maine, sits a white ranch-style house thats been consumed by weeds and vines.The house was once the fulfillment of a dream. The owner had purchased it in 2006 through a federal mortgage program designed specifically for people like her: impoverished, first-time homeowners who live in the most rural parts of the United States. The loan, which came directly from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, required no down payment. But things started going wrong from the day she moved in. First, the basement flooded. Then the furnace stopped working. As major repair costs accumulated over the next six years, the womans health deteriorated until she was forced to leave her job as a manager at Kmart. Her disability check was not enough to cover medical expenses and the upkeep required for the house let alone the $855 monthly mortgage. So in 2012 she drove to a USDA office 20 miles away and tried to give the house back. She said staff there would not accept her keys, telling her instead to call a toll-free number for help, as agency protocol requires. She left a message and did not hear back. She stopped paying her mortgage and moved out. Her dream home sat abandoned for more than a decade. USDA guidance says the agency should act quickly when borrowers fall behind on payments to minimize any potential loss to the Government and to the borrower. A prompt sale keeps the government from having to pay the legal and administrative costs associated with foreclosure down the road and may protect the borrower from incurring a major blemish on their credit history.But that did not happen. Rather, 13 years passed before a sheriffs deputy knocked on the door of the womans public housing apartment in May and served her with foreclosure papers on the now dilapidated ranch home thats been overtaken by squatters. The governments delay hurt the value of its investment and left the woman with a bill far greater than the cost of the loan she initially took out with additional interest and other fees that had accumulated over those years. The woman, now 68, declined to be interviewed, but her attorney, Tom Cox, said she allowed him to share her experience on the condition that she not be named to protect her privacy.Since March, the USDA has filed 56 foreclosures in the federal court system against properties purchased with a rural development mortgage, also known as a Section 502 direct loan. All but one were in Maine. The borrowers have been in default for an average of nearly nine years. As in the case of the Caribou homeowner, the USDAs delays in those cases have resulted in borrowers racking up more debt because of the interest and fees that piled up in the intervening years, according to a Bangor Daily News and ProPublica examination of the foreclosure cases and interviews with former USDA officials and legal experts. On average, borrowers in the 55 Maine cases owe $110,000 more than they would have had the agency moved to take possession of the properties when they first defaulted, the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica found. This includes what the USDA calls preservation and inspection fees, a broad category on the foreclosure filings that can include home repairs and yard maintenance, among other things. Borrowers who cant pay risk having the government garnish their wages or federal benefits such as Social Security. The Caribou woman had her disability checks garnished six times since 2015 to offset her debt before the USDA even foreclosed on her property, according to her lawyer. The best way to keep the government from garnishing federal benefits is to file for bankruptcy, attorneys said. It really undermines the concept of giving access to homeownership to a population who might not otherwise have been able to afford it, said Rhiannon Hampson, former USDA rural development director for Maine who stepped down in January before President Donald Trump was inaugurated. The irony, with all of these fees piled on, is that they cant afford to get out of it.The recent wave of foreclosure filings in Maine underscores the governments failure to monitor a mortgage program that since its founding in 1949 has poured tens of billions of tax dollars into giving the poorest Americans a shot at homeownership.The USDA does not publicly report how often it files foreclosures. U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat and member of a House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the USDAs direct loan program, has proposed language in the House agriculture appropriations report for the 2026 fiscal year calling on the agency to regularly report the number of foreclosures and abandoned properties related to the direct loan program. The bill awaits a vote before the full House of Representatives.The USDA regularly filed foreclosures in Maine prior to the coronavirus pandemic but has rarely done so in recent years, according to Richard H. Broderick Jr., a Maine attorney with whom the agency had contracted to file foreclosures until 2022. Kevin Crosman, the Maine attorney now filing foreclosures on behalf of the USDA, would not comment on why the agency started doing so again.Reporters visited 12 of the 55 homes in the Bangor Daily News core coverage area in May. At least five appeared to be abandoned and in disrepair with windows boarded up or a sign affixed to the door saying it was being cared for by a New York company raising doubts that the government will recoup its investments. The USDA is supposed to take custody of properties purchased with a Section 502 direct loan and begin the foreclosure process when the homeowner becomes incapacitated, dies or has abandoned it, according to the agencys handbook. Otherwise the properties may languish and lose value. It really undermines the concept of giving access to homeownership to a population who might not otherwise have been able to afford it. Rhiannon Hampson, former USDA rural development director for Maine Agency guidelines do not specify how soon the government should step in after a loan falls into delinquency, but under federal law, lenders cannot foreclose on a property until borrowers have been in default for 120 days.Nearly a fifth of the USDAs 159,208 Section 502 direct loans in its active national portfolio 30,496 were delinquent as of March, according to internal agency data obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. That rate is double what a 1993 internal agency report said was acceptable. But neither the USDA nor the White House would say why the agency is focusing on foreclosures in Maine. Vermont is the only other state in which the USDA has filed a single foreclosure, according to federal court filings.The foreclosures started just before Trumps Justice Department sued the state of Maine in April over its inclusion of transgender athletes in girls sports, part of a larger spat between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills. The White House would not say whether the foreclosures are connected in any way to those ongoing conflicts.The Trump administration is seeking to eliminate the 76-year-old rural homeownership program in the White Houses budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year. Some of his predecessors, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have also sought to cut back the $880 million direct mortgage program, which has bipartisan support in Congress.A USDA spokesperson said the Trump administration is in the process of reviewing the loans to understand the magnitude of the problems it has inherited. The agency noted that in Maine alone, more than 800 properties are considered delinquent and nearly 400 homes are being tracked for foreclosure. The USDA did not respond to additional questions.Hopelessly in DebtIn 2013, months after the Caribou woman had abandoned her property, she received a letter at her new residence from the USDA informing her that she had to pay the government $22,000 in missed mortgage payments and late fees or shed lose the Caribou home, said Cox, her lawyer. He said she did not pay because she did not want the house anymore. The USDA sent her nearly a dozen letters between 2014 and 2015 claiming foreclosure was imminent, but a decade passed before she was served with foreclosure papers this spring. A sign on the front door says the property is being maintained by a New York City company, which did not return calls seeking comment. A green tarp stretches across missing sections of the roof. Inside, piles of garbage and feces litter the floor. The dilapidated state of the house a woman bought with a USDA mortgage in Caribou, Maine (Courtesy of Tom Cox) A real estate broker who inspected the home in June with Cox estimated the value of the house to be around $40,000, a steep depreciation from the 2006 purchase price of $144,000. During the time since she abandoned the property, what the woman owes USDA continued to balloon, Cox said. His client now owes the government $393,463, according to court documents nearly 10 times what the home is worth. Nearly 60% of that comprises interest that accumulated after she defaulted, as well as $91,304 in preservation and inspection fees. If the USDA had dealt with this back in 2012, they might have gotten most or all of their money back by selling the home before it deteriorated, Cox said. Theyre not going to collect it now. Its a huge waste of government resources and money to let this happen.Other USDA borrowers simply continue living in their homes long after they default on their loans, accumulating more debt with each passing year that the government does not move to collect. Its a huge waste of government resources and money to let this happen. Attorney Tom Cox Christine Ogden had stopped paying the $465-a-month mortgage for her blue saltbox home in the coastal Maine town of Searsport in 2013, according to court documents. She said she told the USDA at the time to take her home after the agency threatened her with foreclosure if she did not pay. But it took the government until 2019 to attempt to foreclose upon her property. The case was dismissed in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic. Five years later, in April, she received a summons to appear in federal court to start foreclosure proceedings again.Ogden now owes $203,787 on what had been a $66,200 mortgage, according to court documents. Half of her debt comprises interest that accumulated after she defaulted, as well as other fees she would not have had to pay had the USDA addressed the delinquency sooner, an analysis by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica found. Ogden, who has lived rent-free in the house for 12 years, says she is unable to pay the burgeoning debt and does not know what will happen. The foreclosure will hurt her credit, making it harder for her to get another loan or find rental housing, she said. I'm 59, Ogden said. Ill be homeless, basically. Little Government OversightThe owners of another property, in Norridgewock in central Maine, also stopped paying their mortgage and moved out of the house years before the USDA foreclosed on the home this spring, court records show. The owners have not appeared to live at the property since at least 2014, according to property tax records, and defaulted on their loan in 2019 but the government did not file for foreclosure until April. The owners, it turned out, were violating USDA rules by renting out their home. The tenant, who answered the door when a reporter visited in May after the foreclosure was filed in federal court, would not share his name but estimated that he has paid $100,000 in rent to the owners during the 12 years he said he has lived there. USDA guidelines allow borrowers to rent their homes for up to three years, and only under very narrow circumstances.Properties purchased under the 502 direct loan program are supposed to be the borrowers permanent residence and not meant to generate income, according to USDA guidelines. Homeowners can rent out their properties only due to certain life events such as if their families outgrow their current home or if they are moving for a job. But the borrower must still pay the mortgage every month.The USDA says the owners of the Norridgewock home owe the agency $276,191. The homeowners live in Tennessee, according to foreclosure summons and other court records filed this year by the USDA; they did not respond to calls made to phone numbers listed under their names.USDA staff based in Maine who once were in close touch with borrowers when they ran into financial trouble now have little to no oversight of Section 502 loans. Thats because a major restructuring in the 1990s eliminated many of the county offices that had managed all aspects of the loans and centralized the servicing of these loans to an office in St. Louis, said Leslie Strauss, a senior policy analyst for the Housing Assistance Council, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on affordable rural housing.These changes came on the heels of an internal study in 1991 concluding that centralizing the administration of these loans would result in better service and a lower delinquency rate of about 10%, according to a 1993 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. More than three decades later, the delinquency rate for Section 502 direct loans has nearly doubled to 19%. Hampson, Maines former USDA rural development official who now leads economic development for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, said she had been pushing the agency to allow local staff to regain oversight of borrowers financial situations so that we can go out and monitor whats going on, so that we arent caught by surprise.But her effort did not gain traction, Hampson said. As the foreclosures accumulated in Maine in recent months, the USDA website published an advisory directing struggling Maine borrowers to call the St. Louis office for help. But fewer staff members are available to respond after Trumps recent cuts to the federal workforce.As of early May, 1,536 employees nearly a third of the rural development office had taken the buyout, according to USDA documents outlining the results of the Trump administrations two financial incentive offers to quit. Of those, 197 worked in the St. Louis office.We cant afford failure, Hampson said of the long-delayed foreclosures leading to insurmountable debt. The onus is on the government to make sure that were providing the right kind of safety nets to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Michael Shepherd, Sasha Ray and Paula Brewer of BDN contributed reporting. Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research.0 Comments 0 Shares 14 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGThe Most Interesting Email I Ever Received: Remembering the Incredible Life of DIY Geneticist Jill Vilesby David Epstein ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published.This article was adapted from David Epsteins Substack newsletter, Range Widely, and references the story The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene that he wrote for ProPublica in 2016. That story also became an episode of This American Life. Jill Dopf Viles self-taught genetic detective, the central figure in the most interesting story Ive ever reported and my friend passed away last month in Gowrie, Iowa, at 50.Im heartbroken that Jill did not live to see the publication of her book Manufacturing My Miracle: One Womans Quest to Create Her Personalized Gene Therapy which came out last week. I know how much she treasured the fact that she would soon be able to call herself author.Here is a paragraph from her book:Every gain Id made in learning more about my genetic disease had involved some type of deception to do my familys underground blood draw in 1996 required that phlebotomy supplies be lifted from a hospital and a nurse secretly visit our home; gaining journalist David Epsteins interest began with a wild exaggeration in my email subject line: Woman with muscular dystrophy, Olympic Medalistsame mutation; and Id adopted the lexicon of a research scientist to gain a client rate for Priscillas genetic testing (the cost for clients was half what was charged to individual patients).If I was deceived, Im grateful for it. In that paragraph, Jill is describing just a bit of the effort that went into figuring out that she had a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, which causes muscle wasting, and also an even rarer form of partial lipodystrophy, which causes fat to vanish from certain parts of the body. Jill had been told for years that she didnt have either of these, never mind both. After my first book, The Sports Gene, came out in 2013, I was on Good Morning America talking about genetics, and Jill happened to be within earshot of her TV. I thought, oh, this is divine providence, Jill later told me. So she sent me that email with the provocative subject line. She followed up by sending me a batch of family photos and a bound packet outlining her theory: that she and Canadian sprinter Priscilla Lopes-Schliep bronze medalist in the 100-meter hurdles at the 2008 Olympics shared a genetic mutation.On the face of it, this seemed ridiculous. One could hardly find a picture of two more different women. Take a look at this page from the packet Jill sent me: The packet outlined in granular detail why Jill thought, just from looking at pictures of Priscilla, that the two women shared a genetic mutation that caused the same fat wasting, but because Priscilla didnt also have muscle wasting quite the contrary her body had found some way to go around muscular dystrophy.If Jill was right, she thought, perhaps scientists could study both of them and figure out how to help people with muscles like Jills develop muscles a little closer to Priscillas end of the human physique spectrum. Jill was sharing all this with me because she wasnt sure how best to contact Priscilla and hoped I would facilitate an introduction.Jills hypothesis struck me as unlikely, to say the least. But her presentation in the packet was so interesting, and her knowledge of the underlying genetics and physiology so thorough, that I felt her idea deserved a hearing. I reached out to Priscilla; she agreed to meet Jill, and after comparing body parts in a hotel lobby, Jill convinced her to get a genetic test. Long story short, Jill turned out to be right. She and Priscilla had a mutation in the same gene, albeit at neighboring locations.The discovery led Priscilla to get urgent care for a serious health condition that had previously been overlooked because of her obvious fitness. Jill and I shared this story in an episode of This American Life in 2016 which was rerun last week in her honor.After that story ran, Jills genome became the subject of research, exactly as shed hoped. Today, in a lab in Iowa, there are fruit flies known as Jill flies, because they have been engineered to carry her same mutation. As expected, Jill flies have severely limited mobility. But just recently, a scientist conducted a genetic experiment in which she increased the production of a particular protein in the Jill flies. Suddenly, they began to move like normal fruit flies.The breadth of life contained in Jills new book is incredible.She was a child the first time she heard a doctor discussing her own death with her mother. The indignities of adolescence and young adulthood that she endured were legion, starting with spontaneous falls in school, followed by kids looping their fingers around her arms and legs and asking if her mother fed her.Jills condition accelerated with puberty, so the bodily changes that are confusing for any teenager were absolutely harrowing for her. Almost overnight she lost the ability to do things she loved, like skate or ride a bike.At one point in her early teen years, a doctor ordered pictures of Jills posture, which forced her into a strange and humiliating photo session that hadnt been properly explained beforehand:I had seen these photos before a stark, frozen moment of a patients greatest vulnerability, the body positioned in a way nature and the photographer dictate, all except for the eyes. The eyes cannot be manipulated or coaxed. It is often said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Maybe that is why black bars are printed over the eyes of the patient. Perhaps this is done to protect the patients anonymity, but I wonder if it isnt really done to shield the peering eyes of the medical community from the humanity before them.In college, when Jill rushed a sorority, she couldnt keep up with fellow pledges as they walked across campus. When a man who had been following the group saw Jill lag behind, he crept up and exposed himself to her. I had been targeted because I was weak, Jill writes. I had assumed the plight of the injured gazelle, the one separated from the herd with a lame leg. Any normal eighteen-year-old would bolt for safety, but I remained glued in place, the shame of my predicament filling every cell of my being. I was trapped alongside a simple street curb, something I couldnt climb, no matter my desperate need to get away.But even more powerful in Manufacturing My Miracle than the candid humiliations are the scenes of family, love and hope.Jills wry humor comes through when she writes about dating. At one point she used a Match.com profile to come up with the estimate that at least 1% of men are open to dating a woman with a disability. In typical Jill fashion, rather than lamenting the other 99%, she was thrilled that this meant that if she got her profile in front of enough men, she could have a new date every week of the year.Jill eventually met Jeremy, the man she would marry. She writes about aspects of their relationship with such tenderness that I frequently paused after a passage just to sit and think about her words for a few moments. I recalled our first weeks of dating when Jeremy made a heartfelt observation, Jill writes. Previously, as a single man, he often went an entire weekend without saying even one word aloud. It was such a contrast to the way I lived my life. I was known to strike up a conversation with the caller of a misdialed number, banter with strangers in a bookstore, or chat freely with the checkout clerk at the grocery store.In their second month of dating, Jill and Jeremy attended the gigantic Iowa State Fair. Heres how Jill remembered it:I lived ten years in a single night, clutching carnival booty tightly to my chest as Jeremy walked up and down the rows of carnival games, taking entirely too long to decide which to go for. Whats taking you so long? I asked.Im trying to find one you can play, he said.My eyes filled with tears.After our This American Life segment came out in 2016, Jill became a bit of a celebrity among people struggling to figure out their own mysterious illnesses.She developed into a sort of clearinghouse for people with undiagnosed muscle conditions seeking help. She kept in constant touch with a man in rural Pakistan who sent her a video of his struggle to rise from his knees following daily prayers at a local mosque. She navigated immense cultural and logistical barriers to help him get a genetic test. She was a worldwide person, her mother, Mary, told me recently, just out of her little office in Gowrie, Iowa.Jill became so fluent in genetics that she was perceived as a scientist when she called labs, lab supply companies or pharmaceutical companies. Toward the end of her life, that fluency allowed her to obtain an experimental gene therapy that isnt actually available for nonresearch purposes. She knew the drug was both promising and potentially deadly, and with a loving husband and college student son in mind, she was hesitant. I no longer had a fear of death, Jill writes in her book, but this did not imply that I wanted to die. My wish was the opposite, but without a life partner and a child, I wouldnt need to consider anyones viewpoint but my own.As always, she did consider others, and at the time of her death she had not gone through with this final experiment.In April, Jill and Jeremy drove to Chicago to attend a wedding. Mary shared photos with me, and its the same Jill I began talking to in 2013: dressed impeccably, every strand of blond hair in its right place. She took great care and pride in her appearance. Looking at the pictures, it is extremely hard to imagine that Jill was less than two months away from dying.Her brother Aaron, afflicted with the same condition, had passed away in 2019. Four of the five siblings inherited the mutation, though the disease severity differed likely moderated by other parts of the genome. In Manufacturing My Miracle, Jill writes of the difficult decision regarding whether or not to have a child, given the 50-50 chance of passing down her mutation. Her son, Martin, did not inherit the mutation.Shortly before the This American Life episode ran, Jill got nervous and wondered if we should hit pause on it. She worried that listeners would only focus on her decision to have a child and criticize her for being selfish. We talked for hours about the potential outcomes. Jill and I had been in touch for three years by that time, and we were going to stick together as friends no matter what criticism came. She decided we should forge ahead. Fortunately, the response was the most overwhelmingly positive of any story Ive ever been involved with.Jill and I met up in Chicago after that so I could watch her give an invited lecture. We kept in touch over the years. Sometimes we went months without talking before a burst of calls back and forth.By this spring, it had been an unusually long while since we last talked. We emailed, but no phone calls. Mary told me that Jill had recently bought a new dress that she planned to wear when giving talks about her book. At a visitation before the funeral, shell be wearing her book dress.Mary added that, a few weeks before Jill passed, she caught pneumonia and never recovered. Mary told me her voice was weak. I kept telling her to call you, Mary said. But she kept saying: I want my voice to be stronger. I want my voice to be stronger before I call David.Im crestfallen that I didnt hear from her again, but I think her voice was plenty strong.0 Comments 0 Shares 14 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGHe Came to the U.S. to Support His Sick Child. He Was Detained. Then He Disappeared.by Melissa Sanchez, ProPublica; Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica; Ronna Rsquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrin Gonzlez, Cazadores de Fake News Leer en espaol. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News. On Feb. 15, Jos Manuel Ramos Bastidas called his wife from inside a Texas immigration detention facility.He asked her to record a message so there would be some lasting evidence of his story.They detained me simply because of my tattoos. I am not a criminal.The Trump administration had sent dozens of Venezuelan immigrants to Guantanamo. He was afraid the same would happen to him.Just in case something happens to me, so you can be aware.Uncertain about his fate, Ramos wanted to make sure there was a record of what happened to him.A month later, he was gone.Ramos never set foot in the U.S. at least not as a free man. He left Venezuela in January 2024, hoping to earn enough money to pay for his newborn sons medical needs. Born with a respiratory condition, the familys milagrito, or little miracle, had severe asthma and repeatedly needed to be hospitalized. The cost of treatment had become impossible to manage on the meager wages Ramos made washing cars in Venezuelas collapsed economy, so he trekked thousands of miles through a half dozen countries to reach the U.S. border. When Ramos arrived, he didnt sneak into the country. He followed the rules established by the Biden administration for immigrants seeking asylum. He signed up for an appointment through a government app and, when he was granted one, turned himself in to request protection. An immigration official and a judge determined he didnt qualify, and Ramos didnt fight the decision.The government kept him in detention until he could be deported back to Venezuela. In the months that followed, Donald Trump was elected president for a second term and began his mass deportation campaign. Among his first actions was to fly groups of Venezuelan immigrants whom he had labeled dangerous gang members to a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ramos, 30, panicked and called his wife to say he was worried that the same was going to happen to him. On a video call his wife recorded, he held up a document he said was proof that immigration authorities had agreed to deport him to Venezuela. But he worried that they would not honor that promise. I have a family, he said, staring directly into the camera. I am simply a hard-working Venezuelan. I havent committed any crimes. I dont have a criminal record in my country nor anywhere else.A month later, a more upbeat Ramos called again. He seemed confident that U.S. officials would send him home. Ramos family started preparing for his return. They planned to bake him a cake, cook his favorite chicken dish and go to church together to thank God for bringing him home safely.They never heard from him again. First image: Bastidas rests with Ramos son and her grandson, Jared, at their home in Venezuela. Second image: Rodrguez holds her phone, showing a photo of her husband. (Adriana Loureiro Fernndez for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) On March 15, a day after that call, Ramos and more than 230 other Venezuelan men were sent to the CECOT maximum-security prison in El Salvador, one of the most notorious in the Western Hemisphere. Without publicly providing evidence, the administration accused each of them of being members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang it designated a terrorist organization.In the months since the mass deportation one of the most consequential in recent history the Trump administration has released almost no details about the backgrounds of the people it deported, calling them monsters, sick criminals and the worst of the worst. Several news organizations have reported that most of the men did not have criminal records. ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) went further, finding that the governments own records showed that it knew the vast majority of the men had not been convicted of violent crimes in the U.S. We also searched records in South America and found that only a few had committed violent crimes abroad.Now, a case-by-case examination of each of the deportees, along with interviews with their lawyers and family members, reveals another jarring reality: Most of the men were not hiding from federal authorities but were instead moving through the nations immigration system. They were either in the middle of their cases, which normally should have protected them from deportation, or they had already been ordered deported and should have first been given the option to be sent back to a country they chose.Like Ramos, more than 50 of the men had used the government app called CBP One to make an appointment with border officials to try to enter the country. Others had crossed illegally and then surrendered to border agents, often the first step in seeking asylum in immigration court. According to our analysis, almost half of the men were deported even though their cases hadnt been decided yet. More than 60 of them had pending asylum claims, including several who were only days away from a hearing where a judge could have ruled on whether they would be allowed to stay. Judges or federal officials had issued deportation orders for about 100 of the men, and a handful had even agreed to pay their own way home. Others, like Ramos, had spent their entire time in the U.S. in detention. They had no opportunity to commit crimes in the U.S.Meanwhile, many of those who were allowed into the country had been appearing at their court hearings and immigration check-ins. At least nine had been granted temporary protected status, which gives people from countries affected by disasters or other extraordinary conditions permission to live and work in the U.S. By and large, these were men who had been playing by the rules of the countrys immigration system.Then, the Trump administration changed the rules. Rodrguez reviews the video she recorded of her husband before he was sent to CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. (Alejandro Bonilla Surez for ProPublica) A day before the administration deported the men to El Salvador, Trump invoked an obscure 18th-century law called the Alien Enemies Act and declared that Tren de Aragua was invading the country. Administration officials argued that the declaration authorized them to take extraordinary measures to remove anyone it had determined was a member of the gang and to make sure they would not threaten the U.S. again.Following the March 15 deportations, the Trump administration moved to shut down their pending immigration cases. Since then, more than 95 cases have been dismissed, terminated or otherwise closed by judges, according to our analysis. They disappear from the dockets, some marked as dismissed just hours before a scheduled hearing. Michelle Bran, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official in the Biden administration, said it was very un-American to deport people who followed the immigration rules at the time. You cant retroactively say that those people were acting illegally and now punish them for that, she added. Lawyers for the Venezuelan men have filed several lawsuits against the administration, calling the summary removals from the country a gross violation of their clients rights. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled in June that the move deprived the men of their constitutional rights and called their plight Kafkaesque. He wrote that the men never had any opportunity to challenge the Governments say-so, and that they languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations. The government has appealed the ruling.Meanwhile, Ramos mother, Crislida del Carmen Bastidas de Ramos, waits anxiously for any news about her oldest child. What is my son thinking? Is my son eating well? Is my son sleeping? Is he cold?Is he alive? Rodrguez plays with her son at their home in Venezuela. (Adriana Loureiro Fernndez for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Although the Trump administration routinely describes the men as criminals and terrorists, it has not provided evidence to support the claim. Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at DHS, defended sending them to the Salvadoran prison. They may not have criminal records in the U.S., beyond breaking our laws to enter the country illegally, she said in a statement, but many of these illegal aliens are far from innocent.For example, she said one of the TPS holders sent to El Salvador admitted he had previously been convicted of murder. We obtained Venezuelan court records confirming that the man had been convicted of murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. McLaughlin said his case proved that immigrants had been granted status in the U.S. under Biden without being thoroughly vetted. Three former DHS officials from the Biden administration said the vetting process has remained standard across administrations, including during the first Trump term, and that many governments do not share criminal background histories with U.S. officials.Trump has moved to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of people.Ramos, McLaughlin said, was a terrorist who was flagged as a Tren de Aragua member in a law enforcement database at his CBP One appointment. His family denies he has anything to do with the gang. His lawyers said in court records that U.S. authorities wrongly identified him as a gang member based on his tattoos and an unsubstantiated report from Panamanian officials. A spokesperson for the Panamanian security ministry said he could not locate any documents about Ramos.At least 163 men who were deported had tattoos, we found. Law enforcement officials in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership. Albert Jess Rodrguez Parra had applied for asylum and worked at Chicagos Wrigley Field before he was detained in November. He was deported to El Salvador in March, where he remains imprisoned. (Courtesy of the Cook County public defenders office in Chicago) Days before Albert Jess Rodrguez Parra was whisked away, he appeared in immigration court and tried to convince a judge that his tattoos did not mean he was part of the gang.He had come to the U.S. with a brother in 2023, applied for asylum and settled in Chicago. He told his mother that it was difficult to find work, but that hed gotten an electric razor, learned to cut hair and offered trims on the street. In January 2024, he was arrested at a Walmart in the Chicago suburbs for shoplifting about $1,000 worth of food, laundry detergent, shampoo and other items. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, served a two-day jail sentence and tried to move on. Rodrguez Parra, 28, got a job working in concessions at Wrigley Field, moved in with his girlfriend and sent money home to his mother to buy a refrigerator and a stove. Then, in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents picked him up at his apartment. McLaughlin said he was in the country illegally and was a Tren de Aragua member. Rodrguez Parra continued his asylum case from immigration detention in Indiana. He told his family he believed he would be released soon. But in early March, he was transferred to a jail in Missouri, then to one in Central Texas, then another in Laredo, in South Texas, each move bringing him closer to the border. Uncertainty began creeping into his calls home.Despite the transfers, Rodrguez Parras attorney, Cruz Rodriguez, who works for a small immigration unit at the Cook County public defenders office in Chicago, said he was confident in the merits of the asylum case. He felt optimistic when he logged into his clients virtual bond hearing before Judge Eva Saltzman on March 10. At the hearing, a government attorney asked Rodrguez Parra about a TikTok video hed made of himself dancing to a popular audio clip of someone shouting, Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua, which means, The Tren de Aragua is going to get you. Close to 60,000 users on TikTok have shared the clip. Rodrguez Parra scoffed at the notion that a real gang member would make such a video. It would be like they were outing themselves, he said in Spanish. The audio clip has been used by Venezuelans to ridicule the widespread suggestion that everyone from the country is a gangster.The government attorney also asked Rodrguez Parra about the tattoos that covered his neck, arms and chest a rose, a wolf, carnival masks and an angel holding a gun. In my country, its very normal to have tattoos, he responded. Each one represents a story about my life.He was also questioned about a suspected Tren de Aragua gang member who had crossed the border at the same time as him. Rodrguez Parra said he did not know the man.At the end of the hearing, he pleaded with the judge to free him on bond. Im a good person, he told her. If I was in a gang, I wouldnt have applied for asylum. I came fleeing my country.Saltzman denied Rodrguez Parras request, citing his shoplifting conviction. But she offered him a sliver of hope, reminding him that his final hearing was just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, hed be released and could continue his life in the U.S. Youre not facing a particularly lengthy detention without a bond, she told him.Five days later, he was gone. At what was supposed to be his final asylum hearing on March 20, Rodrguez Parras lawyer sounded despondent. He had barely slept. He didnt know where the authorities had taken his client, but hed seen a video posted online of shackled men being frog-marched into CECOT. The attorney had visited El Salvador and was aware of that countrys reputation for mistreating prisoners. He feared his client would face a similar fate.He felt powerless. At the hearing, he turned to the government lawyer on the call. For his familys sake, he told her, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?The governments lawyer had little to say.Im operating under the same information as you, she responded. I have no further information to provide. Design and development by Anna Donlan and Allen Tan of ProPublica. Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed data reporting. Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research. Adriana Nnez and Carlos Centeno contributed reporting.0 Comments 0 Shares 15 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGFormer NYPD Commissioner Accuses Mayor Adams of Running Criminal Enterprise and Cites ProPublica Investigationby Eric Umansky ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. What Happened: Former New York Police Department Commissioner Thomas Donlon sued Mayor Eric Adams and other top police officials on Wednesday, accusing Adams of running the force as a criminal enterprise that the mayor used to consolidate power, obstruct justice and punish dissent.In the 251-page complaint, Donlon said the mayor used the departments Community Response Team for political gain. CRT became the enforcement arm of Defendant Adams political strategy, the complaint says, a tool for projecting tough on crime optics at the expense of civil rights and constitutional law.It also calls the CRT a rogue unit that answered only to City Hall.The suit drew extensively from a recent ProPublica investigation, which detailed how the mayor championed the CRT despite concerns within the Police Department about the unit. Adams, former officials said, was so close to the unit he had access to a little-known livestream of the CRTs body-worn camera footage, a detail that Donlon cited in his legal complaint.What They Said: The Community Response Team speaks to the culture under Adams of willfully violating the constitutional rights of civilians and officers, John Scola, Donlons lawyer, told ProPublica. That culture is: Well do whatever we want.Background: In 2023, a senior NYPD official wrote a scathing internal audit after finding that CRT officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to document the incidents. Weeks later, Adams took to Instagram to boost the unit. Turning out with the team, he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing a wide smile and khaki pants, CRTs official uniform.The official who wrote that audit was pushed out months later. He and other top former commanders recently sued Adams alleging favoritism and misconduct, charges the mayor denies.Why It Matters: Donlon, a former FBI agent who held the job of police commissioner for only two months, from September to November 2024, lobbed his accusations against Adams as the mayor has been waging an uphill battle to keep his job. Adams was indicted last fall on federal charges of bribery, fraud and illegally taking campaign contributions from foreigners. He pleaded not guilty. He avoided trial by making a deal with President Donald Trump, who dropped the prosecution in exchange for Adams working with the administration on immigration enforcement. Still, he remains unpopular in the city and is running for reelection as an independent against a popular Democrat, Zohran Mamdani.Response: In a statement, the mayors office dismissed Donlons claims.These are baseless accusations from a disgruntled former employee who when given the opportunity to lead the greatest police department in the world proved himself to be ineffective, the statement said. This suit is nothing more than an attempt to seek compensation at the taxpayers expense after Mr. Donlon was rightfully removed from the role of interim police commissioner.Previously, Adam has defended the CRT. Asked about the unit at a press conference this spring, the mayor said, CRT is here. He continued, I support all my units.The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment about the suit.0 Comments 0 Shares 15 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGRFK Jr. Wants to Revolutionize a Program That Supports Childhood Immunizations. The Results Could Be Catastrophic.by Patricia Callahan ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Five months after taking over the federal agency responsible for the health of all Americans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to overhaul an obscure but vital program that underpins the nations childhood immunization system.Depending on what he does, the results could be catastrophic.In his crosshairs is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a system designed to provide fair and quick payouts for people who suffer rare but serious side effects from shots without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent. Congress created the program in the 1980s when lawsuits drove vaccine makers from the market. A special tax on immunizations funds the awards, and manufacturers benefit from legal protections that make it harder to win big-money verdicts against them in civil courts.Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccination group and previously accused the pharmaceutical industry of inflicting unnecessary and risky vaccines on children for profits, has long argued that the program removes any incentive for the industry to make safe products. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy condemned what he called corruption in the program and said he had assigned a team to overhaul it and expand who could seek compensation. He didnt detail his plans but did repeat the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and suggested, without citing any evidence, that shots could also be responsible for a litany of chronic ailments, from diabetes to narcolepsy.There are a number of ways he could blow up the program and prompt vaccine makers to stop selling shots in the U.S., like they did in the 1980s. The trust fund that pays awards, for instance, could run out of money if the government made it easy for Kennedys laundry list of common health problems to qualify for payments from the fund.Or he could pick away at the program one shot at a time. Right now, immunizations routinely recommended for children or pregnant women are covered by the program. Kennedy has the power to drop vaccines from the list, a move that would open up their manufacturers to the kinds of lawsuits that made them flee years ago.Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, who served as New Jerseys state epidemiologist and then spent a dozen years as a vaccine executive at Merck, is among those worried.If his unstated goal is to basically destroy the vaccine industry, that could do it, said Bresnitz, who retired from Merck and has consulted for vaccine manufacturers. I still believe, having worked in the industry, that they care about protecting American health, but they are also for-profit companies with shareholders, and anything that detracts from the bottom line that can be avoided, they will avoid.A spokesperson for PhRMA, a U.S. trade group for pharmaceutical companies, told ProPublica in a written statement that upending the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program would threaten continued patient access to FDA approved vaccines.The spokesperson, Andrew Powaleny, said the program has compensated thousands of claims while helping ensure the continued availability of a safe and effective vaccine supply. It remains a vital safeguard for public health and importantly doesnt shield manufacturers from liability.Since its inception, the compensation fund has paid about $4.8 billion in awards for harm from serious side effects, such as life-threatening allergic reactions and Guillain-Barr syndrome, an autoimmune condition that can cause paralysis. The federal agency that oversees the program found that for every 1 million doses of vaccine distributed between 2006 and 2023, about one person was compensated for an injury.Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has turned the staid world of immunizations on its ear. He reneged on the U.S. governments pledge to fund vaccinations for the worlds poorest kids. He fired every member of the federal advisory group that recommends which shots Americans get, and his new slate vowed to scrutinize the U.S. childhood immunization schedule. Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease eliminated here in 2000, roared back and hit a grim record more cases than the U.S. has seen in 33 years, including three deaths. When a U.S. senator asked Kennedy if he recommended measles shots, Kennedy answered, Senator, if I advised you to swim in a lake that I knew there to be alligators in, wouldnt you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?Fed up, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical societies sued Kennedy last week, accusing him of dismantling the longstanding, Congressionally-authorized, science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans. (The federal government has yet to respond to the suit.)Just about all drugs have side effects. Whats unusual about vaccines is that theyre given to healthy people even newborns on their first day of life. And many shots protect not just the individuals receiving them but also the broader community by making it harder for deadly scourges to spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that routine childhood immunizations have prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations among the generation of Americans born between 1994 and 2023.To most people, the nations vaccine system feels like a solid, reliable fact of life, doling out shots to children like clockwork. But in reality it is surprisingly fragile.There are only a handful of companies that make nearly all of the shots children receive. Only one manufacturer makes chickenpox vaccines. And just two or three make the shots that protect against more than a dozen diseases, including polio and measles. If any were to drop out, the country could find itself in the same crisis that led President Ronald Reagan to sign the law creating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.Back then, pharmaceutical companies faced hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the vaccine protecting kids from whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus caused unrelenting seizures that led to severe disabilities. (Todays version of this shot is different.) One vaccine maker after another left the U.S. market.At one point, pediatricians could only buy whooping cough vaccines from a single company. Shortages were so bad that the CDC recommended doctors stop giving booster shots to preserve supplies for the most vulnerable babies.While Congress debated what to do, public health clinics cost per dose jumped 5,000% in five years.We were really concerned that we would lose all vaccines, and we would get major resurgences of vaccine-preventable diseases, recalled Dr. Walter Orenstein, a vaccine expert who worked in the CDCs immunization division at the time.A Forbes headline captured the anxiety of parents, pediatricians and public health workers: Scared Shotless. So a bipartisan group in Congress hammered out the no-fault system.Today, the program covers vaccines routinely