On Sunday, two New York City police officers fired into a crowded Brooklyn subway station, shooting and injuring four people, including two bystanders, one of whom is a hospital employee now in critical condition after police shot him in the head during his commute. 

The catalyst for this bloody confrontation: an alleged fare evasion. In other words, $2.90.

According to the NYPD, officers suspected that 37-year-old Derell Mickles had skipped a turnstile at the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. The officers followed Mickles, resulting in a chase that ended with officers shooting him, two bystanders, and another officer on duty. While police initially claimed that they had recovered a knife Mickles had used to threaten officers, officials later contradicted their own claim, prompting questions over what exactly had happened.

Asked about body camera footage on Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams deflected, telling a reporter to “speak with the police commissioner,” before praising the officers involved in Sunday’s shooting for demonstrating a “great level of restraint.” The NYPD has since firmly defended the officers, with the police departments chief of patrol stating, “We are not perfect.”

The violent incident, inside one of the world’s busiest subway systems, has sparked outrage among New Yorkers as well as a victim’s family members, who condemned the officers’ actions as “reckless.”

And they’re far from alone. Criminal justice reform advocates are slamming what they see as an outsized response by the NYPD to something as minor and trivial as alleged fare evasion. It comes amid New York Mayor Eric Adams’ aggressive crackdown on fare evaders, a policy Adams has claimed would also help with violence that occurs on trains. Protests have since broken out across the city, calling for the officers involved in Sunday’s shooting to be held accountable.

I spoke with Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the New York City Civil Liberties Union, to learn more about Adams’ crackdown on fare evasion, overpolicing, and lack of police transparency surrounding Sunday’s violent encounter. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This is an ongoing investigation. But there are already significant concerns over how the police handled this situation and how the mayor has responded.

This disturbing incident is sadly not surprising, given what we’ve seen from this administration. The Adams administration and NYPD have been dramatically ramping up enforcement activity, increasing their presence in the subways, increasing stops, increasing frisks, and increasing all of the hallmarks of broken windows policing.  This is a predictable and inevitable consequence of this administration’s approach to a very aggressive enforcement mindset. There are so many questions about what we’ve heard from the mayor’s office from the NYPD about what exactly unfolded. 

We have heard officer accounts of what happened. We’ve heard some witness accounts. The NYPD and the mayor’s office have been reviewing body camera footage. But, we have not been able to see this. We’re not getting a transparent accounting of what took place. It’s absolutely critical that we see the evidence that they’re relying on to make these assertions. 

We’re being asked to take the word of a mayor whose initial tweet in response to this incident had to get community noted because it was leaving out the important context of the officer he was talking about having been shot was shot by a fellow officer. We can’t really trust their version of events when they’re not showing us the evidence of what took place in that incident.

This is a predictable and inevitable consequence of this administration’s approach to a very aggressive enforcement mindset.

Are complaints over transparency from the NYPD common?

It’s a hallmark of the NYPD. We know that they can be transparent when they choose to be and when they think it serves their interest. Folks may remember back in January of 2024 the NYPD released body camera footage within hours, within a day of the traffic stop of a city council member when they sought to use that footage to highlight their version of what took place. But they treat incidents like this very differently.

How common—or rare—are shootings like this in New York?

I don’t know that we have the full stats on how common this type of shooting is in the subway from an officer.  It’s not something that I’ve seen a full accounting of, but what we have seen are increased reports of police misconduct and abuse of New Yorkers that have upticked with this administration. Civilian complaints going into the Civilian Complaint Review Board have reached alarmingly high levels. At the same time, there have also been real concerns about what the department is actually doing with complaints that are moving through the NYPD disciplinary system, where they’re just not taking those reports seriously. 

When you respond to everything with an officer, you are increasing the likelihood that we’re going to see more cases where someone is subject to use of force.

Can overpolicing backfire? How do outsize police presences affect communities, particularly communities of color?

The approach that this administration has taken since day one is overpolicing. 

They’ve identified police officers as the be-all, end-all, sole solution to every societal ill. Fare evasion? Send a cop after it. Homelessness? Send police to conduct sweeps. Mental health crises? Instead of sending peers and EMTs, send a cop instead.

It’s a formula that this administration seems wedded to, but it’s not improving community safety for New Yorkers. Police are primarily concerned with enforcing criminal laws, making arrests, and issuing summonses. They have an enforcement mindset, not a delivery of services or addressing root causes mindset.

So when you respond to everything with an officer, you are increasing the likelihood that we’re going to see more and more cases where someone is subject to use of force, someone is tased, someone is shot, someone is killed when they did not need to be, because you are responding to a situation with tools that are just fundamentally not a good fit for that scenario.

We see this play out largely in communities that need more investments to address the root causes of crime, poverty, homelessness, the need for increased mental health and healthcare services. Rather than making those investments, which are harder and will take more thought to accomplish, we instead default to a reliance on police officers.

In March, the NYPD announced they would send 800 officers into subways to combat fare evasion. In the same month, Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed the National Guard in response to several violent incidents that occurred a few weeks prior. Realistically, how effective are methods like this in preventing crime, and what are some of the pitfalls?

It’s brought up time and time again that if you focus on low-level crime and low-level signs of disorder, you’re mitigating the potential for it to escalate into more serious criminal activity and driving down overall crime rates as a result. 

That’s been studied and debunked numerous times. New York City hit historically low crime rates as stop and frisk plummeted to historic lows and was reined in as enforcement fell, as summonses and arrest activity went down. The data is just not there to justify the approach to broken windows or quality-of-life policing.

Instead, it’s very effective at funneling more and more people into the criminal legal system, saddling people with fines that they cannot afford, making them attend court dates that they cannot afford, and giving people the potentially lifelong consequence of acquiring a criminal record which can extend to every aspect of their life. What it’s not doing is meeting community needs and making New Yorkers safer.

Eric Adams has pushed for a crackdown on fare evasion. Last month, the MTA announced that they’ll be sending summons of up to $50 to $100 to fare evaders. Did a “tough on crime” approach play into what happened over the weekend?

What happened over the weekend is an inevitable outcome of that kind of tough-on-crime approach, where the only tool that we seem to have to offer is police officers, who are going to focus on enforcement and if they’re given an aggressive mandate to enforce, are going to enforce that aggressively.

We haven’t seen the actual footage yet. We’re relying on accounts of what happened. But it’s very easy to see how a police officer pursuing someone, chasing them, is a tactic that is escalatory, as opposed to thinking of ways we can tackle issues like fare evasion without the threat of violence.

That is such a mismatch we don’t need to be constrained thinking about responding to fare evasion with just a police law enforcement tool.

We should be thinking more broadly about getting people access to the support they need to enroll in programs for New Yorkers who can’t afford to pay for fares to get to work, pay for child care, or get access to medical care. We can think about other ways that we are addressing those causes without putting armed officers in and telling them you need to make sure that you are aggressively cracking down on everyone within the system.

As this case has gained traction on social media, one of the most disturbing responses I’ve seen is how so many people justify using this level of force because Mickles was suspected of evading a $2.90 fare. It’s a narrative that oftentimes rears its head after a high-profile case of police brutality. We saw this with George Floyd, Eric Garner. 

The level of force used here is so disproportionate to the alleged infraction. No one should be subject to having their life put in jeopardy because of an alleged evasion of a $2.90 cent fare, to say nothing of the fact that officers pursued him into a crowded station and onto a train.

That response is not only out of proportion to the individual’s alleged offense, but it is putting so many other people needlessly in harm’s way.

It’s deeply disturbing that the NYPD and the administration could view that level of a response as an appropriate reaction when we’re talking about something as trivial as the evasion of a $2.90 cent fare.

Since the shooting occurred, plenty of New Yorkers have started to protest the NYPD’s crackdown on fare evasion. What are your thoughts on some of these demonstrations?

People are recognizing an uptick in the targeting of their communities and an uptick in stop activity racial disparities as bad or even worse than they were at its height. There is a real sense that the NYPD is not providing a service to New Yorkers but is causing active harm In communities.

And I think that an expression that also finds a voice in the number of complaints of police misconduct going in, being on the rise, and is evident in the types of protests that we’re seeing against this incident and against other instances of police brutality and violence.

It’s important that New Yorkers be able to express their to raise their voice and express their views in protesting against policies that are causing harm in their communities rather than actually helping deliver real safety for them.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system, Reveal, and USA Today. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Instagram,  TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.

Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.

Then she ate a salad from Costco. 

It was her final meal before going to Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in Northern California, to give birth in August 2022. It had been an exhausting pregnancy. Her family had just moved houses, and Horton was still breastfeeding her toddler. Because of her teenage son’s heart condition, she remained wary of Covid-19 and avoided crowded places, even doctor’s offices. Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate. 

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.

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The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor—she didn’t even like taking Advil. “You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result. 

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.  

Kaiser Permanente declined to comment on Horton’s care. A spokesperson said the Santa Rosa hospital typically gets consent to drug-test patients for medical reasons, and as a mandated reporter under state law, it refers potential exposures of newborns to illicit drugs to child welfare authorities. 

The Sonoma County Human Services Department said, in a statement, that it evaluates all referrals using “evidence- and research-based” methods, and if a report is deemed valid, it has a duty under state law to investigate.

Horton said the experience made her feel powerless and terrified.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something,” she said, “and it was wrong.” 

For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes. 

But urine drug screens are easily misinterpreted and often wrong, with false positive rates as high as 50 percent, according to some studies. Without confirmation testing and additional review, false positive results can lead hospitals to wrongly accuse parents of illicit drug use and report babies to child welfare agencies—which may separate newborns from their families, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.

It’s unclear how many of the nation’s 3.6 million births every year involve drug testing, but health care experts said urine screening is ubiquitous. Tens of thousands of infants are reported annually to authorities for in utero drug exposure, with no guarantee that the underlying tests are accurate, our analysis of federal data shows.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something, and it was wrong.”

To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists, and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country. 

Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.

Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft, and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women. 

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care. 

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds—which come from the same plant used to make heroin—are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests. 

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results. 

At least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure, according to a review of state laws and policies by The Marshall Project. But, not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. At least 25 states do not require child welfare workers to confirm positive test results, either. 

While parents often lack protections, most of the caseworkers who investigate them are entitled to confirmation testing and a review if they test positive for drugs on the job, our analysis found. 

Health care providers say there are medical reasons to test labor and delivery patients for drugs, including alerting doctors to watch a newborn for withdrawal symptoms. They also cite concerns about criminal and legal liability if they fail to report positive test results. 

Even when a doctor refutes a positive result and vouches for their patient, hospitals may report the incorrect data anyway to child welfare agencies.

“It’s almost like a gut punch. You come to the hospital and you see a social work note on your patient’s chart,” said Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN in Huntsville, Alabama, who has tried and failed several times to halt child welfare reports and investigations of patients with false positive results. “Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop it,” Robinson said.

No government agency collects comprehensive data on false positive results or on how many pregnant patients are tested. And confidentiality laws that shield medical and child welfare records make it difficult for the public to understand how many families are affected. 

In 2016, Congress mandated states to submit the number of “substance-affected” infants to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Not all states track every case, but from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, medical professionals reported at least 170,000 infants to child welfare agencies for exposure to substances, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 such cases were reported, and authorities removed more than 6,000 infants from their families, our analysis found. 

The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed. 

But the false positive cases The Marshall Project identified include parents of all socioeconomic classes and occupations—from a lawyer to a school librarian to a nurse who drug-tests other people for a living. 

“People should be concerned,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, a leading neonatal researcher who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. “This could happen to any one of us.”

“People should be concerned. This could happen to any one of us.”

Drug screens are more guesswork than exact science. Chemicals in the tests quickly cross-react with urine, flagging anything that looks like it could be an illicit substance. The tests are like fishing nets that are cast wide and pick up anything and everything that fits, said Dr. Gwen McMillin, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine and medical director of a drug-testing lab. The problem is that nets also ensnare fish that aren’t being targeted: compounds that are closely related to illicit substances or merely look similar. 

“Drug testing results need to be confirmed before they go to CPS,” McMillin said. “Actions should not be taken based on a single drug testing result. Period.” 

But sometimes, even confirmation tests can be misinterpreted, as Susan Horton found. At first, Horton was puzzled by her positive test result. She wondered if her urine might have been mixed up with another patient’s. Then—“ding ding ding!”—her last meal popped into her head. She told a nurse about the poppy seeds in her salad, sure that this would resolve her doctors’ concerns. 

Horton’s records show Kaiser ran her urine sample through a second test, and this time it came back positive for one opiate in particular: codeine. That shouldn’t have been surprising—poppy seeds, like the ones in Horton’s salad, are derived from the opium poppy plant and contain codeine. 

To differentiate between salad dressing or bagels and illicit drugs, toxicologists have long recommended testing urine for the presence of a compound called thebaine, which is found in poppy seeds but not in heroin. There’s no indication that the hospital performed or even knew about the thebaine test, leaving providers with no way to prove or disprove Horton’s claims.

“Mom and dad insistent that a Costco salad with poppyseed dressing is responsible,” a doctor wrote in her notes. Another doctor wrote: “We are unable to verify whether this could result in a positive test.”

Soon, multiple doctors and nurses filed into Horton’s room. They said hospital policy dictated that Halle remain there for five days to be monitored for possible drug withdrawal symptoms—“for baby’s safety,” a doctor told Horton.

