Candace Leslie was leaving church when she got the call she will never forget.

“All I heard was his girlfriend yelling in the phone, and she was like, ‘Cameron! Cameron! … He won’t get up. He won’t get up!’ ”

Someone shot Leslie’s son four times that Sunday evening in September 2021 outside his new apartment on Indianapolis’ northeast side.

Cameron Brown was 19. He was working at FedEx. He loved fishing with his grandfather and was trying to follow his footsteps into the U.S. Army.

Brown died at the scene.

“I just felt numb. I felt kind of disoriented,” Leslie said, remembering the chaos, the yellow police tape and officers scouring the scene.

Police recovered at least one gun. It was a Glock pistol. Unbeknownst to investigators at the time, the gun once served as a law enforcement duty weapon, carried by a sheriff’s deputy more than 2,000 miles away in California.

According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Glock was one of at least 52,529 police guns that have turned up at crime scenes since 2006, the earliest year provided. While that tally includes guns lost by or stolen from police, many of the firearms were released back into the market by the very law enforcement agencies sworn to protect the public.

Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with The Trace and CBS News, reviewed records from hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the United States and found that many had routinely resold or traded in their used duty weapons – a practice that has sent thousands of guns into the hands of criminals. 

Law enforcement resold guns to firearms dealers for discounts on new equipment and, in some cases, directly to their own officers, records show. Some of the guns were later involved in shootings, domestic violence incidents and other violent crimes.

A Kentucky State Police pistol sold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, where federal agents executing a search warrant on a suspect in a murder investigation in 2019 found the gun in a backpack alongside heroin and a bulletproof vest. In another case in Indianapolis in 2021, police seized a former Iowa State Patrol pistol from a man while arresting him for allegedly choking a woman. The gun was fully loaded with a round in the chamber.

Reporters surveyed state and local law enforcement agencies and found that at least 145 of them had resold guns on at least one occasion between 2006 and 2024. That’s about 90% of the more than 160 agencies that responded. 

Records from 67 agencies showed they had collectively resold more than 87,000 firearms over the past two decades. That figure is likely a significant undercount, however, because many agencies’ records were incomplete or heavily redacted. 

Scot Thomasson, a former ATF division chief who is now a consultant for SafeGunLock, a Washington, D.C.-based company, believes police departments that resell weapons are violating their obligation to protect the public. “Taxpayers are buying firearms that are then resold for pennies on the dollar and ultimately ending up in criminals’ hands,” Thomasson said. “It is absolutely ridiculous.” 

Many police departments resold their weapons while holding buyback events, which they say are important to pull guns off the street. 

The Philadelphia City Council boasts on its website of having collected 825 guns in buybacks since 2021. But records show that Philadelphia police resold at least 886 guns over the past two decades, including 85 firearms between 2021 and 2022. 

In some cases, departments added more guns to the marketplace than they removed. 

The Newark Police Department in New Jersey staged a buyback in 2021, offering the public up to $250 for each firearm turned over. The event netted 146 guns. “Without question, 146 fewer firearms on our streets means less gun violence, fewer gun violence victims, and less risk of suicide or death,” the city’s public safety director said in a YouTube post celebrating the haul. 

But five years earlier, Newark police resold more than five times that number of guns – nearly 1,000. One of those weapons surfaced in Pittsburgh, where police seized it from a convicted felon after he allegedly squeezed off more than a dozen shots in a neighborhood and then led officers on a foot chase.

A Newark police spokesperson said that the guns had been traded in as a cost-saving measure under a previous administration and that the department currently “has no plans to upgrade its service weapons.”

The Glock pistol involved in the killing of Cameron Brown in Indianapolis was one of more than 600 guns resold by the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office in Modesto, California, between March 2019 and August 2023, records show. Another weapon from the same agency found its way to Texas, where San Antonio police recovered it in connection with the shooting of a 15-year-old in 2020. 

In an interview with CBS News, Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse defended the practice of reselling weapons as necessary to reduce the cost of new equipment. “You’re talking several hundred thousand dollars every few years, and that’s all taxpayer money,” he said. “It’s just a cost benefit to the department.”

Dirkse expressed sympathy to Brown’s family but said his agency was not responsible for the teenager’s killing. “Whoever did this, if he didn’t acquire that gun, he’s probably going to go acquire another one,” Dirkse said. “My organization had nothing to do with it.”

When a reporter told Brown’s family members that the gun involved in his death once belonged to a sheriff’s office, they were at first in disbelief and then angry.

“One more gun on the street actually changed our lives forever,” said Brown’s grandmother, Maria Leslie, a pastor. “We’re missing a piece of our puzzle.”

Now the family wants police to stop selling their weapons.

“I’m losing trust in the people who’re supposed to protect and serve us,” said Leslie, Brown’s mother. “There’s no reason for police firearms to be in the hands of young teenagers.”

Indianapolis Police Chief Christopher Bailey told CBS News that his agency has historically traded in its weapons, but he would consider changing that policy in light of Brown’s death. “I don’t want any weapon that we owned to end up being used violently against another person,” he said.

Brown’s killing remains unsolved.

A Rift in Law Enforcement

For decades, the ATF has worked on behalf of state and local law enforcement to trace recovered crime guns to their original owners, providing fresh leads to investigators and insights into firearms trafficking. 

ATF data obtained by Reveal shows that between 2006 and 2021, the number of crime guns traced to law enforcement agencies each year more than doubled, from about 2,200 to more than 4,500. On average, more than 3,200 duty weapons were recovered at crime scenes annually over that 16-year period.

Records detailing some of the traces conducted between 2013 and 2017 indicate that the guns previously belonged to more than 800 different agencies, ranging from rural sheriff’s offices to police departments in the country’s largest cities.

Even more granular trace information used to be publicly available, making it easier for reporters to hold police accountable for their resale practices. The Washington Post in 1999 analyzed ATF data and identified 107 crimes linked to former District of Columbia police guns. That same year, a similar investigation by CBS News revealed more than 3,000 police guns had been connected to crimes – including nearly 300 homicides – since 1990. 

The Tiahrt Amendment, passed by Congress in 2003 and named after the lawmaker who introduced it, now bars the ATF from disclosing most trace information to the public. In 2017, Reveal sued the ATF for refusing to respond to a public records request for statistical data on recovered police guns. The agency pushed back, citing Tiahrt. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in favor of Reveal in 2020, ruling that the request fit within an exception to Tiahrt that allows the ATF to release statistical information.

Federal law enforcement agencies are legally required to destroy their used guns, but there’s no similar mandate for state and local agencies. As a result, decisions about what to do with old guns are left up to state and local leaders and police chiefs, who’ve taken a variety of stances. 

Public safety concerns prompted Seattle police to stop trading in handguns around 2016. “If we’re selling them out, we just don’t know where those guns could end up,” said Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz. “We don’t want to contribute to the problem.”

When CBS News Minnesota showed our findings to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, he said his agency would stop reselling its guns.

“I don’t want us to be in a position where a weapon that was once in service for the police department here is then winding up used in a crime, or in an act of violence against a person, or even to shoot a police officer,” O’Hara said. “So going forward, we’re not going to be selling any weapons at all.”

Law enforcement agencies often trade their used weapons to a gun dealer for credit toward their next purchase, similar to how cellphone companies offer discounts on new phones in exchange for previous models. 

William Brooks, a board member for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said resales are essential for many departments to afford weapons upgrades. “Decisions about trading in old police service weapons should be left to individual communities and their police chiefs,” he said. “We believe that, should a community decide to destroy old weapons when new ones are purchased, they should commit just as fervently to fully funding new firearm purchases when their police chiefs call for them.”

Once sold by a department, weapons enter a secondary market where they can be resold to members of the public or other dealers. By the time they turn up at crime scenes, the guns may have been stolen, traded or resold multiple times with little documentation. They sometimes still have the department’s name stamped on the side. 

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing,” said trade-ins allow police to avoid public scrutiny, as they can purchase new guns without having to obtain budgetary approval from city leaders. 

“There are certainly other mechanisms to acquire weapons. You can get a line item in the budget with the city, but that could come with all kinds of political hurdles to jump through,” Sierra-Arévalo said. “So I’m not surprised that when someone shows up and says they can help the police skip all of that, the police go with that.” 

The Baltimore Police Department weathered public criticism in 2008 after one of its traded-in service weapons was used to kill two children as they walked home from a slumber party in Oklahoma. 

At a news conference in April, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said officers are given the opportunity to purchase their duty weapons for personal use before the guns are traded in for credit. If an officer buys a gun and wants to resell it later on, they must first offer it back to the department. 

“We know that there are some issues around the country,” Scott said. “For BPD, we’re extremely diligent about what happens when we have weapons retire.”