recommended for children or pregnant women once Congress approves the special tax that funds awards. (COVID-19 shots are part of a separate, often-maligned system for handling claims of harm, though Kennedy has said hes looking at ways to add them to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.)Under program rules, people who say they are harmed by covered vaccines cant head straight to civil court to sue manufacturers. First, they have to go through the no-fault system. The law established a table of injuries and the time frame for when those conditions must have appeared in order to be considered for quicker payouts. A tax on those vaccines now 75 cents for every disease that a shot protects against flows into a trust fund that pays those approved for awards. Win or lose, the program, for the most part, pays attorney fees and forbids lawyers from taking a cut of the money paid to the injured.The law set up a dedicated vaccine court where government officials known as special masters, who operate like judges, rule on cases without juries. People can ask for compensation for health problems not listed on the injury table, and they dont have to prove that the vaccine maker was negligent or failed to warn them about the medical condition they wound up with. At the same time, they cant claim punitive damages, which drive up payouts in civil courts, and pain and suffering payments are capped at $250,000.Plaintiffs who arent satisfied with the outcome or whose cases drag on too long can exit the program and file their cases in traditional civil courts. There they can pursue punitive damages, contingency-fee agreements with lawyers and the usual evidence gathering that plaintiffs use to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing.But a Supreme Court ruling, interpreting the law that created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, limited the kinds of claims that can prevail in civil court. So while the program isnt a full liability shield for vaccine makers, its very existence significantly narrows the cases trial lawyers can file.Kennedy has been involved in such civil litigation. In his federal disclosures, he revealed that he referred plaintiffs to a law firm filing cases against Merck over its HPV shot in exchange for a 10% cut of the fees if they win. After a heated exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation proceedings, Kennedy said his share of any money from those cases would instead go to one of his adult sons, who he later said is a lawyer in California. His son Conor works as an attorney at the Los Angeles law firm benefiting from his referrals. When ProPublica asked about this arrangement, Conor Kennedy wrote, I dont work on those cases and Im not receiving any money from them.In March, a North Carolina federal judge overseeing hundreds of cases that alleged Merck failed to warn patients about serious side effects from its HPV vaccine ruled in favor of Merck; an appeal is pending.The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program succeeded in stabilizing the business of childhood vaccines, with many more shots developed and approved in the decades since it was established. But even ardent supporters acknowledge there are problems. The programs staff levels havent kept up with the caseload. The law capped the number of special masters at eight, and congressional bills to increase that have failed. An influx of adult claims swamped the system after adverse reactions to flu shots became eligible for compensation in 2005 and serious shoulder problems were added to the injury table in 2017.The quick and smooth system of payouts originally envisioned has evolved into a more adversarial one with lawyers for the Department of Justice duking it out with plaintiffs attorneys, which Kennedy says runs counter to the programs intent. Many cases drag on for years.In his recent interview with Carlson, he described the lawyers of the Department of Justice, the leaders of it working on the cases as corrupt. They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice, and were going to change all that, he said. And Ive brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that.The system is supposed to be generous and fast and gives a tie to the runner, he told Carlson. In other words, if theres doubts about, you know, whether somebodys injury came from a vaccine or not, youre going to assume they got it and compensate them.Kennedy didnt identify who is on the team reviewing the program. At one point in the interview, he said, We just brought a guy in this week whos going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.The HHS employee directory now lists Andrew Downing as a counselor working in Kennedys office. Downing for many years has filed claims with the program and suits in civil courts on behalf of clients alleging harm from shots. Last month, HHS awarded a contract for Vaccine Injury Compensation Program expertise to Downings firm, as NOTUS has reported.Downing did not respond to a voicemail left at his law office. HHS didnt reply to a request to make him and Kennedy available for an interview and declined to answer detailed questions about its plans for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In the past, an HHS spokesperson has said that Kennedy is not anti-vaccine he is pro-safety.While its not clear what changes Downing and Kennedy have in mind, Kennedys interview with Carlson offered some insights. Kennedy said he was working to expand the programs three-year statute of limitations so that more people can be compensated. Downing has complained that patients who have certain autoimmune disorders dont realize their ailments were caused by a vaccine until its too late to file. Congress would have to change the law to allow this, experts said.A key issue is whether Kennedy will try to add new ailments to the list of injuries that qualify for quicker awards.In the Carlson interview, Kennedy dismissed the many studies and scientific consensus that shots dont cause autism as nothing more than statistical trickery. Were going to do real science, Kennedy said.The vaccine court spent years in the 2000s trying cases that alleged autism was caused by the vaccine ingredient thimerosal and the shot that protects people from measles, mumps and rubella. Facing more than 5,000 claims, the court asked a committee of attorneys representing children with autism to pick test cases that represented themes common in the broader group. In the cases that went to trial, the special masters considered more than 900 medical articles and heard testimony from dozens of experts. In each of those cases, the special masters found that the shots didnt cause autism.In at least two subsequent cases, children with autism were granted compensation because they met the criteria listed in the programs injury table, according to a vaccine court decision. That table, for instance, lists certain forms of encephalopathy a type of brain dysfunction as a rare side effect of shots that protect people from whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella. In a 2016 vaccine court ruling, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. explained, The compensation of these two cases, thus does not afford any support to the notion that vaccinations can contribute to the causation of autism.Hastings noted that when Congress set up the injury table, the lawmakers acknowledged that people would get compensated for some injuries that were not, in fact, truly vaccine-caused.Many disabling neurological disorders in children become apparent around the time kids get their shots. Figuring out whether the timing was coincidental or an indication that the vaccines caused the problem has been a huge challenge.Devastating seizures in young children were the impetus for the compensation program. But in the mid-1990s, after a yearslong review of the evidence, HHS removed seizure disorder from the injury table and narrowed the type of encephalopathy that would automatically qualify for compensation. Scientists subsequently have discovered genetic mutations that cause some of the most severe forms of epilepsy.Whats different now, though, is that Kennedy, as HHS secretary, has the power to add autism or other disorders to that injury table. Experts say hed have to go through the federal governments cumbersome rulemaking process to do so. He could also lean on federal employees to green-light more claims.In addition, Kennedy has made it clear hes thinking about illnesses beyond autism. We have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and theres no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits, he told Carlson. Kennedy mentioned diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, seizure disorders, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, peanut allergies and eczema.President Donald Trumps budget estimated that the value of the investments in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program trust fund could reach $4.8 billion this year. While thats a lot of money, a life-care plan for a child with severe autism can cost tens of millions of dollars, and the CDC reported in April that 1 in 31 children is diagnosed with autism by their 8th birthday. The other illnesses Kennedy mentioned also affect a wide swath of the U.S. population.Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed studies to justify adding autism and other common medical problems to the injury table, no matter how much they conflict with robust scientific research.You can do that, and you will bankrupt the program, he said. These are ways to end vaccine manufacturing in this country.If the trust fund were to run out of money, Congress would have to act, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at University of California Law San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress could increase the excise tax on vaccines, she said, or pass a law limiting whats on the injury table. Or Congress could abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would find themselves back in the situation they faced in the 1980s.Thats not unrealistic, Reiss said.Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, last year proposed the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which would have allowed people to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil court. His press release for the bill written in September, before Kennedys ascension to HHS secretary quoted Kennedy saying, If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.The legislation never came up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman said he expects to introduce it again in the very near future.Rene Gentry, director of the George Washington University Law Schools Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, thinks its unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. But Gentry, who represents people filing claims for injuries, said its hard to predict what Congress, faced with a doomsday scenario, would do.Normally Democrats are friends of plaintiffs lawyers, she said. But talking about vaccines on the Hill is like walking on a razor blade thats on fire.0 Comments 0 Shares 21 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGFDA Inspectors Again Find Dangerous Breakdowns at an Indian Factory Supplying Medications to U.S. Consumersby Megan Rose and Debbie Cenziper ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. U.S. inspectors have uncovered new and dangerous breakdowns in drugmaking at an Indian factory owned by Sun Pharma that produces generic medications for American consumers.The latest problems come 2 1/2 years after the Food and Drug Administration gave the facility a special pass to continue sending certain drugs made there to the United States, even after the factory was officially banned from the U.S. market. The factory failed to investigate the source of bacteria found in test vials or deal with damaged equipment that had caused drugs to be contaminated with metal particles, according to the June inspection report, which ProPublica obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.Workers improperly handled vials and stoppers meant for sterile medications and, in some cases, failed to disinfect manufacturing areas and equipment, according to the report. One FDA inspector saw a worker put on a sterile gown and then brush up against a waste bin and use their hands to push down the overflowing trash. Investigators also saw liquid dripping through ceiling cracks and the growth of what appeared to be fungus and mold in a storage area for samples used for testing.The FDA in late 2022 had banned the factory in the city of Halol from shipping drugs to the United States because of similar manufacturing failures.ProPublica reported last month that a low-profile group inside the agency at the same time exempted