Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill that will allow courts to shorten the prison sentences of people who can prove they committed their crime because they were experiencing domestic violence—a significant reform in a state that incarcerates many domestic violence survivors for fighting back in self-defense, doing drugs to cope, or failing to protect their kids from the abuse.

Stitt’s decision to approve the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act came last week, after he vetoed a similar bill with the same name in April. Oklahoma has the country’s highest rate of domestic violence per capita and among the highest rates of female incarceration. Under the new law, sentences of life without the possibility of parole could be reduced to 30 years or less; sentences of 30 years or more could be reduced to 20 years or less; and so on.

Incarcerated survivors in Oklahoma cheered the news of the law’s passage, though it came with a catch: To get the governor’s signature, compromise language was inserted into the bill that could make it harder for some of them to shorten their sentences. Bolts reported on the specifics:

The compromise language…raised the burden of proof for those convicted of violent felonies, such as assault, manslaughter, murder, and robbery. To qualify [for resentencing], they must provide documentation that the victim of the crime was also the perpetrator of the defendant’s abuse, the person who trafficked them, or that their action was coerced by their abuser.

Documentation can include trial transcripts, court briefs, law enforcement reports, or other records, according to Colleen McCarty, executive director of the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, which advocated for the bill.

The compromise language could affect survivors who are incarcerated for failing to protect their kids from an abuser, a plight I covered in a Mother Jones investigation. Although many of these survivors committed no violence themselves, “failing to protect” a child is often charged as a violent felony in Oklahoma. As a result, in order to get resentenced under the new law, these survivors will have to prove that they didn’t stop the child abuse because they were coerced by the abuser. Some of them, disproportionately mothers of color, are serving more prison time than the men who harmed them and their kids.

The Oklahoma Survivors’ Act goes into effect in August. McCarty has already identified more than a dozen people whom her organization plans to help with resentencing petitions under the law.

In early April, Sarah Moore got the news she was dreading: Her husband, Dennis Jackson Moore, had been denied parole again. It was his fourth rejection in as many years. 

Dennis, who goes by Vega, is 45. He has spent more than half his life in prison in Virginia for a murder and armed robbery he committed as a teenager. At the time, his defense argued that he did not fully understand the charges against him and had been misled by a detective when he gave a recorded confession. Vega was tried in adult court. Prosecutors called him a “cunning seventeen and three-quarters-year-old who committed a violent and senseless act.” When Vega was 18, the jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to 53 years in prison. 

Up until four years ago, Vega, like most people in Virginia prisons, was not eligible for parole. But in 2020 state lawmakers extended the possibility of early release to Vega and hundreds of others who carried out crimes as juveniles and have served at least 20 years of their sentence. “We are a nation of second chances,” Senator David W. Marsden, a Democrat who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said at the time, “and those who are incarcerated for long periods of time when they are juveniles are especially deserving of that look.”

Vega’s 38-page application packet to the parole board makes the case that he is no longer a “misguided seventeen-year-old who made extremely reckless and thoughtless decisions.” He says he has spent more than two decades behind bars working to better himself—getting his GED, teaching himself multiple languages, studying real estate, marrying Sarah, and learning to care for her two daughters and son from afar. Vega says he’s become a rehabilitated and remorseful man worthy of an opportunity to rejoin society. If he ever gets out, he wants to help at-risk youth avoid incarceration. “I’ve grown up in prison,” he writes, “but I will not make prison my life.”  

After repeated denials from the parole board, Sarah says any second chance for her husband only seems good on paper. Like in previous decisions, the parole board’s most recent denial delivered in late March stated that releasing Vega would diminish the seriousness of his crime and he should serve more time. “We’re just so frustrated,” Sarah said after his latest rejection. She’s left wondering: “What more does he have to do?” 

For Vega and others eligible for parole in Virginia, the odds of being released have gone from slim to nearly impossible in recent years under new GOP leadership, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis of monthly parole board decisions. 

Under past Democratic administrations, Virginia already had one of the harshest parole systems in the nation, with single-digit annual approval rates. But parole grants have declined even further since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin began to overhaul the parole board in 2022, dipping to an approval rate of just 1.6 percent in 2023. So far this year, Youngkin’s parole board has approved only eight of the 628 applications it considered, a grant rate of 1.3 percent, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis. 

In March, the month Vega was denied for a fourth time, the board approved only 2 out of the 117 cases it considered. 

As chances for parole decline across the country, experts say the Commonwealth stands out. “Virginia is paroling basically nobody,” says Wanda Bertram with the Prison Policy Initiative. The blanket denial of conditional release to deserving candidates, supporters of parole argue, ultimately advances blind punishment and undermines incentives toward rehabilitation and positive change.

Vega says he now understands the devastation caused by his actions. “I took a life and I don’t condone that,” he says. “I don’t even understand my thoughts at that time, but I feel for the victim’s family.” (In a 1997 victim impact statement, the mother of Vance Horne, the man he killed, wrote that the loss of her son felt “as though a part of my body, a part of my very being has been taken away without warning or reason.”) In the years since, Vega says he’s become a different person. “I’m not the same guy anymore,” he explains. “Who of us is the same person they were at that age?” 

He also sees how the crime hurt his own family; Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says his arrest for the murder felt like “someone reached in my chest and pulled my heart out and just set it on fire.”

With every “no” from the parole board, Vega and his supporters feel like the system is dangling a possibility for release that will never materialize: “What’s the point of having a second chance available,” he wonders, “when you’re not willing to give it?” 

Almost two decades ago, during the height of a nationwide wave of tough-on-crime policies, Virginia effectively abolished parole by adopting a “truth-in-sentencing” law. The new rules mandated people serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Only elderly prisoners, or those convicted before the law was enacted in 1995, were eligible for parole. 

Before parole was gutted, 46 percent of eligible candidates in Virginia were granted early release. By 1998, that figure had dropped to 5 percent. Although the number of people up for parole has grown in recent years as a result of criminal justice reforms expanding eligibility and an aging adult population, their chances of actually getting out have remained low. Only about 6 percent of parole applicants were approved under Terry McAuliffe, the state’s Democratic governor from 2014 to 2018.

Recognizing a problem, McAuliffe created a state commission to study reinstating parole, questioning whether Virginia kept too many people in prison for too long. In 2019, Democrats seized control of the rest of the state government. Soon after, Virginia extended parole eligibility to juvenile offenders like Vega, as well as to people convicted by juries between 1995 and 2000 because of constitutional issues with how trials were conducted at the time. 

But even with those expansions, parole releases were still a drop in the bucket compared to a state prison population of roughly 24,000. This contributed to Virginia’s crowded prisons and aging incarcerated population—at a high cost to taxpayers. 

“The expectation pre-1995 was that you had a very good chance of receiving parole once you were eligible to be reviewed,” says Allison Weiss, a professor of prison litigation at Washington and Lee University School of Law who teaches a course where students assist parole applicants. “Over time, there’s just been a narrowing of the view of what parole is or should be in the state.” 

By the time McAuliffe ran for governor again in 2021, Youngkin had folded attacks on Virginia’s already-restrictive parole system into a broader GOP campaign that painted Democrats as soft on crime. “Terry McAuliffe’s hand-picked parole board had one mission—cut them loose,” Youngkin posted on X during the race, adding that Virginia wouldn’t be safe under his opponent. 

After taking office the following year, Youngkin swiftly fired his predecessor Ralph Northam’s five-member parole board and installed his own appointees, some of whom had openly opposed releasing people on parole—triggering a political standoff with Democrats who still control the state Senate and must confirm the governor’s nominees. The Senate blocked most of Youngkin’s initial selections, except for Chadwick Dotson, a former judge and prosecutor who was chosen to chair the parole board. 

Even before this battle to reshape it, the agency was already in disarray. In 2010, prisoners who were eligible for parole but denied multiple times sued the parole board, claiming it refused to properly consider their cases; the reason for denial provided in most instances was the seriousness of the original crime. A 2021 report from Washington and Lee University found deficiencies in the board’s decision-making process, including the fact that members don’t meet in person to discuss cases and instead vote electronically. 

Virginia Republicans have also criticized the parole board for failing to give legally required notices to victims and prosecutors when considering releases and for proceeding with some releases without receiving recommendations from local parole officers. As chair, Dotson issued a report to the governor last year calling for “drastic changes” to the board, like opening the hearings to the public and expanding the number of board members. 

Under Youngkin, the board has consistently been missing a fifth member, working at times with as few as three members, which experts say further diminishes chances for parole applicants.

Several advocates for people seeking parole say Dotson seemed to make improvements to the board’s practices. During his tenure, Dotson made visits to parole candidates, sometimes accompanied by other board members. Members also began gathering on a weekly basis to debate cases where there was “reasonable chance” of granting release. 

“I think he did give people a fair chance,” says Lisa Spees, who has advocated on behalf of more than 30 parole candidates in Virginia over the years. “He implemented a lot of changes into the parole system that were much needed.” Having the opportunity to meet with a parole board member, Spees added, “gave the individual a sense of being a part of that decision-making process.” She and others fear that Dotson’s departure last year brought that momentum to a halt. 

Even with those improvements, when Dotson chaired the board, between January 2022 and September 2023, the grant rate was only about 2 percent. 

Last September, Youngkin replaced Dotson as board chair by appointing Patricia West. A one-time judge and former chief deputy attorney general, West also once acted as state director of juvenile justice; decades ago she served on Republican Governor George Allen’s commission that pushed for minors as young as 14 to be automatically tried in adult court when charged with some violent offenses. 

Shawn Weneta, who was until recently a policy strategist with the ACLU of Virginia, calls West “the architect of parole abolition in Virginia.” He points to her role during the Allen administration, which led the charge to eliminate parole. In 1996, Allen picked West as secretary of public safety overseeing Virginia’s prisons and parole. “We have serious concerns with her being in that role [of parole board chair],” Weneta says. 

At first, Senate Democrats tried to remove West from a list of gubernatorial appointments pending confirmation. But, with little explanation, they voted a few days later to confirm her. Between her appointment last September and late March, West has voted on fewer than 50 cases to consider parole, according to state records showing individual board members’ voting history. She approved just three people for release, all of whom were eligible under geriatric release—available for applicants 65 or older after serving at least five years of their sentence and those 60 or more who served a minimum of 10 years. 

Julie McConnell, a law professor at the University of Richmond and director of a defense clinic that works on juvenile parole law cases, says Virginia’s current parole board only seems to be approving such geriatric cases. In past years, McConnell says her legal clinic won parole for seven candidates who committed crimes as juveniles. 

So far in 2024, she says none of the applicants represented by her clinic have been granted parole. 

“I don’t know that there is a silver bullet with this board where you can present the perfect package to them that gets their attention,” McConnell says. She suspects the board focuses more on aspects outside of the applicant’s control like the crime itself or input from the prosecutor and victim’s families. 

“The Parole Board deals with some of the most heinous and violent offenders within the Department of Corrections who are eligible for parole,” Youngkin’s press secretary Christian Martinez said in an email. “Judge West and the Parole Board assess each case with a comprehensive approach, guided by policies that prioritize the voices of victims before any decision is made to release violent offenders back on the street. Parole is not a right, it’s a privilege extended only to those inmates who are eligible for consideration.” West declined to answer questions for this story. 

Advocates for people seeking parole now worry that a recently announced policy change will even further decrease their chances of release. Starting in July, victims of people applying for parole will still be entitled to annual appointments with the board, while meetings with families and advocates for the parole applicants will instead now happen every two years.

“We’ve just become so acculturated to extreme punishment that we don’t even recognize when we’re going too far,” McConnell says. “We could give people an opportunity for a fresh start.” 

In late February, Leroy Gilliam III became one of the lucky few to be granted parole in Virginia. 

Gilliam, 51, had already served almost 28 years for first-degree murder by the time he went before the parole board last June. The board had denied him twice in recent years due to the serious nature of his crime. But this time, the board decided Gilliam had shown “excellent institutional adjustment” and didn’t present a threat to public safety. 

Gilliam was both thrilled and perplexed by the decision: “I don’t know what actually changed their minds this time.” 

Parole board decisions could soon at least become less opaque in Virginia. Last year, Youngkin signed a bipartisan transparency bill into law that the ACLU touted as “the biggest reform of Virginia’s parole system since 1994.” Under the new law, which takes effect in July, the board will have to publish more regular detailed reports with individualized reasons on grants and denials, and parole review hearings will be required to include interviews with candidates themselves. The bill also gives parole applicants and their attorneys access to all of the information being considered by the board. 

“We don’t know that it will increase grant rates at all,” Weneta says. “We certainly hope that it helps. But it’s a piece of the puzzle.” He believes insulating the parole board from the influence of any individual politician is the only way to ensure an equitable system. “As long as we continue to have partisan actors setting the mandate and making the appointments, they’re going to achieve the outcomes that they want,” he says, adding that the ultimate goal is to reinstate parole for everyone.  

When Vega’s stepdaughter, Shaelyce, first spoke to Virginia’s parole board two years ago, she told them how he had become the first male role model in her life. Before Vega came into the picture, Shaelyce says her mother had been in a 13-year-long abusive relationship and they were living out of a hotel. Shaelyce, 22, is now studying to become a child psychologist to work with children who have experienced trauma. 

Shaelyce remembers pouring her heart out to the board, but says it didn’t seem to make a difference. “It’s like there’s a tablecloth that we place on the table,” she recalls with tears in her eyes, “and every time we get ready for him to come home, they sweep it right from underneath us.” Her sister Carol, 24, has also come to see Moore as a father figure. “We got all these plans,” she says. “We talk about what it’s going to be like and then to get denied it’s heartbreaking.” 

Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says she goes through bouts of depression and shuts down after each denial from the parole board. “He picks me up and he tells me, ‘Mom, I didn’t have this chance when I first went to prison,’” she says. “‘At least now I have a chance.’” But in Virginia, that chance is increasingly unlikely.

Sarah says each denial feels personal, like the support she and her family have given him is insufficient. “You’re telling us, ‘you’re not good enough to get him home,’” she says.

I’ve been thinking about Chin Rodger’s words a lot lately. Chin is the subject of Mark Follman’s wrenching Mother Jones cover story about the massacre that her son, Elliot, perpetrated in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin opened up to Mark about the depths of her grief and sorrow after the mass shooting and the almost unimaginable strength she’s shown in the aftermath. As Mark writes, Chin made the “grueling choice” to reconstruct her son’s path to horrific violence and suicide, so that she can help threat assessment experts understand what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies.

I had the privilege of editing Mark’s magazine story, so I’ve read Chin’s words over and over these past few months. They are haunting and deeply moving every time. But actually hearing Chin say them is something else entirely. The pain, the resilience, the determination to make a real difference for other children and parents—it all comes through so powerfully in a new audio investigation from our colleagues at ReveaI.

Please give it a listen. You can hear Chin speaking out publicly for the first time about the shooting and about her determination to help prevent future violence. You can hear about the trove of new evidence Mark found, shedding light on what drove Elliot to do what he did. And you can hear Mark’s interviews with the threat assessment practitioners who are using Chin’s insights in their efforts to reach troubled people before they harm themselves or others.

“The nightmare that I’m living, that the victims and the families are living, these nightmares are real, and these nightmares could be your reality any day,” Chin warns. “So we must work harder in coming together and try and prevent these horrific acts from happening again and again.”

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of harming yourself or others, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” Abbott explained on X at the time. He used that same line verbatim in his statement declaring Perry a free man. This is the twisted nature of what law-and-order means in Texas: It is soft-on-crime to convict someone of murder now.

Perry was driving his vehicle near the state Capitol when he encountered the BLM protesters that night in Austin. He drove into a crowd of demonstrators after honking at them first. He then shot Foster five times through his car window.

Perry claimed self-defense as his justification for killing Foster, who was also armed, and his attorneys argued that Foster had pointed a rifle at him. Witnesses stated that Foster had not raised his gun, however. And the prosecution produced disturbing messages from Perry in which he talked repeatedly about shooting and killing protesters. “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters,” he wrote in one text.  In another message, per the Texas Tribune, he mentioned seeing “blacks … gathering up in a group.” and wrote that “I wonder if they will let my cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.” He told a friend that “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

After being charged, Perry became a right-wing cause célèbre. Abbott made his initial promise to look into a pardon almost immediately after then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a segment criticizing him for inaction in April of 2023. Members of Perry’s defense team did make hay of the fact that one member of the jury had apparently improperly consulted information that was not introduced in court. But conservatives were attracted to the trial for bigger reasons. Like Kyle Rittenhouse, Perry was exalted as a persecuted martyr standing up to progressive “anarcho-tyranny.” In his own statement on the pardon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton placed the shooting in the context of the “BLM riots [that] terrorized the nation in 2020.”

It’s worth reckoning with the ramifications of the self-defense argument here: The right to bear arms is so inviolable that you can carry a gun almost anywhere—but, also, if you see someone carrying a gun at a protest, you can shoot them justifiably. It’s hard to have a First Amendment when the Second Amendment looks like that. It doesn’t make for much of a Second Amendment either.

But this is not just about Daniel Perry. Abbott’s pardon and its accompanying rhetoric fits into a pattern of sanctioned violence or threatened violence against undesirables. In this case, it was an Air Force veteran protesting police brutality—there is not even a cursory mention in Abbott’s statement of Foster, the victim. In January, it was migrants. “The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” Abbott told former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, “because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

The question of how to deal with people—and particularly people who are inside cars—who inflict harm on protesters is very much a live issue. Drivers deliberately hitting groups of people with their vehicles is an extremely common thing in the United States; a Boston Globe analysis found that “Between Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021, vehicles drove into protests at least 139 times.” There were charges in just 65 of those incidents. At least 16 states have recently considered laws to grant immunity to drivers in such circumstances. Last month, ater critics of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza shut down streets in New York City, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) implored drivers to “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.” In another text message ahead of an earlier trip to Dallas, Perry wrote to a friend, “no protestors go near me or my car.” The message from Abbott and people like him is ominous. Daniel Perry was not the first. Do you really think he’ll be the last?

It was a horrific event that has, in some ways, been poorly understood by the public ever since.

Friends sometimes ask me how I could spend so much time researching and reporting on mass shootings, as I’ve done for more than a decade. The answer is simple: I want to know more about how these tragedies can be prevented.