The police department for Baltimore County – which is separate from the Baltimore city police department – takes a different approach. In 2013, it traded in its old guns to a firearms dealer, but under the terms of the agreement, key parts of the guns were destroyed, a spokesperson said.

“I felt throughout my entire career that police departments should not be in the business of putting more guns back out into our society,” said James Johnson, who served as Baltimore County police chief from 2007 to 2017. 

In 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a requirement that the Sheriff’s Department destroy firearms it no longer needed. Board Supervisor Janice Hahn said she hopes the decision can serve as a model for the rest of the country. “Those of us at the local level should do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” she said. “We all can wait all day long for Congress to pass common-sense gun violence prevention laws.” 

Some police departments argued that because they were reselling to gun stores and other federally licensed gun dealers, they were not technically purveying firearms directly to members of the public. 

In an email, a spokesperson for the Fort Worth Police Department, Buddy Calzada, said it would be “inaccurate” to report that the agency resells guns to the public. 

He then went on to explain how the department resells guns: “In rare cases, the department has traded small quantities of firearms back to the dealer the department purchased them from and received credit for newer weapons,” Calazada wrote. “It is important to note, any guns sold by a dealer are sold only to qualified buyers who have passed the Federal background checks.” 

Internal records show that the department resold more than 1,000 guns to two dealers in the past 10 years. The department declined an interview request. 

Appealing to Gun Buyers

Using sales records obtained by CBS News from dozens of police departments, reporters identified nearly 50 gun dealers whose business includes buying and reselling retired police weapons. Many are self-styled police-supply companies that also sell flashlights, handcuffs and other tools of the law enforcement trade. 

Police-supply companies that buy and sell firearms have to hold a federal gun dealer’s license, which allows them to sell guns to members of the public. The license opens them up to inspections by the ATF, but internal records show that the agency has long been toothless and conciliatory, mostly issuing warnings instead of serious punishment when its inspectors find dealers breaking the law.

To encourage better practices among suppliers competing for lucrative public contracts, some California cities have passed measures to prevent local law enforcement from doing business with gun dealers that have been cited for serious violations during inspections. But in most of the country, there is no requirement for law enforcement to consider a dealer’s compliance history when awarding contracts.  

Lindsay Nichols, policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said police have a moral and ethical responsibility to do business only with gun dealers that follow best practices. “There are plenty of conditions that an agency could put on a gun store as a condition of receiving their weapons,” she said. “There are lots of gun stores out there. You don’t have to sell to any one particular business.”  

ATF inspection records show that one of the most prolific buyers of used police guns has a long history of violating federal regulations.

LC Action Police Supply, based in San Jose, California, bought more than 3,000 guns from 11 different law enforcement agencies between 2005 and 2023, including the gun involved in Cameron Brown’s homicide, according to records obtained by CBS News.

Over that same period, the ATF cited LC Action for 30 violations of federal firearms laws, including failing to conduct background checks and report suspicious gun sales, records show. One ATF inspector pushed for revoking LC Action’s license to sell guns after the company was cited for six violations in 2005, but the recommendation was overruled by agency higher-ups.  

The ATF inspected LC Action four more times between 2009 and 2019, uncovering many of the same violations. The agency allowed the company to keep its license to sell firearms.  

LC Action did not respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email. When a reporter and a photographer from CBS News Los Angeles visited the company’s retail store and asked to speak with a representative, they were told to leave. 

An ATF spokesperson said the agency does not comment on specific cases, but as a general matter, the outcome of any licensing action involving a gun dealer is dependent on the underlying facts and circumstances. The spokesperson added that the ATF’s policies and procedures were designed to maximize public safety by ensuring federal law is fairly and consistently administered.

In 2021, the Biden administration ordered the ATF to implement a zero-tolerance policy on lawbreaking gun dealers, a step that has led to an increase in license revocations. 

Used police guns are popular among gun buyers because they’re relatively inexpensive and often in good condition. They also typically have high ammunition capacities and are designed to hold large- to medium-caliber rounds. 

Larry Brown Jr., a firearms instructor and president of the Bass Reeves Gun Club in Atlanta, said he bought a used police gun because it was already equipped with glow-in-the-dark sights and a special trigger that made it easier to shoot, saving him money on upgrades. 

“The price is on point,” Brown said. “Police trade-ins are typically better equipped and better souped-up than what I would buy new. That’s what made me buy the one I have.”

The demand for decommissioned police weapons has created a thriving market, with gun dealers snapping them up en masse.

“Every now and then, I’ll get a call from my reps saying, ‘Hey, we got a bunch of police Glock 22 trade-ins for a great price. They’re all in good shape if you’re interested,’ ” said Mark Major, the owner of 2-Swords Tactical & Defense, a gun dealer in Lithonia, Georgia. “Usually, police trade-ins are kept up by the armorer in the department. They do have some scratches and rubs on them from being in a holster, but they work.” 

Online forums and blogs promoting the benefits of used police guns are common, and there are dozens of YouTube videos featuring gun dealers and enthusiasts showing off large shipments of the weapons to entice potential buyers. 

In a video posted last month by AimSurplus, a gun dealer in Monroe, Ohio, one of the store’s employees shows off a rolling cart piled high with assault weapons, as well as several boxes of pistols and shotguns – all former police guns to be resold on its website. 

“You guys love our police trade-ins,” the employee says. “And why shouldn’t you? They’re awesome. We just got a whole truckload in.” 

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.

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.

Part One

Introduction

The Rise of the American Oligarchy

What targeting Russia’s wayward billionaires revealed about our own.

It’s Time the Word “Oligarch” Lost Its Russian Veneer

America does oligarchy better than anyone.

Part Two

Hoarding

How the US Became the World’s Refuge for Dirty Money

Who needs the Bahamas anymore when you’ve got Sioux Falls?

The Dark Side of the $100 Bill

Benjamins are fueling international crime and corruption. So why are we printing more than ever?

When Gilded Age Lawmakers Saved America From Plutocracy

And how Biden's team is using their playbook to take on Big Tech.

How the Rich Keep Their Riches Out of Reach

Eight ways to hide an asset

Refuge for the Robber Barons

Deranged stalkers? Bitter exes? Angry mobs? Tom Gaffney’s clients are ready.

This Is What It Costs to Be Rich

Our attempt to document the uncommon common costs for the uber-wealthy.

Martha’s Vineyard Is Being Gutted by Skyrocketing Housing Costs. Yes, You Should Care.

The fight for affordable year-round housing in this elite summer destination offers lessons for dealing with a national crisis.

Part Three

Influencing

Philanthropy in America Is Broken

We taxpayers heavily subsidize ultrawealthy giving. But who really benefits?

Billionaires’ Giving Pledge: Part Tax Strategy, Part PR Stunt

Has it made the world a better place? You be the judge.

A Brief History of Superyachts

And how they explain the world.

How “Woke Capitalism” Became a Right-Wing Obsession

Vivek Ramaswamy may no longer be running for president. But his anti-ESG legacy has already won.

Receipts. Proof. Timelines. Screenshots: Why We Can’t Look Away From Rich People’s Drama

The uber-wealthy are losing it over the dumbest things—and we're hooked.

How Hollywood Learned to Eat the Rich

From "Clueless" to "Parasite," film and TV have long been barometers for how Americans feel about wealth.

Part Four

Dominating

Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover

How the world’s richest man transformed the Lone Star State into “the modern incarnation of the company town.”

There Is a Very Good Reason Why Donald Trump Thinks Everything Is Rigged

In business, he was a master of gaming the system.

Meet the Silicon Valley CEOs Who Insist That Greed Is Good

Even if "effective accelerationism" kills us all.

These Billionaires Want to Disrupt Death—and Keep Their Fortunes Forever

Sci-fi meets Silicon Valley meets the trust industry.

Welcome to America’s Wealthiest Zip Code

Our guide to one of the nation's priciest plutocrat playgrounds.

Monet Changes Everything

Tainted billionaires rejoice—redemption is an auction away.

Australia vs. Rupert Murdoch

What's the future of the aging mogul's global empire? Look to the place where it all began.

It claims that Jack Smith, the special counsel who is prosecuting Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and for his alleged swiping of classified documents, was part of a multimillion dollar extortion scheme when he was the chief prosecutor investigating and prosecuting war crimes in Kosovo. In the past two weeks, this unsubstantiated narrative has started popping up on fringe right-wing sites and social media posts. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and QAnonish MAGA champion, has promoted this tale. These allegations appear to be in the early phase of the right-wing transmission belt that propels false stories and conspiracy theories from less prominent platforms to more established conservative media and toward the mainstream—often facilitated by Republican members of Congress. 