some medications from that ban, ostensibly to prevent drug shortages. The FDA has granted similar exemptions for drugs made at more than 20 other foreign factories that violated critical standards in drugmaking and were barred from the U.S. market.The FDA kept the practice largely hidden from the public. The agency did not regularly test drugs coming from the banned factories or proactively monitor reports about potential harm among consumers, ProPublica found. In Suns case, more than a dozen drugs were initially excluded from the Halol import ban. The company is still allowed to send five to the United States, government records show, including vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, and the cancer drug doxorubicin. Also excluded are divalproex delayed release tablets, which treat seizures and other conditions; leuprolide injection, used by people with prostate cancer, endometriosis and other conditions; and temozolomide capsules, for brain cancer.The inspection last month marked the first time the FDA had been back to the factory in the 2.5 years since it imposed the import ban and Sun started sending exempted drugs to the United States. Inspectors found that procedures designed to prevent microbiological contamination of sterile drugs were not established or followed and that equipment wasnt maintained to prevent malfunctions that would alter the safety, identity, strength, quality or purity of the drug product, according to the report. Some of the concerns focused on the exempted drugs still being sent to the United States, according to a person familiar with the situation who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The FDA blacked out the names of the drugs that were potentially compromised on its publicly released inspection report, including a medication made on a manufacturing line in which several batches had to be rejected because they were filled with black particles. A portion of the FDAs June inspection report redacted the names of potentially compromised drugs manufactured by Sun that continue to be released to the U.S. market. (Obtained by ProPublica) Its disappointing to see issues continue to come up at this site given the sites role in potentially manufacturing critical drugs for U.S. consumers, said the person familiar with the inspection findings. Sun did not respond to questions about the latest inspection or its regulatory history with the FDA. In an email, the company said that adherence to quality standards is a top priority for Sun, and we maintain a relentless focus on quality and compliance to ensure the uninterrupted supply of medicines to our customers and patients worldwide. We continue to work proactively with the US FDA and remain committed to achieve full resolution of any FDA regulatory issues at our facilities.The FDA said factories that receive exemptions from import bans are required to conduct extra testing on drugs with third-party oversight before they are sent to the United States, helping to ensure patient safety. Suns Halol plant, however, was cited in 2022 and again last month for failing to thoroughly investigate unexplained quality problems, including impurities, found during drug testing. The FDA did not respond to a request for comment about the latest Sun inspection. U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Michigan, who recently co-sponsored a bill to lower prescription drug costs, said in a statement to ProPublica that the FDA has a responsibility to ensure that drugs coming into the country are safe.We need full transparency about the extent to which exemptions enabled sub-par, unsafe, or ineffective drugs to be distributed to American patients, she said. Medill Investigative Lab student Katherine Dailey contributed reporting.0 Comments 0 Shares 16 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGTexas Officials Say They Didnt See the Flood Coming. Oral Histories Show Residents Have Long Warned of Risks.by Logan Jaffe In late September 2000, longtime Kerr County, Texas, resident W. Thornton Secor Jr. sat down with an oral historian to tell his story. Like many of the residents recorded as part of a decadeslong effort by the Kerr County Historical Commission to document the communitys history, Secor had a lot to say about the areas floods. It always seems to happen at night too, Secor said of local floods he and his family had experienced. Cant see most of it.Secor, who died in 2022, was a third-generation manager of a lodge that still operates along the Guadalupe River. His oral history shares family memories of floods going back to 1932 like the time a flood that year washed away most of the cabins his grandfather built. Now, Secors daughter, Mandi Secor Lipscomb, is left considering the future of the lodge in the aftermath of another devastating flood, on July 4. Secor Lipscomb is the fourth-generation owner and operator of the same lodge, Waltonia on the River.Often when I try to understand a place or process a big news event, I look for records kept by local historical societies and libraries. In archived documents, preserved photographs and oral history collections, one can start to see how a community understands itself. So, as news reports about the floods in the Central Texas Hill Country poured in throughout the week, I went looking for historical context. What local knowledge is held by people who live, or have lived, in whats repeatedly described as Flash Flood Alley? How have people in Kerr Countys past contended with floods of their own time? A trove of more than 70 oral histories recorded by the Kerr County Historical Commission begins to answer those questions. The recordings document memories of floods going back to 1900, but oral histories alone rarely tell a full or accurate story. Still, theres at least one conclusion to draw: Everything has a history. The flood that killed more than 130 people in the Kerr County area this month is not the first time a flash flood on the Guadalupe River took lives of people, including children. The front page of a local newspaper, the Kerrville Daily Times, on July 20, 1987. A flash flood killed 10 campers as they tried to evacuate. (Kerrville Daily Times via Newspapers.com) I keep this history in mind when I hear local and state officials say no one could have seen this coming. Take this exchange between a reporter and Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly:Reporter: Why werent these camps evacuated?Kelly: I cant answer that. I dont know.Reporter: Well youre the judge. I mean youre the top official here in this county. Why cant you answer that? There are kids missing. These camps were in harms way. We knew this flood was coming.Kelly: We didnt know this flood was coming. Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States. And we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be anything like whats happened here. None whatsoever. My colleague Jennifer Berry Hawes wrote last week about the uncanny similarities between the Texas floods and Hurricane Helene, which struck North Carolina last year. In both disasters, weather forecasts predicted the potential devastation, yet people were left in harms way. And as another colleague, ProPublica editor Abrahm Lustgarten, pointed out in a piece about how climate change is making disasters like the flood in Texas more common, there will be tireless and warranted analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss in the weeks to come.Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Lustgarten wrote. Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? As we wait for answers or as journalists dig for them the oral histories show Kerr County residents have warned one another, as well as newcomers and out-of-towners, about flooding for a long time. In his 2000 oral history, Secor said he remembered a time in the spring of 1959 when his father tried to warn one new-to-town woman about building a house so close to the river. He took her out and showed her the watermarks on the trees in front of our house and all, Secor said, likely referring to the watermarks from the flood of 1932, which a local newspaper described at the time as the most disastrous flood that ever swept the upper Guadalupe Valley. The flood killed at least seven people. Oh, she says, that will never happen again, Secor recalled. He said her body was found in a tree a few months later after a flood swept her and the roof she stood on away. Its going to surprise newcomers when we get another flood like the 32 flood, Secor said in 2000.Itll get us again someday. As the Guadalupe River rose over the July 4 weekend, the 16-cabin lodge his daughter owns was sold out and full of guests. All of them escaped the floods, said Secor Lipscomb. They ran, some barefoot in the mud, up a steep hill beyond the propertys retaining wall. They took shelter in a barn. Later, Secor Lipscomb assessed the damage to her family property. What she saw left her in tears: Four cabins had water up to the ceiling. Another two had flooded about 5 feet. But among the wreckage was a crew of nearly 40 volunteers, ready to help with the cleanup.By the time I reached out to her to ask her about her fathers oral history, six cabins and the main camp office were already demolished. The cabin her great-grandfather and grandfather built together more than 100 years ago still stood. But it wont for much longer. It is so damaged with water that it, too, will have to go. This is our family history, our family legacy, Secor Lipscomb told me. Of course were going to rebuild.When they do, their customers will be ready. Many of the families who survived the flood already told her theyll be first in line to book for the next available July 4.0 Comments 0 Shares 23 Views 0 Reviews
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WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORGHe Was Accused of Killing His Wife. Idahos Coroner System Let Clues Vanish After a Previous Wifes Death.by Audrey Dutton ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Clayton Strong pulled up to a tiny hospital in Idaho, walked through the emergency room doors and told a clerk that his wifes body was outside in their SUV.A sheriffs deputy was at the hospital talking to Strong by the time the coroner arrived. This was an unattended death: one where no doctor could attest to a medical reason for the persons demise. That made it the coroners job to determine how and why she died.Strong, a stocky man with white hair and bushy eyebrows, explained that he and his wife lived in an RV park on the edge of the woods nearby. He said his wife had been bedridden for years with Parkinsons disease. That morning shed woken up and asked for peanut butter and water, Strong told the deputy. He found her dead some time later.The coroner looked over Betty Strongs body. It was thin and frail. He didnt see a reason to suspect anything other than a natural death for this 75-year-old woman. The sheriffs deputy seemed to be satisfied with the explanation too. So, the coroner ruled that Betty Strong died around 8:40 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2016, from complications of Parkinsons, and he signed off on allowing cremation of her body.Less than five years later, Clayton Strongs next wife turned up dead, too: shot in the chest in Texas.It turns out that both marriages had a history of domestic unrest, with visits from police who documented threats to each womans safety.Its impossible to know whether a different approach to investigating Betty Strongs death would have uncovered foul play. What is certain is that clues and evidence in the case were lost forever and Idahos system for death investigation let it happen.Family members of both women believe a more thorough investigation of the death in Idaho might have saved the life of Clayton Strongs next wife in Texas.Someone shows up with a dead body and just says they died of natural causes, said Amy Belanger, one of Betty Strongs children. I mean, really, do you just take their word for it?The answer is no, according to five of six national death investigation experts ProPublica consulted. They said the coroner should have obtained medical records to confirm Betty Strong was diagnosed with Parkinsons, examined the trailer where her husband said she died, or both.You can think of all sorts of scenarios criminal, accidental or natural that could have occurred there, said Jennifer Snippen, a death investigator, educator and consultant in Oregon. But my argument is, if you dont go to the scene and you dont look at the medical records, you just dont know.Most of the county coroners in Idaho are part-time elected officials with tiny budgets and no oversight or state funding to support their work. The national experts said that kind of system is more prone to cursory investigations like the one into Betty Strongs death.The failure to