Unlike most other states that require hospitals to report positive drug tests, California law says a positive test alone “is not in and of itself a sufficient basis for reporting child abuse or neglect.” But because of Covid-19 and her son’s heart condition, Horton had also missed some prenatal appointments, which many providers see as a red flag for drug use. A hospital social worker noted the missed appointments and decided to file a report.

In a statement about its practices in general, Kaiser said it always conducts a “multi-faceted assessment” prior to filing a report to CPS, which is responsible for reviewing the information and investigating. 

Horton insisted that keeping her baby at the hospital was unnecessary. “I’m not a drug addict,” she said she pleaded. Desperate for help, her husband called the police, who declined to oppose hospital directives, records show. 

When the caseworker arrived, the couple refused to sign a safety plan or allow the person to interview their children and inspect their home. So the caseworker immediately obtained a judge’s order and placed baby Halle into temporary custody in the hospital, before discharging her to her grandparents, who were ordered to supervise Horton with her child. 

A few days later, Horton stood silently in court, dressed in pants that clung uncomfortably to her still-healing body, feeling as if her motherhood was on trial. A caseworker told the judge it would be dangerous to release Halle to her parents, and Horton agreed to another drug test. A worker followed her to the bathroom and watched her urinate in a cup.

By then, caseworkers and doctors had privately acknowledged that poppy seeds could have caused Horton’s positive test result. But in court the caseworker didn’t mention that. Instead, she argued that Horton’s purported drug use had “caused serious physical harm” to her child. 

The agency said under state law it can’t comment on individual cases. Speaking generally, it said a single positive drug test, false or otherwise, doesn’t warrant an investigation, and that there needs to be “a reported observation of impact to the child.”

When workplace drug testing was introduced in the 1980s, unions and civil rights groups decried the error rates of drug screens and how companies were firing workers over false positive results. In response, federal authorities mandated safeguards for employees, including requiring confirmation tests and a review from a specially trained doctor to determine whether a food or medication could have caused a positive result. 

A federal medical advisory committee in 1993 urged health care providers who drug-test pregnant patients to adopt the same rigorous standards. But amid the “crack baby” panic, the idea of protecting mothers did not catch on. 

Hospital drug testing policies vary widely. Many facilities, such as Kaiser in Santa Rosa, test every labor-and-delivery patient. Other hospitals flag only certain people, such as those with limited prenatal care, high blood pressure, even bad teeth, experts say. At many hospitals, the decision is up to doctors and nurses, who may view a mother’s tattoos, disheveled clothing, or stressed demeanor with suspicion. Studies have found that the decision to test is rife with class and race bias.

“Those who look like they have less resources, people might say, ‘Well, they look more likely to use drugs,’” said Dr. Cresta Jones, an associate professor and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Hospitals often have full discretion over whether to screen for drugs, but once a positive result is in hand, the decision to report becomes more complicated. Laws and policies in at least 12 states explicitly require hospitals to send screen results to child welfare agencies, even if they are not confirmed, according to The Marshall Project’s review. 

For hospitals, cost is also an issue. While urine screens are cheap, the equipment needed to run a confirmation test costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to the cost of expert personnel and lab certification. Some hospitals contract out confirmation testing—a lower-cost alternative—but getting results can take days, long after many families are ready to go home.

Doctors, nurses, and hospital social workers face an uncomfortable predicament: Do they send the baby home to what they believe could be an unsafe environment, or do they call authorities?

“God forbid the baby goes home, withdraws and dies, we’re going to be held liable for that,” said Dr. Adi Davidov, an obstetrician at Staten Island University Hospital, which drug-tests every birthing patient.

State mandatory reporting laws add to the pressure on doctors and nurses. These laws impose criminal liability on providers who fail to report, while also protecting physicians who report “in good faith”—insulating hospitals from lawsuits if test results are wrong. 

Even when doctors have the ability to order a confirmation test, they don’t always do so. Many misinterpret positive screens as definitive evidence of drug use.

“We were guilty until proven innocent.”

When Grace Smith had her fourth child in 2021 at St. Luke’s University Hospital, an hour north of Philadelphia, she was taking prescribed marijuana and Vyvanse, a medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The medicine contains amphetamine, but the hospital’s drug screen results did not differentiate between meth and amphetamine, according to medical records. The day after Smith delivered her son, a doctor told her that she and her baby had tested positive for meth and that the hospital had notified child protective services.

Smith’s husband, Michael, asked the doctor to review his wife’s medical records to confirm her prescription, according to the doctor’s notes. The doctor argued that wasn’t her role. “I explained that our responsibility as healthcare workers was to report the case” to child welfare authorities, she wrote, adding that the agency “would conduct any investigation that was necessary.”

When Michael Smith told the doctor they were leaving with their baby, the hospital called the police. An officer escorted the parents out, without their newborn, a police report shows. The Smiths said the police told them they would be arrested if they returned.

A spokesperson for St. Luke’s University Health Network declined to answer questions from The Marshall Project, saying in an email that the hospital “complies with all rules and regulations regarding drug testing and reporting” and that the newborn’s welfare “is always our primary concern.”

Four days after the Smiths’ son was born, Monroe County Children and Youth Services told the hospital it was okay to release the baby to his parents. But the investigation remained open. It wasn’t until the Smiths paid more than $3,500 for a lawyer—and nearly $300 for a confirmation drug test that came back negative—that the agency closed their case. The agency declined to comment.

The Smiths filed a lawsuit in 2022 against St. Luke’s. In its response, the hospital acknowledged that it had not given Grace a confirmation test, but denied violating the Smiths’ privacy or civil rights. A judge dismissed the suit in 2023, saying in part that the Smiths did not sufficiently argue their claims.

Many providers erroneously assume that child welfare agencies verify a parent’s drug use. But government caseworkers typically lack the expertise to accurately interpret drug test results. State policy manuals seldom mention the possibility of false positives. It often falls on parents to prove their own innocence.

As a nurse in South Carolina, Ashley Riley said she regularly drug-tested patients in an addiction treatment program, flagged faulty tests, and sent out positive screens for confirmation. But when she herself screened positive for opiates after delivering her son in 2023, Riley said the hospital declined to order a confirmation test, then reported her to authorities.

Riley and her husband, Jeffrey, insisted the positive result was from lemon poppy seed muffins that she had eaten throughout her pregnancy. As proof, Jeffrey Riley texted the investigator a receipt for the muffins, studies on false positives caused by poppy seeds, and the 2023 memo from the Department of Defense urging service members to avoid poppy seeds.

“At no point in time was there anybody in there that was even trying to advocate for my wife, except for me,” he recalled.

At first, he thought his efforts were working. The caseworker acknowledged in his notes having seen the poppy seeds and noted that the report “could be falsified.” 

But the caseworker still insisted the couple sign a safety plan, advising them that their two children would be placed in foster care unless they assigned a “protector”—a responsible adult who would supervise them with their children at all times. This continued for 45 days before the case was closed as unfounded. 

“We were guilty until proven innocent,” Ashley Riley said. 

The hospital even charged $424 for the problematic urine test. Hospital officials did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Will Batchelor, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, wrote in a statement that the agency has a duty to investigate once a hospital has filed a report and that it “exercised appropriate restraint” by not removing the child from the home.

“Because the safety of a child is at stake, DSS has to continue its investigation beyond seeing a receipt for poppy seed muffins,” Batchelor wrote.

Even when a parent has a confirmation test and her own doctor’s word attesting to a false positive result, authorities may keep investigating.

When Melissa Robinson, an elementary school librarian in Huntsville, Alabama, screened pos​​itive for cocaine in early 2024, the news shocked her and her doctors. Robinson had avoided anything during her pregnancy that could be risky, even cold cuts—which may carry bacteria—and had no history of drug use. Because of the positive test, staff told Robinson she was not allowed to breastfeed her daughter, hospital records show, and they reported her to Alabama’s child welfare agency, the Department of Human Resources. Robinson said a caseworker told her that she probably wouldn’t be allowed to be alone with her baby—her husband would have to supervise.

A few days later, a confirmation test came back negative for any substances. With proof that she had not used cocaine, Robinson assumed the case would be closed. Instead, the agency continued to investigate, inspecting her home and even requiring her husband to take a drug test, she said.

A spokesperson for Alabama’s child welfare agency said they are required to respond immediately to a hospital report and “make safety decisions relying on current and most accessible information.”

When the baby was two weeks old, the agency closed the case, citing insufficient evidence. But the allegations will remain on Robinson’s record for at least five years.

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult,” Robinson recalled. “Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult. Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

Some medical groups and providers have taken steps to reduce unnecessary child welfare reports. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises hospitals to use a screening questionnaire rather than drug tests to identify people who may have substance abuse problems. The organization also recommends that hospitals obtain consent from patients, explaining the potential consequences of a positive result—including if the hospital is required to report it to authorities. A number of large hospitals have adopted some version of those recommendations. 

After a study at Staten Island University Hospital in New York found a high rate of false positives, administrators brought the confirmation testing in-house. They said results come back within a day or two, rather than the week that is typical for outside tests, which allows providers to wait before contacting child welfare.

“Any time you act on a test that’s not 100 percent, you run the risk of causing more harm than good,” said the hospital’s Dr. Davidov. “If you are going to get CPS involved with a mother who did nothing wrong and is a good citizen, that’s harming her. It’s harming her experience, it’s harming her ability to take care of her newborn.”

In recent years, advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against hospitals for testing without explicit consent, which has led some state officials and lawmakers to speak out against the testing. But in most of the United States, it remains common practice to report families based on unconfirmed positive screens. Most of the women interviewed by The Marshall Project signed general consent forms at the hospital but said they were never informed explicitly they would be drug-tested, nor that a positive result could be reported to authorities.

For Susan Horton, her family’s ordeal has created an undercurrent of fear that courses through her daily life. 

After the court hearing in August 2022, child welfare workers took the baby to Horton’s elderly in-laws and barred Horton and her husband from being alone with their newborn while the agency investigated. Finally, almost two weeks after their daughter was born, the agency withdrew its petition and a judge dismissed the case, allowing the Hortons to bring baby Halle home.

One afternoon last spring, Horton took her daughter, now a toddler, outside. Halle giggled as her mother chased her around the front yard, her little feet splashing in a small mud hole. This was the life Horton had envisioned years ago—a quiet place in the California countryside where her children could delight in the world around them. And yet, Horton couldn’t help but remember the investigation that destroyed her family’s peace of mind—and her self-esteem.

“I had a lot of confidence in how I mother and how I parent,” she said. “Now in my head, I’m always questioning my choices.” She wondered aloud what neighbors would say if they saw her daughter playing in the mud, if someone might accuse her of being a bad parent.

“I just always have that looming feeling that at any moment CPS could come knocking and take my children away.” 

Marshall Project reporters Weihua Li, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Nakylah Carter, and Catherine Odom contributed to this story.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system, Reveal, and USA Today. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Instagram,  TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.

Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.

Then she ate a salad from Costco. 

It was her final meal before going to Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in Northern California, to give birth in August 2022. It had been an exhausting pregnancy. Her family had just moved houses, and Horton was still breastfeeding her toddler. Because of her teenage son’s heart condition, she remained wary of Covid-19 and avoided crowded places, even doctor’s offices. Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate. 

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.

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The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor—she didn’t even like taking Advil. “You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result. 

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.  

Kaiser Permanente declined to comment on Horton’s care. A spokesperson said the Santa Rosa hospital typically gets consent to drug-test patients for medical reasons, and as a mandated reporter under state law, it refers potential exposures of newborns to illicit drugs to child welfare authorities. 

The Sonoma County Human Services Department said, in a statement, that it evaluates all referrals using “evidence- and research-based” methods, and if a report is deemed valid, it has a duty under state law to investigate.

Horton said the experience made her feel powerless and terrified.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something,” she said, “and it was wrong.” 

For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes. 

But urine drug screens are easily misinterpreted and often wrong, with false positive rates as high as 50 percent, according to some studies. Without confirmation testing and additional review, false positive results can lead hospitals to wrongly accuse parents of illicit drug use and report babies to child welfare agencies—which may separate newborns from their families, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.

It’s unclear how many of the nation’s 3.6 million births every year involve drug testing, but health care experts said urine screening is ubiquitous. Tens of thousands of infants are reported annually to authorities for in utero drug exposure, with no guarantee that the underlying tests are accurate, our analysis of federal data shows.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something, and it was wrong.”

To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists, and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country. 

Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.

Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft, and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women. 

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care. 

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds—which come from the same plant used to make heroin—are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests. 

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results. 

At least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure, according to a review of state laws and policies by The Marshall Project. But, not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. At least 25 states do not require child welfare workers to confirm positive test results, either. 

While parents often lack protections, most of the caseworkers who investigate them are entitled to confirmation testing and a review if they test positive for drugs on the job, our analysis found. 

Health care providers say there are medical reasons to test labor and delivery patients for drugs, including alerting doctors to watch a newborn for withdrawal symptoms. They also cite concerns about criminal and legal liability if they fail to report positive test results. 

Even when a doctor refutes a positive result and vouches for their patient, hospitals may report the incorrect data anyway to child welfare agencies.

“It’s almost like a gut punch. You come to the hospital and you see a social work note on your patient’s chart,” said Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN in Huntsville, Alabama, who has tried and failed several times to halt child welfare reports and investigations of patients with false positive results. “Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop it,” Robinson said.

No government agency collects comprehensive data on false positive results or on how many pregnant patients are tested. And confidentiality laws that shield medical and child welfare records make it difficult for the public to understand how many families are affected. 