The participants in this current effort include a former DEA official who not long ago claimed to have evidence showing the Clinton Foundation was a criminal enterprise, a lawyer who represents the computer repair shop owner who obtained and passed along Hunter Biden’s laptop, and one of the most prominent election deniers of 2020. And this allegation is mostly based on a wild account provided by a Kosovo businessman who was twice arrested in Spain for extortion, who has disputed rumors that he was tied to Russian intelligence, and who has been linked to a Russian mobster.

This campaign against Smith is based on documents circulated by John Moynihan, a onetime DEA employee who says he handled money laundering investigations for the agency. Last month, he submitted to the inspector general of the Justice Department—as well as the IGs of the State Department and CIA—what he termed a “whistleblower complaint” (though he no longer works for the DEA) that charges that a blackmail ring was set up within the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a European Union judicial initiative based in The Hague to prosecute war crimes committed during the Kosovo war of independence in the late 1990s. This criminal enterprise, Moynihan claims, “extorted millions of dollars from wealthy individuals targeted for investigation and/or prosecution by the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office” (known as the SPO), which brings the cases tried by the chambers. Smith was the chief prosecutor for the SPO from 2018 to 2022, and Moynihan alleges that witnesses he spoke to said Smith was an “active participant” in this conspiracy. 

It’s an explosive charge: the prosecutor pursuing Trump being a power-abusing crook himself. But the sources for these unconfirmed allegations have told outlandish stories, and some of the promoters of this tale have track records of involvement in squirrelly endeavors to tar Trump’s political opponents. 

This is not Moynihan’s first rodeo. In December 2018, he and an associate, Larry Doyle, appeared before the House Oversight Committee, chaired by then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), and claimed they had evidence that the Clinton Foundation had engaged in serious financial crimes. The pair asserted that the Clinton Foundation was operating as an agent of a foreign government and that Bill Clinton had used its funds for personal business. But they refused GOP entreaties to turn over the 6,000-plus pages of evidence they said they had amassed, noting they had passed the material to the FBI and the IRS. “If you’re not going to share [the documents] with the committee and cut to the chase, my patience is running out,” Meadows groused.

Meadows pointed out the IRS had told him it would be fine for Moynihan and Doyle to share their files. “I don’t find how [refusing to turn over information] provides a good foundation for truth and transparency,” the congressman told them. Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) slammed the duo: “I feel like you’re using us for your own benefit.” He added there was a “little game going on here.” The Washington Examiner called the hearing a “fiasco.”

Moynihan and Doyle certainly had an agenda. They had sued the IRS in 2017 alleging improprieties related to how that agency handled the Clinton Foundation. They maintained that the foundation had underpaid its taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars. If they prevailed in court, they could be entitled to tens of millions of dollars for exposing an underpayment. That case is still pending. 

Moynihan did not respond to requests for comment.

Brian Della Rocca, the lawyer representing Moynihan in his crusade against Jack Smith, has played an important role in another MAGA project. He is representing John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware computer shop who came into possession of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and turned it over to Rudy Giuliani. Hunter Biden has sued Mac Isaac and others for disseminating material from his laptop. And Mac Isaac has sued Hunter Biden and others for defamation. 

Della Rocca says has “no comment at this time” about Moynihan’s complaint, adding he wants “to give the government the opportunity to review the complaint and take action.”

Patrick Byrne, a prominent 2020 election denier and ardent conspiracy theorist, has claimed credit for helping to launch Moynihan’s allegations against Smith. The former CEO of Overstock, Byrne tweeted a link to a story on the Moynihan charges that appeared on Gateway Pundit, a fringe-right site, and he declared, “I DID THAT. Well, the extraordinary federal John Moynihan and I.” He added laughing emojis. A website he created called Deep Capture was among the first to post the Moynihan complaint. Weeks prior to that, Byrne repeatedly declared on his Telegram account that he was involved in arranging a “liver punch.” He then used that term to describe the Moynihan complaint.

Mother Jones sent Byrne emails asking him to explain how he was responsible for the Moynihan complaint. He did not reply.

Byrne resigned as head of Overstock in 2019 after he admitted publicly that he had an intimate affair with Maria Butina, a Russian agent. He claimed the Deep State encouraged his relationship with her and that he “was being used in some sort of soft coup” against Trump. A year later, he was one of the loudest voices spreading assorted conspiracy theories and asserting the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. In December 2020, he participated in an unscheduled White House meeting with Trump, Flynn, and attorney Sidney Powell, during which they considered various schemes to overturn the election results, including Trump seizing voting machines. Weeks earlier, Byrne paid for a private jet to fly a group of Proud Boys to Washington, DC, to attend a protest supporting Trump and his false claim that the election had been rigged against him.

The heart of Moynihan’s case is an account from a 57-year-old Kosovar businessman named Halit Sahitaj, who lives in Spain and travels on a Serbian passport. A statement from Sahitaj dated October 3, 2023, is attached to Moynihan’s complaint. The statement doesn’t indicate who collected it from Sahitaj, but in his filing, Moynihan says he spoke with the witnesses he cites.

Sahitaj offers a wild and seemingly implausible account. He claims that in February 2020 he was contacted by a man who called himself Florian and who said he worked for the US State Department. Florian told Sahitaj that Kosovo intelligence suspected Sahitaj was a Russian spy and that he could help Sahitaj with this situation. Florian eventually revealed that he worked for the CIA. He noted he was interested in Sahitaj’s connections in Russia. According to Sahitaj, he officially recruited Sahitaj as a CIA informant. But Sahitaj doesn’t say whether he was able to confirm Florian worked for the intelligence agency.

Florian instructed Sahitaj to meet him at a safe house in Belgium and to bring watches worn by him, his wife, and their son. These watches and his car would be modified with tracking technology. All Sahitaj had to do was pay Florian 75,000 euros for these modifications and 12,000 euros for a training course and wire an additional 6,000 eruos to a colleague of Florian in the United States to cover expense for the training course. Sahitaj claims he did all this. Florian supposedly showed him a badge that said “Special Agent” and bore the initials “CIA.” 

This recruitment story does not match with what’s known about CIA procedures.

Months later, in June 2020, when Sahitaj was with Florian, the supposed CIA officer received a call from a man Florian identified as Jack Smith. On speaker, the man said to Sahitaj, “Hello, it’s nice to meet you.” Later Florian told Sahitaj that Smith wanted Sahitaj to assist his investigations. Then an assignment came: Sahitaj should contact people in Kosovo and ask them for money to be dropped from war crime investigations. If they actually paid Sahitaj, he could keep 10 percent and the rest would go into a “black account” to finance future operations run by Smith’s office.

Sahitaj says he approached three people with this offer, and they each angrily told him to get lost. Florian subsequently informed Sahitaj that he was mad at Sahitaj for blowing this job. But, he said, Sahitaj could demonstrate his “value” to the CIA by voluntarily donating 400,000 to 500,000 euros to Smith’s “black funds.” Sahitaj reports that he made a 400,000 euro payment, and Florian put Sahitaj on the phone with the fellow who supposedly was Smith. That man thanked Sahitaj. So by now, Sahitaj, at Florian’s instruction, had supposedly handed the CIA and this “black account” 493,000 euros of his own funds. He had not met Smith in person. At one point, while he was traveling with Florian, he saw Florian flash an identification card with the name Faik Imeri. 

The story continues. Sahitaj says that Florian arranged for him to provide false and incriminating testimony to Smith’s investigators during an October 1, 2020 interview. This was being done, he was told, at Smith’s behest. Florian also “tasked” Sahitaj with locating Russian oligarchs on the US sanctions list and offering to remove them from the list if they would sign a contract to work with the CIA, provide the agency information on Vladimir Putin, and pay into the “black fund.” Sahitaj maintains that Florian told him “during this operation I would be working directly for Jack Smith.” He says he found one Russian oligarch for this scheme. Then on December 15, 2020, according to his statement, Sahitaj was arrested in Spain for extortion and money laundering. He was imprisoned for ten months before he was released on bail.

Once again he heard from the man who Florian claimed was Jack Smith—via phone—and this fellow urged him to continue pursuing that Russian oligarch. Sahitaj says that he used this oligarch to cut a deal with another oligarch.

Not surprisingly, there is a supposed Hillary Clinton angle in Sahitaj’s account. He claims that in January 2022 Florian told him that Smith wanted to know if the second oligarch “was still in possession of evidence of corruption by Hillary Clinton” and that Sahitaj learned through an intermediary that the second oligarch “does still have the evidence and had not shared it with anyone.” Sahitaj’s statement does not provide any details regarding this alleged material. 

Then, Sahitaj recounts, he had a falling out with Florian, who abruptly dumped him as an operative. He says in the statement that he felt he “had been used by Florian and Prosecutor Jack Smith.” Sahitaj adds that he learned that Florian had swindled $16 million from the two Russian oligarchs, and one was demanding that Sahitaj pay him back for that.  