For me, this work started in 2012 with assembling a public database of mass shootings, the first of its kind. Then I began hearing about an obscure approach to violence prevention called behavioral threat assessment. America’s debate over gun policies has long been frustratingly mired in partisan politics, and as I looked into threat assessment, I saw an additional solution, one compelling enough to write a book about. I gained access to leaders in this field and began learning of successful interventions—eye-opening cases of near-attacks unknown to the public because disasters had been averted. Threat assessment teams had stepped in with troubled adults and kids and had gotten them potentially life-saving help. The cases contained vivid evidence of people who were desperate, angry, and often suicidal—and in various stages of planning extreme acts of violence.

As in most places in America back in May 2014, the threat assessment approach did not exist in the college town of Isla Vista adjacent to UC Santa Barbara, where perpetrator Elliot Rodger caused devastation. The attack provoked a media frenzy. That helped give rise to “incel” copycat shooters, an ongoing trend fueled by sensationalized and superficial news coverage. The case also prompted the creation of California’s red flag law, a policy for temporarily removing guns from troubled people that would soon spread to nearly half of all states.

I long knew from my research that Elliot Rodger’s attack had been distorted in the media and online, where commentators and YouTubers focused on the vile misogyny of his final video and his book-length, rage-filled “manifesto.” The more complicated realities of his path to catastrophic violence came even more fully into view after a source told me three years ago about a unique development: Elliot’s mother, Chin Rodger, was privately starting to share her experience with threat assessment experts, wanting to help their mission.

“I hope my hindsight will be others’ foresight,” Chin told me, after we began talking in late 2021. She said that she had stayed silent for years because she feared that telling her story would only harm the victims’ families more. But after she learned about threat assessment, she came to believe that this approach could save lives.

[Related: Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother]

I spent a significant part of the next two years investigating the Isla Vista tragedy and figuring out the right way to tell this story. New details about Elliot’s life from Chin and others, and a trove of previously unreported case evidence that I obtained, reveal important lessons. This is knowledge that can help prevent other attacks—but much of it had been buried by the mythologizing about Elliot as the iconic leader of a violent incel “revolution,” and by other unhelpful themes about America’s epidemic of mass shootings.

These new insights and evidence are featured in my Mother Jones cover story, “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” which we are publishing online today. An accompanying Reveal audio investigation will further allow the public to hear from the shooter’s mother for the first time, in her own voice. My new reporting includes:

• Chin Rodger’s extensive account of what she did and didn’t notice, or misunderstood, about her troubled son’s behaviors—warning signs that she had no way of knowing about back then, but that can potentially help experts, and the public, prevent future mass shootings
• Previously unreported case evidence from the perpetrator’s cellphone videos, secret diaries, and private email communications
• Interviews with top threat assessment experts at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and elsewhere that cast new light on this pivotal case
• Evidence that calls into question the narrative of Elliot Rodger as an incel ringleader—a narrative that has motivated a decade’s worth of copycat attackers, including at least one mass murderer who in reality had little connection to the so-called incel movement
• Perspective from prevention experts on how red flag laws and threat assessment programs can be key tools for stopping attacks

Digging deep into the story of a mass shooter is delicate and fraught, foremost in terms of how it might affect the victims and their families. There is also the risk of feeding the kind of notoriety that many perpetrators seek. I’ve long reported and warned about these media pitfalls myself.

But as I wrote at the outset of my book, Trigger Points, focusing to varying degrees on mass shooters is integral to understanding the problem, and it reflects how the field of behavioral threat assessment operates and develops research. Reporting in the public interest requires a careful balancing act in this terrain. My purpose is to examine Elliot Rodger’s case in a way that illuminates the potential for thwarting future tragedies. That is possible to an even greater extent because of Chin’s willingness to share her account.

This month marks 10 years since the carnage perpetrated by her son. Ultimately, my hope is that this deeper investigation of the tragedy will serve to improve public understanding of mass shootings—and raise awareness of what we all can do to help prevent the next one.

along the coastal 101 in brilliant blue, the bright May sky beginning to soften toward sunset. Chin Rodger felt a lift of optimism as she exited the freeway and arrived at a sushi restaurant tucked away in the tony town of Montecito, where she greeted her 22-year-old son, Elliot. He looked well. He wore a designer shirt and Armani sunglasses, his dark hair styled, a smile on his boyish face. He was happy to see her and his younger sister, Georgia, a high school senior who often joined their mom for the drive up from Los Angeles.

This was a favorite dinner spot for their monthly get-together since Elliot began attending Santa Barbara City College more than two years earlier. They ordered their usual plates to share and chatted about nothing in particular. Seated across from Chin, Elliot began glancing over her shoulder.

“Look at that couple,” he said, eyeing a young man and woman at another table. He muttered that the guy looked unworthy of his attractive blonde date. Chin was used to his awkward social insecurity, part of his longtime emotional struggles, and she steered him back to positive conversation. She was pleased when the always skinny Elliot ordered an additional roll and began polishing it off.

“Wow, you’re eating a lot,” Georgia said.

He shrugged. “So what?”

Elliot liked this place because it felt far removed from where he lived in nearby Isla Vista, a small bluff-top town hugging University of California, Santa Barbara, whose party scene once attracted Elliot but had become alienating for him. Chin watched him enjoying the meal. It had been about three weeks since he had dropped out of communication for a few days and she found a video he’d posted online about his frustrations over girls. Worried, she’d called a social worker Elliot met with when visiting home, who said they should dial a crisis hotline in Santa Barbara. When police went to Elliot’s apartment for a welfare check, they concluded that all seemed fine with him, and his texts and calls with Chin since then had been encouraging. He’d told her his spring classes were finishing well and talked of promptly paying off a parking ticket, which struck her as part of his emerging self-improvement.

Chin cut the visit a little short because Georgia had plans with friends later that night. Their usual stroll for coffee and dessert would have to wait for next time. They hugged Elliot goodbye in the mild evening air, then got on the road back to LA.

Chin left heartened by her son’s relaxed demeanor and newfound appetite. It would be years before she would begin to learn what those really were: the last in an accumulating trail of warning signs.

The following week, Chin was driving home from work on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend when she got the news that the hot tub at her employer’s estate was malfunctioning. In recent years she had settled into her job as a trusted personal assistant to a family of wealthy philanthropists, while continuing to raise the two kids jointly with her ex-husband, Peter Rodger, a photographer and filmmaker. She pulled over from LA traffic and made a call to line up a quick repair. The forgettable task would soon be seared into her memory as a last bit of normalcy.

When she got home, Georgia was headed out for an overnight with friends, and Chin decided to relax with a bath. A little after 10 p.m., she saw a text message from Gavin Linderman, the social worker helping Elliot. Linderman was one of several young counselors in LA and Santa Barbara enlisted by Chin to give Elliot life-coaching, augmenting the therapy he sometimes did with a psychologist. Chin had texted with Elliot that evening to celebrate the end of his semester, and she figured she’d catch up to Linderman’s message later. Then he called.

“Have you checked your email?” he asked, his voice taut.

“No,” she said, “I just got out of the bath.”

“There’s an email from Elliot.”

An hour before, her son had sent out a 137-page document to nearly three dozen people with a terse message: “Attached is Elliot Rodger’s life story, which explains how I came to be the way I am.” Titled “My Twisted World,” much of it was an extended tirade about his feelings of extreme social isolation and lack of sexual experience, for which he categorically blamed women. He vowed “a day of retribution” and at the end described a plan to commit mass murder. Linderman had also found a seven-minute video that Elliot had just posted on YouTube in which he declared the same intent.

Chin glanced at the materials and quickly tried calling Elliot, but there was no answer. She dialed 911, got connected to the Santa Barbara police, and said she urgently needed to locate her son. She was disoriented: Elliot had messaged with her amicably about three hours earlier, and she had yet to really grasp what the long document and video revealed. She called Peter, who was having dinner at home with his wife and another couple. They set out immediately for Isla Vista.

As Chin left her home in West Hills and drove up the 101 freeway, she called the manager of Elliot’s apartment building and pleaded with him to go knock on Elliot’s door. He told her there was chaos in the area from a shooting and car chase, and that he thought it best to wait until morning. Chin knew Elliot liked to cruise around in the black BMW she’d gotten him—was he somehow involved or hurt? As she pressed on toward the coast, she received a call from Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Detective Joe Schmidt, who asked her a few plain questions, including whether Elliot had firearms. That startled her: Elliot had never shown any interest in guns. She explained that he had social problems and saw a therapist, and that she’d been unable to get him to call her back that day. The detective asked Chin to meet him in the parking lot of a Home Depot near Isla Vista, where Peter also was headed, accompanied by his wife and their dinner companions.

The hour-plus drive felt like forever. Chin reached the meetup location and found Peter and the others, and they waited in the lot anxiously. Around 1 a.m., a police vehicle pulled in. Schmidt walked over with a fellow detective and asked to speak with Chin and Peter privately.

“Where is my son?” Chin implored. “I’m not answering more questions until you tell me where my son is.”

Schmidt conferred for a moment with his colleague. Authorities were still in the early stages of piecing together a string of violent events in Isla Vista. He informed Chin and Peter that police had found a driver’s license on Elliot’s person at the site of a car crash, and that Elliot was deceased.

Chin dropped to her knees. She heard a guttural sound rising from Peter. Beneath her was hard ground, but she felt like she was plummeting.

They would soon learn that the news was far worse. Elliot had perpetrated a horrific massacre, one that still stands apart in America’s epidemic of mass shootings. The case would be documented extensively by investigators and play a unique role: Its unusual range of evidence would show experts more about what leads to such attacks and help advance a growing field of violence prevention. And eventually, Chin herself would join that effort.

Before the sun went down on May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger ambushed three college students inside his rental apartment in central Isla Vista, stabbing them to death with fixed-blade hunting knives. Two of the victims were his roommates: Weihan Wang and Cheng Hong, both age 20 and students at UCSB. He killed Wang first, in Wang’s bedroom, according to an investigative report from the sheriff’s office. Hong, later returning from class, died second. The third victim, 19-year-old George Chen, a friend of Wang’s who lived on the UCSB campus, had come over after that, around dinnertime. Elliot’s violence escalated with each victim, stabbing them 15, 25, and 94 times. He covered the first body, and then the second, with blankets and clothing, likely to preserve his element of surprise.

He had a history of conflict with his roommates, who had been assigned by building management, a common practice locally with student renters. Four months earlier, Elliot had called the police claiming that Hong stole candles from his bedroom, and then had pressed the building manager in an email to kick out Hong over this “extreme problem.” The 137-page screed he blasted out the night of the rampage described his intent to lure victims to the apartment and make it his “personal torture and killing chamber,” which would require first killing his roommates. According to investigators, crime scene evidence suggested he’d rehearsed by stabbing pillows and slashing at the sheets on his bed.

Though the small apartment was within earshot of others, no one in the two-story complex noticed anything was wrong. Elliot’s roommates often shouted with excitement while playing video games together in the apartment—he’d complained bitterly about that too—and raucous noise was common in a college town. Or maybe the lack of notice was explained by the search history investigators found on Elliot’s laptop: “Quick silent kill with a knife.”

By the end of the day he’d used towels to wipe blood from the walls, removed his bloody jeans and shirt, and showered and put on fresh clothes. Around 7:30 p.m., he went to the Isla Vista Starbucks a few blocks away, where he ordered a triple vanilla latte and texted with his mom. Chin had asked Elliot earlier in the day to call when he was finished with his classes.

“I’ll call you tomorrow when I’m in my car,” he now messaged back. She replied asking why he couldn’t call sooner.

“Feel like relaxing right now,” he said. “Maybe later tonight then. All done with school now.”

“Congrats,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Latte in hand, he walked casually out of the Starbucks and returned to the apartment, where he wrote in a diary he’d been keeping for more than three years. Unlike the other neatly scripted entries, the jagged handwriting spilled down the paper: “This is it. In one hour I will have my revenge on this cruel world. I HATE YOU ALLLL! DIE.”

Just after 9 p.m., fueled by caffeine and Xanax, he sent out his screed, posted the video to YouTube, then drove his car a few blocks and parked. Recently he’d been surveilling what he called “the hottest sorority of UCSB.” This time he brought three semiautomatic pistols and more than 500 rounds of ammunition. He walked up to the front door, wearing extra ammunition strapped to his waist and carrying a filled gas can. He tried the handle, then poked at the keypad, guessing at the entry code. Then he started banging repeatedly on the door. In a fortunate twist of fate, about 40 of the residents were away on a trip to Las Vegas, and the remaining handful felt wary enough not to answer.

He left the gas can at the door, went back to his car, and spotted three sorority members walking down the street. He rolled up on them from behind with the passenger-side window down and opened fire. The burst of bullets gravely injured 20-year-old Bianca de Kock and fatally wounded her friends Katherine Cooper, 22, and Veronika Weiss, 19. Calls to 911 began to flood the system as he drove a few blocks to the front of a deli mart and fired at people who fled inside, killing 20-year-old Christopher Martinez with a single shot from close range. Then he headed for the nearby oceanfront neighborhood, ramming people and firing more shots on his way to the party epicenter of Del Playa Drive. He plowed into some victims with enough force to shatter his windshield and catapult them to the pavement.

Cruiser lights and sirens pierced the Isla Vista night as police pursued the black BMW, twice exchanging gunfire with Elliot along Del Playa and the surrounding blocks. On the passenger side of the car were the other pistols he’d purchased at area gun shops over the past 18 months, the extras to ensure he could finish his plan even if one jammed. About eight minutes into the rampage, with a bullet graze to his left hip, he circled back onto Del Playa for another pass. As police closed in, he followed a script common among mass shooters: He raised his Sig Sauer 9 mm to his head and pulled the trigger one last time. Witnesses heard the final shot and watched as the BMW, still moving westbound on Del Playa, swerved to the right and smashed into a parked car.

By then Elliot had murdered six people, wounded and injured 14 others, and traumatized countless more. Where the attack ended was no coincidence.

but exhuming Elliot Rodger’s life and ghastly final actions remains fraught. It risks inflicting further pain for the victims’ families and other survivors, and new revelations could feed the kind of infamy many perpetrators seek. The case stands out among the hundreds I’ve studied in 12 years of reporting on mass shootings. To this day it fuels copycat attackers who fixate on misogyny, making it an ongoing subject of news coverage and various academic and security research. It also helped catalyze policy change, in particular the spread of “red flag” laws aimed at keeping guns away from unstable people.

Yet from the start, this tragedy has been wrongly mythologized in the media and academia and poorly understood by the public, its lessons for prevention buried. The voluminous case evidence casts light on warning signs, the complicated role of mental illness, and other keys to effective intervention. Elliot’s behaviors leading up to the attack also make clear how the common portrayal of mass shooters is misguided and undermines the potential to stop them: They are not inscrutable monsters who suddenly “snap” and attack impulsively, but instead are troubled people who spiral into crisis—and whose brewing plans for violence can be detected, explained, and potentially prevented.

These are among the reasons Chin Rodger eventually decided to speak out about what she did and didn’t notice, or misunderstood, before Elliot’s rampage. By sharing her experience with prevention experts, and by talking with me about a trove of previously unreported case evidence and details of Elliot’s life, she hopes to help foster a clearer understanding of his attack, and, with it, greater potential to prevent violence.

“Inside I was broken into a million pieces,” she recalled about the early aftermath. “It still tears me to pieces—reading about and reliving the events, going over all the conversations I had with him and everyone around him, his writings, his personal things. It’s not just the pain of losing my son but the horrible suffering his actions caused for so many. I will carry this pain for the rest of my life.”

She had always felt close with Elliot, who was intelligent and came across as quiet and polite. Diminutive from childhood, he struggled with developmental disabilities that made him acutely shy and awkward, and his parents moved him between various schools as they sought special education and therapeutic help. He was bullied, but prior to his attack had no history of aggression known to his parents or anyone else around him. It was hard for Chin to comprehend how well he’d hidden his innermost torment, and ultimately his suicidal and homicidal intent. Even today, she hasn’t felt ready to read all of his “life story,” or to go through his two handwritten diaries, which are part of his deeper trail that until now has been almost entirely unknown to the public. She has five sealed boxes of his personal effects sitting in storage, long ago returned to her by investigators. Digging further is often still too painful and heartbreaking, she says, yet she feels compelled to keep going because she believes in the value of spotlighting missed chances to stop Elliot’s plan.

Related

Why I Spent Two Years Investigating a Notorious Mass Shooting

I began speaking with Chin in 2021 as I was finishing work on Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings through the use of behavioral threat assessment. This emerging method has been adopted by businesses and government entities and is now required in public schools in 20 states. It’s a community-based approach that combines expertise from mental health, law enforcement, and other disciplines to intervene with troubled individuals who show signs of planning violence. Even as they descend into rage and despair, many mass shooters remain ambivalent about killing themselves and others—and most engage in observable warning behaviors well before they attack.

Therein lies opportunity to head off catastrophe. The red flags can range from communicated threats and changes in routine to fixation on grievances, guns, and previous killers. Signs of suicidality are crucial, as is evidence of preparation. Successful intervention usually begins after someone close to a troubled person feels worry or fear and reaches out to authorities for help. That’s where a threat assessment team comes in. Made up of psychologists, administrators, law enforcement, and other trained practitioners who meet regularly to handle cases, the team conducts interviews and gathers information to gauge the danger. Then, over weeks or months, they use constructive tools like counseling, social services, and education support to guide the troubled person away from what the field calls “the pathway to violence.”

Think of that person’s life and circumstances as a giant impressionist painting filling a gallery wall. People up close to it—a parent, a teacher, a peer—may notice a few striking details, but what do they show? A threat assessment team has the ability to make sense of the whole picture by stepping back and seeing how all those details come together. There is a well-known adage in the field: “You can’t connect the dots if you don’t collect the dots.” From Virginia Tech in 2007 to Isla Vista and beyond, many mass shootings have been marked by a disastrous lack of information sharing. People spoke up with alarm, but no threat assessment programs were in place to pull together the data and respond.

Threat assessment is about prevention, not prediction. Despite popular belief, there is no such thing as a set of demographic or personal characteristics for profiling potential mass shooters; though overwhelmingly male, they range widely in age, background, and circumstances. It is not possible to forecast with certainty who will commit violence—but experts can see when someone is at growing risk of doing so. The “profile,” so to speak, is a pattern of behaviors indicating danger. Using a method first pioneered in the 1980s, threat assessment teams have deterred scores, if not hundreds, of people who appeared headed for violence in schools, workplaces, and other venues. Often there is no crime to prosecute, and importantly, experts have learned that a supportive rather than punitive approach is more effective in many cases for reducing danger over the longer term.