In 2016, Congress mandated states to submit the number of “substance-affected” infants to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Not all states track every case, but from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, medical professionals reported at least 170,000 infants to child welfare agencies for exposure to substances, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 such cases were reported, and authorities removed more than 6,000 infants from their families, our analysis found. 

The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed. 

But the false positive cases The Marshall Project identified include parents of all socioeconomic classes and occupations—from a lawyer to a school librarian to a nurse who drug-tests other people for a living. 

“People should be concerned,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, a leading neonatal researcher who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. “This could happen to any one of us.”

“People should be concerned. This could happen to any one of us.”

Drug screens are more guesswork than exact science. Chemicals in the tests quickly cross-react with urine, flagging anything that looks like it could be an illicit substance. The tests are like fishing nets that are cast wide and pick up anything and everything that fits, said Dr. Gwen McMillin, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine and medical director of a drug-testing lab. The problem is that nets also ensnare fish that aren’t being targeted: compounds that are closely related to illicit substances or merely look similar. 

“Drug testing results need to be confirmed before they go to CPS,” McMillin said. “Actions should not be taken based on a single drug testing result. Period.” 

But sometimes, even confirmation tests can be misinterpreted, as Susan Horton found. At first, Horton was puzzled by her positive test result. She wondered if her urine might have been mixed up with another patient’s. Then—“ding ding ding!”—her last meal popped into her head. She told a nurse about the poppy seeds in her salad, sure that this would resolve her doctors’ concerns. 

Horton’s records show Kaiser ran her urine sample through a second test, and this time it came back positive for one opiate in particular: codeine. That shouldn’t have been surprising—poppy seeds, like the ones in Horton’s salad, are derived from the opium poppy plant and contain codeine. 

To differentiate between salad dressing or bagels and illicit drugs, toxicologists have long recommended testing urine for the presence of a compound called thebaine, which is found in poppy seeds but not in heroin. There’s no indication that the hospital performed or even knew about the thebaine test, leaving providers with no way to prove or disprove Horton’s claims.

“Mom and dad insistent that a Costco salad with poppyseed dressing is responsible,” a doctor wrote in her notes. Another doctor wrote: “We are unable to verify whether this could result in a positive test.”

Soon, multiple doctors and nurses filed into Horton’s room. They said hospital policy dictated that Halle remain there for five days to be monitored for possible drug withdrawal symptoms—“for baby’s safety,” a doctor told Horton.

Unlike most other states that require hospitals to report positive drug tests, California law says a positive test alone “is not in and of itself a sufficient basis for reporting child abuse or neglect.” But because of Covid-19 and her son’s heart condition, Horton had also missed some prenatal appointments, which many providers see as a red flag for drug use. A hospital social worker noted the missed appointments and decided to file a report.

In a statement about its practices in general, Kaiser said it always conducts a “multi-faceted assessment” prior to filing a report to CPS, which is responsible for reviewing the information and investigating. 

Horton insisted that keeping her baby at the hospital was unnecessary. “I’m not a drug addict,” she said she pleaded. Desperate for help, her husband called the police, who declined to oppose hospital directives, records show. 

When the caseworker arrived, the couple refused to sign a safety plan or allow the person to interview their children and inspect their home. So the caseworker immediately obtained a judge’s order and placed baby Halle into temporary custody in the hospital, before discharging her to her grandparents, who were ordered to supervise Horton with her child. 

A few days later, Horton stood silently in court, dressed in pants that clung uncomfortably to her still-healing body, feeling as if her motherhood was on trial. A caseworker told the judge it would be dangerous to release Halle to her parents, and Horton agreed to another drug test. A worker followed her to the bathroom and watched her urinate in a cup.

By then, caseworkers and doctors had privately acknowledged that poppy seeds could have caused Horton’s positive test result. But in court the caseworker didn’t mention that. Instead, she argued that Horton’s purported drug use had “caused serious physical harm” to her child. 

The agency said under state law it can’t comment on individual cases. Speaking generally, it said a single positive drug test, false or otherwise, doesn’t warrant an investigation, and that there needs to be “a reported observation of impact to the child.”

When workplace drug testing was introduced in the 1980s, unions and civil rights groups decried the error rates of drug screens and how companies were firing workers over false positive results. In response, federal authorities mandated safeguards for employees, including requiring confirmation tests and a review from a specially trained doctor to determine whether a food or medication could have caused a positive result. 

A federal medical advisory committee in 1993 urged health care providers who drug-test pregnant patients to adopt the same rigorous standards. But amid the “crack baby” panic, the idea of protecting mothers did not catch on. 

Hospital drug testing policies vary widely. Many facilities, such as Kaiser in Santa Rosa, test every labor-and-delivery patient. Other hospitals flag only certain people, such as those with limited prenatal care, high blood pressure, even bad teeth, experts say. At many hospitals, the decision is up to doctors and nurses, who may view a mother’s tattoos, disheveled clothing, or stressed demeanor with suspicion. Studies have found that the decision to test is rife with class and race bias.

“Those who look like they have less resources, people might say, ‘Well, they look more likely to use drugs,’” said Dr. Cresta Jones, an associate professor and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Hospitals often have full discretion over whether to screen for drugs, but once a positive result is in hand, the decision to report becomes more complicated. Laws and policies in at least 12 states explicitly require hospitals to send screen results to child welfare agencies, even if they are not confirmed, according to The Marshall Project’s review. 

For hospitals, cost is also an issue. While urine screens are cheap, the equipment needed to run a confirmation test costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to the cost of expert personnel and lab certification. Some hospitals contract out confirmation testing—a lower-cost alternative—but getting results can take days, long after many families are ready to go home.

Doctors, nurses, and hospital social workers face an uncomfortable predicament: Do they send the baby home to what they believe could be an unsafe environment, or do they call authorities?

“God forbid the baby goes home, withdraws and dies, we’re going to be held liable for that,” said Dr. Adi Davidov, an obstetrician at Staten Island University Hospital, which drug-tests every birthing patient.

State mandatory reporting laws add to the pressure on doctors and nurses. These laws impose criminal liability on providers who fail to report, while also protecting physicians who report “in good faith”—insulating hospitals from lawsuits if test results are wrong. 

Even when doctors have the ability to order a confirmation test, they don’t always do so. Many misinterpret positive screens as definitive evidence of drug use.

“We were guilty until proven innocent.”

When Grace Smith had her fourth child in 2021 at St. Luke’s University Hospital, an hour north of Philadelphia, she was taking prescribed marijuana and Vyvanse, a medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The medicine contains amphetamine, but the hospital’s drug screen results did not differentiate between meth and amphetamine, according to medical records. The day after Smith delivered her son, a doctor told her that she and her baby had tested positive for meth and that the hospital had notified child protective services.

Smith’s husband, Michael, asked the doctor to review his wife’s medical records to confirm her prescription, according to the doctor’s notes. The doctor argued that wasn’t her role. “I explained that our responsibility as healthcare workers was to report the case” to child welfare authorities, she wrote, adding that the agency “would conduct any investigation that was necessary.”

When Michael Smith told the doctor they were leaving with their baby, the hospital called the police. An officer escorted the parents out, without their newborn, a police report shows. The Smiths said the police told them they would be arrested if they returned.

A spokesperson for St. Luke’s University Health Network declined to answer questions from The Marshall Project, saying in an email that the hospital “complies with all rules and regulations regarding drug testing and reporting” and that the newborn’s welfare “is always our primary concern.”

Four days after the Smiths’ son was born, Monroe County Children and Youth Services told the hospital it was okay to release the baby to his parents. But the investigation remained open. It wasn’t until the Smiths paid more than $3,500 for a lawyer—and nearly $300 for a confirmation drug test that came back negative—that the agency closed their case. The agency declined to comment.

The Smiths filed a lawsuit in 2022 against St. Luke’s. In its response, the hospital acknowledged that it had not given Grace a confirmation test, but denied violating the Smiths’ privacy or civil rights. A judge dismissed the suit in 2023, saying in part that the Smiths did not sufficiently argue their claims.

Many providers erroneously assume that child welfare agencies verify a parent’s drug use. But government caseworkers typically lack the expertise to accurately interpret drug test results. State policy manuals seldom mention the possibility of false positives. It often falls on parents to prove their own innocence.

As a nurse in South Carolina, Ashley Riley said she regularly drug-tested patients in an addiction treatment program, flagged faulty tests, and sent out positive screens for confirmation. But when she herself screened positive for opiates after delivering her son in 2023, Riley said the hospital declined to order a confirmation test, then reported her to authorities.

Riley and her husband, Jeffrey, insisted the positive result was from lemon poppy seed muffins that she had eaten throughout her pregnancy. As proof, Jeffrey Riley texted the investigator a receipt for the muffins, studies on false positives caused by poppy seeds, and the 2023 memo from the Department of Defense urging service members to avoid poppy seeds.

“At no point in time was there anybody in there that was even trying to advocate for my wife, except for me,” he recalled.

At first, he thought his efforts were working. The caseworker acknowledged in his notes having seen the poppy seeds and noted that the report “could be falsified.” 

But the caseworker still insisted the couple sign a safety plan, advising them that their two children would be placed in foster care unless they assigned a “protector”—a responsible adult who would supervise them with their children at all times. This continued for 45 days before the case was closed as unfounded. 

“We were guilty until proven innocent,” Ashley Riley said. 

The hospital even charged $424 for the problematic urine test. Hospital officials did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Will Batchelor, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, wrote in a statement that the agency has a duty to investigate once a hospital has filed a report and that it “exercised appropriate restraint” by not removing the child from the home.

“Because the safety of a child is at stake, DSS has to continue its investigation beyond seeing a receipt for poppy seed muffins,” Batchelor wrote.

Even when a parent has a confirmation test and her own doctor’s word attesting to a false positive result, authorities may keep investigating.

When Melissa Robinson, an elementary school librarian in Huntsville, Alabama, screened pos​​itive for cocaine in early 2024, the news shocked her and her doctors. Robinson had avoided anything during her pregnancy that could be risky, even cold cuts—which may carry bacteria—and had no history of drug use. Because of the positive test, staff told Robinson she was not allowed to breastfeed her daughter, hospital records show, and they reported her to Alabama’s child welfare agency, the Department of Human Resources. Robinson said a caseworker told her that she probably wouldn’t be allowed to be alone with her baby—her husband would have to supervise.

A few days later, a confirmation test came back negative for any substances. With proof that she had not used cocaine, Robinson assumed the case would be closed. Instead, the agency continued to investigate, inspecting her home and even requiring her husband to take a drug test, she said.

A spokesperson for Alabama’s child welfare agency said they are required to respond immediately to a hospital report and “make safety decisions relying on current and most accessible information.”

When the baby was two weeks old, the agency closed the case, citing insufficient evidence. But the allegations will remain on Robinson’s record for at least five years.

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult,” Robinson recalled. “Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult. Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

Some medical groups and providers have taken steps to reduce unnecessary child welfare reports. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises hospitals to use a screening questionnaire rather than drug tests to identify people who may have substance abuse problems. The organization also recommends that hospitals obtain consent from patients, explaining the potential consequences of a positive result—including if the hospital is required to report it to authorities. A number of large hospitals have adopted some version of those recommendations. 

After a study at Staten Island University Hospital in New York found a high rate of false positives, administrators brought the confirmation testing in-house. They said results come back within a day or two, rather than the week that is typical for outside tests, which allows providers to wait before contacting child welfare.

“Any time you act on a test that’s not 100 percent, you run the risk of causing more harm than good,” said the hospital’s Dr. Davidov. “If you are going to get CPS involved with a mother who did nothing wrong and is a good citizen, that’s harming her. It’s harming her experience, it’s harming her ability to take care of her newborn.”

In recent years, advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against hospitals for testing without explicit consent, which has led some state officials and lawmakers to speak out against the testing. But in most of the United States, it remains common practice to report families based on unconfirmed positive screens. Most of the women interviewed by The Marshall Project signed general consent forms at the hospital but said they were never informed explicitly they would be drug-tested, nor that a positive result could be reported to authorities.

For Susan Horton, her family’s ordeal has created an undercurrent of fear that courses through her daily life. 

After the court hearing in August 2022, child welfare workers took the baby to Horton’s elderly in-laws and barred Horton and her husband from being alone with their newborn while the agency investigated. Finally, almost two weeks after their daughter was born, the agency withdrew its petition and a judge dismissed the case, allowing the Hortons to bring baby Halle home.

One afternoon last spring, Horton took her daughter, now a toddler, outside. Halle giggled as her mother chased her around the front yard, her little feet splashing in a small mud hole. This was the life Horton had envisioned years ago—a quiet place in the California countryside where her children could delight in the world around them. And yet, Horton couldn’t help but remember the investigation that destroyed her family’s peace of mind—and her self-esteem.

“I had a lot of confidence in how I mother and how I parent,” she said. “Now in my head, I’m always questioning my choices.” She wondered aloud what neighbors would say if they saw her daughter playing in the mud, if someone might accuse her of being a bad parent.

“I just always have that looming feeling that at any moment CPS could come knocking and take my children away.” 

Marshall Project reporters Weihua Li, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Nakylah Carter, and Catherine Odom contributed to this story.

In the aftermath of the bloodshed on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, state authorities arrested Colin Gray, whose 14-year-old son, Colt Gray, allegedly shot four people to death and injured nine others before surrendering to police. The father is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, eight counts of cruelty to children—and, most significantly, two counts of second-degree murder.