It’s a bizarre account from a fellow who says he handed a self-proclaimed CIA officer half a million euros to become his operative without ever ascertaining this man was truly connected to the agency and who was arrested for extortion and money laundering, not once but twice. In his statement, he acknowledges his first arrest. And according to El Confidencial, a Spanish outlet, Sahitaj was arrested in Spain in August. It reported he had allegedly “contacted various individuals and threatened to file false complaints against them in Russia or Spain to involve them in criminal cases if they did not agree to pay him large sums of money.” Spanish news outlets have described Sahitaj as an associate of a convicted Russian mobster. 

In a 2019 interview with a Kosovo outlet, Sahitaj said, “Anyone who thinks I’m a spy for Russia is a spy for Serbia.” He noted, “I know the Russian oligarchs, even those who hang out with Putin.” He maintained in this interview that Interpol files stated that he was not suspected of criminal activities such as espionage and money laundering.

It’s tough to confirm the key—and most outlandish—parts of Sahitaj’s story. But he did interact with the SPO. On April 22, 2022, he had an interview via phone with with Alan Tieger, a prominent lawyer who was a senior prosecutor in the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office. According to a transcript of the conversation—which Moynihan attached to his complaint—Sahitaj had indeed been interviewed by the SPO in October 2020. That was when, according to Sahitaj’s statement, he presented false testimony to the war crime prosecutors at Florian’s urging.

The SPO declined to comment regarding Sahitaj’s allegations or Tieger’s interview with Sahitaj. But in a court filing the SPO submitted last year—in which Sahitaj was identified not by name but by a witness number, W04730—the prosecutors asserted that Sahitaj has been spreading “fanciful allegations” and a “fantastical” account regarding his own actions and that the SPO possessed no material “suggesting that [Sahitaj] has a relationship with any intelligence agency.” 

Sahitaj could not be reached for comment.

Another statement attached to Moynihan’s complaint comes from Milaim Zeka, a 61-year-old, Kosovo-born Swedish citizen who is a journalist and a former member of the Kosovo parliament. Zeka is a controversial figure in Kosovo, with a history of arrests and acquittals. He was arrested in 2013 and charged for broadcasting a show in which protected witnesses against a group of former fighters for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—an ethnic Albanian militia that fought for Kosovo independence and has faced accusations it committed war crimes—could be identified. Prosecutors said this was an effort at witness intimidation. He was later acquitted. Zeka was charged in 2018 with fraud and money laundering and subsequently indicted for threatening a prosecutor in the case. He was acquitted this year of some of those charges. Others are pending before an appeals court. He was charged in 2021 with illegally recording and photographing subjects of a story, but again acquitted.

Moynihan’s complaint does not mention Zeka’s arrests or his ties to lawmakers Smith prosecuted. It describes Zeka as a “well known journalist in Kosovo.”

In the Zeka statement Moynihan cites—dated September 26, 2023 and titled “Statement for the American Congress (not to be disclosed with media)”—Zeka recalls his own interactions with the self-purported CIA officer who Sahitaj knew as Florian. Zeka’s statement says that this man told him he had participated in the assassination of Osama bin Laden and that he said that Smith had been part of an attempt to extort 10 million euros from a Kosovo businessmen. Zeka maintains this fellow claimed that Smith worked with Serbian intelligence to create a “criminal group” in Kosovo that involved Halit Sahitaj. Zeka notes that he came to the conclusion that the this supposed CIA operative had “nothing to do with the CIA.”

Edlira Qefalija, Zeka’s wife, also submitted a “Statement for the American Congress” attached to Moynihan’s complaint. She says that she witnessed Zeka’s conversations with the man who claimed to be a CIA officer and that this person “on behalf of Jack Smith” told her husband that he could be arrested due to a 2003 real estate transaction and sent to prison for 10 years. But if Zeka paid 320,000 euros he could be cleared. She notes that Sahitaj loaned her and Zeka 100,000 euros for this payment but “it was [Sahitaj] who actually gave…the whole sum of money.” She also says, “I heard [the man who claimed to be with the CIA] was asking for money on behalf of Jack Smith in order for other people not to face possible charges.” 

Mother Jones sent Zeka messages asking who took his statement and whether he possessed any firsthand information implicating Smith in any wrongdoing. We also requested comment regarding his arrests. He replied, “You have read my statement. I have nothing more to add.” Qefalija, his wife, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

The statements from Sahitaj, Zeka, and Qefalija contain a whirl of allegations that are difficult to follow and assess. They appear tied to political disputes and intrigues related to the prosecution of war crimes in Kosovo. Bota Sot, a newspaper in Kosovo, reported in September that both Sahitaj and Zeka were involved in a wiretapping scandal related to Serbian intelligence and persons accused of war crimes. (Sahitaj has also been tied to a separate wiretapping controversy in Spain.) 

Neither Sahitaj nor Zeka, in their statements, present direct evidence of wrongdoing by Smith. His name only came up when mentioned by the man Sahitaj knew as Florian, whose credibility they each ended up questioning. Was Florian really a CIA officer? Or was something else afoot? Zeka’s statement also claims that this person was somehow connected to Charles McGonigal, the FBI official who pleaded guilty to money laundering, violating US sanctions on Russia, and accepting $225,000 from an Albanian American named Agron Nezaj, a former Albanian intelligence employee. 

Dibran Hoxha, a political analyst and activist in Kosovo, says Zeka appears to be part of an opposition to the SPO that has developed in Kosovo since prosecutors began targeting former members of the KLA, in addition to Serbs, for war crimes in the 1990s. “They want to delegitimize the functioning and the role of the court,” Hoxha explains. He adds that these critics, with their grudges against Smith, have seemingly found “a common interest” with Trump supporters in the United States.

The Justice Department did not reply to a request for comment regarding Moynihan’s allegations. 

The MAGA right has seized on Sahitaj’s uncorroborated story to disparage Smith. And there’s an interesting piece of history to this episode. In June 2020, the SPO announced the indictment of Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi. This came three days before he was to travel to the United States for a special summit with Serbia at the Trump White House. Thaçi had been one of the top commanders of the KLA during Kosovo’s war for independence. The SPO said that after a “lengthy investigation,” it could demonstrate “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Thaçi, who denied committing war crimes, and others had perpetrated “murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.” It alleged the victims numbered nearly 100. 

In response to the indictment, Thaçi canceled his trip to Washington, and the summit was scuttled. This meeting, promoted as a step toward a final peace settlement between Kosovo and Serbia, was touted by the Trump administration as a major accomplishment. The talks had been brokered by Ric Grenell, a Trump-appointed special envoy. Some European diplomats feared Grenell had rushed the negotiations, which included dicey land swaps that had the potential to rekindle the fighting. Several months later, Thaçi resigned. (The Thaçi case is pending. He has pleaded not guilty.) 

Smith’s decision to indict Thaçi before the summit has long rankled Trump and his crew. Earlier this year, Trump, apparently referencing Thaçi, put up a social media post that accused Smith of seeking to put “a high government official in prison because he was a Trump positive person.” After Smith was appointed special counsel to investigate Trump, Grenell, a fierce Trump cheerleader and potential top national security official if Trump regains the White House, claimed that Smith had indicted Thaci purely for Smith’s own benefit. He tweeted, “Jack Smith’s actions to indict and imprison [based on] a 20 year old accusation simply because President Thaçi was negotiating a big agreement that would end Jack’s cushy job is a scandal.”

After Smith in June indicted Trump for mishandling sensitive government documents, Grenell declared, “He has always overplayed his hand in the cases he’s handled because he’s an emotional partisan activist. His Kosovo case is falling apart and his own witnesses there are now claiming he and his team at The Hague faked CIA officials to intimidate them.” Earlier this month, Grenell in an interview with America’s Future, a group led by Mike Flynn, slammed Smith as “willing to do anything, including manipulating the rule of law, to indict his political opponents and put them in jail. What Smith did to Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was purely political. It was designed to ruin President Trump’s negotiations to normalize relations between Kosovo and Serbia.”

This latest effort to undermine Smith echoes the Trump gang’s attempt to tar Joe Biden with allegations from Ukraine. Prior to the 2020 election, Giuliani, on Trump’s behalf, went hunting for dirt on Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine and ended up collaborating with Ukraine officials who have been cited by the US government as Russian disinformation agents. To concoct a scandal, Giuliani and right-wing media disseminated allegations from unreliable sources that emerged from the cauldron of Ukraine politics and that were unsupported or debunked. The made-in-Kosovo Smith allegations have a similar ring. Moynihan states in his complaint that he is unable to “corroborate” these “serious allegations,” insisting the Justice Department and other US agencies must investigate them. This lack of corroboration is unlikely to keep these allegations from spreading. For the moment, they are percolating within far-right circles. But if the past is any guide, they could soon be coming to a cable news show or congressional hearing.