About five years after Elliot’s attack, Chin discovered threat assessment while researching mass shootings online. When I learned of her interest from a source and contacted her, she waited months to open up. The first time we met in person near a sunny beach in Los Angeles felt a little surreal. Up walked a petite woman with shoulder-length brown hair and dark eyes who radiated a kindness and humor that were at first hard to reconcile with her burden. Her speech was soft, with a lilting sadness. We spoke for an entire day. She wanted to know more about the successful prevention cases I’d been chronicling for the book.

She felt haunted by questions of why therapy, social counseling, and various other efforts over the years to help her son connect with people had failed. After moving away for college, Elliot met with his social worker and sometimes a therapist during his visits home to LA. He’d been prescribed meds for depression and anxiety, though he wrote about refusing to take them. Chin hired an agency to provide Elliot with life-coaching in Santa Barbara; in his final year he met individually 29 times for walks and other activities with three young peer counselors, who encouraged him and focused on building his social skills.

Chin’s trauma was exacerbated by an enduring media-driven narrative that depicts her son as a totem of misogynistic evil, the putative leader of a violent movement made up of aggrieved men who call themselves “involuntary celibates,” or “incels.” Elliot voiced grotesque hatred of women in his writings and videos, and in his final year had posted comments on a fringe website that drew men from this online community. But, for Chin, the idea that incel ideology was the core explanation for what Elliot did seemed a distortion. She was determined to understand more clearly what had led him to carry out catastrophic violence and how it could have been prevented.

The public rarely hears from parents of mass shooters apart from brief statements of sorrow in the aftermath. (A notable exception was the mother of one of the Columbine school shooters in 1999, Sue Klebold, who became devoted to raising suicide awareness and later published a bestselling memoir.) 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. Earlier this year, the mother and father of a 15-year-old mass shooter at Oxford High School in Michigan were convicted of involuntary manslaughter—an extreme case in which they’d ignored their son’s mental deterioration and gave him a gun just before he attacked in November 2021. In many ways, that scenario could not have been more different from Elliot’s. The Oxford shooter was an openly distressed minor living at home who was given no mental health care but access to a weapon. Elliot, by contrast, was a young adult out in the world who got extensive counseling and family support and skillfully hid his intent. Both cases, however, speak to the role of parents as potentially key to prompting expert intervention.

In a decade-plus of investigating mass shootings, I had never before heard of a perpetrator’s mother making the grueling choice to become a student of her son’s case. None of the nearly dozen threat assessment experts I spoke with for this story suggested they thought that Chin, or anyone else in Elliot’s life, was at fault for failing to anticipate what happened. Yet, Chin came to believe that there had indeed been warning signs, even though she’d had no way of knowing back then what they were. She feels she can help spread awareness, especially for people whose own loved ones might be turning dangerous. “I hope my hindsight will be others’ foresight,” she says.

In 2020, she spoke with FBI experts to provide additional details about Elliot, and, in a unique development for the field, threat assessment leaders soon began inviting her to share her perspective at trainings. Those leaders caution against overstating retrospective conclusions, given that some warning signs are more reasonably identifiable than others prior to violence. But they concur that Chin has helped further the field’s knowledge of pre-attack behaviors and circumstances, and prospects for intervention.

People close to perpetrators often hesitate to seek help and will minimize or rationalize concerning behaviors, according to Dr. Karie Gibson, unit chief at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. In her view, Chin’s account is powerfully humanizing and will encourage others to come forward.

“I believe that prevention is possible right up until the attack happens,” Gibson told me, noting that because the public tends to regard the family members as monsters, “when you hear individuals [like Chin] tell their stories, and the personal impact, it challenges that stereotype and breaks it down. You see the realness of a mother or father, or a sister or brother connected to the individuals who go on to commit these attacks, and they also suffer in that reality.”

Chin’s experience illuminates a challenging paradox: While parents can be among those best positioned to notice warning signs, they are also likely to have the biggest blind spots to anomalous and disturbing behavior. Consider what it would really mean to realize one’s own child might be planning lethal harm. “A concerned parent may be looking for the positive, for things that are comforting, and that can cloud the ability to see certain things they may not want to see,” another threat assessment leader familiar with Elliot’s case told me.

Take what happened that night at the sushi restaurant. Elliot’s conspicuous change in demeanor and appetite had reassured Chin. But that shift in him was what experts call “unexpected brightening,” an indication of rising danger. Once a perpetrator becomes more resolved and prepared for a suicidal attack, a heightened sense of purpose and calm sets in. Elliot exuded less turmoil because he was finally ready to act.

The recently paid-off parking ticket was also not what it seemed. Whereas Chin saw her son taking responsibility, the writings and videos Elliot left behind suggest a different potential motivation: He was keen toward the end to avoid any attention from authorities, lest they possibly discover his plans. His skills of manipulation and deception had also played into the tragic miss when police went to his apartment for a welfare check in response to Chin’s concerns, just a few weeks before the mass murder.

Psychologist Stephen White, a top expert in the field who authored a definitive case study on the attack, says Chin’s engagement with threat assessment reflects extraordinary courage and resilience. “It’s the ultimate curse to be the parent of a mass murderer,” he says, with the entire world rendering a judgment of failure and culpability. “It’s confronting an enormity of shame that you’re left with. You either descend into letting that bury you, or you do the bleak work of redefining the meaning of your life. She made it her purpose to try to help, and she has.”

Those first days after were brutal. The drive back to LA to tell Georgia the crushing news. Anguished thoughts of the victims and their families. A swarm of media outside the house, then an escape to a local hotel. A hasty family meeting at a Denny’s joined by a friend of Peter’s who would help handle PR matters. A call overseas to her own mother, who’d helped care for Elliot as a child, so she wouldn’t find out from watching TV.

A gutting emptiness. The death of her son.

Chin and Peter cooperated exhaustively with police, but they struggled with how else to respond. Peter wanted to speak out and express the family’s sorrow. Chin wanted to remain in seclusion, though she recognized the pressure Peter felt to comment publicly—the intense media coverage was also spotlighting his career, particularly his recent work as an assistant director on The Hunger Games, the blockbuster tale of youths forced to hunt down and kill each other. In 2012, Elliot had joined Peter on the red carpet for the film’s LA premiere. Graphic Hollywood entertainment had been baselessly blamed for causing mass shootings ever since the Columbine massacre. One prominent film critic wrote a column arguing that Elliot’s “delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in.”

A month after the tragedy, Peter sat down with Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20 to convey the family’s condolences and devastation. He described Elliot’s long-standing issues and the family’s various efforts to help him. When Walters prodded him about public reaction, he said Elliot was “far from evil” but that “something happened to him, and then I think he became very mentally ill.” He emphasized that no one had ever thought Elliot would become violent: “What I don’t get,” he told Walters, “is that we didn’t see this coming at all. None of us.” (When I contacted Peter this spring, he declined to comment further.)

It was clear from the ABC interview that Elliot’s parents, aided by educators and therapists, had struggled to help an increasingly troubled kid—but the broadcast also engaged in a form of TV sensationalism that is now more understood to be unhelpful or even reckless in how it pushes myths about mass shooters. It played multiple segments from Elliot’s videos and used news clips, witness interviews, and voiceover narration to depict him as “a madman,” “psychotic,” “the face of the devil,” and a quiet boy turned “monster.” This reinforced the notion that mass shooters are inexplicable demons who can’t be stopped—and who can indeed capture the major media attention many crave.

In the aftermath, the world made little sense to Chin. She wouldn’t turn on a TV unless it was set to a cooking channel. She wanted to reach out to the victims’ families but feared that would only hurt them more. A mother of one of the murder victims sent her a condemning letter that was shattering to read. Only later would she know about the press conference the day after the carnage where anguished father Richard Martinez assailed politicians and the National Rifle Association for complicity in his son’s death. “They talk about gun rights—what about Chris’ right to live?” he beseeched in his wrenching remarks. “When will this insanity stop?”

Martinez agreed to a meeting with Peter at a friend’s house 10 days after the massacre, the details of which they kept private at the time.

“I got a box and put together a bunch of Chris’ stuff,” Martinez told me recently. “Pictures of him, trophies and sports jerseys, different things about Chris. Mainly a lot of photos.” They sat together in the backyard for more than an hour and Martinez did most of the talking, he recalled. Peter appeared deeply saddened and sorry. “He didn’t really talk about his son. I had the table between us full of Chris’ stuff, and I was just showing him and telling him about my son. It just felt like the right thing to do. I wanted him to know my son. I wanted him to understand our loss.”

Survivor Bianca de Kock, recovering from five bullet wounds, had also decided to speak out in the early aftermath, to grieve her murdered friends: “They were both two very incredible, beautiful people,” she told a TV reporter through tears, “and that’s how I want them remembered.” The reporter noted in the broadcast that de Kock’s parents had acknowledged that Chin and Peter also must have been “hurting terribly.”

Chin felt she would never get over what happened. “For many, many months I was just so numb,” she recalled. But an entry in her personal journal five weeks after the massacre, from just after she’d taken Georgia to stay temporarily with family abroad, suggested something more. “If you look at me now,” she wrote, “you’ll see the saddest human being on earth. But my spirit is OK, it is strong.” She would focus on caring for Georgia, and beyond that would withdraw into work, her small circle of friends and family, and her Buddhist faith.

After Georgia went away to college, Chin began to immerse herself in reading about reconciliation and violence prevention. Eventually she began reaching out to others who knew calamitous violence. She contacted Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, had died in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, and who was working to boost social-emotional learning in schools. Amid tearful conversations, the two grew close from opposite ends of shared horror.

“I think it was healing for Chin to be able to talk to a victim’s parent who understands and has compassion,” Lewis said when we spoke. “I love Chin like a sister. We are sisters in grief.”

Of Chinese descent, Li Chin Tye grew up in Penang, Malaysia, and moved at age 17 to England, where she trained in health care and later worked as a unit nurse on the productions of The Princess Bride and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. A photo from the late 1980s that circulated online after Elliot’s attack showed her with George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and Michael Jackson. She met and soon married Peter, whose father was renowned British war photographer George Rodger, and Elliot was born in July 1991. When Elliot was 5 and Georgia was an infant, the family relocated to California.

By then, Elliot was showing behavioral issues. He was shy and sometimes withdrawn, and struggled with speech. He was prone to repetitive behaviors like tapping his feet and was sensitive to overstimulation—the colorful chaos of Disneyland made him cry intensely. His parents, who would soon divorce, began what would become years of therapeutic and special education support, seeing some progress as they tried different schools and as Elliot made some friends and his speech improved. But he was bullied and continued to struggle socially. The mother of an elementary school friend quoted in the New York Times remembered Elliot as an “emotionally troubled” boy who would come over to their house and just hide, leaving her and her husband apprehensive.

In high school, Elliot was diagnosed with “Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a term covering a range of behavioral issues that today are categorized under autism spectrum disorder. His evaluation scores, however, landed below the threshold for ASD. The broad PDD diagnosis was intended to qualify him for special education resources, an approach sometimes used by psychologists seeking help for a troubled kid.

The ambiguity of whether Elliot was on the spectrum only underscores an egregious failure of the media frenzy—one headline labeled him as “Autistic Santa Barbara rampage killer.” Worse than just highlighting an unverified claim, various coverage misled about the possible role of the disorder and amplified a damaging stigma. Less than two years prior, the Sandy Hook massacre had stirred fear around autism when the public learned that the 20-year-old shooter had an ASD diagnosis among multiple conditions. But implied blame on autism is fundamentally wrong, as White and several colleagues made clear in research published in 2017 in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. “Most individuals who fall on the spectrum of ASD are neither violent nor criminal,” they wrote, affirming multiple previous studies.

That echoed decades of research showing that the link more broadly between mental illness and violence is small and has no predictive value. In an obvious basic sense, no mass shooter is mentally healthy, but the vast majority of people with mental health struggles or developmental disorders do not commit violence. Any influence of ASD among some killers studied by threat assessment experts is nuanced and requires an understanding, crucially, of comorbid factors. As White found in his case study, Elliot’s situation involved “likely features of autism spectrum disorder, narcissism, psychopathy, and depression. A predominant theme is the role of extreme social isolation and severe, pathological envy, fueling the eventual attacks.”

The media skewed the picture of his mental health in further ways: White and other experts later concluded that the large volume of forensic evidence showed that Elliot—notwithstanding how Barbara Walters had labeled him for an audience of millions—was not psychotic, a state of mental disconnection from reality. The myth that mass shooters are all insane and lack command of their actions strongly implies that they are driven by hallucinations or delusions, yet psychosis is present in only about 5 percent of all cases, according to in-depth FBI research and a study by Columbia University psychiatrists.

In reality, many mass shooters are just deeply isolated, angry, and desperate. They have decided that death is their only way out and have settled on their justification for taking others with them. Most key for prevention, then, is not a mental health diagnosis per se, but instead the recognition of a behavioral trajectory and its context. How might Elliot’s situation and lengthy planning for the attack have been identified and addressed effectively?

After mass shootings, we frequently hear that mental health treatment is paramount, a generalized assertion often used to deflect from debate over gun laws. But as Elliot’s case makes evident, conventional therapy and counseling are no magic solution when it comes to detecting and preventing planned violence.

“In a lot of cases you’ll see attempts at intervention but they aren’t landing, and that’s because something key is missing,” says FBI unit chief Karie Gibson, who is a licensed clinical psychologist. Threat experts have found that for many potential attackers, only a “thin line” separates suicidal and homicidal intent—so a priority is to discern whether a person has crossed over and is driven by both. “Someone could be in therapy but not feel comfortable or safe enough to share those deepest, darkest thoughts,” she says. Threat assessment extends concern and care but also collects information more broadly—background checks, scrutiny of social media, interviews with family, peers, and others—to evaluate the significance of specific behaviors. That includes understanding the individuals’ core grievances, Gibson adds, even if unfounded. “Whether what happened to them is real or only perceived, that’s a fact they’re living by.”

So much of Elliot’s inner rage was focused around his perception that the whole world was rejecting him. But this was wrapped up in his acute “shy narcissism,” according to White, which kept his shame and envy mostly hidden until near the end.

After high school, Elliot attended local community college briefly but was getting nowhere with school or social life. Chin and Peter hoped to expand his horizons when he expressed interest in moving 70 miles up the coast to enroll at Santa Barbara City College. Emails he wrote during this period show he felt bitter toward Peter, whom he blamed for failing to teach him how to be a successful “gentleman”—an oddly aristocratic term Elliot used in his 137-page screed that would later feed the incel mythologizing of him.

I contacted several people who worked to help Elliot during his two-plus years away from home: Gavin Linderman, the young LA social worker who’d helped instigate the welfare check in Isla Vista and called Chin the night of the massacre, did not respond to multiple inquiries. Nor did a psychologist in LA who treated Elliot periodically over the years, including near the end. A director of the agency whose three young counselors coached Elliot in Santa Barbara spoke with me, but asked not to be named. She said she noticed from the start that Elliot was keenly aware of how hard he struggled to be more normal socially, and that he had an edge to him. She explained that he liked his two male counselors but also envied their social charisma and sometimes made bitter comments in their presence about girls. He connected well with a kind female counselor, but resented the implication he needed paid female companionship.

“He deeply wanted a fairytale ending and it wasn’t coming,” the counseling director recalled.

Mental health specialists know that high-functioning youth with disabilities can become more aware of lacking progress as they grow older, which can fuel anxiety and feelings that they won’t succeed in life. Threat assessment calls this “downward drift,” says White. “That can contribute to depression, a sense of despair.”

In Elliot’s final year, Peter had enlisted a longtime friend, Hollywood producer and screenwriter Dale Launer, to try to help mentor him. The two corresponded by email and met up in LA, but that led nowhere, according to Elliot’s writing in “My Twisted World” and Launer’s own account in an essay and interview with the BBC. Launer long knew Elliot was troubled and by this point noticed he had an unhealthy entitlement about women. “We met three or four times, for a couple of hours each time,” Launer told the BBC, “and each time I had to index my expectations lower and lower.” He saw Elliot as paralyzed by timidity, and suggested he try an acting class to overcome it, but said he never got an inkling of Elliot’s “violent nature.” (Launer did not respond to a request for comment.)

I found no evidence that anyone in Elliot’s orbit ever thought he might hurt or kill people. His suicidality, a key warning factor in threat assessment, also was elusive to friends and family. Chin told me repeatedly in our many interviews that she never felt Elliot wanted to take his own life. “It’s very, very difficult to see all of this when you are in it,” she reiterated. “Now I can see that, but at that time, no way.”

The counseling director told me that when the male counselors had brought up some dark outbursts from Elliot, she didn’t think too much of it because young people facing social deficits often feel discontent and act out: “I live in the world of disabilities. Unusual behavior is all day long.”

“Chin was the most engaged parent I’ve ever seen,” she added, noting that social counseling often can succeed with high-functioning individuals. Still, she’d sensed in the final months that they were in over their heads. “We’re trying to apply social skills with this guy,” she said. “I felt that this whole situation was way beyond what I was brought in to do.”

It’s important to remember that this was early in the era of escalating mass shootings, when threat assessment was unknown to the public and even to most in mental health and law enforcement. White pointed to the implications in his study of Elliot’s condition: “Such complex difficulties are not the domain for ‘life coaches’ or ‘social skills counselors,’ however well-intentioned.”

Elliot also showed positive signs. His social counselors reported that he spoke of interest in political science clubs and volunteer work, and a document charting his goals included his aspiration to transfer to UCSB. Based on such feedback, the counseling director told Chin in late 2013 that Elliot seemed “headed in the right direction.” They saw him trying hard to improve, but he was also propping up certain illusions of progress. And his diaries were just the start of what he was concealing.

 

“It’s not just the pain of losing my son but the horrible suffering his actions caused for so many,” Chin said.

“I will carry this pain for the rest of my life.”

The term traces back more than four decades to FBI research on serial killers and certain behaviors they exude that point to their crimes. Later applied to mass shooters, it evokes how perpetrators signal their plans to attack. Threat assessment experts have found that these communications can be subtle, taking the form of innuendo, bragging, blame, or predictions. Veiled or more explicit threats show up in talk, writings, online posts, or other personal expressions—a few cases have even involved tattoos, including in homage to a Columbine shooter. Hours before gunfire erupted at Oxford High in Michigan, whose district had no threat assessment team, a teacher found a drawing of a shooting by the perpetrator labeled with comments such as “Blood everywhere” and “My life is useless.” The behavior arises from personal deterioration, as a cry for help, or both.