The murder charges are unprecedented, the most severe ever filed against the parent of a school shooter. Late Thursday, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said at a news conference that the charges against Colin Gray are “directly connected with the actions of his son” and that the father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon.”

Authorities have not provided further details about evidence they may have, but according to news reports, Colin Gray owned the type of AR-15 that his son allegedly used in the attack. And Colt Gray had been “begging for months” for mental health help but had received none, according to an aunt of his who spoke to the Washington Post. (Colt Gray has been charged with four counts of murder and will be tried as an adult, authorities said.)

For more than a decade, I’ve studied and reported on the American epidemic of mass shootings. Over the past several years, and particularly since early 2024, a dramatic shift has taken shape: a reckoning for the parents of school shooters. Today, with more than 400 million guns and a lack of political will to regulate them more effectively nationwide, it may be that America has begun to find another route—a legal end-run of sorts—to bring accountability for these events of catastrophic gun violence.

The arrest of the school shooter’s father in Georgia comes just seven months after James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of a 15-year-old school shooter in Michigan, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter—also a first. What is publicly alleged so far about the role of Colin Gray appears to echo the case of the Crumbleys, who were found to have ignored their son’s mental health crisis and supplied him with the gun he used to commit his attack at Oxford High School, where four died and seven were injured.

The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included. But that theme no longer holds.

It is a near certainty that in the days and weeks ahead, more details will emerge about warning signs given off by the school shooter in Georgia, one of 20 states now requiring plans for violence prevention in public schools. School shootings are almost always preceded by such warning signs. Significant questions also loom about what may have been done regarding concerns about Colt Gray by law enforcement or the school district, after anonymous tips about threats posted online put him on the radar of the FBI and local authorities in 2023.

Another parental role—starkly different—came into public view this spring, when we published my two-year investigation, “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” in Mother Jones and aired a companion audio investigation on our radio show Reveal. These chronicle the experience of Chin Rodger, whose son Elliot Rodger committed mass murder in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin Rodger hadn’t been able to recognize her deeply troubled son’s suicidal and homicidal warning behaviors, but she had gone to great lengths to get him help and care before his attack. Years later she began working with violence prevention experts at the FBI and beyond, sharing myriad details about her son’s life with them—and eventually with the public—in hopes of raising awareness about warning signs and helping avert future violence.

As I wrote in the story: “The public rarely hears from parents of mass shooters apart from brief statements of sorrow in the aftermath. The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included. But that theme no longer holds, especially in light of a recent tragedy that could remake the legal landscape.”

There I was referring to the new criminal precedent established with the Crumbleys—one with the potential to expand, it now appears, with the case in Georgia. The recurring mass murder of school kids and their teachers drives intense public calls for finding culpability among parents (and others), which may well be warranted in some cases. But this nascent trend of criminalizing parents is not without possible pitfalls, including, legal experts have said, for mothers and fathers of minority children exposed disproportionately to gun violence.

Another notable development in the past several years has been a trend of civil liability for gun manufacturers who market their AR-15s and other firearms aggressively to America’s youth. In early 2022, Remington, the company that made the AR-15 used in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, agreed to a landmark $73 million civil settlement with victims’ families. In late 2022, the family of a 10-year-old victim in Uvalde, Texas, filed suit against Daniel Defense, the maker of the AR-15 used in the massacre at Robb Elementary School, accusing the company of using militaristic marketing appeals to target “young male consumers.”

The devastation in Georgia this week is far from the first to involve a shockingly young perpetrator. The shooter at Oxford High School in 2021 was only one year older, just 15 at the time. Other cases going back in time, documented in our mass shootings database and in my book on prevention, Trigger Points, have involved shooters as young as 13 and 11 years old.

In January 2023, a 6-year-old child brought a pistol to school in Virginia and shot his first grade teacher—a case in which the mother was later imprisoned for gun-related federal crimes. (The child used the mother’s unsecured firearm; her prosecution involved drug use and lying related to the gun purchase.)

What happened in Georgia this week serves as a particularly stark reminder: In America, a teenager can easily get his hands on a military-grade rifle and use it to gun down his classmates and teachers. Why we have this problem—and tens of millions of AR-15s in civilian hands—is complicated and arises from a recent history that many Americans know relatively little about.

Another reminder about this problem worth repeating is that, despite popular opinion, it is not an unsolvable one. Now, deterrence for gun-owning parents may be a growing part of a broader solution.

When New York’s Nassau County signed the first county-level mask ban into law in August, its deputy police commissioner, Kevin Smith, told local news that training was “being conducted [in] the department, which means across ranks.”

But that has not happened, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Through an information request reviewed by Mother Jones, NYCLU, a state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, requested policies and training materials used to instruct the county’s police on enforcing the ban. In return, the group received a three-page legal bulletin on the “Mask Transparency Act,” and a six-slide presentation, including a title page, briefly going over the new law. The presentation reiterates the bulletin’s explanation of the law, as well as saying police officers still need to follow Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure—but there is little else.

“There’s none of the sort of type of training and guardrails you would expect to see in a police procedure or in a training module around how you interact with members of the public,” said Beth Haroules, a senior staff attorney at NYCLU.

The very brief materials also do not address people’s rights in protecting their health information from police, which also underscores why police officers cannot independently determine whether someone is wearing a mask for health reasons. “You’re not allowed to interrogate somebody about their private health information, or family member’s or loved one’s health information,” Haroules continued, “including whether or not you’re just Covid cautious,” something county law enforcement seems to have overlooked altogether.

The Nassau County Police Department did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on the extent of its training.

The law allows Nassau County police four reasons to question people about their mask-wearing—among them, when they are gathered in a public space with other people who are wearing masks. Haroules notes that this seems to clearly target people at protests, especially recent waves of pro-Palestinian protests, some of whom may be wearing masks for health reasons—but the implications for who the ban could suddenly impact would be much wider.

“You could be waiting at a bus stop at Nassau County with a mask on, and then, suddenly, three or four more people show up,” Haroules said. “You’re all subject to arrest or interrogation as to whether or not you have a right to wear that mask.”

As Mother Jones previously reported, fear of being interrogated by police over masking has led Disability Rights New York to sue Nassau County in federal court on behalf of two disabled residents.

Since the mask ban law was enacted, two people have been charged with misdemeanors for violating it, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. In both cases, Haroules says, “there probably wasn’t probable cause to arrest either gentleman.”

Haroules agrees with concerns that people of color will be disproportionately targeted for wearing masks. The Nassau County Police Department, Haroules says, “has a documented history of inappropriate interactions with people of color.” (It also has a troubled record on other fronts, including around residents’ civil rights.)

Choosing to wear masks, as Haroules told Mother Jones she herself continues to do on public transportation, is an individual decision which mask bans threaten. Having other community members “enforcing the mask ban by threatening to call police,” Haroules says, “really suggests that there’s a societal problem.”

Jade Dass was taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant—which scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend. But after Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

Even as medications like Suboxone help pregnant women safely treat addiction, taking them can trigger investigations by child welfare agencies that separate parents from their newborns. Why are women like Dass being investigated for using addiction-treatment medications during pregnancy?

To understand the scope of the dragnet, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Shoshana Walter and Melissa Lewis, with a team of researchers and lawyers, filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy. 

This week on Reveal, in an episode first aired in July 2023, follow Dass as she grapples with losing custody of her baby—and makes one last desperate attempt to keep her family together.

For more about Dass and other mothers facing investigation for taking medication-assisted treatment, read Shoshana Walter’s investigation in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine.

More than four years after Kentucky police barged into Breonna Taylor’s home in the middle of the night and shot her to death, her family is still fighting for justice. And this week, a federal judge dealt them a major blow.

On Thursday, US District Judge Charles Simpson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, dismissed felony charges against two of the former Louisville officers involved in the police raid that led to Taylor’s death. Instead, the judge ruled that Taylor’s boyfriend was legally responsible for her death. The officers still face other charges.

Former Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany were not present at the raid on Taylor’s home in March 2020, but they allegedly lied to obtain a warrant for other officers to enter in search of drugs. Taylor, a Black 26-year-old medical worker, had fallen asleep watching the movie Freedom Writers when, a little after midnight, seven plainclothes police barged through her door. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, thinking the officers were intruders, fired a single shot, and the officers returned with a barrage of bullets that struck Taylor. As she lay wounded, Walker called 911, still not realizing it was the police who had attacked them.

In 2022 the Justice Department filed civil rights charges against four current and former officers who were involved in her death, including Jaynes and Meany. Not long afterward I was writing a profile of Taylor’s aunt, Bianca Austin, who told me that the family felt relieved about the prosecutions. “I was just so happy,” Austin said of the indictments. “I’m just grateful the DOJ decided to do their job, that somebody decided to step up and say, ‘This is not right.'”

Within a few weeks of the charges, one of the four officers, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty. Goodlett said she and her colleagues lied to obtain the warrant by claiming to have evidence they didn’t have. More specifically, she said she did not stop Jaynes when he falsely claimed to have proof that a drug dealer was sending packages to Taylor’s apartment. According to prosecutors, the warrant application also stated that the dealer used Taylor’s address as his own, even though the detectives knew the dealer did not live there. No drugs were found on the premises.

The lies allegedly continued later. News of Taylor’s death sparked widespread outrage. Thousands protested. As public backlash grew, according to prosecutors, Goodlett and Jaynes met in Jaynes’ garage to scheme how they could cover up the false statements they had made. And according to prosecutors, Meany allegedly lied to the FBI.

The two cops who actually shot Taylor—Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove—were never charged. Prosecutors said they did not know their colleagues had lied to obtain the warrant. Instead, the Justice Department blamed the four other officers for Taylor’s death. But on Thursday, Judge Simpson disagreed. “While the indictment alleges that Jaynes and Meany set off a series of events that ended in Taylor’s death, it also alleges that [Taylor’s boyfriend, Walker] disrupted those events when he decided to open fire” on the police, Simpson wrote. Walker’s “decision to open fire,” he added, “is the legal cause of her death.”

The ruling effectively reduced some of the felony charges against Jaynes and Meany, which had carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors. But officers are not totally off the hook: The judge refused to dismiss a charge against Jaynes for conspiracy and a charge against Meany for lying to the FBI. Goodlett, who pleaded guilty to federal charges, is expected to testify against them at their trials. A fourth former officer, Brett Hankison, also faces a retrial for federal charges in October.

Taylor’s family said prosecutors plan to appeal this week’s ruling. “Obviously we are devastated,” the family wrote in a statement to the Associated Press. “The only thing we can do at this point is continue to be patient…we will continue to fight until we get full justice for Breonna Taylor.”

As soon as President Biden handed the baton to Kamala Harris, who is now expected to clinch the Democratic nomination, her campaign team and many journalists started framing the presidential race in new terms: “the prosecutor vs. the felon.”

Before I became vice president and before I was elected as U.S. senator, I was the attorney general of California. Before that, I was a prosecutor who took on predators, fraudsters, and cheaters.

So I know Donald Trump’s type.

In this campaign, I will put my record against his. pic.twitter.com/fdnlJNTIKH

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 23, 2024

The slogan, which you’ve probably heard repeated ad nauseam by now, is a not-so-subtle reference to Donald Trump’s extremely long rap sheet—filled with 34 criminal convictions—and to Harris’ record of convicting law-breakers while she was San Francisco’s district attorney and then California’s attorney general.

Many former presidents started as lawyers, but Harris would be among the rare few, along with Bill Clinton, William McKinley, and Benjamin Harrison, to bring a prosecutor’s resume to the table. (Side note: It has been reported that James Polk was a county prosecutor, but Polk biographer Walter Borneman dug through his sourcing for me and could find no evidence to suggest he was.) Over the past week, we’ve heard Democratic strategists and political commentators speak on what Harris’ legal credentials could mean for the election. But I wanted to talk with a different sort of expert: those who have actually worked inside prosecutors’ offices.

Cristine Soto DeBerry was chief of staff to then-San Francisco DAs George Gascón and Chesa Boudin, just after Harris vacated that office, and now leads the Prosecutors Alliance of California. Miriam Krinsky was a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and the Mid-Atlantic and now runs Fair and Just Prosecution, which works with DAs around the country. And Jamila Hodge, who leads nonprofit Equal Justice USA, previously served as a federal prosecutor in DC and advised the Obama administration on criminal justice policies.

I called them up separately last week after Biden endorsed Harris. Here, they reflect on how Harris’ record as a chief prosecutor could help or hurt her in the race, how it could come in handy if she wins, and what her likely nomination says about these strange times we find ourselves in.

On how Harris’ prosecutorial skill set could be useful in the Oval Office:

Soto DeBerry: The Supreme Court says the president is above the law. Who thinks that’s right? Nobody. And who says we need to hold people to rules? Prosecutors.

“Running this country requires a lot of backbone.”

Harris has a great record on holding powerful people accountable. During the mortgage crisis when she was California’s attorney general, she refused to accept the smaller amount the banks offered in that settlement—she held out and got a huge settlement. When she was San Francisco DA, she made a pledge that she wouldn’t seek the death penalty, and then a police officer was killed almost immediately in her term, and she stood to her principles on that under enormous political pressure, including from Sen. Feinstein and the police union. She’s so tested in being able to stand her ground.