The investigation follows the story of Katrina Edwards, a former Alaska foster child who spent years at UHS facilities. She was put on high doses of psychiatric medications, physically restrained, held in seclusion, and forcibly injected with sedatives, according to medical and court records. Perhaps worst of all, there was no end in sight. At times, she remained locked in long after she was ready for discharge because there was no foster home available for her. 

Our investigation found that Edwards’ story isn’t uncommon: Foster children from 38 states were admitted to UHS inpatient psychiatric facilities more than 36,000 times between 2017 and 2022, where they often spend weeks or months. Foster kids are a lucrative patient base for the same reasons they’re vulnerable: There’s rarely an adult on the outside scrambling to get them out, and often, they don’t have anywhere else to go. Plus, Medicaid typically foots the bill. As one expert put it, for companies like UHS, foster kids are a “cash cow.”

You can listen to the investigation here, on your local NPR station, or wherever you get your podcasts.

While the investigation focuses on the story of Katrina Edwards, who spent years in UHS’s North Star Behavioral Health, in Anchorage, several former foster children in Alaska shared similar accounts. They talked about the violence, seclusion, and overmedication at UHS facilities, and of feeling abandoned by the Office of Children’s Services, the state’s child welfare agency.

Below, five former foster youth recount their experiences at North Star and another UHS center. (UHS couldn’t comment on the specific stories, but has denied similar allegations.) Their stories reflect claims made in pending lawsuits against UHS, and have been lightly edited for clarity.

Alexies Ezell

20 years old; at North Star three times between 2017 and 2019, totaling six months

“It was just really lonely. No one would call unless it was a court date. I felt really forgotten about. And when [OCS] would check in, it’d be just very brief, just like, ‘Oh, you’re okay? You’re still alive? Okay, well, we’re still looking for a placement.’”

Mateo Jaime

21 years old; at North Star for two months around 2018

“With North Star, once you’re there long enough, you want to be a juvenile delinquent. You want to cause trouble. Everything’s so gray. There’s no purpose to be there. Therapy’s once every two weeks—so-called therapy. During that time, they just want to send you to Nevada. They want to send you to Oklahoma, send you to California. It was this merry-go-round, merry-go-round.”

Nathon Pressley

26 years old; at North Star for eight stays from 2003 to 2011, totaling 14 months

By age 6, “they stick me with people that are [older]. I could say one wrong word and suddenly I had my face in the ground. So I started misbehaving as well. I would get angry at people keeping me there. I would tell adults to fuck off. I learned those words very quickly. That’s how the chain started. They would throw me into a cage and treat me like an animal. I would act like an animal in return, and they would keep on caging me.”

Abigail Redmon

19 years old; at North Star three times from 2016 to 2020, totaling roughly 3.5 months

“We weren’t supposed to bring bugs inside, but there was a small outside part with a basketball hoop. I used to go back there and lift up the mats and find worms. I found an inchworm one time, and I named him José. I tried to keep him alive as long as I could, sneaking pieces of broccoli and carrots in my clothes to bring upstairs. I also had a spider. His name was Mark. José and Mark, they were in styrofoam cups all the way in the back of the desk.”

Jyasia Batts

22 years old; at North Star an estimated 11 times and Texas NeuroRehab Center for two years starting in 2011

“There was this male [staffer at Texas NeuroRehab]—he slammed my head into the floor. And he put his elbow on the side of my face, just digging it in. It got to a point where I couldn’t breathe because he was putting so much pressure on me. After that, they put me in my room and told me I couldn’t come out. I was obviously hysterically crying. I was in pain. The fact that the bruises were so visible was traumatizing. That’s when OCS should have taken me out. But I stayed there. I remember [my caseworker’s] response was, ‘You just have a few more months and you will be discharged.’”

It was a spring night in 2012 when Edwards, then 12 years old, was admitted to North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage. In a photo taken upon her arrival, Edwards wears an Abercrombie hoodie and has dark circles under her eyes, her expression skeptical. During her initial evaluation, a psychiatrist asked a battery of questions, including what Edwards wanted to be when she grew up (a police officer), what she did for fun (sports), and how she slept (poorly, with nightmares).

Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services had put Edwards in foster care earlier that year after she reported being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend. Asked why she’d ended up at North Star, Edwards explained that she had threatened to run away from her foster home and commit suicide. Medical records from her admission noted that she had a history of fleeting suicidal ideation, but that Edwards said she didn’t have a plan or intention of killing herself.

Then, the psychiatrist asked, if Edwards had three wishes, what would they be? Instead of talking about her dreams for the future, Edwards focused on the past: She said she wished that she hadn’t been abused, that she hadn’t been sexually abused, and, pointedly, that she hadn’t threatened suicide.

Edwards sobbed and yelled in protest as she handed over her cellphone and jewelry and changed into blue scrubs and hospital socks. She refused to sign the admissions paperwork; an OCS caseworker did so instead, according to court documents. Her outburst continued as a staffer ushered her into the unit for adolescent girls.

“If you keep acting like this,” one girl warned her, “you’re gonna get booty juiced.”

In the days to follow, Edwards learned the facility’s peculiar vernacular. “Booty juice” was the intramuscular sedative that staffers gave to kids they thought were acting out. According to court documents, they would restrain children and pull their pants down to administer the injection, then seclude them in the small, unfurnished space known as the “quiet room.” If someone in your unit got into a fight, or if you refused to take your medications, you could be put on “unit restriction,” unable to leave the dormitory area to go to the cafeteria, classes, or the fenced-in basketball court outside.

How was it possible, Edwards wondered, that passing thoughts of suicide had landed her in a “mini prison for children”? She says that when she mentioned suicide to her foster mom, she hadn’t meant it literally; she’d meant that she felt miserable and wanted someone to sit down and listen to her. The chaos of the facility felt like the opposite of what Edwards needed. A few weeks into her stay, she filled out a “personal de-escalation plan.” It asked, “What are some things that do not help you calm down or stay safe?” She checked all the boxes on the sheet: things like “loud tone of voice” and “being ignored.” She also wrote in her own answer: “Being in North Star.”

Now 23, Edwards has a round face, a quick laugh, and an unfiltered way of speaking that’s disarmingly charming, even if she’s telling you that you’re an overcautious driver and that you’ve had something in your teeth all day—which she did, the first time we met. She giggles while telling traumatic stories. In those first days at North Star, she banged on the windows, hoping to be rescued. “When people would walk up, I’d be in the window, thinking they could see me cry for help,” she explained with a laugh. “They couldn’t see me at all.”

Edwards was released after 24 days. But just two weeks later, she was back—this time in a police car, after reportedly making suicidal comments. Noting Edwards was “agitated and prone to threaten others,” a psychiatrist prescribed Seroquel, a potent antipsychotic. Twenty-eight days later, she was released, and by February 2013, she had run away, again had been picked up by the police, and again was deposited at North Star.

This time, she repeatedly attempted to escape. Over the course of two weeks, she was put in the quiet room three times, restrained twice, and forcibly injected once—for pulling a fire alarm in an escape attempt, according to medical records. She vividly recalls being held down, a male staff member’s knee on her back as she was injected, the panic and confusion she felt when waking up in the quiet room.

The psychiatrist increased Edwards’ Seroquel prescription; she was also taking Concerta for ADHD, Benadryl for “agitation,” melatonin for sleep, and the antidepressant Lexapro. At times, Edwards pleaded to stop the meds. “They are messing up with my body,” she told her psychiatrist, according to medical records. “They are messing up with my mind and sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

A month into her stay, Edwards was moved from North Star’s hospital to its psychiatric residential facility, a locked unit for longer stays. From the unit’s window, she stared out at a bank on the other side of a parking lot, imagining the lives of the customers—their baby mamas, their paydays. For a time, Edwards shared a room with a girl who talked to “Sally,” her hallucinated friend who visited their dorm.

OCS turnover was so common that Edwards often didn’t know who her caseworker was, but on the rare occasions they spoke, Edwards begged to go anywhere else. According to Edwards, North Star staffers told her she’d have to wait for a foster family to become available. “They would tell me, ‘Oh, you’re only gonna be here for a month,’” she said. “And then a month would go by, and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we got to extend it for like another month.’” Medical records show that Edwards’ discharge was pushed back on at least two occasions because OCS couldn’t find a home for her.

Edwards celebrated her 13th birthday at North Star in March, and her 14th a year later. She remained in the facility for 18 months.

North Star is owned by Universal Health Services, a publicly traded, Fortune 500 company that is the nation’s largest psychiatric hospital chain, with 185 inpatient behavioral health facilities and dozens of acute care hospitals across the country, in addition to centers in Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom. More than 21,000 inpatient psychiatric beds—or one in six across the country—are operated by UHS, which brought in $13.4 billion last year.