Elliot’s case also exemplifies a more recent insight. In 2018 research examining 63 active shooters, FBI experts found that despite the perpetrators’ self-isolating or erratic behaviors, four out of five had dodged empathetic or suspicious questioning from concerned people around them. (School shooters often claim to be just “joking” with their threats.) The research confirmed a long-standing theory: Many shooters engage in both leakage and subterfuge.

If Elliot’s troubling behaviors had come to the attention of a threat assessment team, odds for effective intervention would have jumped. He announced his intent most clearly via email and YouTube at the last moment, but other leakage appeared in his diaries going back more than four years, and in talk and actions he recorded on cellphone videos in the final months. Threat assessment leaders I reviewed this material with said his planning could have been uncovered through empathetic questioning and reviews of his online posts. “We certainly would have encouraged him to talk to us about what was burdening him and pursued other lawful ways to look into his communications,” one longtime practitioner told me.

The diaries reveal Elliot’s thinking contemporaneously and more reliably than his autobiographical screed, which he wrote in the final months and to some extent is a retrospective performance of his grievance and rage. That’s made clear by another document, “Life Story Structure Notes,” in which he outlined methodically how he would depict his early childhood as blissful yet tainted by grief, anger, and a purported focus on getting revenge against a social “enemy” at the tender age of 6. He completed his performance the day before he struck, when he parked at a palm-lined beach and recorded two takes of his final video announcing his attack. The first version of the seven-minute diatribe was disrupted by a jogger going by. The second version, the one he posted, was smoother, with his face lit more cinematically by the setting sun. “I’ll be a god, exacting my retribution on all those who deserve it,” he declared with an almost cartoonish villainy.

This final video was his bid to broadcast omnipotence in place of failure. But for a long time prior, a part of Elliot appears to have wanted his plans discovered. “I didn’t write about this before because I was scared someone might find and read my diary,” he stated in a June 2013 entry noting his purchase of a second gun and plans to stockpile ammunition. And yet, knowing he planned to attack in November (later postponing that to the following spring), he chose to create that evidence months in advance: “Since the Day of Retribution may be happening soon, perhaps even this year, I figure I’ll write it down now.” Later that June he wrote, “I am now armed and it makes me feel powerful,” describing a suicidal mission to “slaughter all of my enemies.” In that same entry, though, he also described feeling “sick with anguish” and a desire to escape his predicament.

“One of the values of this case is how extensively he documents his ambivalence,” notes White.

Such ambivalence is common among perpetrators, a pattern first highlighted two decades ago in the Safe School Initiative, a landmark federal study done by threat assessment experts after Columbine. That investigation of 37 school shooters showed how some had wavered and likely would have been receptive to help. Most young shooters leak their intent to peers, who seldom fully grasp the situation or tell an authority figure. By Elliot’s own account, he voiced biting contempt for girls to a friend he’d grown up with and then assuaged him when the friend responded that Elliot shouldn’t do anything “rash.”

His fantasies of vengeance were intercut with desperate longing throughout the nearly 200 pages of his diaries. “I really, really wish there was a way out,” he wrote in another entry. “Perhaps I should give the world another chance…I don’t want to have to resort to violent, final retribution. I want a happy life!”

“I think deep down all he really wanted was to find someone to love and have a family with, and he would say that,” Chin told me. She recalled talking with Elliot when he was attending community college in LA and hanging out at a local Barnes & Noble. One day he described looking out the window at a father helping his young kid from the car. “I wish I could have that,” he told her.

A week after the massacre, Chin received a letter from the young female social counselor who had met with Elliot over several weeks in early summer 2013. She recounted how he had opened up on their walks together, sharing laughs and bonding over an appreciation of the coastal scenery. “This is the Elliot I remember and knew,” she wrote. “A gentle, reflective, curious, clever, conscientious, and kind man. I am so incredibly sorry for your loss.” She said she’d been sad to move away from Santa Barbara and stop working with Elliot.

Later that summer Elliot was focused on “a last ditch effort” to lose his virginity before his 22nd birthday. On July 20, 2013, he got up his nerve with some shots of vodka and entered the Saturday night scene along Del Playa Drive. Around 11:30 p.m., he ventured into a house where college kids reveled in beer pong and hip-hop tracks from a DJ. Feeling ignored, he went back outside and up onto a wooden platform running along the top of the front fence line. These makeshift structures were common on Del Playa, a place for partygoers to hang out and drink while overlooking the action on the street. Around him he saw Isla Vista at its “wildest state.” When a few others came up on the platform, Elliot began insulting them—and then tried to shove a couple of the young women off the roughly 8-foot drop, toward the street. He failed and ended up on the pavement himself, fracturing his ankle. It’s unclear whether he was pushed off by guys who intervened, as he later claimed, or he jumped off, as one eyewitness said. He made his way to another nearby house party, where he also got into a confrontation. He was pummeled by a group of “obnoxious brutes,” he later wrote, only to drag himself back to his apartment in the wee hours, alone.

Later that morning Peter drove from LA to take Elliot to the hospital and help him file a police report. (No one was ever charged.) He was bruised and had facial abrasions and a swollen left eye. His ankle needed surgery. But even worse for Elliot was the shame.

“AAARGH!!! I sit here in defeat, and I am fuming with rage,” he wrote two weeks later, recovering from surgery back in LA. He wrote that his actions had been wrong, but he was horrified that “everyone in Isla Vista saw what happened” and no one had come to his aid. “That was the final straw,” he continued. “I ended up beaten, crippled, and humiliated.”

A neighbor interviewed by CNN after the massacre would recall seeing Elliot when he came back from Del Playa Drive, beaten up and sobbing uncontrollably. According to the neighbor, Elliot said, “I’m going to kill all of them. I’m going to kill myself.”

“Shame is a core motivator for many mass shooters,” says White, who observed in his case study that Elliot was mired in “pathological, insidious envy—a painful state of unworthiness related to shame that leads to the wish to destroy goodness in others.”

To some degree Elliot knew this himself: “Jealousy and envy,” he wrote in his 137-page screed, “those are two feelings that would dominate my entire life and bring me immense pain.”

In addition to his hostility toward his roommates, who were of Asian background, some of Elliot’s writings suggested self-loathing over his mixed racial identity. This included his belief that girls should be more attracted to his English heritage than they would be to “full-blooded Asians”—the “gentleman” side he imagined cultivating. Experts told me perpetrators respond to futility and shame by seeking a sense of power and control through violence. Often that includes trying to shape public perception of their attacks with bids for media attention, such as voicing racism or hateful ideology.

The party ordeal was also pivotal in Elliot’s attempt at violence. On prior occasions he had tried to splash drinks on young couples he saw in public and then quickly fled, a way he would feed his envy and anger. But this time he had sought to cause major physical injury—an escalation known as “novel aggression,” essentially a test of one’s capacity to do harm. These risk-taking behaviors also indicated Elliot’s suicidality, White told me.

As mass shooters become consumed with anger and despair, they build justification. Various extremist ideologies can serve to validate their conclusion that the only answer to their suffering is lethal violence. For years, Elliot had harbored suicidal thoughts and blamed others for his pain. But his humiliation on the party scene was a key triggering event, and it soon combined with a stirring interest in online extremism.

before his attack, Elliot began engaging with an obscure website frequented by incels, a subculture of disaffected men who lament their lack of romantic success and blame women for denying them sex. Immediately after the massacre, extremism researchers and journalists highlighted disparaging comments he’d posted online. They cited his menacing final video and his widely republished “manifesto,” as the media called it. (Though rife with ugly rants against women and grandiose ideas of violence, the book-length work is more accurately described as an autobiography of sorts.) The attack also compelled women to share stories of misogynistic abuse they’d suffered in their own lives, marked by the viral hashtag #YesAllWomen.

Internet trolls depicted Elliot as the iconic leader of an incel “revolution,” which he had said in one comment “needs to happen.” He’d posted a couple other comments about provoking fear in women and “struggling as an incel.” This drove a pat explanation of Elliot’s self-identity and motive. The media, academics, and policymakers have run with this narrative of him ever since.

The reality of Elliot’s connection to incels is more complicated. Mass shootings inevitably set off a clamor to blame an ideology as the fundamental cause, often fed by the perpetrators’ social media, but rarely do thorough investigations produce any such clear explanation. From a threat assessment perspective, Elliot’s hyperbolic misogyny is better understood as the particular way he found to channel his long-brewing suicidal despair.

Though his comments referencing incels were seized upon to show that his violence arose from that world, there is substantial evidence to the contrary. He never once used the term “incel” in his voluminous diaries or other private writings, and some of his online comments suggest he did not identify as one. While incels often attribute their failures to what they see as their physical and genetic inferiority, Elliot asserted his sense of superiority: “How dare you speak to me like that,” he retorted when one commenter insulted his looks. “I am perfection incarnate.” In a final comment posted two nights before the massacre, he told off users who labeled him a “low-class incel,” linking to video of himself accompanying his “high status” dad and stepmom at the Hunger Games premiere. “You’re all jealous of my 10/10 pretty-boy face,” he wrote. “This site is full of stupid, disgusting, mentally ill degenerates who take pleasure in putting down others. That is all I have to say on here. Goodbye.”

He appeared to engage in these forums primarily to fuel his anger and justify ideas for violence that he’d nurtured for at least a year before this activity, as his writings show and experts affirmed to me. That is, incel forums were not the source or cause of Elliot’s violent planning, but rather a tool he used to psych himself up as he prepared to act. He would also rewatch his self-recorded video rants over and over to boost his rage and resolve, case investigators told me.

This suggests that when it comes to preventing future massacres, explaining why people commit these crimes—the often murky question of motive—may ultimately be secondary to knowing the process of how they reach the point of carrying out an attack. Put another way: Elliot’s engagement with incel forums was one of many steps he took along his way to a specific form of suicide. Many mass shooters are people who have decided to end their pain by also taking out others they feel have wronged them—that’s the crossing over of the “thin line”—whether they justify their suicidal nihilism with misogyny or other strains of extremist thought.

Chin recalled Elliot telling her about the websites he’d found, but she wasn’t tech savvy and paid little attention, figuring it was “just some harmless online activity” that young people did. “I wish I’d investigated more,” she said. “I think he was telling me, ‘Look, Mom, there are other people suffering like me and this is what they are.’ But I don’t think he saw himself as one of them—he saw himself as opposite.”

The totality of case evidence does not support the idea that Elliot sought or expected to lead a violent incel movement, White told me. “He wrote well, and he used some language about social change, but he knew it was grandiose. It wasn’t some grand philosophy or manifesto. He was talking to himself about his own pain, and falling into his self-loathing.” White added that much commentary citing or analyzing Elliot’s case does not hold up from a threat assessment perspective. “You see all these articles about him from the standpoint of sociology and so on, focusing on the misogyny, and then they wander into ‘This is what caused the attack.’”

The narrative of Elliot as incel ringleader distracts from what can be learned about prevention from his case—and even worse, it fuels attention-seeking imitators. Since the Isla Vista massacre, dozens of plotters and attackers have cited incel ideology or Elliot directly as their inspiration (including in several alarming cases threat assessors have shown me that are not public). Chatter about Elliot has metastasized on incel forums, where he has a “martyr-like importance,” according to researchers. A 2018 van attack on pedestrians in Toronto that killed 10 people and injured 16 others, frequently highlighted as the deadliest incel case, stands as a remarkable example.

“The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” the 25-year-old perpetrator, Alek Minassian, posted on Facebook as he began his rampage. “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Interviewed by police after his arrest, Minassian echoed Elliot’s own story, insisting that he, too, had been humiliated at a party by women who rejected him in favor of “obnoxious brutes.” He also said he’d communicated online with Elliot prior to the Isla Vista attack. The media ate it up. A Rolling Stone headline declared Minassian was “Radicalized by Incels,” atop an article parroting his claims from the police transcript.

It was all a ruse, as he later admitted to mental health practitioners who evaluated him for trial. He told them he wanted to become an infamous killer rather than “rot in obscurity.” He believed he could achieve “upgraded” notoriety by focusing on Elliot and using associated catchphrases “to boost my name.”

The trial judge in the Minassian case ultimately ruled that he was cognizant of his crimes and that his incel motive “was a lie.” That outcome, more than two years after the van attack, drew far less media attention than the story that Elliot’s massacre directly inspired Minassian’s own. (Even some threat assessment experts I flagged this for were not aware.)

By then it was also too late to stop a grim compounding effect. A 17-year-old who attacked two women in Toronto in 2020 with a large knife, killing one, had cited Minassian as his own inspiration. He too sought notoriety, and had carried a handwritten note: “Long Live the Incel Rebellion.”

Essential to threat assessment research is building a detailed panoramic view of a case subject’s life, to conduct what the FBI’s Karie Gibson calls an analysis “from cradle to grave.” In the earlier days of social media, it was rare for a mass shooter to leave behind a large trove of lucid personal evidence, and that made Elliot’s case an opportunity. I’d long compiled research on it myself, some of which raised questions about the role of the location where Elliot carried out his attack.

On a cool spring morning in March, as the pillowy marine layer began to lift over Isla Vista, I walked the blocks of Del Playa Drive where the catastrophe played out. The shabby party houses where he’d gotten hurt looked unchanged. No one was home at the one with the platform for hanging out at the fence line, which had a ragged couch sitting on top of it. Just across the street, behind facing houses and an apartment complex, the bluffs dropped down several stories to the Pacific crashing below. It was midweek, but along the block the densely parked cars, surfboards standing against a wall, and music drifting from a nearby balcony all suggested only a brief morning lull to party life. It was from one of these balconies that witnesses had heard the final gunshot and watched the black BMW crash.

A short distance into the center of town, at the Starbucks where he’d gotten his last latte, college kids in sweats and hoodies scrolled on their phones and talked about spring break plans. I wondered if they even knew what happened to some of their counterparts here a decade ago.

Soon I met up with Joe Schmidt, the lead detective on the case, now a lieutenant with the sheriff’s office. Also joining us in his unmarked SUV was his colleague Dr. Cherylynn Lee, a clinical psychologist and threat assessment expert who leads the department’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, developed in the years since the tragedy.

“The freshmen who are here now were 8 years old when it happened,” Schmidt said, as we began retracing the path of the carnage. “So they might’ve heard about it, but most of the people who I ask that question have no idea. I’m always taken aback, because to me it feels like it happened last year.”

Behind the wheel, in casual sheriff’s tan and green with a baseball cap on his clean-shaven head, Schmidt recounted from an encyclopedic knowledge of the case. He has briefed law enforcement nationwide ever since on lessons learned. He went through the names of every victim injured or killed, what happened to them, and where.

We stopped to look at a bullet hole that still marks the top of a cooking range inside the deli mart, then two others pocking the exterior wall of a building along the route to Del Playa Drive. College kids whizzed by on bikes and skateboards, past the sandwich shops and more apartment buildings. We paused at a small park where four officers had fired on the black BMW, trying to stop it, then arrived at the house on Del Playa where the ordeal had ended, a palm tree out front recognizable from the news photos.

This was just a college town. I tried to reconcile that as I thought of the endless media stories on incels, all the airtime his sinister video and “manifesto” had gotten, the heated debates about Hollywood and misogyny. I asked Dr. Lee what she thought was most important to know about what led to the attack.

“It’s suicidality and isolation without a doubt,” she said. “That is the constant in upwards of 95 percent of the cases we’ve worked at the Behavioral Sciences Unit. The persons are not well connected socially, and they’re often alone and have thoughts of killing themselves.”

It was also clear that Isla Vista was not a good place for Elliot to be. In effect, he was living in the center of concentrated insecurity, putting right in his face what he came to feel he could never have. “If his grievance is he can’t connect with people, and people are around him all the time and he’s constantly isolated, he’s living in that environment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” Lee observed.

Not long before the tragedy, Chin began to realize this herself, and she wanted to get him out.

In August 2013, nine months before the massacre, Elliot was recovering back home from his ankle surgery and Chin was focused on boosting his confidence for the fall semester. He agreed to meet with a trusted therapist who’d treated him when he was younger. He looked happy when a childhood friend visited. He’d been pining for a flashier car than his old used Honda, so even though money was tight, Chin decided to buy him a used black BMW coupe. It needed some repairs, but would give him an appearance he craved. She didn’t know he’d grown fixated on wealth as the key to getting a girlfriend; she’d laughed it off when he urged her to remarry someone rich, and he never said a word about the many Powerball tickets he’d been buying.

“Now I am one of them, and it certainly boosts my self-esteem every time I go out,” he wrote that October, focused on Santa Barbara students who drove luxury cars. “I’m hoping that since I now have a cooler car than most kids at my college, I’d have a chance of attracting a girlfriend.”

By the following semester he was secretly quitting his classes, clashing with his roommates, and writing his rageful “life story.” He shared a carefully selected sample with Chin, his depiction of an idyllic childhood in England, and, impressed, she encouraged his stated aspirations to write a novel.

One night in February 2014, Elliot called Georgia while wandering the streets drunk and railed about girls ignoring him. His sister talked him down and had the awareness as a high school senior to know that the social scene in Isla Vista was toxic for him. She’d long worried about her brother being there, she later told me.

Chin consulted with Elliot’s therapist, with social worker Gavin Linderman, and with the counseling director in Santa Barbara, then called Elliot and urged him to leave Isla Vista temporarily. She offered him a choice: She would arrange for him to go to a high-quality residential treatment center where he could relax and get daily therapy, or he could come stay at home with her and see his therapist and social worker for an intensive period of help. She followed up with an email reiterating her love and confidence that he would overcome his struggles.

“Dear Mother,” Elliot soon wrote back, “I would love the chance to try and get something positive out of my time here. I now realize that time is running short and I have to do something with my life. If you agree to continue with my rent, I promise I will do everything I can and turn my life around. I will study hard, complete the courses that I’m halfway through, and spend the next four to five months here more productively.” He said he’d made new acquaintances and was keeping busy with his social counselors, and he promised to see his therapist and his social worker when back home. “Please let me prove to you that I can make it here.”

Chin spoke further with the professionals helping Elliot, who suggested that she’d done her best to give him options and advised her to support his goals for finishing school. There was no legal basis to make him leave or get more intensive help, the counseling director recalled. “He’s an adult. He can just say ‘no.’”

“I relied on them to guide my thinking,” Chin said, emphasizing that she wasn’t casting blame—and that none of them could’ve seen the whole picture. No one involved had the training to grasp the rising danger, or a way to share Elliot’s concerning behaviors in the methodical manner a threat assessment team would have. They didn’t know or imagine that he’d been stalking a sorority house and buying guns; their focus was on normalizing his experiences and helping him gain greater independence.