Krinsky: That’s a testament to a backbone, and running this country requires a lot of backbone. She understands the need for prosecutorial independence—prosecutors are not partisan puppets. That’s important as we’re seeing efforts by some to politicize the vast clout and power that prosecutors have.

On how it could makes things more difficult for her during the election:

Hodge: She did harm as a prosecutor; you’re not going to find a prosecutor’s office, even progressive prosecutors’ offices, where harm is not being done. If we understand history—abolishing slavery through the 13th Amendment but carving out the exception, and the imposition of Black Codes—the [legal] system has been used as a means of control of the formerly enslaved. That same foundation still exists. In any courtroom, you’re going to see an overrepresentation of Black people, brown people, marginalized people, poor people. And so harm is being done.

I think that is going to be a liability. You can see it now, just as the announcement came out: There are some folks who are excited, but there are some folks who are very concerned because of her background as a prosecutor, and because they know the system disproportionately harms these important groups.

On Harris’ evolution with criminal justice:

Hodge: She started as a DA in the ’90s, when “tough on crime” was the status quo, and took positions on some things that are now coming back to bite her: You know, that parents should be jailed if kids were absent. As an AG, she would fight to keep the death penalty.

Krinsky: Even at the time, she stood up in some important ways: She recognized the vital importance of building successful reentry back to the community for individuals who have been behind bars.

She was one of the early implementers of body-worn cameras, of implicit bias principles. Those are concepts that have become far more normalized now, but she was an early embracer.

Soto DeBerry: She’s been nuanced in it; her record isn’t all reform or all aggressive: And that’s a lot of where the conversation is right now.

“Her record isn’t all reform or all aggressive.”

Hodge: Over these last 30 years, we’re understanding that punishment doesn’t have the deterrent effect that we thought it did, and that if we want to drive down violence, we need to have better strategies. Under the Biden-Harris administration, there are federal dollars for grassroots efforts that address the root causes of violence—working with youth exposed to trauma, and programs where people volunteer and essentially walk kids to school so they are safe. Services like cognitive behavioral therapy, or grief counseling. Her own support of these approaches mirrors our movement as a country on these issues: that there’s a better way.

On what a Harris presidency could mean for other prosecutors:

Krinsky: Reform-minded prosecutors have seen increasing attacks on their autonomy: efforts to remove elected DAs from office, to erode their discretion. In [the GOP’s] Agenda47 and Project 2025, there’s a suggestion that we should move toward a politicized Department of Justice and labels like “Marxist prosecutors.” [Editor’s note: Trump recently called for the DOJ to investigate reformist DAs who decline to charge certain crimes.] The attacks of local prosecutors for decisions they’re making is going to drive those decisions into the shadows—we’re going to lose the transparency that currently exists, and people aren’t going to know where their DA stands on critical issues.

Harris recognizes the danger in eroding an independent Department of Justice, in politicizing elected local prosecutors, in removing somebody from office just because their agenda may not align with that of the state executive or the president. And so there’s hope that if she’s in office, those fundamental principles around democracy and the rule of law will remain sound.

Hodge: Black women prosecutors who lead offices, particularly offices where they are implementing policies to change the system, have had a hard time—they get lots of death threats, racist attacks. So it’s got to be encouraging [for them] to see that if you keep pushing, if you keep putting your head down and doing the work, sometimes it comes together and your work is seen. Your leadership is recognized, and the doors are open for you.

Interview excerpts have been condensed.

Adam Aurand spent nearly a decade of his life stuck in an endless “churn” of emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, prison, and life on the streets in and around Seattle. He picked up diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. He also used opioids and methamphetamine.

Each time he entered an institution for care or incarceration, he was released back into homelessness. And the cycle started again.

In 2023, his mother Heidi made a last-ditch effort to break the pattern. “I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that wasn’t the answer,” she said.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

On this week’s episode of Reveal, reporters from the Lost Patients podcast by KUOW and the Seattle Times try to answer a question: Why do America’s systems for treating serious mental illness break down in this way? 

Finding the answer took them to the present-day streets of Seattle, decades into America’s past, and into the minds of people who experience psychosis.

Adam Aurand spent nearly a decade of his life stuck in an endless “churn” of emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, prison, and life on the streets in and around Seattle. He picked up diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. He also used opioids and methamphetamine.

Each time he entered an institution for care or incarceration, he was released back into homelessness. And the cycle started again.

In 2023, his mother Heidi made a last-ditch effort to break the pattern. “I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that wasn’t the answer,” she said.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

On this week’s episode of Reveal, reporters from the Lost Patients podcast by KUOW and the Seattle Times try to answer a question: Why do America’s systems for treating serious mental illness break down in this way? 

Finding the answer took them to the present-day streets of Seattle, decades into America’s past, and into the minds of people who experience psychosis.

Update: On Tuesday, Attorney Ben Crump announced that the Department of Justice will be investigating the death of Sonya Massey, who was shot and killed by a former Illinois sheriff’s deputy earlier this month. 

“We don’t know what the scope is. We just know they’ve opened an investigation file on Sonya Massey,” said Crump in a press conference. “Obviously, with the family’s guidance, if the family wants them to go deeper, we’re going to advocate for them to go deeper.”

On Monday, an Illinois county sheriff’s department released body camera footage showing the fatal shooting of a Black woman who originally called 911 for help. Earlier this month, Deputy Sean Grayson shot 36-year-old Sonya Massey after she attempted to move a pot of water off of her stove at the officer’s behest.

The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office has reportedly fired Grayson, who was later charged with first-degree murder last week. He’s pleaded not guilty.

“She needed a helping hand,” attorney Ben Crump said at a press conference on Monday. “She didn’t need a bullet to the face.” On July 6, Massey reportedly called the authorities about a potential prowler around her Springfield home. Officer Grayson and another deputy arrived on the scene.

While asking her a few questions, Grayson asked her to turn off her stove, where a pot of water was reportedly boiling. Massey gets up to turn it off and pick up the pot. The officers then step back. She asks where they’re going; Grayson replies, “Away from your hot steaming water.”

Massey then says, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” Grayson responds that she “better not,” threatening to shoot her “in her fucking face.” She apologizes before three shots ring in the air.

As Massey laid bleeding in her kitchen, the other unnamed officer said he was going to get his medical kit from his car when Grayson said, “Nah, she’s done. You can go get it, but that’s a headshot.”

Following the shooting, the 30-year-old deputy referred to Massey as a “crazy fucking bitch” to other officers who arrived on the scene. Grayson’s body camera was reportedly turned off for most of the shooting.

The footage of Massey’s death, captured by the other deputy’s body camera, shocked the nation. Several local, state, and federal officials have condemned the officer’s actions. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both released statements calling for justice for Massey’s family on Tuesday.

“Sonya Massey deserved to be safe,” said Harris. “After she called the police for help, she was tragically killed in her own home at the hands of a responding officer sworn to protect and serve.”

In an interview with CNN, her father, James Wilburn, alleged that law enforcement had given them conflicting information about his daughter’s death, leading him to believe that a robber had killed her. Massey’s killing has devastated him.

“Sonya was a daddy’s girl. She never ended a conversation—whether by text or telephone or in person—without saying, ‘Daddy, I love you,” her father, James Wilburn, told CNN’s Laura Coates in an interview. “And that’s the last message I have from my daughter that’s saved on my voicemail, was ‘Daddy, I love you.'”

When police kill someone, a medical examiner lists their cause of death—which plays a significant role in whether a police officer will be held accountable.

Some of those determinations shield the police from potential accountability: notably, “excited delirium,” a so-called syndrome not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases, with research finding that most deaths attributed to the term involve aggressive restraint.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, a professor of American studies at Princeton University, traces the history of “excited delirium” in a new book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease—and calls it a “very useful tool that has allowed medical examiners to participate in these cover-ups.”

Beliso-De Jesús spoke to me about the racist and xenophobic views behind the term, the devastating impact of its pseudoscience on the families of the deceased, and what has to be done to move forward.

Forensic pathologist Charles Wetli first used the concept of “excited delirium” in dismissing the deaths of Black sex workers in the 1980s; they were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer. Does the term’s origin speak to its being dehumanizing? 

Medical diagnoses are supposed to be helpful to people. But as we can see in the example of excited delirium, and specifically with the misdiagnosis of the cases that you’re referring to—the misdiagnosis of Black women who were strangled to death, murdered and raped by a serial killer—which Charles Wetli described as “cocaine sex deaths,” this horrific term was really used for him to substantiate his argument.

He used these Black women’s deaths to sort of make the argument that Black people, who he saw as a species that was separate from white people, had a specific genetic flaw [causing them] to die spontaneously.

He argued Black women died through small amounts of cocaine use and sexual activity, which he assumed or presumed to be consensual. Then he argued that Black men died spontaneously around police officers. This reveals so much dehumanization.

How did Wetli use and misconstrue Afro-Latine religions in rationalizing excited delirium? 

The relationship between Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine and “excited delirium syndrome” is not direct or obvious, but I think it’s much more subtle and ingrained. So this is the 1980s, during the Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans arrived as refugees in Miami—and those Cubans that arrive are darker, poorer and less well or less resourced than the previous generations of Cubans, who were whiter and wealthier.

Wetli was in his first couple of years as the new assistant medical examiner, and at the same time, there was a mass criminalization of this community. You see it in stereotypes like the famous Tony Montana from Scarface, who is this sweaty, aggravated, sexual predator mobster who is addicted to cocaine and murder.

Charles Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine, particularly on the tattoos of Afro-Cubans, is a participation in this longer criminalization of Afro-Cuban religions. He has this hobby where he claims himself as an expert on Afro-Caribbean religions, or cults, as he calls them.

He’s saying that, basically, mostly Black and Latino men have this tendency to become aggressive, sweaty, and overheated—essentially just self-combusting as a result of their aggressiveness. And as a result, he argues, they die, and police witness their deaths. It becomes a pattern with the Afro-Cubans he’s studying, where he blames the religion and the Cubans as these aggressive criminals, almost a plague infection into the United States.

How has the label of “excited delirium” in the killing of Black people by police been used to underplay how lethal other forms of police violence can be, such as the use of tasers?

Excited delirium has allowed for certain deaths to go under the radar for so long. With shootings, it’s very clear what the cause of death was. But for many years, with this term, these deaths have been completely ignored.

What excited delirium does is say that the person’s own behavior— cocaine use or hyper-masculinity, aggressiveness—leads to their death. As a result, there’s a very frightening, medicalized cover-up of police violence. If it hadn’t been for footage of George Floyd’s death, many people would have taken for granted the initial argument: that he was simply a man who died under medical distress. That was what [Minneapolis police] had posted when his death first occurred. Without the bystander video, there really would have been no way for the world to have known that this was someone who was essentially murdered in plain sight.

Was there anything that stood out to you in conversations with family members of people whose deaths were labeled as excited delirium?

For a lot of the family members I spoke with, there is a sense of relief—because for many years, people were blaming the victims. A family I interviewed was told that their father just suddenly up and died during a police car chase, that it was his drug use, and his heart had just self-combusted. There were other stories that maybe the police had pushed him off the road. Questions around that completely got erased by the narrative.

These people who are labeled as dying by “excited delirium” are often seen as written off by society, similar to the way that the Black women who were murdered and raped were written off as so-called “crack whores.” That weaponization [of the term] by police justified blaming the victims, and in many [cases], created a buffer for police and medical doctors to work together to write off whole communities.

The American Medical Association came out against “excited delirium” in 2021. What do you think would need to change for its racist pseudoscience to be discarded?

I’m really glad to see that there have been many people, many organizations, many states, actively working against excited delirium right now. I think it’s [a trend] that grew out of the post-2020 uprising of people coming together and recognizing systemic police violence.

That practice has not gone away simply because people don’t use the term any longer. People are still being tased and asphyxiated. Police officers are putting their weight on people’s bodies, putting them into chokeholds; people are complaining of not being able to breathe, and then ultimately dying. Medical examiners and coroners are still using the same kinds of medical justifications, like heart failure and drug use, rather than acknowledging the role of police violence in these deaths.

We have to continue to ensure that we don’t just focus solely on this term, but on the broader structure of policing in the country and how these two institutions—medical institutions, police institutions—are tied together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It took seven long years to pry one staggering number from the hands of the federal government: that 52,529 weapons once owned by police were recovered at crime scenes across the country from 2006 to 2021. In that period, an average of nine cop guns were recovered each day. The public didn’t know it.

This statistic was the missing piece in a yearslong reporting effort by Reveal, the Trace, and CBS News into how weapons sold by police departments were getting into the hands of criminals. Reveal first sought this information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—the keystone law centered on government transparency. But it wouldn’t be that easy. As Reveal’s court battles demonstrate, there is resistance to such transparency. 

These types of legal battles over FOIA requests are becoming more commonplace. According to a 2020 study by the FOIA Project, a Syracuse University-based research effort, media outlets filed more FOIA lawsuits to disclose government records during Donald Trump’s four-year presidential term than in the 16 years spanning Barack Obama and George W. Bush’s administrations. 

The origins of the police weapons FOIA case date back to 2008, when Alain Stephens, then a police recruit, purchased a Glock handgun in a Texas parking lot that turned out to have come from a New Jersey police department. It got him thinking: How often do police guns end up in the hands of criminals? This question grew into a larger project once Stephens became a reporter and started the fight for this number as a fellow at Reveal. After his FOIA request was denied based on an argument that firearms trace data is confidential, the Reveal legal team sued—but it took seven years to claim victory. 