reform death investigations in Idaho has raised alarms for more than 70 years, according to current and former Idaho coroners and previous ProPublica reporting.A national magazine called Idaho the best place in the nation for a criminal to get away with murder in the literal sense because of the states antiquated county coroners system, the Idaho Statesman newspaper reported in 1951.Asked whether murderers have escaped prosecution in Idahos coroner system, Rich Riffle, coroner for the county that includes Boise, said, My humble opinion? Yes. That almost happened in 2019 when one inexperienced Idaho coroner decided to take the word of Chad Daybell that his wife, Tammy Daybell, had died in her sleep after chronic health problems, vomiting and a cough. Her body was later exhumed after his next wifes children went missing. An autopsy by the Utah medical examiners office found what medical records would have shown, had the Idaho coroner requested them: Tammy Daybell was healthy. A jury convicted Chad Daybell of murdering her by asphyxiation and of killing his next wifes two youngest children. The case is under appeal.At trial, coroner Brenda Dye said she had regrets. Her voice shaking, Dye told the court she would have ordered an autopsy if shed known better, but at that time, with my limited training and being new, I did the best I could. She declined ProPublicas interview request, citing the cases effect on her mental health. The community set up a memorial to two children who Chad Daybell was convicted of murdering; he was also convicted of killing his previous wife Tammy. The coroner originally believed Chad Daybell when he said that Tammy had died in her sleep. (John Roark/Post Register via AP) Idaho isnt the only place where death investigations fall short. Because there is no uniform federal system, the rigor with which your death is investigated depends on where you die. Other states lack enough forensic pathologists to do autopsies. And many local systems like Idaho Countys are squeezed for money.But even among its short-staffed, underfunded peers, Idaho stands out. One measure is the states autopsy rate: third-lowest for autopsies in all deaths, last in the nation for autopsies in known cases of homicide.Gov. Brad Little said in January that he would support more state resources to help Idahos coroners do their jobs. But he never got the chance; coroner-related bills passed by the Idaho Legislature this year contained no funding or other assistance for coroners and death investigations.So for now, each of Idahos 44 coroners will bear costs that other states help cover: driving a body hundreds of miles to an autopsy; paying for some of those autopsies; or trying to recruit one more person to join Idahos statewide forensic pathology workforce of three.If you dont care enough about how death investigations are done in your jurisdiction to invest in the people doing it, to provide them with the resources or to have high enough standards for the people that you hire to do this, youre going to get what you get, what you accept, said Snippen. Youre going to get what you allow to happen.Florida, 2010-2015Betty Brock was a mother of seven who enjoyed singing and art, long bicycle rides, organizing family photos and researching her ancestry.She was caring for her terminally ill husband in 2010 when Clayton Strong befriended her on the internet, according to Belanger, her daughter. Strong claimed to be basically destitute and living in his car, a backstory that appealed to a woman with a soft spot for taking in wounded people and trying to heal them with love, Belanger said.Strong drove hundreds of miles from Southwest Florida and showed up at the Brocks property in the Florida panhandle. They agreed he could sleep in his car there as long as he helped with caregiving and housework. Soon he was sleeping in an outbuilding on the property, then in the house.Bettys children were puzzled as this newcomer became a fixture in their mothers life. They wanted to give Strong a chance, but they soon grew suspicious.Betty Brocks husband died in August 2010. By January, she was Betty Strong.After their courthouse marriage, Clayton Strong used their now-shared funds to buy a Ford truck and an Airstream trailer and took his bride on the road, Belanger said. The couple visited national parks that Betty had always wanted to see. They camped and hiked their way across the continent. They bought mining claims and panned for gold in the remote Idaho wilderness. Betty and Clayton Strong. Bettys children say Clayton isolated her, threatened them when they tried to visit her, kept her from seeing her doctor, then took her to Idaho, where she died. (Courtesy of Amy Belanger) After that honeymoon, the walls around Betty Strong grew impenetrable, her children said. According to what two of her children told ProPublica and to statements two others made to police, Clayton became the gatekeeper of all communication with their mother, and he padlocked the doors of their Florida home and held the key.The last time Betty Strong saw her primary care doctor in Florida was in May 2013, according to records her son obtained after the death. Before that, she hadnt been in since 2010, the year Clayton Strong entered her life. The notes from the 2013 checkup show health issues common in older adults but no Parkinsons diagnosis, and neither Parkinsons nor other neurodegenerative diseases were listed in the family history section.The children watched from afar as the marriage devolved over the next two years. Between January 2014 and February 2015, police went to the couples residence for welfare checks and domestic disturbances at least six times, according to police reports that Belanger provided to ProPublica. Her children told police that Clayton Strong threatened to shoot them if they set foot on the property, threatened to hurt their mother if they didnt back off, and prevented her from seeing a doctor.In the first of those police visits, in January 2014, the records show that Belangers sister, who lived nearby, called the sheriff while standing outside the Strong residence, a brown house surrounded by oak trees and pines on a winding country road. A deputy arrived to find Belangers sister and Clayton Strong in a stalemate, then talked to everyone outside, according to a sheriffs office report. The deputy then watched as Betty Strong turned to her husband to ask him for permission to hug her daughter, and Clayton Strong removed a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the porch entrance gate so Betty could go in the yard for the hug.The report says the deputy made a referral to Florida Department of Children and Families, the agency that investigates possible abuse of vulnerable adults, and that the department opened a case.A similar scene played out when one of Betty Strongs sons went to the house to check on her in February 2015. For two years, Clayton Strong turned the son away when he tried to visit, and this time Strong threatened to shoot him with a gun if he did not leave, the son told a sheriffs deputy. Clayton Strong denied that, the deputys report says.The deputy found Betty Strong alone on a bed in an RV parked behind the home, the report says. She said she had Parkinsons disease and couldnt get around well. Clayton wasnt holding her against her will, she told the deputy, but she couldnt take care of herself without him.She had a walkie-talkie. The deputy asked: Is Clayton using that radio and telling you what to say? Betty answered no while nodding her head yes. It was a chilly afternoon, and the deputy noticed Betty had a blanket but no heater. Bettys demeanor, living conditions, and the controlling behavior by Clayton warranted a referral to the Florida Department of Children and Families, the deputy wrote.Asked for the outcome of that referral, a spokesperson told ProPublica the department investigates all allegations of abuse, neglect, or exploitation but that records of those investigations are confidential under state law.Days after the referral in February 2015, police were again dispatched to the Florida home. This time, it wasnt one of Betty Strongs children who called; it was someone from adult protective services in need of police backup. According to the dispatch log, the worker said Clayton Strong has threatened before to pull a gun on her and is very anti-law enforcement.The couple left town a month later. Betty Strongs children never heard from her again. Betty Strong early in her relationship with Clayton Strong. Within a few years of this trip, Clayton told authorities shed died of Parkinsons, but her children say she never had the disease. (Courtesy of Amy Belanger) Idaho, December 2016By the time Betty Strong died in Idaho County in December 2016, she hadnt been seen in Florida in 21 months.Idaho Countys elected coroner, Cody Funke, had been in the job about as long.He knew the county well. Its vast forests, mountains and meadows stretch across more land than Massachusetts. Rugged and remote, it attracts people who want to be left alone and who distrust both government and conventional medicine. Funke, pronounced funk, was in his late 20s in 2014 when he learned his part-time job at a funeral home was being eliminated. His boss asked: Had he considered running for coroner? The coroner at the time was retiring and urged Funke to do it. So did Funkes boss from his other part-time job, as an EMT. What sealed the deal for Funke: As coroner, he would get health insurance.Funke started the job with a feeling of good luck, godspeed, youre gonna need it. There was no apprenticeship or ride-along to watch seasoned pros, like hed gotten when he trained to be an EMT. There was a training conference he attended in Las Vegas before taking office, and Funke received more than double the 24 hours of coroner education required by Idaho law. Even so, he isnt sure it was enough to prepare him. Funke learned on his first day that he wasnt getting a vehicle to move bodies from a death scene. If the local funeral homes vehicle was occupied, Funke had to use his family truck. A year after Betty Strongs death, the county commission got the coroner a vehicle: a pickup truck the sheriffs office didnt need anymore.The office he inherited also had no camera, and the county hadnt budgeted to give him one. Hed have to use his phone to take pictures of bodies and death scenes.There was no morgue.The Idaho County coroners office didnt even have an actual office.Funkes predecessors kept their files on paper, at home, he learned. The previous coroners house had flooded, so when Funke took over, all that remained fit in two manila folders.The coroners entire budget this year is $85,651. By comparison, coroners offices serving small populations had an average budget of $280,000 in 2018, according to a national study.Paid $13,000 a year, Funke is on call 24 hours a day and, last year, investigated and ruled on 71 deaths, about one every five days. Papers on an additional 102 deaths of people under a doctors care came through needing his signature for cremation.Funke does the coroner work on top of a full-time job. When a call comes in during business hours, he dips out to go to a death scene. If someone dies at dinnertime, he might not see his family until morning.He must decide with each death what the circumstances require: a simple phone call; an all-out investigation with autopsy, witness interviews, tissue samples and more; or something in the middle.To examine a death scene, Funke might have to drive three hours or longer each way. Whenever he orders an autopsy, Funke or his deputies have to take the body to the nearest autopsy center, a trip that takes a full day and usually demands an overnight stay. His current budget can cover 10 autopsies a year. Cody Funke, the Idaho County coroner, also worked full time as a city wastewater treatment operator. He now works for the state prison system while remaining the coroner. (Liesbeth Powers for ProPublica) In those first years as coroner, Funke often leaned on police.Funke found it strange that Clayton Strong had loaded his wifes body into their SUV and driven to the hospital. Most people call 911 to report a death and wait for help to arrive, Funke said. But Strong offered an explanation that seemed to satisfy the sheriffs deputy: He didnt know many people in town and wasnt sure what to do.Strong had said his wife hadnt seen a doctor because she stuck to homeopathic remedies. Thats not unusual for Funke to hear. The widower gave Funke the impression a coroner and sheriffs deputy wouldnt be welcome inside the trailer where she died. Thats not so outside the norm for Idaho County either, Funke said.Betty Strongs death looked like an easy call. So Funke helped move her body to a cot to be taken from the hospital to a local funeral home.According to a later report from the sheriffs office, Clayton