In recent years, the company has been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits and investigations, including a blistering BuzzFeed News series in 2016 and a Department of Justice probe that resulted in $122 million in settlements in 2020. The claims of these investigations bear a striking resemblance to Edwards’ experience: UHS facilities admitted patients who didn’t need to be there to begin with, failed to provide adequate treatment and staffing, billed insurance for unnecessary services over excessive lengths of time, and improperly used physical and chemical restraints and isolation. BuzzFeed reported that some of the company’s psychiatric hospitals used suicidal ideation to “justify almost any admission”; in 2013, UHS hospitals submitted Medicare claims for suicidal ideation at more than four times the rate of non-UHS psychiatric hospitals.

In a statement, UHS denied BuzzFeed’s conclusions and disputed the DOJ’s allegations, noting that the settlement agreement “is not an admission of liability.” The company said it complies with regulations related to “restrictive practices” and is committed to reducing the use of restraints and seclusion. (Read the statement here.)

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have decried the company, and Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) launched an ongoing probe into UHS and other operators of residential facilities for kids in July 2022. Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton—who experienced physical and sexual abuse as a teenager in the 1990s at Provo Canyon School, a Utah facility since bought by UHS—took aim at the company as part of her advocacy work against the so-called troubled teen industry.

Despite all this scrutiny, a large, highly profitable, and easily exploitable group of UHS patients has been overlooked: foster children. A yearlong Mother Jones investigation shows that thousands of foster kids have been admitted in recent years to UHS’s psychiatric facilities, where they typically stay for weeks or months, sometimes leaving far worse off than when they arrived. Foster children provide a lucrative patient base for the same reasons they’re so vulnerable: There’s rarely an adult on the outside clamoring to get them out, and often, they don’t have anywhere else to go. Plus, Medicaid typically foots the bill, which at North Star costs $938 per night. As Edwards notes, “They got a lot of money from me.” (UHS disputed the allegation that many children get worse in its care, pointing to its positive clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction scores.)

Over time, a symbiotic relationship has developed between overburdened child welfare agencies, which have too many kids in custody and not enough places to put them, and large, for-profit companies like UHS, with beds to fill and profits to make, says Ronald Davidson, a psychologist and the former director of the Mental Health Policy Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Over the course of two decades, until 2014, Davidson and his team reviewed hundreds of psychiatric facilities across the country as part of a consent decree intended to reform Illinois’ child welfare system. He also conducted similar reviews as a DOJ consultant. “The sales pitch—‘We can offer solutions to your overwhelming caseloads of high-needs children’—appeared irresistible to frantic agencies in need of more beds,” he explains, “and many of them desperately took the bait.” Kids often come back to facilities again and again, acting out more with each admission. “Unfortunately, in many hospitals, the door only swings one way,” Davidson says. “You become a patient, and you stay a patient.” To UHS and its competitors, he concludes, foster kids are “a gold mine.”

Related

Former foster youth recount their experiences at North Star and other UHS treatment centers

Alexies Ezell, 20 years old

“It was just really lonely. No one would call unless it was a court date. I felt really forgotten about. And when [OCS] would check in, it’d be just very brief, just like, ‘Oh, you’re okay? You’re still alive? Okay, well, we’re still looking for a placement.’”

Read more first-person accounts here.

For some foster children, the results have been devastating. As Edwards endured her stay at North Star, a 12-year-old West Virginia foster child was placed at UHS’s Cedar Grove Residential Treatment Center, a program in Tennessee for sexually abusive and reactive boys, even though he wasn’t a sex offender. He begged his caseworker to let him leave but was held at the facility for 18 months, according to a subsequent lawsuit against the state’s CPS agency. In 2018, Oregon CPS sent a 14-year-old girl to Provo Canyon School, where she experienced 42 instances of peer assault, seclusion, or restraint—including being forcibly injected with the antipsychotic Haldol 17 times—over the course of three months, according to records obtained by state officials. The same year, Virginia’s CPS agency sent 17-year-old Raven Nichole Keffer to UHS’s Newport News Behavioral Health Center, where she collapsed after days of complaining of feeling sick. According to a lawsuit, a 15-year-old patient was the first to call 911; Keffer died of an allegedly preventable adrenal insufficiency. In 2021, Alabama CPS placed a 10-year-old at UHS’s Alabama Clinical Schools, where he was repeatedly assaulted by staffers over six months, resulting in a broken collarbone and black eye, in addition to being bitten by scorpions in his bed “many times,” according to a recent lawsuit. When he reported the injuries, staffers allegedly threatened to kill him.

In its statement, UHS noted it couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations, pending lawsuits, or specific patients, though it did say the incident at Newport News “was the only death of a patient while in the care of the facility.” The statement added, “Our facilities are highly regarded, trusted providers of behavioral health services in the communities we serve.”

Last year, when a lawyer in Alaska offhandedly mentioned that OCS uses North Star as a “dumping ground,” I started talking to foster kids about their experiences at the facility. I was struck by the similarities in their stories: the frequency of restraints and booty juicing; the panic of being sent to the quiet room; the claims that a caseworker or staffer said they were only there because they were waiting for a foster home; even the banging on the double-paned windows. The problem transcends Alaska or UHS. As many lawsuits have documented, child welfare agencies across the country rely on locked psychiatric facilities, many of which use punitive disciplinary tactics, to house difficult-to-place kids. These placements disproportionately affect children of color. Black and Indigenous kids—including Edwards, who is part Yupik—are more likely to enter the foster system and more likely to be sent to residential treatment facilities.

To understand just how big an impact UHS has on the lives of foster kids, I combed through thousands of pages of court filings and medical records, and interviewed more than 50 former UHS employees, patients, child welfare experts, lawyers, and policymakers. I also filed public records requests to the CPS and Medicaid agencies in all 50 states, asking for the number of foster children sent to the company’s inpatient behavioral health facilities and the amount of money spent on their care. (No national database exists.) The 38 states that provided data sent foster children to UHS facilities more than 36,000 times between 2017 and 2022. Meanwhile, the 31 states that responded to my Medicaid query spent more than $600 million on the treatment of foster children at UHS facilities over the same period.

The data shows that child welfare agencies routinely send foster children to UHS programs already implicated by damning inspections and media reports. Hundreds went to Provo Canyon, whose license was threatened twice after children escaped or were injured during physical restraints. (UHS noted Provo Canyon School resolved concerns with state inspectors in a timely manner.) Hundreds more went to Hill Crest Behavioral Health Services, where internal videos revealed by BuzzFeed in 2017 showed staffers repeatedly beating and dragging young patients, to the condemnation of members of Congress, and to North Star, where federal investigators last year reported escapes, assaults, and a patient not receiving a single therapy appointment for 40 days.

“It does kind of make your head spin,” said Davidson, when presented with the data. “It is a huge, huge market, dollarwise. And the thing that irritates advocates and people like me is that so much of this market­place is either unnecessary or patients could far more easily be treated at far lower cost in outpatient care.”

By February 2015, Edwards had spent a total of 722 nights at North Star—a stay that cost the state an estimated $330,000. For Edwards, the years collapsed into one long, medicated blur. Recalling her experience there, she says, is “like explaining what happens when you get into a fight, and you don’t know how you got the bruises on your body.”

Back in 2020, North Star’s Haley Morrissey had a clear sales goal: “Get numbers up and make sure census was at capacity.” That meant spreading the word about the treatment center to 120 people each month. As part of a five-person team of “clinical community liaisons,” Morrissey contacted police officers, first responders, and emergency departments, alerting them when North Star had open beds and reminding them that prospective patients could always get a free assessment. She met with school counselors across southeastern Alaska. Her team sent care packages to OCS offices with North Star–branded mugs, stress balls, and lip balms, thanking them for their work. Organizations with particularly high referral rates to North Star received bath bombs and cards reminding the recipients to practice self-care.

Morrissey spent nearly a decade working at North Star, including time as a recreational therapist. She took pride in helping provide much-needed mental health services. Her enthusiasm dimmed, though, as she became increasingly alarmed by the understaffing and unsafe conditions. Foster kids, sometimes called “frequent flyers” by the staff, tended to come back. A bright-eyed 8-year-old on the children’s unit would turn into a slightly more aggressive kid on the preteen unit and then become an apathetic, angry teenager on the adolescent unit. Eventually, Morrissey decided to resign, leaving North Star last fall. Her message for families today is a far cry from when she was on the road marketing North Star: “Absolutely do not send them there.”

Alaska perfectly exemplifies the way UHS profits from failing foster care systems. More than three times as many kids are in foster care as there are licensed foster homes, a problem some critics attribute to too many children being removed from their families to begin with—particularly Alaska Native kids, who make up two-thirds of the state’s foster children. A quarter of OCS caseworker positions are empty; more than half of caseworkers leave each year. Meanwhile, behavioral health resources for kids are so lacking that the DOJ recently concluded the state is violating the Americans With Disabilities Act.