Five of those years were court battles that rose all the way to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The case stalled further after another federal court interpreted the exemption differently and generated an opposing precedent, creating uncertainty.

The last two years were spent waiting for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to cough up that one statistic. Armed with that number—52,529 former law enforcement weapons recovered at crime scenes—teams at the Trace, CBS News, and Reveal found that many of these guns had been traded in or sold back to gun manufacturers, a cost-saving measure that has sent thousands of guns back onto the streets to be used in violent crimes.

I spoke with D. Victoria Baranetsky—general counsel for the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), which houses Mother Jones and Reveal—about the battle over transparency on cop guns and the state of FOIA today. She’s led several other FOIA lawsuits for Reveal that have forced more transparency from the federal government: The rate of worker injuries at Amazon warehouses and most other American employers is no longer confidential, and the government now has to disclose the diversity of contractors it hires. She recently filed a case against OpenAI and Microsoft for using CIR’s content without permission or compensation. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.

How did this case with the ATF start?

It started with Alain [Stephens] calling me up and being like, “Does this law say what I think it says?” 

Alain was explaining to me that he was trying to get data from the ATF, but he was denied. There was this statute called the Tiahrt Amendment that did not allow for gun data to be disclosed. But there were exceptions—and the third exception under the law was for statistical aggregate data. 

And he said, “I’m asking for just the number of guns that law enforcement have given back and put back into the marketplace.” And I said, “Yeah, I think that’s statistical aggregate data.” 

So we sued.

What arguments did the ATF give for withholding data about police guns used in crimes?

They were saying that that exception was not meant for reporters. It was meant for only law enforcement and other folks that were supposed to be getting access to this data, not the general public. 

And then there was a whole new issue entirely. They said that making them search for this number through their database would be the creation of a new record, and agencies are not required to create new records. They’re only required to produce what they have. And so they said, “Listen, you make us plug in this analysis and spew out a number for you, that’s going to be a new record that wouldn’t have existed prior, and so we’re not obligated to disclose this.” 

The court shut that down immediately.

That kind of analysis would essentially destroy all kinds of data searches that governments have in their capacity today, because we’re living in the modern world and databases are the way that information is held. So if you limited searching a database as the creation of a new record, you’d essentially cut off access to tons of information that the public should have the right to know. 

Unfortunately, this is not the only case where we have come across that argument. 

So has that become a new tactic of how the government tries to restrict access to data?

Yes, it has worked in some locations. There’s a smattering of cases across the country leaning in either direction, but there’s no prevailing outcome yet as this is still being deliberated on across the country. 

I think there’s also an even more disturbing reason for transparency today, which is more and more information is being created than ever before—and more is being collected than ever before by large corporate and government powers. There’s a massive imbalance as to who has access to that data; it’s all corporations and governments.

That is one of the reasons why this case was actually a huge win completely outside the realm of the ATF…this was something that would apply to all cases involving databases.

What does a seven-year FOIA legal battle look like? 

A lot of emails. 

This was actually the longest case I dealt with while I’ve been at this job. It’s just stages of a lot of intense work and then waiting. So writing the brief, which takes, like, three months, and you’re kind of in this tunnel vision of how to perfectly describe this argument to the court, and you submit it, you file it at midnight, and then you wait. You just wait for months and months and then get an argument date, and you prep for that for months and months. And then you wait. 

Why is data transparency important for democracy?

In the United States, FOIA is actually one of the very few laws committed to transparency. And constitutionally, there are actually fewer and fewer protections for transparency.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of Exemption 3 statutes. Those are the statutes that Congress has been lobbied to pass to stop information from being disclosed under FOIA.

In fact, the Tiahrt Amendment, and the center of this case with Alain, was one of those statutes. The NRA [National Rifle Association] lobbied for that law to be passed, and I think they very intelligently did so, because I think its impact was actually huge. When you don’t have access to information, the public doesn’t really know what it thinks about an issue, because it can’t really get to the facts of the matter. So, I think, in general, facts help people make choices that can help them then make choices about who they elect into power. 

But I think there’s also an even more disturbing reason for transparency today, which is more and more information is being created than ever before—and more is being collected than ever before by large corporate and government powers. There’s a massive imbalance as to who has access to that data; it’s all corporations and governments. For the public to not have a countervailing pressure or countervailing force to have access to that is deeply problematic. More and more decisions are having an impact in our life that corporations and governments are involved in, and they’re making those decisions based on data that we have no access to. If you have no access to that, there’s no accountability as to how those decisions are being made.

Reveal faced a SLAPP lawsuit in 2016 from Planet Aid that was eventually thrown out by a federal court in 2021. What does the legal battle with Planet Aid have in common with the lawsuit for gun trace data? 

A SLAPP is a strategic lawsuit against public participation, something that’s supposed to quash First Amendment free speech activity. And anti-SLAPP statutes were created to quickly go into court. It’s not, theoretically, supposed to take more than a year or so at most. That [SLAPP] case went on for years—this incredible process of delay, delay, delay, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, for something that was especially made to be answered quickly and efficiently. It dragged out for so long that it almost bankrupted our organization. You see tactics of this being used all over our system. 

I think that’s the greatest parallel to this case with Alain. There’s no end in sight, right? Like, you filed a lawsuit. You go through seven years. You win. And then you still have to file another lawsuit to actually enforce it. To get to finality, it just takes too long now, much longer than it ever should have taken. 

And there’s an added problem with FOIA where at some point, that information is stale. It doesn’t matter in the same way it would have mattered if it had been disclosed years prior. 

Most smaller newsrooms and freelance journalists don’t have the luxury of legal support on staff like Mother Jones and Reveal do. Knowing that, what does this mean for journalism? 

Most newsrooms, most journalists, most academics, protesters, citizens just don’t have the legal support to execute this. And that is really unfortunate and depressing. There was a paper written more than five years ago about how corporations are actually the ones that use FOIA the most to find out information about their competitors. So FOIA, drafted for the public and reporters, is not really being used by that sect of people. It’s being used often by corporate stakeholders who want to find information and that’ll give them a competitive advantage.

I still think [FOIA] does a lot, but I think the problem is how agencies choose to comply. The pressure put on them to comply is very minimal, and I think that greatly impacts journalism, because you know that if you actually did have access to this information, it would be helpful. 

In looking at FOIAs, does the presidential administration make a difference in how they’re treated? Did you see differences between our fights under Trump and Biden’s administrations? 

Honestly, I don’t think any administration is ever forthright in giving information. I think if you ask most people who live in the land of FOIA lawsuits, they’ll tell you that every administration kind of acts with a similarly hostile manner. The truth is power wants to hide problems. Power chooses to evade accountability, and that’s the whole point of FOIA. I think anyone who’s really in that position doesn’t necessarily want to share information. And our government, especially since 9/11, has just become a secrecy-obsessed state.

Thinking forward, what do you think the future holds for FOIA requests? 

There are all these specific areas that are going under a lot of different splits or interpretations. One of them is about whether data searching a database is the production of a new record. That’s like one little spot. I think that there are a few other hot-button areas. One is like the exemption “Glomar,” where an agency gives the response, “Can’t confirm or deny that the records even exist.” Now we’re seeing that Glomar is applied even in cases where Glomar can’t be applied, or just the expansion of Glomar. 

There was a decision that came out in 2019 that changed the test for what was confidential business information, which is exempt. And the Supreme Court changed it to be more friendly toward corporations. Previously, confidential business information was things that only would substantially hurt a corporation if disclosed—like you have an ingredient list for Coca-Cola. But the court changed it to whatever a company says is customarily or actually secret. As long as they give it a rubber stamp and say it’s so, it is so. I think that area of law already has had a lot of litigation, but that’ll be really interesting. 

Transparency has actually always been a bipartisan issue. In some ways, all administrations hate it and all administrations love it because it equally hurts both sides or helps both sides. So that’s why legislation on FOIA has been able to pass over the past decade. That being said, the courts have been much more pro-corporate and pro-law enforcement in a way that I do worry will further stifle the charge of FOIA.

It took seven long years to pry one staggering number from the hands of the federal government: that 52,529 weapons once owned by police were recovered at crime scenes across the country from 2006 to 2021. In that period, an average of nine cop guns were recovered each day. The public didn’t know it.

This statistic was the missing piece in a yearslong reporting effort by Reveal, the Trace, and CBS News into how weapons sold by police departments were getting into the hands of criminals. Reveal first sought this information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—the keystone law centered on government transparency. But it wouldn’t be that easy. As Reveal’s court battles demonstrate, there is resistance to such transparency. 

These types of legal battles over FOIA requests are becoming more commonplace. According to a 2020 study by the FOIA Project, a Syracuse University-based research effort, media outlets filed more FOIA lawsuits to disclose government records during Donald Trump’s four-year presidential term than in the 16 years spanning Barack Obama and George W. Bush’s administrations. 

The origins of the police weapons FOIA case date back to 2008, when Alain Stephens, then a police recruit, purchased a Glock handgun in a Texas parking lot that turned out to have come from a New Jersey police department. It got him thinking: How often do police guns end up in the hands of criminals? This question grew into a larger project once Stephens became a reporter and started the fight for this number as a fellow at Reveal. After his FOIA request was denied based on an argument that firearms trace data is confidential, the Reveal legal team sued—but it took seven years to claim victory. 

Five of those years were court battles that rose all the way to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The case stalled further after another federal court interpreted the exemption differently and generated an opposing precedent, creating uncertainty.

The last two years were spent waiting for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to cough up that one statistic. Armed with that number—52,529 former law enforcement weapons recovered at crime scenes—teams at the Trace, CBS News, and Reveal found that many of these guns had been traded in or sold back to gun manufacturers, a cost-saving measure that has sent thousands of guns back onto the streets to be used in violent crimes.

I spoke with D. Victoria Baranetsky—general counsel for the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), which houses Mother Jones and Reveal—about the battle over transparency on cop guns and the state of FOIA today. She’s led several other FOIA lawsuits for Reveal that have forced more transparency from the federal government: The rate of worker injuries at Amazon warehouses and most other American employers is no longer confidential, and the government now has to disclose the diversity of contractors it hires. She recently filed a case against OpenAI and Microsoft for using CIR’s content without permission or compensation. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.

How did this case with the ATF start?

It started with Alain [Stephens] calling me up and being like, “Does this law say what I think it says?” 

Alain was explaining to me that he was trying to get data from the ATF, but he was denied. There was this statute called the Tiahrt Amendment that did not allow for gun data to be disclosed. But there were exceptions—and the third exception under the law was for statistical aggregate data. 

And he said, “I’m asking for just the number of guns that law enforcement have given back and put back into the marketplace.” And I said, “Yeah, I think that’s statistical aggregate data.” 

So we sued.

What arguments did the ATF give for withholding data about police guns used in crimes?

They were saying that that exception was not meant for reporters. It was meant for only law enforcement and other folks that were supposed to be getting access to this data, not the general public. 

And then there was a whole new issue entirely. They said that making them search for this number through their database would be the creation of a new record, and agencies are not required to create new records. They’re only required to produce what they have. And so they said, “Listen, you make us plug in this analysis and spew out a number for you, that’s going to be a new record that wouldn’t have existed prior, and so we’re not obligated to disclose this.” 

The court shut that down immediately.

That kind of analysis would essentially destroy all kinds of data searches that governments have in their capacity today, because we’re living in the modern world and databases are the way that information is held. So if you limited searching a database as the creation of a new record, you’d essentially cut off access to tons of information that the public should have the right to know. 

Unfortunately, this is not the only case where we have come across that argument. 

So has that become a new tactic of how the government tries to restrict access to data?

Yes, it has worked in some locations. There’s a smattering of cases across the country leaning in either direction, but there’s no prevailing outcome yet as this is still being deliberated on across the country. 

I think there’s also an even more disturbing reason for transparency today, which is more and more information is being created than ever before—and more is being collected than ever before by large corporate and government powers. There’s a massive imbalance as to who has access to that data; it’s all corporations and governments.

That is one of the reasons why this case was actually a huge win completely outside the realm of the ATF…this was something that would apply to all cases involving databases.

What does a seven-year FOIA legal battle look like? 

A lot of emails. 

This was actually the longest case I dealt with while I’ve been at this job. It’s just stages of a lot of intense work and then waiting. So writing the brief, which takes, like, three months, and you’re kind of in this tunnel vision of how to perfectly describe this argument to the court, and you submit it, you file it at midnight, and then you wait. You just wait for months and months and then get an argument date, and you prep for that for months and months. And then you wait. 

Why is data transparency important for democracy?

In the United States, FOIA is actually one of the very few laws committed to transparency. And constitutionally, there are actually fewer and fewer protections for transparency.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of Exemption 3 statutes. Those are the statutes that Congress has been lobbied to pass to stop information from being disclosed under FOIA.

In fact, the Tiahrt Amendment, and the center of this case with Alain, was one of those statutes. The NRA [National Rifle Association] lobbied for that law to be passed, and I think they very intelligently did so, because I think its impact was actually huge. When you don’t have access to information, the public doesn’t really know what it thinks about an issue, because it can’t really get to the facts of the matter. So, I think, in general, facts help people make choices that can help them then make choices about who they elect into power. 

But I think there’s also an even more disturbing reason for transparency today, which is more and more information is being created than ever before—and more is being collected than ever before by large corporate and government powers. There’s a massive imbalance as to who has access to that data; it’s all corporations and governments. For the public to not have a countervailing pressure or countervailing force to have access to that is deeply problematic. More and more decisions are having an impact in our life that corporations and governments are involved in, and they’re making those decisions based on data that we have no access to. If you have no access to that, there’s no accountability as to how those decisions are being made.