Tragically, that just allowed him to isolate further, the counseling director now believes. Her young staff was actively meeting up with Elliot, but he still had a lot of time, she said, “to sit in his own thoughts.”

On the morning of April 18, 2014, Elliot recorded himself driving an hour down the coast to Oxnard, his car stereo blaring the Motels’ “Suddenly Last Summer,” a 1980s pop hit romanticizing youthful innocence and the loss of virginity. He arrived at a familiar destination: Shooters Paradise. It was one of half a dozen trips he made to gun ranges in the final four months, where he had paid upward of $100 for a lane, targets, eye and ear protective gear, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Back in Isla Vista that evening, he recorded two videos on his phone. They contained no explicit threats, but further revealed how the humiliation at the party the prior summer kept eating at him—and showed him engaging in stalking and surveillance.

He cruised the streets starting around 10:30 p.m., narrating his grievances as his phone mounted on the dashboard recorded the scenery. “Every time I drive through this place I am overcome with rage,” he said, soon turning onto Del Playa Drive. Partygoers walked in the street or rode bikes or skateboards in the balmy night air. He slowed the car as he approached a pair of houses, one festooned with string lights and the next fronted by a platform at the top of the fence line. “Look,” he said, “that’s the house I got beat up at when I walked in on the party.”

He rehearsed his anger as he continued along the block. “Ah, here we go, look at this,” he sneered as he passed a trio of college girls heading for the party house. “Groups of hot young sluts who would just reject me.”

He recorded a second video as the area grew more crowded, lamenting the “sick and evil” town and shouting “You’re an asshole” at a guy walking in the street with two girls. The footage of him slow-rolling past partygoers suggested a chilling prospect he’d written about: “Isla Vista on weekend nights was always filled with my enemies walking right in the middle of the road. They would be easy targets.”

Five weeks later, he would ram several victims along Del Playa, then end it all just a block from the house where he’d fallen from the platform.

Elliot kept the Del Playa footage concealed, but by the end of April, his picture of calm and stability started to slip. Chin was used to him responding to her texts and calls, and after he went silent for several days she grew worried. She searched online and found a video he’d posted: Dressed in his favorite blue Hugo Boss shirt and Armani sunglasses, he stood by a canyon road in Montecito extolling the scenery, complaining about girls ignoring him, and talking up his looks and personality. The six minutes included flashes of resentment and despair, and objectively would have struck at least some viewers as troubling or strange. But Elliot also expressed sincere longing, and nothing openly menacing like what was to come.

Chin would later conclude this juncture had been a major blind spot for her. Elliot posting a recording of himself was new, and though she noted his frustration, it struck her as part of his efforts to overcome his social deficits. “He was trying so hard, and I thought this was him evolving and putting himself out there more,” she recalled.

Still, Chin felt unsettled and feared Elliot wasn’t responding to her texts and calls because he’d gotten lost or had an accident on one of his sunset hikes. She again reached out. The Santa Barbara counseling director remembered the video as “very ominous” in tone, she told me. “It was definitely a window into his psyche at that moment,” she said. Chin also called social worker Linderman, who raised concern about self-harm and said he would call the crisis hotline in Santa Barbara right away to ask for help.

What was said on that call remains unclear, but when sheriff’s deputies arrived at Elliot’s apartment that evening of April 30, they found him to be “shy, timid, and polite.” He told them that he was lonely and that the video, which they hadn’t seen, was just a way of “expressing himself,” investigators later wrote. After they spoke with him for a few minutes at the door, his arsenal hidden just inside, a deputy suggested he call Chin. He coolly explained that she was a “worry wart” as he dialed her on his cellphone.

“Mom, why did you call the police on me? There’s nothing wrong, I’m just busy. Here, talk to them.” He handed his phone to the deputy, who asked Chin if the video made her concerned about Elliot harming himself or others. She said no. The deputy affirmed for her in the brief exchange that Elliot appeared fine.

The facts known at the time didn’t provide a basis to use California’s law allowing for temporary custody for a mental health evaluation, recalled Lieutenant Joe Schmidt (who was not a part of the welfare check that night). He noted these calls are common: students new to the area who prompt concerns that turn out to be nothing serious. “It was very consistent with the majority of those calls,” he said. (Protocols changed after the tragedy, and now include more records checks, including for gun purchases.)

Notably, Chin had done exactly what threat assessment hopes for above all else: She made the difficult choice to report a loved one to authorities for help. Today, in Santa Barbara and many other places, the response to such reporting would and should be quite different.

The next day Chin also called a counseling office at Santa Barbara City College to alert them to the incident but failed to connect with anyone. She felt relieved after the welfare check, though. And she knew she’d be able to see Elliot again herself in less than three weeks, when she and Georgia would head to Montecito for their favorite sushi dinner together.

in front of you, sharing what only a mother who has been through this can know.”

It was mid-August 2022, and inside the low-lit main ballroom of the Disneyland Hotel’s conference center, Chin Rodger was telling her story to an audience for the first time. In attendance at the annual training conference of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals were more than 1,000 psychologists, counselors, cops, FBI agents, and other practitioners. (The organization has convened in this rather surreal location since shortly after its founding in the early 1990s by threat assessment experts from the Los Angeles Police Department.) I’d attended this conference for several years myself, watching presentations of numerous harrowing case studies, and rarely had seen the typically stoic crowd so gripped with emotion.

“My life as I knew it ended that day,” Chin said. “Life can change in an instant.” She wept as she spoke from the podium, her voice quiet but deliberate.

“I want to share now what I saw in my son—his behavior, circumstances, and actions that culminated in this horrific tragedy—so that when you’re out there talking to parents, or to a young man on this same pathway, you’ll have more insights on your mission to prevent targeted violence.”

“Sorry,” she said, steadying herself. “I didn’t know this was going to be so hard.”

She recounted finding Elliot’s video, the welfare check, the final dinner, and many other details preceding the devastation. She said she believed firmly that the outcome would have been different if a threat assessment team had been involved “to dig deeper, ask more questions, connect all the dots.” She paused for another deep breath. “Then my son and the six individuals whose lives he took would be here today, and the families whose lives were destroyed would never have to live this nightmare.”

She said that being brought to her knees by tragedy made her want to advocate for threat assessment. “It will give me the courage to stand back up, to go forward with hope. I want to thank you all for what you are doing. I know you are saving lives,” she said, her concluding words met with a standing ovation.

After returning home, she began hearing from more leaders in the field. A senior federal agent emailed her: “As a career threat investigator, I appreciated everything that you shared with us, and everything you did to try to prevent this tragedy. As a parent, however, I was blown away by your openness and your willingness to talk so honestly about what must have been the most difficult event of your life. I doubt that there was a dry eye in the audience by the time you finished, mine included.”

Since then, Chin has spoken at additional trainings, including for school systems and corporate programs. (She declines payment, and has funded scholarships for law enforcement agents to attend.) Her talk now includes a call for broader threat assessment programs in communities.

“I feel very fortunate now in my journey to know the people who are doing this important work,” she told me. It’s a path she chose, but she also feels that a “river of grief” carried her inevitably to it.

At a recent training not far from Sandy Hook Elementary School, a young FBI analyst approached to thank her. She explained that she’d been in a class with Elliot at Santa Barbara City College and had talked with him a couple of times: “He was very shy, and so polite and kind.” She’d wished that she’d reached out to him more. She told Chin that she’d planned to go into the military, but that after the attack she grew interested in the FBI and threat assessment. Now she was helping school systems learn how to prevent tragedies.

Chin was floored. “That was a very powerful moment for me.”

On that trip, she also went with Scarlett Lewis to the Sandy Hook memorial and Jesse’s grave. “I could feel that she has forgiven, and really has grown and evolved so much,” Chin said. “I drew strength from that.”

We were sitting in a cafe on a warm LA afternoon as Chin described her own evolving struggle. “I miss Elliot very, very much,” she said. She spoke of how small things could still hit hard, like seeing his favorite oat clusters cereal at the grocery store. “The feeling of that memory overwhelms me and I have to leave. Even now that can happen.” Yet, for years she felt that she had no right even to acknowledge her own grief, out of deference to the victims’ families. “They lost their children to what he did. They had no say in that. Elliot made the decision to do what he did.”

There are ways in which she still can’t confront his violence. “I have not put myself there yet, to visualize the horrible things he did,” she said, tearing up. “It’s still just so hard.” She was quiet for a moment. “Even saying the words ‘mass shooter’ is still really hard for me. But I’m working through it.”

Though he also used knives and a car, Elliot wrote that his “main weapons” for vengeance would be guns. Like most mass shooters, he purchased them easily and legally.

His case became key to the rise of so-called red flag laws, which allow a civil court to order the temporary removal of access to firearms based on evidence that a person poses danger to themself or others. Such laws existed in just two states before 2014 and were rarely used; four months after the Isla Vista tragedy, California instituted what it calls a “gun violence restraining order.” Red flag laws soon began to spread, especially after the Parkland high school massacre in 2018, and today exist to varying degrees in 22 states and the District of Columbia. Studies in California and beyond have shown them to be effective for preventing both suicide and mass shootings.

Fierce opposition from the gun industry and its allies, however, has slowed this progress. And a lack of resources and awareness can also stand in the way. There was no attempt to use New York’s red flag law with the 18-year-old who committed a racist massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo in May 2022, despite a prior threat from him that prompted a state-ordered mental health evaluation. Maine’s far weaker version of the law played no role in the case of the brain-damaged Army reservist who caused carnage in October 2023, despite family and friends having long alerted police and military supervisors to his alarming behavior.

“We have to find ways to push our legal and social systems to provide the authority and tools to better intervene,” Dr. Jack Rozel, who specializes in emergency psychiatric care at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told me. He suggests that wider awareness and training are essential for crisis hotline staff, counselors, and beyond. “There’s a growing realization that the risk factors for suicide and targeted violence are deeply entwined. So how do we get all mental health professionals better at thinking and asking about violence risk?”

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office has made frequent use of California’s red flag law, according to Lieutenant Schmidt and Dr. Lee. In one case, they were alerted to a person who had texted friends he was suicidal, and the team moved quickly to intervene. “He had 16 guns, two of which were buried in the backyard,” Lee told me. “He was sewing armored plating into the driver’s side and passenger side of his vehicle. So this is somebody who wanted to do some damage.” They put him on a psychiatric hold and got him help.

Red flag policy is also useful for dealing with the copycat problem, which affects the local community to this day, Lee said. “It’s not uncommon for us to get a case of an individual who is saying that he wants to be like Elliot Rodger or idolizes him and also happens to be a student going to UC Santa Barbara. Individuals that are not associated with the school come to the region, to see where it all happened.”

Even the trend of spurious copycats has changed law: When the Toronto knife attacker was sentenced to prison last fall, the judge ruled that incel-driven violence now qualified as terrorism.

There may be no way to end the incel mythology around Elliot, but stopping the media repetition could diminish it. That could also serve survivors like still-grieving father Richard Martinez, who helped push for California’s red flag law. “It bothers me so much for him to be a ‘hero’ to some people,” Martinez told me.

A study of more than 500 self-identifying incels published in February found that most did not believe violence is justified. The researchers recommended a “multipronged approach” to intervention, including “psychosocial support.” One in three incels, they found, thought daily about taking their own lives.

Like all suicidal mass shooters, Elliot Rodger lacked hope. The fundamental importance of that echoes in how his mother cultivates her own resilience. Volunteer work is part of it. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Chin went on two trips with World Central Kitchen to Poland, helping to feed refugees fleeing the war. It was a powerful and humbling experience for her, but she says violence prevention has remained her strongest calling.

More training conferences are ahead on her calendar, and she says the reception for her talks has begun to help make certain things feel more possible, if not necessarily easier. “In the past, if I met someone new and they asked me if I have any kids, I would say, ‘Yes, I have a daughter.’ Then I would quickly start talking all about Georgia, what she was doing, her interests and her travel—that was my safe place.” But now, when a new acquaintance asks her about family, she finds herself answering differently.

“I also have a son,” she says. “I lost him in a tragedy.”

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of harming yourself or others, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

In an award-winning investigation in 2022, I told the story of Kerry King, a mom in Tulsa who got 30 years in prison under the state’s “failure to protect” law because she couldn’t stop her abusive boyfriend from beating her 4-year-old daughter. He received significantly less time behind bars for committing that violence. When my colleague Ryan Little and I conducted a groundbreaking review of Oklahoma’s court records, we identified hundreds of people like King who had been charged under the state’s law since 2009 for allegedly failing to protect their children from another adult’s harm. About 90 percent of those imprisoned under the statute were women, disproportionately Black mothers. Many of them experienced abuse from the same person, often a romantic partner, who harmed their children.

In recent weeks, Oklahoma’s legislature overwhelmingly approved the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, which would allow courts to shorten prison sentences for people who can prove their crime stemmed from domestic violence. The legislation could help mothers like King who are convicted for “failure to protect,” as well as others who killed an abuser in self-defense, or committed a crime while attempting to escape from the abusive relationship, or followed an abuser’s order to break the law for fear of retribution. It would apply to both new and old cases, theoretically helping people with active trials or those who want to retroactively shorten their sentences.

It’s a big deal that this legislation passed with so much support: As I’ve reported before, only a few other states have laws like this, including New York. And none of those states are as conservative as Oklahoma. But the issue appears to have struck a chord on both sides of the Sooner State’s political aisle. “This may be the first time in my life I agree with someone from San Francisco,” then-Rep. Todd Russ, who is Republican and now Oklahoma’s state treasurer, wrote to me in 2022 after I emailed him from California to share our investigation. In March, the state Senate unanimously approved the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, and in April the state House approved it with a vote of 84-3.

Despite such broad support, Republican Gov. Stitt vetoed the bill on Tuesday. He described the legislation as “bad policy,” arguing that “untold numbers of violent individuals who are incarcerated or should be incarcerated in the future will have greater opportunity to present a threat to society due to this bill’s impact.” (Our investigation found that the vast majority of women in Oklahoma convicted for failure to protect—a nonviolent crime—had no prior felony record.)

In his veto message, the governor also warned that defendants could point to abuse that happened years ago as justification for crimes they were committing today, something he described as “a bridge too far.” But that’s not how the bill would actually work. The Oklahoma Survivors’ Act applies only in cases where someone was experiencing abuse at the time they committed the offense, and only if they can prove the abuse was “a significant contributing factor” causing them to commit it. “He either has no grasp of this policy or doesn’t care enough to get involved to inform himself,” Senate Pro Tempore Greg Treat, a Republican who authored the bill, said in a statement. “Whichever it is, it’s embarrassing, especially for our state that has such a high rate of domestic violence.”

Oklahoma ranks first in the country for the most domestic violence cases per capita, according to one recent study, and many women in the state’s prisons are survivors of abuse. “Women, especially in Oklahoma, are overpunished,” Amanda Ross, whose aunt got a life sentence for killing an abuser, told the Oklahoma City-based television station KFOR-TV. Under the bill, sentences of life without the possibility of parole could be reduced to 30 years or less; sentences of 30 years or more could be reduced to 20 years or less.

The Oklahoma District Attorneys Council supports the veto, arguing the bill is too broad. But criminal justice reform advocates haven’t given up on the legislation. On Wednesday, the state Senate overrode the governor’s veto with a vote of 46-1. If the state House overrides it too, the bill could still become law. Incarcerated “survivors have been waiting and praying for the opportunity to return to their children and families,” Alexandra Bailey, a campaign strategist for the nonprofit Sentencing Project, which supported the legislation, said in a statement.

Kerry King is now nearly a decade into her 30-year sentence and has tried her best to stay in touch with her four kids, the oldest of whom was about 9 when she was convicted. She calls them as often as she can and writes them letters, and sends them socks and blankets with yarn she bought at the commissary. When I visited three of her kids in 2022, they were confused and devastated about why she was still locked up. “Like, I kind of know why she’s in jail, but I know she’s not supposed to be there,” 11-year-old Lilah said, holding back tears.

“I just really miss her,” she said. “You can’t really make memories on a phone.” To learn more about King’s case and the incarceration of other survivors in Oklahoma, read our investigation and watch the documentary I helped make with filmmaker Mark Helenowski below.

Most days, Braven took his time while driving; his friends sometimes teased him for staying below the speed limit. But lately he hadn’t been feeling like himself—not since his grandma died from Covid weeks earlier. On this particular night, when a car ahead of him sat at around 60 mph in a 70 mph zone, he signaled and passed it, slowing again to the speed limit after crossing back over the dotted yellow line.

Then lights flashed behind him. The car he’d passed belonged to a white cop from the reservation’s brand-new tribal police department. Headquartered inside a former Subway restaurant, the department had launched just five months earlier with Covid relief funding—an attempt by the tribal nation’s chairman to address crime and a huge deficit of federal police.

The officer called dispatch to report a speeding driver, according to law enforcement records, even though Braven wasn’t speeding when she activated her siren.

A chase began.

Within 70 seconds, his car was struck by a train.

More than two years later, on a Sunday evening in May 2023, Braven’s mother, Blossom Old Bull, took a deep breath as she parked her Honda Odyssey on the side of the highway near the site of the wreck. Together we walked through knee-high grass toward the railroad. “This is what’s left of it,” she said, bending over to show me a scrap of burned metal. A suspension spring, a radiator, and a wheel also lay nearby.

Old Bull tilted up one of the rims to get a better look, exposing a tattoo with Braven’s name on her forearm. She often drove out of her way to make sure the memorial for him was still standing there, a cross with his basketball jersey draped over it.

It had been difficult for her to move forward after the crash; she still had so many questions about what happened. According to interviews, public records requests, and court documents from a lawsuit over Braven’s death, a Crow couple who had pulled over at the wreck site said Braven was denied medical care for a half-hour as he begged for help. The cop who chased him, moonlighting from her job as a Veterans Affairs security officer, left the scene with a crucial piece of evidence: her patrol vehicle. Someone broke into the police headquarters, and the incident report went missing along with records from other cases. Two or three days after the crash, the entire police force disbanded, offering the community—and Braven’s family—no explanation. When Old Bull went to the department for answers, she found a locked door and windows taped over with white paper. “Everybody just up and left,” she recalled.

The disappearance of a new police department so soon after the wreck was highly unusual, the kind of story you might never hear twice. But other parts of Braven’s story were deeply familiar: unanswered questions after deaths on the reservation, inadequate law enforcement. Before 2020, the federal government controlled policing in the Crow Nation—providing only a handful of officers for an area two-thirds the size of Connecticut. Crimes went unsolved, grieving relatives complained of faulty investigations, and some victims wouldn’t even call for help, fearing violence by officers. (Nationally, police kill Native Americans at higher rates than other people of color.) The Crow’s tribal police department was a desperately needed but underfunded counterbalance to a federal system that isn’t working. And Braven was caught up in the dysfunction.