It’s no wonder, then, that foster children have been admitted to North Star, the state’s only private psychiatric facility for kids, more than 500 times over the past six years, or that foster kids are routinely sent to similar programs out of state. Two of every three admissions of Alaska foster children to psychiatric facilities occurred at those owned by UHS, including half of out-of-state placements. From 2017 to 2022, the state’s Medicaid program for children paid North Star $119 million.

But the spending doesn’t stop there: OCS data shows that the agency pays for kids to stay at North Star even when Medicaid reviewers have determined it’s not medically necessary. Between 2017 and 2020, the agency paid North Star more than $1 million for the care of foster children whose stays weren’t covered by Medicaid.

Of the many lawsuits involving OCS and North Star over the years, the case of a “frequent flyer” named Nathon Pressley stands out for laying bare their mutually beneficial relationship. Pressley entered the foster system in 1998, when he was a year old, and bounced from foster home to residential facility to foster home for 17 years—his entire childhood. He cycled in and out of North Star starting when he was 5, ultimately spending a cumulative 429 days there.

Sometime after his last North Star stay, Pressley went to a retreat organized by Facing Foster Care in Alaska, an advocacy group for foster youth. At a church on the outskirts of Anchorage, he met Jim Davis, the co-founding attorney of the Northern Justice Project, a civil rights law firm. Davis had recently had his own awakening at one of the retreats, hanging out with foster youth, mostly teenagers, eating pizza at the church. The kids seemed “basically normal,” Davis remembers—they reminded him of his own kids. “And then a lot of them started talking about North Star, and how they were institutionalized at North Star, and how they were forced to take drugs at North Star.”

This was news to Davis. “To be honest with you, I just remember leaving and thinking, maybe these foster youth are exaggerating everything,” Davis says. “It just seemed too far-fetched.”

But once Davis dug into foster care records, he was convinced. In 2017, Davis represented Pressley in a lawsuit accusing OCS of negligence; OCS, in turn, sued North Star in a third-party complaint, arguing that, if Pressley had been harmed, North Star was partially at fault. In her deposition, then–OCS director Christy Lawton said that foster children stay at North Star—even after Medicaid stops paying—when the agency can’t find a “safe, appropriate discharge placement.” In the foster system, she admitted, “there often can be cases that end up languishing.”

Lindsay Bothe, an OCS manager who was an expert witness in Pressley’s case, acknowledged in her deposition that Pressley “did have some longer stays while they were looking for a placement for him to discharge to.” Davis then pressed Bothe:

Davis: Nathon didn’t really belong at North Star anymore because he didn’t meet that level of care, and he was already stabilized, at least as far as North Star goes, but there wasn’t anyplace else with the right level of care to put him?

Bothe: Correct.

Davis: So he just stayed locked up in a psychiatric facility?

Bothe: Yes.

Davis: For months.

Bothe: Yes.

OCS and North Star settled with Pressley last year for an undisclosed sum. In a statement, OCS said finding suitable placements is a “nationwide challenge,” and that it strives to do so promptly.

Former North Star staffers told me that the problem wasn’t just that kids stayed too long, but that they were admitted at all. Jason Fedeli, who worked as an intake coordinator and counselor until 2020, repeatedly saw cases in which children would end up at North Star after having an argument with their foster parents. Fedeli interviewed kids who he didn’t think needed a locked psychiatric hospital. But again and again, they were admitted. He often saw them get worse rather than better, in part because the facility was so understaffed. When Fedeli became a therapist, he says he was spread so thin that “therapy” often amounted to five-minute check-ins during which he would ask, “How’re you doing? You feeling good? Are you suicidal?” Staffers would call such encounters “flybys.” (UHS denied that its facilities operate with inadequate staffing levels, adding that admissions are based “only on the patient’s clinical presentation.”)

Eventually, North Star dismantled the discharge planning team, and this, too, became Fedeli’s responsibility. He learned that there were plenty of places out of state—particularly in Utah—that would take struggling children. Medicaid covered a child’s out-of-state stay only if they first had been denied by three Alaska facilities; when staffers wanted to send a child to the Lower 48, they would “go to three places that you knew would deny the child,” Fedeli said, “and just mark them off your list. Or you’d even call them up and be like, ‘Hey, we just want a denial.’”

This may help explain why so many foster children who stayed at North Star said that staffers proposed out-of-state transfers. “They kept trying to bring me to Utah,” said Alexies Ezell, who attended North Star three times. “Every single time I was brought there, it was fucking Utah. I was like, What is in Utah?”

Katrina Edwards would find out. In 2015, shortly before her 15th birthday, Edwards received news: She was being moved from North Star, where she’d lived for two years, to Copper Hills, in West Jordan, Utah. Plane tickets had already been bought. She had never been out of state before. Everything about Copper Hills—the climate, the terrain, the people—was unfamiliar. But Copper Hills did have something in common with North Star: It, too, was owned by UHS.

 

“Unfortunately, in many hospitals, the door only swings one way,” Davidson says.

“You become a patient, and you stay a patient.”

Founded in 1979, UHS traces its origins back a decade earlier, when Alan Miller—a Brooklynite, veteran, and Wharton School of Business graduate—was working at an ad agency. One day, an old Wharton roommate approached him with a business idea: “He said, ‘You know, we can own private hospitals,’” Miller later told the New York Times. “To which I responded, ‘You’re kidding.’ He said they had them in California, and it sounded like a good idea.” The roommate started the hospital company American Medicorp, and, by 1972, Miller was the CEO.

A few years later, the company faced a hostile takeover by the health care company Humana. “When you’re faced with a takeover bid, your true nature comes out. It’s war,” Miller, a lover of military history who says his leadership style was inspired by George Washington, told the Times. Humana kept raising the price, and Miller eventually lost the company. But the very next day, he started UHS. His timing was perfect: As deinstitutionalization emptied out state psychiatric hospitals, private facilities stepped into the breach. Between 1983 and 1986, the number of patients in private psychiatric hospitals nearly doubled.

By the ’90s, this freewheeling growth came back to haunt the industry as mounting lawsuits accused psychiatric institutions of defrauding insurers. Medicaid tightened its policies, lowering reimbursements. UHS began buying up floundering facilities. In 2003, the company made the Fortune 500 list for the first time.

A pivotal moment came seven years later, when UHS more than doubled its number of behavioral health beds by buying its direct competitor, Psychiatric Solutions Inc.—even though journalists and government regulators repeatedly had revealed abuse at a number of PSI facilities. In 2008, a Chicago Tribune investigation found that PSI’s Riveredge Hospital, in suburban Chicago, “left sexual predators unguarded,” leading to “savage violence.” The Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found a pattern of abuse and neglect throughout the company’s California establishments. During an earnings call that year, PSI’s co-founder, Joey Jacobs, acknowledged that most of the company’s business came from children and adolescents, “and the vast majority of those are Medicaid or state agency” kids. In a 2009 review, Davidson’s team reported that PSI facilities in five states showed a pattern of violence, sexual assault, poor medical care, inadequate staffing, and “a general failure of professional clinical leadership and accountability.” Nonetheless, in a jubilant call with investors after the acquisition, Miller said, “We know these facilities well, and these are very attractive assets. The fit with our business is outstanding.” (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.)

UHS grew in tandem with a burgeoning population of foster kids. For decades, “troubled” kids had been sent away to military schools and “tough love” programs, but what we think of as the child welfare system emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, as state mandatory reporting laws went into effect and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act provided federal funding to CPS agencies. Reported cases of child abuse and neglect skyrocketed, from some 60,000 in 1974 to about 3 million in 2000.

Faced with too many foster kids and not enough places to put them, some CPS agencies sent them far away. At its peak in the mid-’90s, Illinois had 800 children placed out of state. After the ACLU sued the state, Davidson was hired in 1994 to ensure the child welfare system was complying with requirements of the resulting consent decree. Over the next 20 years, he and his team crisscrossed the country, visiting and revisiting the facilities, eventually compiling reports on more than 400 of them. Several patterns emerged: Very few kids needed inpatient psychiatric treatment to begin with; the out-of-state treatment centers were substandard; and more often than not, they presented imminent risk of sexual or physical abuse. The researchers found that foster children in the facilities—particularly those out of state—were essentially stranded.

There were a few reasons for this. Behavioral health programs attracted little scrutiny from insurers. “It tends to get, I don’t want to say no attention, but a fairly minimal amount of attention from payers, which I think is generally a good thing,” said UHS’s chief financial officer Steve Filton at a health care conference in 2013. “So, it is a space that tends to operate…under a lot of people’s radar.” Making matters worse, Davidson notes, “these are kids by and large who’ve been taken away from their parents, so they have no family to watch out for them.” Caseworkers didn’t keep a close eye on them either. “In Chicago, they couldn’t even monitor the kids that were five miles away on the South Side,” he adds. “How were they going to monitor a kid in Arizona or Texas? The short answer is they couldn’t and they didn’t.”