Reveal faced a SLAPP lawsuit in 2016 from Planet Aid that was eventually thrown out by a federal court in 2021. What does the legal battle with Planet Aid have in common with the lawsuit for gun trace data? 

A SLAPP is a strategic lawsuit against public participation, something that’s supposed to quash First Amendment free speech activity. And anti-SLAPP statutes were created to quickly go into court. It’s not, theoretically, supposed to take more than a year or so at most. That [SLAPP] case went on for years—this incredible process of delay, delay, delay, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, for something that was especially made to be answered quickly and efficiently. It dragged out for so long that it almost bankrupted our organization. You see tactics of this being used all over our system. 

I think that’s the greatest parallel to this case with Alain. There’s no end in sight, right? Like, you filed a lawsuit. You go through seven years. You win. And then you still have to file another lawsuit to actually enforce it. To get to finality, it just takes too long now, much longer than it ever should have taken. 

And there’s an added problem with FOIA where at some point, that information is stale. It doesn’t matter in the same way it would have mattered if it had been disclosed years prior. 

Most smaller newsrooms and freelance journalists don’t have the luxury of legal support on staff like Mother Jones and Reveal do. Knowing that, what does this mean for journalism? 

Most newsrooms, most journalists, most academics, protesters, citizens just don’t have the legal support to execute this. And that is really unfortunate and depressing. There was a paper written more than five years ago about how corporations are actually the ones that use FOIA the most to find out information about their competitors. So FOIA, drafted for the public and reporters, is not really being used by that sect of people. It’s being used often by corporate stakeholders who want to find information and that’ll give them a competitive advantage.

I still think [FOIA] does a lot, but I think the problem is how agencies choose to comply. The pressure put on them to comply is very minimal, and I think that greatly impacts journalism, because you know that if you actually did have access to this information, it would be helpful. 

In looking at FOIAs, does the presidential administration make a difference in how they’re treated? Did you see differences between our fights under Trump and Biden’s administrations? 

Honestly, I don’t think any administration is ever forthright in giving information. I think if you ask most people who live in the land of FOIA lawsuits, they’ll tell you that every administration kind of acts with a similarly hostile manner. The truth is power wants to hide problems. Power chooses to evade accountability, and that’s the whole point of FOIA. I think anyone who’s really in that position doesn’t necessarily want to share information. And our government, especially since 9/11, has just become a secrecy-obsessed state.

Thinking forward, what do you think the future holds for FOIA requests? 

There are all these specific areas that are going under a lot of different splits or interpretations. One of them is about whether data searching a database is the production of a new record. That’s like one little spot. I think that there are a few other hot-button areas. One is like the exemption “Glomar,” where an agency gives the response, “Can’t confirm or deny that the records even exist.” Now we’re seeing that Glomar is applied even in cases where Glomar can’t be applied, or just the expansion of Glomar. 

There was a decision that came out in 2019 that changed the test for what was confidential business information, which is exempt. And the Supreme Court changed it to be more friendly toward corporations. Previously, confidential business information was things that only would substantially hurt a corporation if disclosed—like you have an ingredient list for Coca-Cola. But the court changed it to whatever a company says is customarily or actually secret. As long as they give it a rubber stamp and say it’s so, it is so. I think that area of law already has had a lot of litigation, but that’ll be really interesting. 

Transparency has actually always been a bipartisan issue. In some ways, all administrations hate it and all administrations love it because it equally hurts both sides or helps both sides. So that’s why legislation on FOIA has been able to pass over the past decade. That being said, the courts have been much more pro-corporate and pro-law enforcement in a way that I do worry will further stifle the charge of FOIA.

Five days after the horrific attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, we have a clear picture fundamentally of what happened. There was a catastrophic failure by the Secret Service to protect the former president from a gunman who, incredibly, was able to occupy a rooftop about 450 feet away and get a clear shot at Trump onstage. Trump was wounded on his ear, a 50-year-old man in the crowd hit by the gunfire died shielding his family, and two other people were critically injured. The gunman was quickly shot to death by a Secret Service sniper.

But a crucial piece of this tectonic event remains missing: We still know virtually nothing about the motive of the perpetrator, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, a recent community college student from suburban Pittsburgh. That information void, unusual after a high-profile attack, may have its own repercussions after being filled by a maelstrom of partisan exploitation and conspiracy theories.

In the immediate aftermath on Saturday—well before the shooter’s identity even began to emerge—Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia claimed that “Joe Biden sent the orders” and should be charged with “inciting an assassination.” His fellow Republican and Trump backer, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, said that “Democrats wanted this to happen” and further declared with no evidence that “they tried to murder President Trump.” Swift partisan blame also came from Trump’s son Eric and a prominent Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, who said, “they tried to put him in jail and now you see this.”

Anger and threats from partisans with large social media followings flooded X.com and other platforms. “Retribution is coming,” inveighed one prominent MAGA account. “Guarantee you that.” The post drew more than 100,000 views and included the instantly iconic news photo of Trump pumping his fist as he was evacuated from the stage, his face streaked with blood.

“Extremist groups will take advantage of anything that fits into their narrative and this is a really big plot point for them.”

As various MAGA supporters claimed that Biden had ordered a hit on his election opponent, some on the left spread outlandish conspiracy theories about the attack being “staged” by Trump. An adviser to major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman suggested in an email to journalists they should consider whether the shooting had been encouraged or perhaps even arranged so that “Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.”

Ahead of this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, some party leaders called for calm and a message of unity—but many, including Trump’s now-running mate, JD Vance, continued to declare that Biden’s campaign rhetoric was the direct cause of the assassination attempt.

This atmosphere is further heightening concerns about violence, according to threat assessment leaders with expertise in counterterrorism and mass shootings who I spoke with. Risk of a cycle of political violence and recrimination, including from the far left, is a growing worry. But their greatest concern remains potential bloodshed stemming from Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement and his message that he is supposedly the victim of a systemic conspiracy—a narrative that has now been supercharged.

“Trump people were already mobilizing around the phony message of ‘we’re going to get screwed again by a rigged election,’” one threat expert told me, “and now they’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified. Only a small number of people might take violent action on this, but you don’t need much for things to get worse.”

“Extremist groups will take advantage of anything that fits into their narrative and this is a really big plot point for them,” said another threat assessment expert. (These sources asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the Trump shooting investigation and their working relationships with federal law enforcement agencies.) An intelligence bulletin from the FBI and DHS sent earlier this week to law enforcement throughout the country warned of potential “follow-on or retaliatory attacks.”

Early investigation suggests that Crooks, from the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, left behind few if any real clues as to why he targeted Trump. The relatively thin portrait of him is decidedly mixed in terms of any possible political identity or motive. He was registered to vote as a Republican, and neighbors have told reporters they recalled seeing Trump MAGA signs in the yard of the house where Crooks lived with his parents. Crooks also once donated $15 online to a liberal fundraising group. CNN reported that state voter records show his mother is registered as a Democrat and his father as a Libertarian. His father owns more than a dozen guns and a decade ago purchased the AR-15 used in the attack, according to law enforcement officials.

Media interviews with former high school classmates and employees at a skilled nursing home, where Crooks worked as a dietary aide until last week, all suggest he was quiet, kind, and intelligent. He graduated Bethel Park High School in 2022, where he won a math award, and in May he completed an associate’s degree in engineering science from the Community College of Allegheny County. Claims in the media by a couple of former peers that Crooks was bullied in high school have since been strongly contradicted by a school guidance counselor who worked with him and said he knew him well; the counselor told the Washington Post that Crooks never was bullied, had no disciplinary record, and had a group of close friends. (The idea that bullying is a root cause of school and mass shootings goes back to Columbine and is misguided in many cases.)

None of the wave of media coverage has included reports of Crooks expressing strong political or ideological views, let alone personal grievances or threats. He appears to have had scant presence on social media, relatively unusual for a person of his generation. It’s unclear whether his trail will lead to any meaningful “legacy tokens,” as FBI experts call the written screeds, images, videos, or other evidence that many perpetrators leave behind to convey their grievances and influence media coverage.

By Monday, FBI investigators had begun examining data from a cellphone belonging to Crooks, but they have found “nothing significant” so far to help explain his mindset or intent, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation confirmed to me. There is no indication to date that anyone else was involved, officials have said. Investigators have spoken with Crooks’ parents, who seemed to have little insight into their son’s motive, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal. A second cellphone and other devices Crooks used could yield further information. FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Wednesday afternoon in a Senate briefing that no motive had been established after extensive investigation. FBI analysis of Crooks’ online activity found that he searched for images of Biden and Trump as well as for dates and places for appearances by both of them.

Claims by former peers that Crooks was bullied in high school have since been strongly contradicted by a school guidance counselor who worked with him.

Threat assessment experts told me that a few things can reasonably be surmised at this point about Crooks. Given the physical circumstances of his attack from the rooftop, he likely had no expectation of escaping the Trump rally site and likely was suicidal, as many mass shooters are. It’s highly probable that further evidence exists of him planning and preparing for the attack—including and going beyond his visit to a gun range and his purchase of ammunition in the days ahead, as has been reported, and his advance surveillance of the attack site, which Wray reportedly discussed in Wednesday’s Senate briefing.

The FBI has said that Crooks had no record of mental health problems, but that doesn’t mean he had no such issues, or that he gave off no warning signs. (Nor would any mental health issues have predicted or fundamentally explained his attack—that’s a myth.) As I examined in my recent deep investigation into the 22-year-old who committed mass murder a decade ago in Isla Vista, California, perpetrators who are intelligent and able to present themselves as normal can be skilled at concealing their inner turmoil and lethal intent—while still also “leaking” signs of their plans far in advance.

Big gaps remain in what is publicly known about Crooks’ pathway to the attack: His home life and his relationships with his parents, with whom he lived in Bethel Park, remain of interest to investigators. Little has yet been reported about his recent time at community college.

Many assassination attempts in modern US history have not been motivated fundamentally by political ideology. One case from the 1960s resonates uncannily with the circumstances of today.

Another threat expert I spoke with suggested that America’s heated political atmosphere may have played a role more generally in the shooter’s choice of target. That is, the Trump rally coming to town may even have been a kind of ultimate crime of opportunity for a disturbed young man who wanted to go out in a blaze of infamy. Many shooters seek attention and notoriety—and after Trump announced the event in Butler 10 days ahead, what nearby target could’ve possibly offered that more?

In fact, seminal research in the field of behavioral threat assessment conducted in the early 1990s found that many assassination attempts in modern US history were not motivated fundamentally by political ideology. One case in particular from the 1960s resonates uncannily with the circumstances of today. After the Trump shooting, the Biden administration announced it would begin Secret Service protection for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose father was slain by an assassin’s bullet as he campaigned for president in summer 1968. The killer, Sirhan Sirhan, had expressed anger about Sen. Bobby Kennedy’s policy on arming Israel. But as I reported in my book Trigger Points, the pioneering threat assessment experts who personally interviewed Sirhan and studied his case as part of their research on assassins concluded that he ultimately was driven by a stew of behavioral disorders, personal failures, and fame seeking—not by any clear political motive. (The same was true of Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin.) Notably, Sirhan had considered trying to kill several different public figures, and his stated grievances shifted over the years, later even co-opting conspiracy theories about his attack.

Sirhan’s case was rife with evidence of his thinking and behaviors. A few targeted attacks in the decades since have been mostly bereft of such evidence, including the one by the suicidal gunman who massacred concertgoers in 2017 on the Las Vegas Strip, where he used AR-15s outfitted with bump stocks to kill 58 people and injure more than 500 others. That case is still widely considered to lack a clear motive.

Any student of history knows that the already rampant conspiracy theories about the Trump shooting will never go away. A big future revelation about motive in the case might dampen those, but the relatively minimal picture of Crooks so far suggests the possibility that we may never really have a clear explanation for why he did it. Yet, perhaps no case in modern memory reflects a greater urgency for additional facts to surface and prevail.

Thankfully, some people close to or directly hit by the tragedy have expressed sentiments of civility. Some Trump-supporting locals told reporters they rejected the partisan blame, including a disturbing message posted on a billboard in Butler afterward: “DEMOCRATS ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION.” And although the widow of Corey Comperatore, the man killed at the Trump rally, refused to take a call from Joe Biden, she told the New York Post that she has no ill will towards the president: “He didn’t do anything bad to my husband. A 20-year-old despicable kid did.”

It’s the morning of November 28, 2023, and a lawyer gives an opening statement to the jury. He tells a story of a 9-year-old boy who sees his older brother Bennie collapsed on the ground after being shot in the chest. Someone calls 911, but when the police finally arrive, they don’t rush to help him, instead handcuffing the boy’s mother, who is screaming and hysterical, and pushing her to the ground. When the cops finally go over to Bennie, they put a sheet over his face. But Bennie’s chest is still going up and down—he’s still breathing.

“This probably happens over and over but we only know about it because it’s Young Thug and Brian Steel.”

The lawyer, Brian Steel, says that Bennie’s brother would come to believe that “the only two ways he can break the generational hopelessness and despair for his family, himself—and he wanted to break it for as many people as he could who were in this struggle—was to be a professional athlete or an accomplished musical artist.” He chose music. 