So, too, was Old Bull. After the tribal cops disappeared, it felt like nobody in power would talk to her, like nobody noticed the life that was lost or took responsibility for it. “They come on Native land and they kill, and they just walk away. They think nobody is gonna care,” she said as she drove home from the train tracks, the sun almost set, the clouds a deep blue behind her. “I think they thought that’s how our family was gonna be—that we were gonna let this go.”

“They didn’t expect us to speak out and try to get answers,” she added.

The Crow tribe has about 13,400 members, most of whom live on or around the reservation in southeastern Montana, a lush landscape with towering mountains, open skies, and rivers teeming with trout. The tribal nation earns some revenue from its vast coal and oil reserves. Most people speak Crow as a first language, and the matrilineal clan system remains strong.

Braven and his mom moved to the reservation when he was in eighth grade. Old Bull, a single mom and health care worker from South Dakota, is Lakota, not Crow, and she’d been raising Braven in New Mexico; he was her youngest boy, the eighth of nine siblings. But she wanted him to grow up closer to his father, who was Crow, and some of his older brothers and sisters, and to learn more about that part of his Native heritage. When she’d spent time on the reservation previously, she recalled families camping in teepees for Crow Fair, an annual celebration with a powwow and horse racing and a rodeo, or enjoying the Sun Dance and sweat lodges.

Braven hadn’t wanted to move away from Albuquerque. He was a sensitive kid, and he cried in 2017 when he learned he’d have to leave his basketball team behind. In Montana, the family settled in the town of Crow Agency in a shabby one-story house that they spruced up with fresh paint. It was a rough transition; weeks after they arrived, Braven’s dad died from pneumonia after a struggle with alcoholism. Braven, only 13 years old, stood at his bedside the day they pulled him off life support. I know you weren’t there for me because you were sick, he said, but I still love you. “He was such a good-hearted person, to even think in those terms at that age,” says his sister Marissa.

Braven did his best to settle into the bunkbed room he now shared with his older brother Emilio, who played basketball with him on the corner courts. He grew closer with his half siblings’ grandmother, who adopted him as her own grandson. He loved spending time at her house and would offer to drive her to appointments, help her carry groceries, and put the pots away on the top shelf of her kitchen.

Though he hadn’t wanted to move to the reservation, it didn’t take long for Braven to hit his stride. His cousin Jayden remembers how quickly Braven made friends: “I left for the summer and came back and everyone knew him. He was really popular.” “He had a goofy personality,” says his girlfriend, Jordan Jefferson. As the years passed, Braven excelled—an honor-roll student who ran cross country and track and played JV basketball, and who was unanimously chosen by his teammates to co-manage the varsity squad, which he hoped to eventually join himself, running miles most days to get in better shape. “He was one of a kind and always ready to take the challenge,” says Mike Beads Don’t Mix, his freshman coach.

But the pandemic marked the start of a shift after Braven’s high school switched to remote learning and he couldn’t see his friends much. In August 2020, the month he was turning 17, his grandma got Covid; she fell into a coma and was unable to sing him “Happy Birthday” like she normally did. Weeks later, she was dead. “He took it really hard” and “got a little more distant from all of us,” his sister JoLee remembers. In his bedroom, Braven played his grandma’s favorite song, “Blue Ain’t Your Color” by Keith Urban, over and over. His grades slipped, and he started drinking more.

The week of Braven’s birthday, Old Bull found him passed out on a couch at his older brother’s house. He lashed out at her after she roused him, and she called the cops, hoping they might teach him a lesson. The police arrested him for disorderly conduct and took him to juvenile detention in Billings, about an hour away.

“My mom, she had to raise all these kids on her own, so I guess you could say she’s tough, but not mean,” Emilio says. “She’s loving, she’d get us a bunch of basketball shoes, but she’s gonna give you the tough love you need to succeed in this world.”

When Braven returned three days later, now on probation, he hugged Old Bull and gave her a letter he’d written apologizing for the incident. “I never want to leave your side again,” he wrote. “I know everybody in our family is disappointed in me…I was crying while writing this letter just because I realized how bad I hurt you.”

He told Old Bull that on his way to detention, an arresting officer from the Crow tribal police “choked [him] out,” according to court records, and that it had scared him, reaffirming all the bad stories he’d heard about law enforcement: His cousin Jayden once watched a cop push his uncle’s head into the concrete, and they both remembered when officers at Crow Fair beat Braven’s 15-year-old cousin Esaias Stops Pretty Places. This is why I didn’t want to call the police, Old Bull told him. “But you need to learn now, Braven, that if somebody needs to call the cops on you,” she added, “this is what will happen.”

For centuries before the Europeans arrived, the Crow had no police. Instead, warrior groups protected people and enforced laws like the rules of the buffalo hunt. “There’s a big difference between a warrior and a cop,” says Crow historian Alden Big Man Jr., who has studied the tribe’s traditional systems of justice. Warriors’ punishments could be harsh, including things like burning down a person’s home or killing his horses, but if the offender responded favorably, the warriors would compensate his loss, perhaps giving him as many horses as had been taken away.

In the 1800s, the federal government confined the Crow, also known as the Apsáalooke, to the reservation; white settlers often shot at people who tried to leave. The tribe’s nomadic hunters and gatherers were forced to become sedentary farmers and to accept Christianity, learn English, and educate their kids in the colonizers’ way. As railroads brought white ranchers into their grazing areas and banks denied Crows loans, the former warriors were “reduced to begging for handouts during ration days,” according to Big Man, while they “witnessed a complete annihilation of the buffalo, as well as the disappearance of a whole way of life.” In 1887, after a Crow man led a war party off the reservation to steal horses, a colonial agent sent the party to jail. “It was right then and there,” says Big Man, that in the Crow Nation “the system changed from warrior societies to the government enforcing the law.”

Around that time, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) began appointing Native officers to police reservations—ordering them to prohibit traditional rituals that the colonizers viewed as immoral, ration food and other supplies, and stop any activities that might interfere with white economic pursuits. In 1885, Congress had taken away Native nations’ right to prosecute serious crimes like homicides committed by Native people against other Natives on reservations. (US lawmakers were outraged that a Sioux government in South Dakota had punished a killer according to its own principles of justice—rather than the death penalty, it had fined him $600, eight horses, and a blanket.) Instead, murders and other violent offenses would be investigated by federal agents, some of whom traveled long distances to tribal territories and had little to no long-standing relationship with the people who lived there.

Nearly a century later, as activists from the American Indian Movement protested police brutality and rising crime, Congress passed the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which created a path for tribes to take back more control of law enforcement. If tribal nations were able to jump through the hoops needed to secure a contract with the BIA, they could divert federal dollars intended for BIA cops to their own tribal police. “It was a real game-changer,” says Lauren van Schilfgaarde, an Indian law scholar who is Cochiti Pueblo and previously directed UCLA’s Tribal Legal Development Clinic. Tribes have since set up more than 200 law enforcement agencies on reservations, far surpassing the number of BIA agencies.

But many tribes were not able to get a contract, including the Crow, and those that have tribal police still lack jurisdiction over major crimes. In 1978, the Supreme Court also removed their ability to prosecute non-Natives, even for most minor crimes. “Even if you have infinite dollars, if your police departments have questionable, shaky, or even no authority over any person within their territorial boundaries, that compromises the entire enterprise,” van Schilfgaarde says.

The federal government, meanwhile, skimped on funding for reservation cops, much as it skimped on health care, education, housing, and rural infrastructure. By 2001, violent crime on reservations was double or triple the national average. “Ultimately, you are of your environment,” Aaron Brien, a historian for the Crow tribe, says in the recent documentary Murder in Big Horn. “When you take an entire society and strip them of any confidence and self-worth they have, it becomes very fragile.” Tribes barely had half the policing resources per capita as non-Native communities: While Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and DC had between four and seven officers per thousand residents, few tribal departments had ratios of more than two officers per thousand residents. As some communities of color protested overpolicing in cities, says van Schilfgaarde, reservations suffered the opposite extreme, coupled with a lack of resources to address public safety through other means like addiction treatment, employment, and schooling. “It’s incredibly frustrating and dangerous,” she says.

Under the Obama administration, Congress passed the Tribal Law and Order Act, creating a commission to study the problem. The commission, which included Republican and Democratic lawmakers along with Indian law experts, recommended the federal government pay to nearly double the number of reservation police—noting that crime dropped by more than one-third on four reservations that hired extra cops during a pilot program in 2009. The tribes themselves, instead of the BIA, should lead the police, the commission argued; this change would help build trust with the community and more closely reflect tribal priorities and customs. “Public safety in Indian Country can improve dramatically once Native nations and Tribes have greater freedom to build and maintain their own criminal justice systems,” the commission wrote, describing the federal policing system as “a maze of injustice.” The commission set a goal of 2024 to “close the public safety gap” on reservations.

But by 2018, the number of BIA-funded officers on reservations hadn’t grown at all—in fact, it had fallen by about one-third. Carole Goldberg, a commission member appointed by Obama, says Trump’s administration seemed more focused on approving oil pipelines on Native land than on reforming reservation law enforcement. By 2020, the BIA estimated tribes needed $1.4 billion to handle policing nationally but admitted it was only providing $246 million, almost the same budget as a decade earlier. (The Department of Justice provided less than $100 million.) “It’s like working with strings and tin cans at times,” Robert Bryant, chief of police for the Penobscot Nation, had testified to the commission.

During parts of that year, the Crow Nation had just four BIA police to cover an expanse of 3,500 square miles. BIA cops were stretched so thin that “we were pulling 18-hour days” and “going months without a day off,” says Josie Passes, a former officer who wrote a letter to members of Congress begging for backup. A perceived lack of accountability contributed to a climate of fear. “When you start thinking about it,” says Birdie Real Bird, 70, a lifelong Crow resident whose aunt was assaulted during a home break-in and never received a visit from police, “you’re a sitting duck.”

 

“When our Native women and girls go missing,

law enforcement chooses to do nothing,

and it’s up to the family members to do the hard work of investigating.”

 

Add to that the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, an international problem that’s particularly severe in the Crow Nation, where girls are sometimes sex-trafficked and used as drug mules along Interstate 90. Seventy-four people disappeared on the Crow and neighboring Northern Cheyenne reservations in 2019—more than any other area of Montana, which has one of the highest rates of missing Indigenous women nationally. One of them was Braven’s cousin Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, an 18-year-old who loved to sing, dance, run, and wrestle. Five days after she disappeared, the sheriff’s office found her body face down in a fenced backyard, but the office didn’t notify her family for nearly two weeks. Four and a half years later, her cause of death remains undetermined.

Families of the missing often complain about poor transparency and inadequate investigations, and jurisdictional barriers make the situation worse. The BIA can’t arrest people for crimes committed off the reservation, even in border towns like Hardin, where Kaysera died. And on the reservation, other agencies—like the FBI or the sheriff’s office—might have jurisdiction depending on the type of offense and whether the perpetrator was Native. Because it’s often unclear whether a crime took place on or off the reservation and who the perpetrator was, it’s easy for law enforcement to avoid responsibility. When corpses are discovered, investigators regularly write off the deaths as accidental. Commonly, “when our Native women and girls go missing,” says Mary Kathryn Nagle, a Cherokee attorney who assisted Kaysera’s relatives, “law enforcement chooses to do nothing, and it’s up to the family members to do the hard work of investigating.”

By 2019, the Crow reservation was desperate for a change. In August, one of the few BIA cops there—the police chief, no less—quit in protest of his agency’s understaffing. That November, Crow Chairman AJ Not Afraid, the tribe’s chief executive, issued an emergency declaration over the shortage of police.

Days later, he traveled to DC with other Native leaders to discuss the issue with President Trump, whose administration was announcing Operation Lady Justice, an initiative to improve the federal response to tribes’ missing-persons cases. Some Indigenous critics described the effort as uninformed. Trump, for his part, seemed fixated on the Crow chairman’s name. “Is it true—you’re not afraid? Are you not afraid of anything?” Trump asked, laughing.

On New Year’s Day 2020, Not Afraid’s 16-year-old niece, Selena Not Afraid, went missing at a rest stop between Hardin and Billings. A search party, which included Braven, scoured the surrounding fields with ATVs, helicopters, horses, dogs, and drones. Three weeks later, a team from the Interior Department discovered her body less than a mile away. Her death was attributed to hypothermia, but some locals suspected foul play.

Selena’s sister had previously died in a hit-and-run, and her brother was killed by the Billings police. “The Crow Tribe,” Not Afraid had said in his emergency declaration, “will no longer accept ‘lip service’ for the unacceptable lack of law enforcement.” It was long past time, he and his administration believed, to create their own tribal force.

Not Afraid pleaded with the BIA to fund a new police department, according to records of their correspondence. But the BIA kept denying his request, arguing that the tribe, which didn’t have a jail or other necessary infrastructure, hadn’t fulfilled application requirements and couldn’t effectively manage law enforcement.

The pandemic provided Not Afraid with an opening. In May 2020, the Crow Nation received $27 million in coronavirus relief funding through the CARES Act. Suddenly, he didn’t need the BIA’s money; he had enough to launch a police department on his own. Soon he’d hired about 15 officers, tripling the police presence on the reservation. “I was excited about it,” says Yolanda Fraser, ­Kaysera’s grandmother. “I thought that finally we would have a justice unit that could dig into” missing-persons cases.

However, tribal legal experts say Not Afraid failed to get the necessary approval from tribal lawmakers. “Police departments need to be established by legislation—that wasn’t there,” says Dennis Bear Don’t Walk, the tribe’s former chief judge and now legislative counsel, who says Not Afraid also likely needed lawmakers to sign off on using CARES Act money for policing. Not Afraid declined to comment, but former officials who helped him launch the department told me they believed he had the power to control spending and establish law enforcement during an emergency like the pandemic. (The Treasury Department is reviewing the matter and declined to comment, as did the BIA.)

In Indian Country, tribal chairs have sometimes faced accusations of co-opting police departments for their own purposes—officers can act as enforcers for whoever has the upper hand in tribal management. After the department launched in late June, Not Afraid put out press releases promising to prioritize community involvement and rehabilitation. But he also embraced tactics that appeared to benefit him personally. In August 2020, he responded to an uptick in Covid deaths by imposing a reservation-wide lockdown and curfew, which had public health benefits but also ­prevented political opponents from campaigning ahead of the November election—even as he held events to drum up support himself.

Some doubted the legitimacy of Not Afraid’s new force. “What if they pull a gun on you: Are they a real cop?” Big Man, the historian, wondered. Gerald “Jay” Harris, the chief prosecutor in Big Horn County, which includes most of the reservation, sent a memo to the sheriff’s department warning that the county could be exposed to lawsuits if it worked with the tribal police, which Harris, who is also Crow, did not view as legitimate. The BIA kept patrolling alongside the new officers but sometimes wouldn’t send calls through to them, according to sources familiar with the tribal force. Passes, the BIA officer, viewed the tribal cops as more of a “militia group than a law enforcement department.”

The federal government had never invested enough resources to create a strong pipeline of trained local police. Shilo Bad Bear was hired as a supervising dispatcher of the new department, even though she only had about 10 months of prior experience. “I was so scared—I didn’t have the proper qualifications,” she says. “I basically had to learn by myself,” adds another dispatcher, who asked for anonymity; she had no prior experience and says she received a sheet of 10 codes but no formal training.

Passes questioned whether the force’s employees had undergone sufficient background checks; she recalled that the BIA had arrested some of them in the past. Some of the cops had retired years ago from other agencies, which meant they were no longer certified, according to one former officer, who also requested anonymity. Others had never worked as a cop. Under Montana law, they could patrol for almost a year before attending a police academy to become certified. It’s a delay that’s common in small rural departments, but one that Michael Gennaco, a consultant in California who specializes in civilian oversight of law enforcement, describes as “a tragedy waiting to happen.” Geoffrey Eastman, a tribal patrol sergeant who did have his certification, later testified in litigation surrounding Braven’s death that “there were no policies in place” to show officers what was expected of them.

And resources were tight. For a police headquarters, Not Afraid’s administration purchased a closed-down Subway restaurant attached to a museum that commemorated the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. Confused tourists often dropped in looking to order sandwiches, but the counter that once stored cold cuts had become a temporary shelf for officers’ guns. “It felt like a joke,” says Bad Bear. “We were making do with what we had,” says the department’s first police chief, Terrill Bracken, and “building an airplane as we were flying.”

The goal was to create “a department of the people, for the people,” says Bracken, “with tribal members policing their own.” But recruiting Crow cops was challenging because of the long hours, low pay, and limited benefits, and because of the reservation’s extensive clan system; few locals wanted a job that might involve arresting their relatives. So Not Afraid also brought in outsiders, who he hoped would be more impartial.

Bracken himself was a white martial arts instructor from Billings who had briefly worked as a sheriff’s deputy; he moved into a camping trailer outside the tribal police headquarters, away from his wife and two kids, so he could devote more time to the force. “I had so much passion for that project,” he says. “It wasn’t going to get done unless somebody stepped up.” After one month, he was unexpectedly replaced; Crow local Larry Tobacco, who had previously worked for the BIA, became chief.

The new police department also recruited from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Sheridan, Wyoming, which staffs about a dozen federal cops to patrol a manicured VA campus. “The reservation stays very busy and you would be exposed to a lot more major crime than you are here,” the VA’s police chief told his team in May 2020, according to emails obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request. Under VA ethics guidelines, the agency’s cops generally could not moonlight on the reservation if the tribal police received federal funding. Even though Not Afraid launched the force with CARES Act funds, the tribe assured the VA that no federal funds would be used, according to emails and interviews, so the VA ethics committee gave its blessing. (One former police official told me he was present when an attorney told Not Afraid that the funds became tribal after entering the tribe’s bank accounts; a Treasury Department spokesperson said the funds still would have been federal. Not Afraid did not respond to my request for comment.)

Some Crow residents, including Old Bull, questioned whether it made sense to invite outside law enforcement onto the reservation. And these VA officers may not have been prepared for real policing, says Seth Stoughton, a former cop who lectures on policing issues at the University of South Carolina; patrolling a VA medical center, he says, is more like working as a security guard than as a municipal cop. Bracken tells me these officers had previously completed training in operating a police vehicle to get federal certification at the VA. But a VA spokesperson told me its officers receive no training in high-speed chases because they are banned by the agency.

