“Our job as surgeons is to try to find everything that’s hurt, because if you miss one little thing, the patient dies. You can fix nine holes in the intestine, but if there’s a tenth hole and you miss it, patient dies. It’s really hard, very demanding surgery, and it’s very easy for patients to bleed to death.”
Dr. Jonathan Groner, Pediatric Surgeon, for the Kids Shot series

Missing in Ohio
Rural Ohio can seem lawless. Men go missing into the woods, their bones scattered by wild animals.
For this series, I wrote 27 articles on people missing in Ohio. I hiked with search teams, and followed family members as they came to the realization that their loved one would not be rescued alive, but recovered instead.
And when they invited me, I joined them at the graveyard for a final goodbye.

Rape at OSU
Police logs for Ohio State University showed disturbing reports of multiple rapes per month.

Over 14 articles, I examined rape culture, and learned about its opposite: enthusiastic consent.
I counted up year-on-year statistics, and examined how these statistics are gathered and why, and the university’s responses to the problem.
After the series finished, I kept track of the police logs, with follow-up articles each month.

kids Shot
It shocked me that 20 children died in one year in Columbus from gunshot wounds: through murder, accident, self-harm, and police.
I mapped the shootings, spoke to a pediatric surgeon about how a bullet can destroy a child’s body, and explored the long-term effects on neighborhoods and in schools.

Gun ownership for adults is a choice we’ve made in the U.S. This is the impact of that choice on our most vulnerable citizens.
If you are outside the U.S., please email me to see the full articles.
And, in case you think I never had any lighter moments, I also ate cicadas from Brood X as pasta sauce with a professor and a forager. Sadly, that wasn’t a series.
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