The young boy’s name is Jeffery Williams. He was born in 1991 and grew up in the Jonesboro South projects in Atlanta, Georgia, but was displaced at the age of 16 when the public housing development was demolished. He began rapping as Young Thug in 2010. Three studio albums and nearly 20 mixtapes later, he has become one of the most celebrated trap artists. 

But in May 2022, Young Thug—along with 27 others associated with his label YSL Records—was arrested. The rapper is now on trial for a host of charges, including using YSL as a front to run a criminal street gang and violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

Although he’s not accused of murder, the state alleges that Young Thug rented a car used in the 2015 murder of rival gang member Donovan Thomas Jr. Fulton County prosecutors, led by District Attorney Fani Willis, are connecting this murder to dozens of more recent incidents of gun crime and killings and claiming that Young Thug is the leader and instigator behind the wave of violence. Some of the state’s evidence against the artist comes from his rap lyrics, including bars like “Gave the lawyer close to two mil’, he handle all the killings”—from the song “Just How It Is”—which the indictment describes as “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

For decades, politicians, prosecutors, and the media have incited panic around Black rappers and their lyrics, a practice that, according to some constitutional experts, raises free speech concerns when those lyrics are presented at trial. Reading lyrics out of context, they warn, reinforces racial stereotypes, biases the jury, and prevents fair decisions, reframing the trial around artistic narratives rather than material evidence.

“Prosecutors do this because they know it makes their job easy,” Jack Lerner, a University of California, Irvine, law professor and a co-author of “Rap On Trial: A Legal Guide,” told Courthouse News Service following the Young Thug indictment. “They know that juries that aren’t familiar with rap music will essentially rob the rap artist of a fair trial. It really creates a chilling effect for the artist and has very serious First Amendment implications.” 

Last year, Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) re-introduced the Restoring Artistic Protection Act, which would create federal rules to limit the ways in which artists’ lyrics can be used against them in criminal and civil cases. The lawmakers quoted a federal judge’s 2021 ruling barring two Philadelphia police officers from introducing as evidence the lyrics of a rapper who was suing them for wrongful arrest. “Freddy Mercury did not confess to having ‘just killed a man’ by putting ‘a gun against his head’ and ‘pull[ing] the trigger,’” the Trump-appointed judge wrote. “Bob Marley did not confess to having shot a sheriff. And Johnny Cash did not confess to shooting ‘a man in Reno, just to watch him die.’”

Willis, who was elected DA on a tough-on-crime platform in 2020, is the driving force behind the RICO accusations against Young Thug and his YSL co-defendants. Her history with Georgia’s RICO statute—an unusually broad version of a legal tool used across the country to combat organized crime—dates back a decade. As an assistant district attorney in 2014, she led the prosecution of 12 educators who allegedly cheated on state tests by correcting students’ answers to improve their scores. Eleven of them were convicted under RICO. Willis is now attempting to use the same law to prosecute Donald Trump and his allies for allegedly conspiring to steal the state’s 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, Georgia’s attorney general is prosecuting dozens of anti-Cop City activists under RICO, accusing them of using illegal tactics to stop construction of the controversial law enforcement training center.

Enacted in 1980, Georgia’s RICO law expanded state power by, among other things, making it harder for crime bosses to use subordinates to shield themselves from legal liability. The statute gives prosecutors the authority to combine offenses committed by different people if they can argue that the illegal activity fell into a pattern and the defendants shared a common goal, explained Michael Mears, a professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, in a 2023 interview with the New York Times. “It allows a prosecutor to go after the head of an organization, loosely defined, without having to prove that that head directly engaged in a conspiracy or any acts that violated state law,” he told the paper. “If you are a prosecutor, it’s a gold mine. If you are a defense attorney, it’s a nightmare.”

The law carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and fines of $25,000, giving the government an enormous amount of leverage to push defendants to take plea deals. In a 2022 press conference, Willis called herself a “fan of RICO” because it “allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.” She later stated, “We use it as a tool so [jurors] can have all the information they need to make a wise decision.”

But critics have accused Georgia prosecutors of abusing the law. The cases can take years to try—jury selection alone in the YSL case took 10 months—and are ruinously expensive to defend. Officials from the ACLU blasted the attorney general’s Cop City prosecution as a form of “extreme intimidation tactics that we need to resist.”

“A lot of people ask me to make Brian Steel and Thug merch, but I’m not trying to get sued.”

“There is legitimate concern that Georgia’s sweeping indictment could form a playbook for other prosecutors and state officials seeking to stifle political dissent,” the ACLU officials argued. Those fears aren’t baseless. Earlier this year, 10 Republican state senators put forward a bill that would further expand RICO in Georgia to punish low-level misdemeanors like loitering and illegally putting up posters. The legislation would also provide for increased penalties if the defendants are found to have targeted their victims based on “political affiliation or belief.” 

The AG’s office declined to comment to Mother Jones, citing the pending prosecution. Willis’ office did not respond to questions.

Perhaps because it lacks a clear political valence—like the Trump and Cop City cases—the YSL trial hasn’t always attracted the kind of mainstream media attention it deserves. Until recently, to get any regular updates on the televised trial, one had to turn to social media, particularly to an X account that goes by @ThuggerDaily. The anonymous author now has more than 70,000 followers, and he supplies them with translations of impenetrable legalese, videos of dramatic testimony, and explanations of all the players and strategies used in the trial. His work has brought national attention to the inner workings of Georgia’s criminal justice system, and it’s been cited by everyone from legal experts to music outlets like Complex and The Fader.

Young Thug’s lawyer Brian Steele has officially been held in contempt and taken into custody #FREESTEELE pic.twitter.com/0Lf4ppCVd9

— THUGGERDAILY ひ (@ThuggerDaily) June 10, 2024

Starting last month, the trial began receiving more intensive national coverage after Fulton County Judge Ural Glanville made a series of inflammatory decisions, including holding a secret meeting with prosecutors and a key witness. When Steel, the lawyer for Young Thug, learned about that meeting, Glanville demanded that Steel disclose how he’d found out about it. Steel refused to divulge his source and was then held in contempt by the judge. That was followed by calls for Glanville to withdraw from the case and by a series of appeals to higher courts in Georgia. The trial is now on indefinite hold until another judge makes a formal decision on whether Glanville should be removed.

I had the opportunity to ask @ThuggerDaily about his perspective on the intricacies of the trial, as well as what it reveals about Georgia’s fight against crime. You can read a condensed version of the discussion—which was conducted over email and has been edited for clarity and organization—below: 

How did you become interested in Young Thug’s music? My initiation was when the Jeffery mixtape blew up in 2016.

The first time Thug really clicked for me was on the bus on the way home from a high school soccer game my team had just won. Whoever was on aux played “Hercules” off a mixtape Thug had just dropped, which remains in my top 10 Thug songs ever. I was hooked on that song but didn’t really check out Thug’s other music until a friend of mine showed me “With Them” off Slime Season 3 the day it dropped. That sound blew my mind and that entire tape resonated with me immediately. That week, I went back and checked out Thug’s entire discography and have been a huge fan ever since.

What’s the story behind you starting to cover the YSL trial? What’s your background (legal, music, etc.)?

I often get asked if I have any background in law or journalism—I have literally zero. Never ran a social media account either. 

I had been a part of a Discord chat of active Young Thug fans for a long time, and when the RICO case first dropped, naturally everyone wanted as much information as possible. But the media coverage was absolutely horrid. Early on, none of us understood what Thug was being accused of doing. There were important hearings almost every month for the year leading up to the trial, but they weren’t streamed online and journalists didn’t cover them, so information was sparse. I took it upon myself to start reading court filings and summarizing them in the Discord server, and eventually, the owners of the Discord made me my own channel to announce case updates for everyone. 

We’d have watch parties for hearings with dozens of people tuning into bond hearings, but there were many that were not available for streaming. I accidentally stumbled upon a document summoning someone from jail to the courtroom with a Zoom passcode on it. I tried to keep it private for as long as I could, but eventually someone else came across the code through the same document and trolled the courtroom by screaming, “FREE THUG,” into the mic. After that, they made a new Zoom passcode and kept it super locked up. I was also checking the court docket every day and was reading and learning a lot about the law—just 6 months prior I didn’t even know what an indictment was. 

Fast forward to December 2022 and news of Walter “DK” Murphy taking the first plea deal dropped. The fans realized how big of a deal this was and we all scoured the internet looking for more information, but there was none. Radio silence. It was insane! I even resorted to DMing his lawyer, but they turned me away. The next day, Gunna took a plea deal. The info coming out about the deal was also bad but in the opposite extreme—it obviously made huge waves on social media, but the details coming out were sensationalized and, frankly, full of misinformation. No one posted the actual paperwork—the main thing going around was the video of Gunna’s plea allocution, where he responded, “Yes Ma’am,”—but I got it a full six hours before anyone posted the relevant parts to social media.  I made one very important connection very early on who was able to access court documents without paying and often before journalists got them. I still talk to this same contact a lot. I can’t really say who, but without them, ThuggerDaily wouldn’t be what it is—they sent me all the documents I was getting early on. Before them, I was paying per page and I’d get them delayed.

Slimelife Shawty aka Wunnie Lee is the third person to plea out of jail in the YSL case and will be coming home today.#yslricocase pic.twitter.com/Iqj5DAZHHh

— THUGGERDAILY ひ (@ThuggerDaily) December 16, 2022

This is when someone from the Discord server, the original owner of @ThuggerDaily, reached out to me. At this point, the Twitter account was an inactive Young Thug meme page with roughly 1,000 followers. We’d already talked about me potentially taking it over and turning my Discord updates into a full social media court updates page, but the wave of plea deals was the catalyst. 

My first official post was announcing Slimelife Shawty’s plea deal, which garnered 40 likes.

When did you start getting attention for your work? I was looking at posts from 2023 that didn’t receive as much engagement as you are getting now.

Honestly, getting attention was gradual and consistent. There are, of course, huge spikes when big developments happen, but I was getting recognition from local lawyers and even YSL case lawyers and friends and family of the defendants pretty early on. However, with the craziness in the last month—between Woody, recusal motions, Steel being ordered to go to jail, etc.—my page doubled in size in the span of 2 weeks. 

I started with 1,000 followers. On the day of opening statements, I went from about 16,000 followers to 20k. Today, I’m at 66k.

Why do you think there is so little active coverage of the trial? I mostly see explainers from mainstream outlets or basic reporting on developments with no added context like you’re doing. What are media outlets missing in their coverage of the trial?

This trial is extremely unique in ways that make it difficult to report. It has hundreds of witnesses and spans a timeline of 13 years with multiple narratives. It’s very unfriendly for traditional reporting as they would have to pay someone to cover five days of court a week for over two years. A random viewer can’t just pop in and understand why the state is asking the witness about a 10-year-old robbery in which no defendant was a participant. Even understanding Thug’s charges and what the state has to prove isn’t easy. It’s just too much. The only digestible parts are the funny clips of court proceedings that really SHOULDN’T be happening.

In June, Brian Steel filed a motion to recuse Judge Glanville from the case. Why are there so many moving parts like the absurd number of witnesses involved, the long jury selection process, and the messy court proceedings?

The state chose to indict 28 defendants in a conspiracy case with 700+ witnesses. It’s now around 200 witnesses after the judge ordered cuts when it was clear how long the trial was taking. That’s the source of most of the mess. Most think it’s working against them, but it’s hard to predict what a jury is thinking. They may have a decent murder case somewhere, but they insisted on the fluff to make it a RICO conspiracy. 

What do you think the state wants out of this trial? Is its plan working?

I think that Atlanta has a gang problem for sure, and this is a performative way of saying, “We’re doing something.” They have given plenty of “dangerous” people zero jail time in exchange for testimony against Young Thug. It’s clearly designed to make headlines instead of making a difference. 

You can’t arrest your way out of this.

What possible outcomes do you see for Young Thug and YSL in this trial?

As far as a final outcome, I have no idea. At this juncture, there’s a million ways the case can develop. However, I am 100% certain this first trial will end in a mistrial, whether it’s now or on appeal. Other than that, too much depends on unpredictable variables such as if the state wants to retry or offer favorable pleas, whether we get a new judge, which witnesses will show up again, etc., for me to make a decent prediction.

What do you think the trial says about Georgia’s criminal justice system and the other high-profile RICO cases in the state?

This trial has shown a whole new crowd of people, myself included, how much power the state has. Violation after violation and constant misconduct has been forgiven under the assumption that Georgia is trying their best. Even people who think Thug is guilty still acknowledge he deserves a fair trial and isn’t getting one. Everyone knows it. Yet we are wasting millions of dollars and years of time while the judge, who has lost control of the courtroom, has little oversight.

What do you think is the importance of having trials televised for the public?

It’s horrifying that this probably happens over and over but we only know about it because it’s Young Thug and Brian Steel. Even in this case, the state has tried to turn off the cameras under the guise of “witness safety.” The drawbacks of public trials definitely exist and I’m sure the jurors dislike social media reporting on the trial, but the alternative is no public accountability of public servants. It’s immensely important. 

You should be getting paid for your work. Are you?

Other than Twitter ad revenue—which is honestly pitiful—no. For a while, I tried to monetize my page by reaching out to hip-hop promo agencies to do paid tweets, but it was a hard sell because my page was so niche. A lot of people ask me to make Brian Steel and Thug merch, but I’m not trying to get sued lol. I’m not sure how to go about monetizing my page otherwise. Hopefully I can be involved in the inevitable documentary somehow and get a check there.