The night Braven died, it was a VA police officer turned tribal cop, Pamela Klier, who chased him.

The Crow tribal police “was a good thought,” says Bad Bear, the dispatcher, but “it seemed like something bad was bound to happen because these guys didn’t know what they were doing.”

The morning before Braven died, he and his brother Emilio played basketball for a couple of hours. Then Braven went to his late grandma’s house in Hardin to see his cousins Jayden and Trey, who were still grieving her death. He seemed fine, remembers Jayden; they “danced each other up,” like they always did to say hello, and then Braven went to fish at a nearby pond.

Around 1 p.m., he texted his girlfriend and offered to pick her up at home after her shift at the Boys & Girls Club that evening. He could borrow the car at his grandma’s house, a black Chevy Malibu, to make the 35-minute ride. It was already dark out when he hit the road, a crisp November night, but it hadn’t snowed yet so it would be an easy drive.

Blossom Old Bull didn’t learn about the crash until several hours afterward. She had just woken up from a nap when she got a phone call. Braven’s older brother Gavin was sobbing. He’d heard that Braven had been in an accident.

“Where is he? Which hospital do I go to?” Old Bull asked frantically.

“He’s dead,” Gavin said, still crying.

Old Bull dropped the phone and screamed. No! she yelled. How do you know?

Emilio hit a shelf in the room he shared with Braven, breaking it. His sister Jolene threw herself on the floor and sobbed. They were all still crying, struggling to comfort each other, when they heard a knock on the door a half-hour later at 10 p.m.

Outside, a tall man with a black shirt and badge stood on the rickety front steps. It was BIA Special Agent Jose Figueroa Jr., who’d just come from the crash site.

I’m sure you guys already know what happened, Figueroa said to Braven’s older brother Keenan outside, according to Old Bull and court records. They clocked him going 90 and chased him, and he ended up going head-on with the train. Figueroa said the family could go to the mortuary the next morning. He asked whether Braven drank or did drugs, then left without offering condolences.

When Braven’s older brother returned inside, he had a confused look on his face. Speed limits often weren’t enforced on the reservation. And Braven was always so slow behind the wheel.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Old Bull says. She was inclined to trust Figueroa, because her dad worked as a cop in South Dakota when she was younger. But Figueroa had hardly given the family any details—not even which agency had pursued her son—and she couldn’t square the story she had been told about Braven speeding with the cautious boy she had raised. The next morning, she grew even more baffled when the mortuary owner said she couldn’t see Braven’s body yet. The owner didn’t tell her that it had already been sent to a crime lab for an autopsy.

Her confusion turned to shock in the days that followed. On the TV news, she learned that it was the tribal police who’d chased Braven, so she drove to their headquarters. But the force had by then disbanded, and the windows of the old Subway were covered in paper. Seething with anger, she tugged on the locked door and pressed her face against the windows, trying to see inside. “There was a life taken, and you just closed everything down without giving the family any answers?” she thought. When she went to the BIA office instead, looking for a police report, an officer handed her a sticky note that simply said “FOIA.” Over the next few months, she got an attorney, Nagle, who’d also been helping Kaysera’s family, and they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents with the BIA, but the agency rejected it, citing an ongoing investigation.

The question was, who was investigating? The BIA told Nagle that the FBI had jurisdiction, but an FBI agent told her his office had no case file for Braven. (The FBI, in response to my own FOIA request in 2022, would not confirm or deny whether it possessed documents related to Braven’s death. The BIA told me both agencies initially investigated, but the FBI eventually took control because Klier was non-Native.) When Old Bull tried to get Braven’s death certificate, an assistant at the Big Horn County court couldn’t find it. When she tried to locate his car, the insurance company Progressive said authorities hadn’t released it yet. For weeks, the only information she could access was from Braven’s toxicology report; the coroner personally called to offer his condolences and to tell her that Braven had been drunk and had THC in his system when he died. It would take her four months to get the full autopsy report. She still didn’t know the name of the officer who’d pursued her son or how the chase had unfolded.

Old Bull, a medication aide at a nursing home, is far from naive when it comes to requesting medical documentation. But federal and state law enforcement have a reputation for keeping Native families in the dark after killings. “It’s expected for families not to get information,” says Rae Peppers, a Crow former state lawmaker.

Other families have also struggled to get basic paperwork after their loved ones died. “They never notified me, not once,” Fraser, Kaysera’s grandmother and legal guardian, says of the sheriff’s office that found Kaysera’s body. “It was hard, not getting any support,” says Alvilene Buffalo Bull Tail, whose 14-year-old grandson, nicknamed Jr. Boy, was fatally hit by a train on the Crow reservation in 2017. Authorities deemed his death an accident, surmising that he fell asleep on the tracks; Buffalo Bull Tail suspects someone pushed him, and that law enforcement never properly investigated. “We don’t have closure until at least we know what really happened.”

In Lame Deer, a town on the Northern Cheyenne reservation bordering Crow, Maureen Bryant says her family still hasn’t obtained a death certificate or autopsy report more than two years after her niece DeAnna Limberhand was found hogtied in the Stillwater River. Going to the courthouse for documents felt “like a dead end.” “We kept waiting for paperwork or some kind of information, but we never heard,” she says. “What do you do if no one is helping you?” she adds tearily. “We’re just going through a lot right now, and the not-knowing makes it even worse.”

The stonewalling led Old Bull and her family to speculate about what happened to Braven, and sometimes they clung to upsetting theories. When they went to the railroad after the crash and observed a second set of tire marks alongside Braven’s leading from the highway through the grass to the railroad, they wondered whether the police ran him into the train. And they wondered if perhaps law enforcement’s lack of transparency was a sign of something more nefarious. “If you did nothing wrong, just release the information,” Old Bull wanted to tell them. “What is it you are trying to hide?”

Her suspicions heightened as witnesses came forward. According to her lawsuit, Maurice and Mavis Mountain Sheep, the couple who’d passed the wreck on their way to get gas, told her they had waited near the railroad for about a half-hour and didn’t see anyone offer Braven first aid. Braven “kept saying, ‘Help me,’” Mavis told the family. But law enforcement “just stood there and stared at him.”

Old Bull also got a text from Bad Bear, the tribal police’s dispatcher. “I had quit by the time that occurred with your son but I can tell you right now, absolutely nothing was in compliance,” Bad Bear wrote. “That place should have not ever been opened…It was a shitshow there.”

For Old Bull, the lack of clarity about the night Braven died was like torture. And she isn’t one to let something like this slide. In February 2023, she tried to sue Klier in federal court for wrongful death, hoping the court proceedings would bring new information to light. She had also sued the BIA, which sent officers to the scene of the crash, accusing the agency of negligently allowing the tribal police to operate without proper training and of failing to offer Braven medical care. “The acts of the agents of Defendant United States shock the conscience and offend the community’s sense of fair play and decency,” her attorney wrote.

Last April, a judge allowed Old Bull’s case to proceed against the BIA, but not against Klier, because Klier had chased Braven in her capacity as a tribal employee, not a federal one. By then, it was too late for Old Bull to sue Klier in tribal court; she’d missed the tribe’s statute of limitations.

Old Bull decided to try a different tactic. In July 2023, she drove to Billings to share her story with a broader audience, including federal officials who were seeking feedback about law enforcement on reservations.

She wasn’t sure what to expect, but she hoped someone in power might finally listen. In the years since Braven died, President Biden had appointed the country’s first Indigenous secretary of the interior, Deb Haaland. Before Haaland left Congress to take the job, she and other Native lawmakers passed a bill to hear testimony about crime and the crisis of missing Indigenous people. Now, Native families were coming from Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota to testify to a federal commission, some driving 20 hours round trip for a chance to speak for 15 minutes.

Grace Bulltail, Kaysera’s aunt, was a member of the commission and encouraged Old Bull to join. But Bulltail felt disappointed at the turnout of elected officials. “We invited the Montana Department of Justice—nobody came,” she says. Not even many Crow tribal leaders showed up. (A DOJ spokesperson said he wasn’t aware of an invitation.)

Still, Old Bull told me afterward that the gathering made her “a little optimistic that something will change.” It helped her feel less alone knowing that her family wasn’t the only one waiting for answers. “Listening to everyone’s stories, you realize you’re a piece of a big, big thing.”

The next month, I was in Crow Agency again, reporting on Braven’s case. It had been nearly three years since Old Bull first started investigating the circumstances surrounding her son’s death, but there’d been a big development since the last time I visited: The BIA had sent me an email with a trove of documents about the incident. It had taken me months of corresponding with the agency—after a year examining the case, interviewing dozens of people, and scouring court and government records—to get the details of her son’s final minutes. I wondered whether my luck with the BIA had something to do with all the time that had passed, or my status as an outsider. Nagle, Old Bull’s attorney, told me journalists are “much more likely” than Indigenous families to get documents from the federal government via the Freedom of Information Act.

At Old Bull’s house, she put on her glasses and joined me on the couch, where I spread out the highlighted pages for her to see.

At first, what Old Bull read in the BIA’s investigative report lined up with what she already knew. It all started on Highway 451 on November 24, she read. But the next detail made her purse her lips: At 5:39 p.m., Braven made a “legal pass” of Klier’s police car over a dotted yellow line, according to the BIA’s description of Klier’s dashcam footage, which doesn’t specify how fast he drove past her. Then, once he got in front of her, he slowed back down to the speed limit, about 70 mph, and Klier turned on her emergency lights to pull him over.

He kept driving.

Maybe he was afraid, Old Bull thought, remembering the officer who had choked him on his way to juvenile hall just months before the crash.

In any case, Braven drove, still close to the speed limit.

Seconds later, he slowed down considerably, and it appeared he might pull over. Klier, now following him at 55 mph, called dispatch and reported that he’d passed her at 90 mph. But Braven did not pull over. Klier activated her siren.

Now, Braven began to accelerate, and she chased him. Seventy-seven miles per hour within half a minute. One hundred and nine miles per hour within a minute. They passed two other cars driving the opposite direction.

Then Braven made a bold move. He turned off his headlights and other exterior lights, a tactic that drivers sometimes use to hide from police. At a bend in the highway, he went onto the grass, driving in the dark toward the railroad.

Old Bull stopped reading and pushed her glasses onto her forehead. “He legally passed her,” she said. “All this kid wanted to do was to go see his girlfriend, that was it. It doesn’t make sense.” She covered her face with her hands and cried.

One-third of all police chases in the United States end with a crash, often causing property damage, injury, or death. Many of these chases begin after an officer observes a traffic infraction, but because of the risks involved, some police departments only allow pursuits after a violent felony or something that puts the public in imminent danger. It’s unclear whether the Crow police had a similar rule. Police Chief Tobacco and Sergeant Eastman testified in the lawsuit over Braven’s death that there was not a handbook of policies and procedures in place, or at least they weren’t aware of one. But the tribe submitted one to the BIA in the months leading up to the crash, according to records I obtained. That handbook states that an officer can only pursue a driver if there’s a “compelling need” and if the chase presents less risk to the public than the driver remaining at large. A “compelling need,” the manual adds, “does not include the mere act of fleeing, even if reckless,” or “traffic and licensing infractions, including DUI.”

Some police officers argue it’s worthwhile to chase after a traffic violation, because maybe the driver is actually fleeing due to a bigger offense, like a dead body or bags of cocaine in the trunk. But suspicion alone, says Stoughton, the South Carolina expert, is not enough. “If you aren’t sure what the benefits of the pursuit are, but you do know the dangers,” including a deadly crash, “clearly the risks should outweigh the benefits,” he says. “Failing to stop for a speeding violation is not a good reason to kill someone.” And that’s especially true if the driver may be intoxicated, he says. In Braven’s case, “what’s more dangerous—him driving the speed limit while drunk,” or him being chased and “driving 100 mph while drunk?” says Stoughton, adding that Klier could have arrested him later: According to court documents, she’d already noted his license plate number. “Had she terminated the pursuit,” policing expert Susan Peters testified in Old Bull’s lawsuit, “more likely than not, Braven J. Glenn would not have been involved in a vehicular fatality accident.”

As Old Bull and I read over the BIA reports, it became more and more apparent that the investigation into the crash had been flawed from the start.

Moments after the crash, Klier called dispatch. “Send medical,” she said, according to call logs. “He just got hit.” Soon, other law enforcement arrived—from the tribal police, the BIA, the state highway patrol, the sheriff’s office, and the fire department. But according to other records from the investigation, they struggled to get on the same page, a common complaint on reservations. Bodycam footage from Deputy Sheriff Michael Colvin, a county cop who was assigned to divert traffic, offers a small glimpse into the confusion.

“Hey, where’s the body at?” an officer asked Colvin.

“I don’t know,” Colvin said. “Tribal PD was first on scene, and they told BIA where it was at…He said it wrecked some place down here.”

“Was it crossing or what?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I asked, but he didn’t really give me an answer.”

Seconds later, paramedics drove past Colvin, lights flashing. A voice came over his radio: “They’re on scene, but they’ve been canceled.” The paramedics left.

Six minutes later, a tribal police officer called dispatch, according to records I obtained from the county attorney’s office. “Tribal asked why EMS canceled,” the dispatcher noted in a call log, “because they didn’t make the determination the individual(s) were deceased.” The tribal officer asked the paramedics to return. Later, Braven’s girlfriend, Jordan, who drove over after Braven didn’t pick her up after work, saw men loading a body bag into a white truck.

Meanwhile, BIA special agent Figueroa arrived. According to an investigative report, he told Klier that the BIA would investigate the crash. Later, he told another tribal officer on the scene that Klier would need to have her blood drawn and that he needed the dashcam footage from her patrol vehicle. The officer acknowledged his request, but when Figueroa returned from speaking with the train conductor, Klier was gone and had taken the police car with her. The tribal officer had given Klier permission to go home, according to the report; she’d been visibly shaken up after the crash.

“It’s like, what the fuck?” says attorney Tim Bechtold, who is representing Old Bull in her lawsuit. “All these cops not knowing what the fuck to do.” Klier’s decision to take her vehicle was “incredibly unusual and wildly inappropriate,” says Stoughton, the police expert in South Carolina. “It’s not that much different from an officer who’s involved with a shooting taking their gun home instead of turning that over for evidence.”

A former tribal police officer, who requested anonymity, later told me he saw Klier at the police station soon after the crash. The officer drove to the railroad and alerted Figueroa that the car might be at headquarters. “You need to go down there and get that vehicle now,” he recalls telling Figueroa. But it’s unclear if Figueroa went; he didn’t locate the car that night.

The next day, Figueroa told the Crow police department that he would need a copy of Klier’s incident report and the dashcam footage. The following day was Thanksgiving. And a day after that, Figueroa learned the police department had already “disbanded and closed shop,” according to the BIA investigation. “No one knows who has access to their reports.”

Then things got even more complicated. In mid-December, when Figueroa reminded the tribe that he still needed the report, he learned that someone had broken into the former police headquarters. Now the records he needed were missing.

Figueroa still didn’t know where Klier’s police car was, either. So in January, he drove to Wyoming, where she lived and worked with the VA, to find her. She said she was waiting for an attorney and didn’t want to talk. (She also declined my request for comment.)

Figueroa drove back to Montana and reached out to the tribe’s homeland security director, who said he was “unsure where anything was,” this time citing two break-ins at the police ­headquarters,­ but that he would try his best to find the records. (Police equipment, including guns, had also gone missing.) Two weeks later, in February, Figueroa learned the headquarters had suffered four break-ins, but someone had finally located Klier’s police car; Figueroa copied the dashcam footage. In May, he obtained the BIA’s dispatch logs, but the tribal police’s logs concerning Braven’s death—and Klier’s incident report for it—were still missing. (They don’t appear to have ever been recovered.)

Harris, the former Big Horn county attorney, whose term ended in late 2022, believes the US government may be responsible, at least in part, for mistakes made by law enforcement that night. In addition to allegedly failing to provide potentially lifesaving medical care, the BIA did not properly secure the scene of the crash and allowed Klier’s police car to get away, and then took months to find it. “You would think [the BIA] would have their hair on fire chasing everybody down,” says Jonathan Smith, who oversaw investigations into police department misconduct at Obama’s Justice Department. If it took that long to locate the car, he adds, “it seems unlikely they tried as hard as they could.”

Old Bull’s lawsuit is scheduled for trial this summer. The US government denies any wrongdoing. Since the BIA did not employ the Crow’s tribal police force, an attorney for the government wrote in response to the complaint, “the United States cannot be held liable…for their negligence.”

 

“There’s so much they did wrong…It’s like a ton of bricks just hits you.

I fought so hard…It’s like we don’t matter, like we are nothing.”

 

After reading the BIA reports, Old Bull retraced the new information. “There’s so much they did wrong…It’s like a ton of bricks just hits you,” she told me, motioning with her hands toward her chest. She wondered whether things might have been different if she’d gotten some of this information sooner—whether it would have helped her legal case, or at the very least helped her heal.

And it stung, she added, knowing that an outsider like me—a white journalist with no connection to Braven—could access all these FOIA records, while she, Braven’s mother, had been denied. It took suing for her to begin getting evidence, and even that, she said, didn’t include some of the key details I’d just shared with her. “I fought so hard to get that, years and years,” she said. “It’s like we don’t matter, like we are nothing.”

Two days later, former tribal police chief Terrill Bracken arrived at my Airbnb in Billings. I’d told him that Old Bull was interested in seeing him. Bracken wasn’t leading the police department when Braven died, and he knew little about the chase. But if Old Bull wanted to talk, meeting her seemed like the Christian thing to do, he said. “Anything I can do to help her with the grief that she is going through, that’s why I’m here,” he told me.

Old Bull, who’d worked a 12-hour shift at the nursing home that day, sat in her car outside the house for a moment before entering. For months, she’d been asking God to help her forgive, but it was hard to let go of all the resentments she carried. Maybe, she thought, it would be easier after talking with Bracken and hearing another perspective. “I have to come face-to-face with somebody that started this whole thing, and just get some straightforward answers,” she told me at the front door.

After taking a seat opposite the former police chief, Old Bull anxiously tapped on her glass of water with her fingers, tears welling in her eyes. Bracken said he was sorry for her loss. She thanked him. “That’s our right to know what happened to our child,” she said. “And I never got that. I had to fight and fight and fight.”

“And it should not have to be that way,” Bracken agreed.

“It’s frustrating for me,” he added, “because I know what we were working toward was going to be so much better,” he said of the tribal police.