Strong showed up at the funeral home that day, said he wanted her cremated and paid $2,310 in cash. The way Funke heard it from a funeral home employee a few days later, Strong paid in $100 bills out of a lunch box.The detail struck Funke as peculiar. But he let it go.Florida, 2017The couples Airstream trailer showed up one day in January 2017, parked outside their house in Florida. A neighbor called Amy Belanger with the news, and she dispatched her brother, Daniel, who lived nearby. Theyd spent almost two years fearing the worst.The only person at the house was Clayton Strong.The familys matriarch had died a few weeks ago in Harpster, Idaho, Strong said. Then he told his son-in-law to get off the property.Amy Belanger started making calls the next day. One of the first people she reached was Funke, the county coroner. She was perplexed, she said. Why hadnt anyone called her or her siblings? Why didnt he question whether Betty Strong had actually succumbed to a disease or if something else had killed her? Belanger told Funke about the history of police calls in Florida and concerns about their mothers safety.Funke thought back to what hed heard from the funeral home. A lunch box of cash for a cremation? That image never sat quite right. Now he had solid ground for suspicion. Funke told Belanger hed talk to the county prosecutor and see what could be done. The prosecutor and the sheriffs office initially told Belanger they had opened a homicide investigation, according to a detailed timeline she created at the time. But the death scene the Strongs trailer was long gone, the body cremated. The sheriffs investigator and prosecutor ultimately didnt seem to think there was enough evidence for a homicide investigation, Funke told ProPublica. (The prosecutor and sheriffs investigator did not return phone calls, emails or certified letters from ProPublica requesting comment on their decisions following Betty Strongs death.)Notes from Belangers timeline quote a Florida detective saying he was sorry the death had occurred outside his jurisdiction. He explained to her that in Florida, deputies would have had the medical examiners office verify medical records and take a blood sample.The year Betty Strong died, 20% of natural deaths investigated by a medical examiner in the part of Florida where she had lived underwent autopsies before the examiner decided the cause of death was natural. About 65% of all deaths taken in by Floridas medical examiner that year were autopsied. Both numbers dwarf Idahos coroner autopsy rates.Its not just Florida. Many states have more sophisticated systems for investigating deaths than Idahos. In much of the country, centralized state medical examiner offices oversee all death investigations or provide a backstop to elected coroners in each county. Idahos rural neighbor Montana has a hybrid system of medical examiners and coroners, supported by a coroner liaison who works with death investigators to make the process more consistent statewide. And next door in Wyoming, a state board sets rules for coroners to follow. The rules spell out what each death investigation should include: scene investigation, toxicology sample, DNA sample, photographs, external examination of the body and an inventory of property, evidence and medications.Jennifer Snippen, the death investigator in Oregon, was one of the experts who drafted the National Institute of Justices 2024 death-scene investigation guidebook.She said death investigations are more likely to be thorough when states and counties give their investigators enough funding and education, so that they have the motivation and the ability to get to as many scenes, and get as much information about every single death, as possible.Those who study the work of coroners and medical examiners in the U.S. have learned that the deaths of elderly people are especially likely to be written off as age-related, without considering whether the person may have also been a victim of abuse or neglect.Snippens research in 2023 is one of the most recent studies to confirm that. She reviewed data from thousands of cases. The person least likely to get a scene investigation or autopsy? An elderly woman who dies at home.Lauri McGivern, a nationally recognized expert in death investigations, said national standards would have Funke verify Betty Strongs Parkinsons diagnosis and ask more questions of Clayton Strong as the sole caregiver of a vulnerable adult. McGivern, who coordinates medicolegal death investigations in Vermont, reviewed the facts that Funke was given at the time of Betty Strongs death and his subsequent report at ProPublicas request.To follow national standards, McGivern said, Funke also would have gone to the Airstream trailer or asked law enforcement to examine the death scene and report back to him.But McGivern and other experts said they understand why Funke didnt follow those national guidelines because theyve seen it happen so many times in places like rural Idaho.Hes doing what he was shown how to do, McGivern said. And probably doing the best he can, with no budget and no support and no education. When Funke took over from Idaho Countys previous coroner in 2015, there was no equipment. Over the years, Funke had to get county commissioners to approve purchases like a radio to take coroner calls. (Liesbeth Powers for ProPublica) Frustrated by how little Idaho officials knew and why they hadnt dug further into her mothers death, Amy Belanger channeled her grief into trying to find answers on her own.She followed a trail of public records left by Clayton Strong. Had he harmed other women? Had he been in a relationship with anybody who went missing? I was looking into his past to see if there was a pattern like that, Belanger said. Something she could share with officials in Idaho.Then she stumbled across a document: a recent marriage license.Three months after depositing Betty Strongs body at a hospital in Idaho, Clayton Strong wed a woman from Texas.Belanger needed to warn her.Texas, 2017-2021Shirley Weatherley had a lot in common with Betty Strong. She was a mother and grandmother. Shed been married before. She lived in a small, modest home on a large piece of land in a rural locale, where shed been caring for a terminally ill former spouse when Strong contacted her on Facebook.Theyd known each other as teenagers in Lubbock. Their reconnection after he arrived at her house in Weatherford, a suburb of Fort Worth, eventually began to worry her children.He isolated her, saidJamie Barrington, Weatherleys son with a previous husband. He wouldnt let grandkids, my brother anybodyd come over, he just kept them at arms length. Shirley Weatherley (Courtesy of Jamie Barrington) Barrington said he and other members of Weatherleys family had suspicions about Strong. Then they connected with Belanger and heard what happened in Florida and Idaho.Belanger urged the family to tell their mother everything theyd heard. She actually was pleading with us to watch out, Barrington recalled. Knowing another family was worried helped fuel Amy Belangers quest for the truth about her mothers death. Her siblings chipped in to help Belanger rent a van and drive across the country in search of clues anything that could shed light on her mothers death.Once she got to Idaho, Belanger spent more than a week investigating. She met with the coroner and sheriff. She went to the mining claims the Strongs had purchased. She stayed at the RV park where Betty Strong died and interviewed the people whod owned it in 2016; they remembered talking to each other about how hinky the death and Clayton Strongs reaction to it seemed.Back in Texas, Weatherleys family tried to warn her. When they relayed the story about Betty Strong to her, Weatherley chalked it up to a grieving family trying to cope with loss by grasping for an explanation, Barrington said. After all, Strong had a death certificate that listed natural causes. The details Barrington later learned from family members and police about his mothers life with Strong were pretty horrific, he said. Weatherley had reported that Strong threatened to kill her, but no charges were filed. Then at one point, in the midst of an argument with Strong, Weatherley lobbed the accusations about Betty Strongs death at him, Barrington said. Strong flew into a rage.Weatherley called police in July 2021. She and Strong were splitting up, and he shoved her while moving his stuff out of the house, Weatherley told the officer. Strong had hurt her in the past, so she called police to make sure it didnt happen again, the officers report says. The officer got Strongs side of the story she was running him off, but he didnt push her and stuck around until Strong agreed to leave.Police would later document finding two items in the house. The first was a copy of Weatherleys will that left everything to Strong, on which shed written VOID, the second was a digital camera hidden in their bedroom. The camera contained selfies of injuries to her face and chest and a video of Strong putting his arm around her neck as she screamed for help.Strong persuaded Weatherley to let him back into their home once more on Aug. 4, 2021, according to police records.Four days later, Weatherleys son and grandson found her body wrapped in a gray tarp near the front steps to her home. Shed been shot in the chest. Authorities matched shell casings at the scene to an AK-47-style rifle, which security footage showed Strong ditching in a shopping cart outside a Walmart.Picked up later by police in Mexico, Strong died of cardiac arrest while awaiting extradition in Weatherleys killing. Mexican police booked Clayton Strong on gun charges in 2021. After the arrest, they discovered he was a suspect in the murder of his wife in Texas. (Parker County Sheriffs Office via Facebook) TodayJamie Barrington, Shirley Weatherleys son, was reluctant at first to speak publicly about his mothers death in Texas, even years later. He agreed to talk with ProPublica, he said, because he wants Idahos coroner system to improve. He said he never imagined that a death like Betty Strongs could be ruled natural based on what a spouse told authorities.I truly believe that if there had been a proper investigation and not taking his word for it, Barrington said, that it probably would have made a big difference in what happened to Shirley Weatherley.Word of Weatherleys murder eventually reached Funke, the coroner in Idaho. He said in hindsight, Strongs actions in Idaho County seem more suspicious than they did at the time to his inexperienced eyes and ears.Now, after 10 years as coroner, I would have pushed a little bit harder to have an officer or deputy follow up or go to the RV park with him. He would have asked police to use a national database one he didnt know about at the time to find Betty Strongs family members and learn more about her background. I have trust issues after cases like this, he said.Funke said the story of Betty Strongs death needs to be told, even if it shows that he and Idaho County made mistakes, because it can help lawmakers understand what is wrong with the states system.Idahos coroners need more funding, he said, because right now theyre an afterthought in county budgets. Most counties set a coroner salary at what amounts to less than minimum wage, so its impossible for someone like Funke to be coroner without a second, full-time job.These offices should be fully staffed, he said. Maybe we have one or two people that are here full time to answer questions and respond to these calls, versus, Hey, Ive got to take time off work, boss.And he believes new coroners who lack experience should be required to learn how to work a case from start to finish before theyre called out to a death like Betty Strongs.Daniel Belanger, one of Betty Strongs children, came away from his interactions with Idaho County officials convinced that the only way deaths like his mothers will be properly investigated is through legislation forcing coroners and law enforcement agencies to change their approaches.They completely dropped the ball, he told ProPublica.Amy Belanger said her family has reclaimed very few of her mothers possessions from the Airstream trailer. Strong emptied the Florida house of family heirlooms after their mothers death, Belanger said. Most of the family photo albums her mother toiled over are gone.The brown house on the winding road in Florida is still there. Belangers memories of family cookouts and holiday gatherings linger in the house; they werent wiped away by the police visits and padlocked doors. But the family home isnt the familys anymore. Years later, it is stuck in legal limbo the deed still in the name of Clayton Strong and Shirley Weatherley, the woman he married after the death of Betty Strong.0 Comments 0 Shares 24 Views 0 Reviews
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