Their conversation stretched on for two hours. At points, Old Bull seemed to soften toward Bracken. “I do feel better with you talking to me. I can see you now as a person,” she said.

But when he began talking about Officer Klier, the mood shifted. “For all we know,” Bracken said of Klier, “she’s not doing very well right now.”

“She’s not the one hurting,” Old Bull said quietly.

“I’m not saying who’s suffering more. It’s not a contest,” Bracken responded. “But I’m just being honest with you: Given the information that I have, I can’t see how I would have acted any differently than the officer. And that’s a difficult part of the job.”

Old Bull sighed. “I gotta work in the morning,” she said, signaling her intent to leave.

“Would it be okay if I prayed with you?” he asked.

She nodded, her eyes shut, and began crying after he placed his hands over hers.

Driving home, Old Bull was glad to have spoken with Bracken. But as she lay in bed the next morning, recalling the conversation, her anger grew. “For him to say, ‘Oh, poor Pamela, I wonder what she’s going through’? How dare you,” she thought.

She picked up her phone and texted me: “Samantha there was a lot that bothered me. He put her on this pedestal,” she wrote. “To sit there and emphasize her feelings, when this is about the loss of my son and her actions made that loss happen. I feel like it was an attempt…to glorify what she did as a cop.”

“This is a system made to oppress us. It’s been this way since Columbus,” she added, before putting down her phone and heading to work.

The doors of the tribal police headquarters were locked the first time I visited last year, but I could peek inside to see how abruptly it was all abandoned. The police’s whiteboard calendar still showed the Thanksgiving party scheduled for the day Braven died. Stacks of unused call logs sat in dusty boxes. In the parking lot, a makeshift jail remained, two tiny cells inside a shipping container. The refrigerated counter that once held Subway’s sandwich ingredients—and then guns—had been removed. The dining tables that the cops used as desks were piled outside beneath cottonwood trees.

There was never a public explanation for why the department closed in late November 2020, leading to speculation. Old Bull still wonders whether the police are hiding something. Big Man, the historian, wonders if they packed up and left because of poor training and lack of community support, and because Braven’s chase was “the final straw.”

“There were a lot of reasons why it shut down,” says one of the tribal police officers who requested anonymity. “It was starting to fail” even before Braven’s accident, and then “the money stopped coming in.”

Bracken doubts Braven’s death was the only motivation for disbanding, if it was a motivation at all. He blames politics: A few weeks before the crash, Chairman Not Afraid lost the election to Frank White Clay, a former tribal lawmaker who believed propping up a new police force with Covid relief funding violated federal spending guidelines. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly where that money went,” White Clay would later tell a journalism student at the University of Montana in 2021. He agreed the reservation needed more law enforcement but said this police force was just “playing cops.”

Rather than give White Clay the satisfaction of disbanding the force, Not Afraid beat him to it and shut down the department about a week before the inauguration, according to another former tribal police official. It was possible Braven’s accident may have been “the catalyst, the icing on the cake,” but it wasn’t the primary reason for closing, he said.

Harris, the former Big Horn county attorney, says the department’s sudden ­closure was evidence that it was never properly established. “A legitimate, lawful police agency doesn’t just end because a chairman or president or governor says, ‘All right. Enough,’” he tells me. “This [police department] was a mirage, a facade.” It was “a temporary fix, nothing more than a Band-Aid,” one of the former police officers tells me.

“Did we do everything perfectly? Absolutely not,” says Bracken. “But were we doing the best we could with what we had? Yes. I really believe that department would have flourished into something had it gotten a fair opportunity.”

The Crow police force’s brief existence and abrupt end is not just a story about a tribal administration’s mistakes, says Big Man. It is also a story about the federal government’s repeated failures leading up to 2020—to keep families informed, to conduct thorough investigations, to keep the reservation safe. And it shows “a real need for clear, meaningful communication” with Crow people, says Kristina Lucero, who directs the American Indian Governance and Policy Institute at the University of Montana, “about expected goals and the mission of what law enforcement should be doing.”

Many of the families who testified with Old Bull in Billings were adamant that they want more transparent policing, including easier access to information after loved ones die or go missing. “Authorities at all levels must improve communications with family members, who are too often left in the dark for days, weeks, or months,” causing “enormous stress,” the federal commission wrote afterward.

Indigenous communities also want more funding: In 2022, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in Montana sued the US government because of a shortage of police. The state’s Fort Belknap Indian Community sued too, after the BIA refused to provide more public safety money. “What’s happening at Crow, that’s pretty extreme,” says UCLA’s van Schilfgaarde, but “when budgets are tight, these [police] departments come and go in a way that would just never happen in other communities.” The problem isn’t just in Montana, she adds. Most Native villages in Alaska have no law enforcement presence whatsoever.

Two days after his inauguration in 2020, White Clay informed the BIA that “an independent law enforcement effort is not the direction that the new administration of the Crow Tribe intends to continue.” Since then, complaints about BIA policing persist. In July 2021, the tribe sued a BIA officer after he was caught on video failing to stop his dog from biting someone handcuffed after a traffic stop, for nearly a minute, leading to three surgeries on the man’s ankle and foot. “Unfortunately, nothing in this video is surprising to anyone who has lived on the Crow Nation,” the tribe’s attorney wrote. “I had a lot of faith in the police before,” Old Bull says, “but after Braven died, I don’t believe they’re there to protect us.”

In December, President Biden signed an executive order to remove red tape that has hampered Native access to law enforcement funding. But legal action might be more effective. In May, a US district judge encouraged the feds to meet with the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and “figure out how to more fairly fund” tribal policing—or else go to trial. The decision was “the first to acknowledge that the government owes a treaty-based duty to fund law enforcement for [an] Indian tribe,” according to the Oglala Sioux’s attorneys. And they say it could at last force a legal reckoning over Washington’s centuries-long harm to Native justice systems.

A successful reckoning must give tribes more jurisdiction and make room for them to reimagine policing and public safety in ways that reflect their own cultures and customs, says Goldberg, the Obama appointee to the Indian Law and Order Commission. She’s seen Indigenous communities that involve spiritual leaders in justice proceedings to weigh in on punishments and design a path forward. The Tulalip reservation in Washington state, in keeping with its values, has required police to stop by the Boys & Girls Club twice a shift to help kids with homework, and they attend elders’ breakfasts to share data and answer questions.

On the Crow reservation, most people I asked said the tribe needed more law enforcement, but they also emphasized the importance of better officer training. Some said they wanted to think about public safety in a more balanced way, with funding for mental health, addiction treatment, housing, and education. Investments like these could make it easier to recruit good local cops, says the University of Montana’s Lucero, since people might be less hesitant to police their relatives if the justice system offered more second chances and paths toward healing. “You just can’t arrest people, lock them up, and expect to throw them back in the same situation and change,” says Big Man. “Past traumas have created who we are,” adds Old Bull. “Get people into treatment and get them help and programs before moving in a police department.”

Tribal nations that are successful with law enforcement, says Goldberg, are ones with “strong congruence between the views of the community and the way it’s done.”

Old Bull buried Braven about an hour from home, at the foot of the Pryor Mountains, next to the graves of his father and his cousin Kaysera. The cemetery is small and quiet, off a dirt path surrounded by fields, and most of the gravestones are simple, some with fake flowers and crosses. Old Bull and her family go there often to mow the grass around Braven’s plot and decorate it with gifts, like chocolate-covered pretzels, one of his favorite snacks, and a basketball covered in their handwritten messages for him.

At times they’ll play music and reminisce about the ways he made them laugh, like how he’d make a muscle like Popeye and kiss it. When two of his older sisters got pregnant, they went to the cemetery and told him about it. When his younger sister graduated high school, she wore a cap beaded with the words, “We did it Brave.” They feel sometimes like he’s still with them, even sending them messages. The night before his funeral, when Old Bull slept in a teepee with his remains, in keeping with her Lakota traditions, she and another family member heard a basketball bouncing in the middle of the night, even though everyone else had long since gone to bed.

In August 2023, on what would have been his 20th birthday, Old Bull and her kids drive to the cemetery to visit Braven. They eat chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles, Braven’s favorite, and release balloons into the sky for him.

“I want them to know he was a person too,” Emilio says. “He was a good kid and had big dreams, and for them to hide in the shadows—he deserves justice, the truth.”

“Accountability and closure—that’s what my mom really needs, what I really need,” adds sister Marissa.

“I do want accountability, and I want them to admit this didn’t have to happen,” says Old Bull.

On the drive home around 10 p.m., Old Bull sees a white owl sitting on the side of the road. In her tradition, owls are harbingers of death. The last time she encountered one, her mom died, and not too long afterward Braven did, too. When she arrives home it’s almost midnight, and she lights a bundle of sage and cedar, calling her kids and grandkids out of the house to smudge them and help keep them safe. “Bring the babies out,” she instructs, walking to each person with the bundle and watching as they wave the smoke over their heads and into their hearts, all the way down to their legs. “Who’s next?”

This project was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

After about a week, sympathy for Russell turned to anger as investigators concluded that she had faked her disappearance and charged her with two misdemeanors for false reporting. She pleaded guilty, and a judge ordered Russell to pay nearly $18,000 in restitution and to serve probation and community service—a sentence deemed far too lenient by those outraged by Russell’s actions. Nothing less than jail time would satisfy them.

“The biggest thing was just the impact it had,” said Alabama state Rep. Mike Shaw, a Republican from Hoover. “I mean, hundreds of people showed up to search, and it was a pretty damaging thing for the community.”

Emboldened by the community outrage, Shaw and other state lawmakers proposed legislation that was designed to deter, or at least more severely punish, the next Carlee Russell. The bill, which has cleared the House of Representatives and is poised for a vote in the Senate, would create a new class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a false report that “alleges imminent danger to a person or the public.”

“One of the real problems with that false report is that it hurts the next person who actually experiences something,” Shaw said. “If you have a false report, it kind of makes everybody skeptical on the next one.”

As anyone who has been told the fable of the child who cried wolf knows, Shaw is right that false reports lead to more skepticism. But the outsized attention they receive obscures the fact that they’re relatively rare. And this legislation doesn’t consider a prevalent problem: the troubling track record of police in Alabama and across the country when it comes to framing reports of violence as having been made up. 

Kijana Mitchell is an Alabama-based advocate for survivors of domestic violence who’s also worked as a 911 dispatcher. She said she’s encountered law enforcement officers who suspect a victim is lying simply because they make the common and complicated decision to return to an abusive relationship.

And she fears this bill could work in the favor of abusers—“master manipulators ”—who will use it to convince victims not to report an assault to skeptical officers. “A law like this can scoop up a lot of innocent victims” if people aren’t able to prove their case to the police’s satisfaction, Mitchell said. “This added factor that our lawmakers are trying to bring into the equation will really bolster a lot of [abusers’] ability to keep victims from speaking up.”

For the last six years, I’ve been collecting and researching cases in which people—mostly young women and sometimes children—were charged with falsely reporting a rape or sexual assault. I’ve amassed more than 230 cases that span the country, an investigation we first shared in the documentary Victim/Suspect, streaming on Netflix. In our first-of-its-kind qualitative analysis, we found a pattern of police turning their suspicions to the reporting victim before thoroughly investigating the alleged crime.

Academic studies consistently estimate that 2–8 percent of reports of sexual assault and rape are false. But police officers presume reporting victims are lying much more frequently: In one 2010 study, a majority of sex crimes detectives with less than seven years of experience believed that anywhere from 40–80 percent of rape reports were false. And a 2018 study found that officers’ estimates of false rape reports go up the more they believe in popular myths about rape, like the idea that women lie about rape after regrettable sex or they bear responsibility if they were drunk.

In case after case I reviewed, detectives didn’t interview suspects or send rape kits to the lab. Instead, they interrogated the reporting victim, seizing on the moment when they backtracked or buckled under the pressure, framing it as either a recantation or a confession. In one-quarter of the 52 cases we analyzed, it took investigators less than 24 hours after the report was made to conclude the victims were lying.

Tangled up in these reports are complicating factors: gaps in memory due to trauma, delays in reporting, and a lack of physical evidence. I’ve watched or listened to more than a dozen recorded interrogations and interviewed women who were charged with false reporting.

What I heard again and again were police officers clumsily or aggressively questioning alleged victims, who were typically interviewed alone, in the same manner in which they interrogated suspects. One detective lied to a teenager, saying videos proved her account of being raped at a party wasn’t true. She was left confused and desperate to end the interaction. Another detective told a 12-year-old who insisted she was raped by a family member that she would have to return to foster care. A college student facing harsh questioning about an allegation of sexual assault eventually agreed when police said it wasn’t true, wanting to drop the case.

All of them saw the police conclude their reports were intentionally fabricated and were charged with crimes.

Emma Mannion is all too familiar with this dynamic. In 2016, when she was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Alabama, she told police that a man she’d met earlier that night had raped her in the back of a car while his friend stood guard. “Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely not report,” said Mannion, now living in her home state of New Hampshire.

Tuscaloosa investigators concluded within a few days that she lied because she was ashamed that she had sex with a stranger. Under questioning for two and a half hours, Mannion never backed away from her allegation that she was raped—and still hasn’t. But there was a moment in her interrogation when everything seemed to change. A detective chided her for wasting police resources. She had distracted him from working with “true victims,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” she responded.

“Well, if you’re sorry, then that makes me feel better,” the detective said, softening his tone.

Police records summarized that Mannion confessed to lying about the assault and she was charged with making a false report to law enforcement.

Shortly before Mannion had to decide whether to fight the charge, she heard about what happened to University of Alabama student Megan Rondini, who was also interrogated by Tuscaloosa police after reporting a rape. Similarly, detectives quickly turned the focus of their investigation against Rondini. While a grand jury considered criminal charges against her in February 2016, Rondini took her own life. 

Mannion said she wasn’t mentally stable enough to go through a trial and relive the incident again and again. She pleaded guilty to a youthful offender charge, a generic label used for nonviolent crimes. Mannion faced only a misdemeanor. But other young women seeking justice after being sexually assaulted could face felony charges.

“I already have a hard time comprehending and understanding how they did what they did,” Mannion said. “I cannot fathom [Tuscaloosa police] looking at 18-year-old Emma and going, ‘Yes, this is a felony charge, and she should go to prison.’ ”

There is no evidence that false reports in Alabama—or nationwide—are increasing or creating a measurable strain on police resources. Nonetheless, this isn’t the first time Alabama has tried to make false reporting penalties more severe. In 2019, then-Rep. Dickie Drake, a Republican, introduced a similar bill, aiming to make a false report of sexual assault or rape a class C felony. At the time, advocates and survivors testified against the measure, saying it would only deter legitimate reports of assault. It didn’t make it out of the Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Merika Coleman, a Democrat based in the greater Birmingham area, spoke out against the bill back then and intends to do the same when the new proposal goes to a vote in the Senate. “I think that it can make our communities less safe,” she said. “If someone is afraid to report because they may face up to 10 years in prison if they are not believed,  you would have a monster still on the streets.” She also said the racial dynamics of Carlee Russell’s case can’t be ignored. Russell is a young Black woman who received the type of sympathetic media treatment usually reserved for blond-haired, blue-eyed women. “I think people got pissed off,” Coleman said. “White folks got pissed off.”

The proposed bill includes a qualifier that the false report must allege “imminent danger” to a person or the public, a provision a sponsor said is intended to account for only the most egregious false reports: someone falsely reporting a bomb threat, for instance, or a report similar to Russell’s that launches a big police response. But could a report of a stranger rape or an abusive spouse with a gun also be considered an imminent threat? After Mannion reported rape, her university issued a public safety notice to warn other students.

Best estimates suggest that only about a third of sexual assaults are reported to police,  and advocates worry this bill could further exacerbate already existing police and victim mistrust.

“My greatest fear is that this bill will cause victims of sexual violence to read this as another reason NOT to report,” Brenda Maddox, executive director of the Tuscaloosa SAFE Center, a sexual assault crisis center, wrote in an email. “These types of crimes are significantly underreported because by nature they are shrouded in secrecy, not to be talked about in the light of day, and often turned back on the victim as being culpable in their own crime.”

Shaw, the state representative who proposed the House version of the bill, said he spoke to constituents, law enforcement officers, and his fellow legislators while drafting this legislation. But he said he didn’t reach out to anyone who works with victims, the community that is most likely to ask police for help and at risk of being accused of false reporting.

He acknowledged the bill is in response to the Russell case—a “sample size of one,” he said. “I think it’s somewhat reactive. But we’re really trying not to be.”

If this bill passes and law enforcement officers in Alabama pursue felony charges for a rape or domestic violence case and there are questions about the quality of the investigation, Shaw promised that he would look into it.

Watch the trailer for Victim/Suspect now streaming on Netflix. 

Lurie’s reporting reveals a symbiotic relationship between child welfare agencies, which don’t have enough foster homes for all the kids in custody, and large for-profit companies like Universal Health Services, which have beds to fill. Children admitted to UHS facilities have reported on the use of violent restraints and being put in seclusion rooms, among other alarming allegations (UHS has said it complies with regulations related to some of these practices and is committed to reducing the use of restraints and seclusion). Even though government and media reports have documented these complaints, Lurie’s investigation found that some foster kids continue to spend months or even years in United Health Services facilities. 

One of those kids was Trina Edwards, a former foster kid who first was admitted to a UHS psychiatric hospital called North Star in Alaska when she was 12. In this podcast episode, an updated version of a previous show, Lurie speaks to Edwards about her experience.

Since this episode first aired in October, two bills have been introduced in Alaska’s state legislature that aim to address some of the problems Lurie worked to uncover. Lurie wrote about the proposed legislation earlier this month: 

Though neither bill mentions North Star by name, it looms large as the state’s only private psychiatric hospital for children.

HB 363 would require a court to review a foster child’s placement at a psychiatric hospital within 72 hours to determine if that child meets medical criteria for hospitalization. (There’s no statute on when an initial hearing should take place, though a preliminary injunction requires a hearing within 30 days.) 

A second bill, HB 366, would require health department employees to conduct unannounced visits to residential psychiatric facilities at least twice a year, and to interview at least half of the patients during such visits. It would also require facility staff to report incidents of seclusion or restraint to the state within a day of the incident, and allow weekly, confidential video visits with parents or guardians. Rep. Maxine Dibert, a Fairbanks Democrat and the legislature’s sole female Alaska Native lawmaker, was reportedly inspired to introduce the bill by the prevalence of Native children in psychiatric residential treatment facilities. (The same legislation was also introduced in the Senate.)