Thanks in part to Davidson’s work, UHS attracted the attention of federal regulators, who, by 2013, were investigating 10 of UHS’s psychiatric facilities—including Florida’s River Point Behavioral Health, where they were looking into allegations that staffers had doctored records and diagnosed patients with psychiatric disorders to extend their stays. The DOJ initiated concurrent civil and criminal investigations into false-claims allegations, expanding its criminal probe to include UHS as a corporate entity in 2015.

BuzzFeed then reported that many UHS facilities kept beds filled at the expense of patient safety. Employees in 14 treatment centers were allegedly pressured to hold patients until their insurance coverage ran out—a strategy summed up in the instruction “Don’t leave days on the table.” UHS’s stock dipped; one Oklahoma facility lost state funding and later was forced to close. But the investigations had little effect on the company’s bottom line, and when the Justice Department’s criminal investigation closed in 2019 with no charges filed, share prices soared. The following year, UHS agreed to pay $122 million to resolve allegations brought by the DOJ and state attorneys general. It amounted to roughly one-hundredth of the company’s net revenues that year.

In 2021, after more than four decades at the helm of UHS, Alan Miller passed the reins to his son, Marc—sort of. The 86-year-old executive remains chair of the board, holds the vast majority of shareholders’ general voting power, and controls most board appointments. Forbes estimates his family’s net worth at $1.3 billion—wealth Miller has long used to support conservative politicians, including in his longtime role as a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He and his wife, Jill, live in the Philadelphia area, home of Miller Theater, which hosts touring Broadway shows; the Ronald McDonald House’s Jill and Alan B. Miller Tower; and, in an homage to the benefactor’s military hero, the Alan B. Miller Theater at the Museum of the American Revolution, which houses George Washington’s Revolutionary War tent.

On the flight to Utah, Edwards wore scrubs and handcuffs, accompanied by two security escorts. “I looked like a fucking criminal,” she remembers.

The sprawling Copper Hills campus sits on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, surrounded by a tall fence. Edwards considered her options: She could try to escape again, but she had no money for a return plane ticket. Perhaps she could be homeless in Utah, she thought. “I didn’t care about anything,” she says. “I was thousands of miles away from home. What the hell are they going to do to me?”

When Edwards was admitted in 2015, Copper Hills was spiraling out of control. The previous year, patients “acted out sexually” on a child after staff left them unsupervised, according to court records. State officials put the facility on conditional status, which was lifted in 2016. Physical restraints and sedative injections were used more than a dozen times per day, say two former executives. (I spoke with eight recent employees, including four people in leadership.)

Edwards arrived just before a new CFO named Brian Blohm was hired to help turn things around. Looking back on his tenure, which stretched until 2019, Blohm sees red flags from the beginning. His bonus was based partly on the ratio of employees per occupied bed—with the goal of maximizing the number of beds filled and minimizing the cost of staff. But when crunching numbers, Blohm realized it was impossible for him to be paid his full bonus without running under the state’s staffing requirement. He mentioned it to higher-ups, who eventually changed the bonus plan, though the pressure to cut costs remained. Each week, he was required to send a report on employees per occupied bed to regional and corporate leadership; if there was an increase, there had to be a justification, Blohm explains.

Though state law mandates one staff member for every five patients, a single employee routinely watched more than a dozen kids, former staffers said. A staffing spreadsheet I reviewed from January 2022 shows that, across nine units of patients, only one was within the legal staffing ratio. Six units had just one employee—with as many as 15 children—for hours. Employees lay the blame partly on meager wages: Entry-level “mental health technicians” today begin at $16 an hour—the same starting wage as the McDonald’s down the street.

The understaffing extended to medical personnel: Copper Hills and Benchmark Behavioral Health, another UHS site a half-hour away, house some 200 kids at a time, many with acute psychiatric needs. Yet, for years—until the pandemic hit—they were served by just two psychiatrists, who split their time between the facilities. (UHS said it complies with staffing regulations and doesn’t incentivize unsafe staffing levels.)

Though a clinical team reviewed intake referrals to make sure they could safely meet new patients’ needs, Blohm would often receive calls from UHS executives in other states asking him to free up bed space for a patient at a sister facility who needed to be admitted immediately. “We’d even get calls from our CEO’s boss saying, ‘Take this kid, because they’re in my facility, and we’re not getting paid by insurance anymore,’” said a former Copper Hills clinical director, who asked that Mother Jones not use her name. “The goal was to fill the beds.”

In Harm’s Way

Multiple former Copper Hills employees said that, around 2016, they were informed of a new goal: Increase patients’ length of stay from about seven months to a full year. That way, they could introduce fewer potentially disruptive children while still generating revenue. Rather than leaving a patient’s discharge up to a therapist, the facility implemented a lengthy review process involving its leadership. “There was pressure on me to push back, too, and say, ‘Oh, you think they’re ready?’” said the former clinical director. “‘What makes you say that they’re ready? Have you addressed trauma?’”

Blohm was directed to have his staff report monthly on “unused days,” or times when the facility could have gotten insurance money but didn’t. Minimizing unused days helped determine discharge, he said. A soon-to-be-released patient may be “ready to go home today—and maybe it’s their birthday tomorrow,” he said. “But, you know, we have two weeks approved. We’ll just plan the travel for two weeks." (After four years as CFO, Blohm was fired following a dispute with an employee. He later filed a complaint with Utah's labor division for retaliatory discrimination.)

Long stays were rationalized as better for kids, many of whom had chaotic home lives. Plus, it made life easier for everyone else. “If there is a stable kid on the unit, that is fantastic for the staff and the other patients, who all benefit from having less disruptive behaviors happening around them,” the former clinical director said.

The length of patient stays had come up in UHS investor calls and conferences for years. At the 2013 Credit Suisse Healthcare Conference, Filton, the CFO, noted that nearly all of the reimbursement for behavioral treatment was on a per-diem basis, “and obviously if they spend less days in a facility, then we’re going to be paid less for a single admission.” A few years later, when behavioral facilities started to see a slight downturn in length of stay, Filton assured investors they’d reach out to facilities “to make sure we’re doing all the appropriate...blocking and tackling that we do vis-à-vis length of stay.”

Once more, foster kids offered a convenient patient base. They tended to linger, especially if they had “an uninvested caseworker or a caseworker who doesn’t trust this kid,” said the former Copper Hills clinical director. Chalese Meyer, a former recreational therapist, adds, “They were the kids who stayed there for extended amounts of time, and usually were institutionalized and placed over and over and over again. So they know how to work the system—and they felt comfortable in those places.”

This, in effect, is what happened to Edwards: Her resistance to Copper Hills morphed into something like acceptance. A few months into her stay, it dawned on her that she wasn’t leaving anytime soon. “So I was like, ‘Might as well start doing what I’m told,’” she remembers. A staffer took her on a walk to the campus store, where kids who had earned enough points based on behavior could buy snacks, and asked for her opinion on what the store should stock. This type of conversation—an adult treating her like an adult—was new to Edwards. “From then on, I was like, I want to be a teacher’s pet,” she said.

She stopped trying to escape and getting into fights. She started doing well in school. She participated in activities reserved for kids who were behaving, like cheerleading and cooking in the campus kitchen. When Edwards talks about Copper Hills, it’s hard to tell if it was genuinely helpful or simply better than before. At one point, she told me, “It was like a high school. It really was. The facility was locked, and that’s it.”

After more than a year in Utah, Edwards was discharged. She returned to Anchorage, where she lived in a group home. But the following months were challenging. Edwards testified in the trial of the man whose abuse sent her to foster care to begin with; he was convicted and sentenced to 39 years in prison. Soon after, she attempted suicide. Edwards says that she did need mental health services during this period, but when she learned that she was being sent to North Star, she was filled with dread. “If I could paint a picture of what North Star is,” she says, “it is literally hell on earth.”

At first, it looked like this North Star stay was going to go like the others. She was unhappy and resistant to treatment. Her psychiatrist expected her to be there a full year. Her three wishes on admission: to get out, to go to school, and to find a foster family.

Then, on the eve of her 17th birthday, it finally happened. A foster family came through. As it turned out, it was someone Edwards already knew—a former North Star staffer. Edwards, thrilled, was discharged early.

By the time she was released in March 2017, she had been in treatment for the better part of five years, including 891 nights at North Star. All told, Alaska’s Medicaid program had paid more than half a million dollars for her care at UHS facilities.

When she got out, she felt like she’d emerged from an alternate universe—one devoid of fashion trends, everyday interactions with strangers, and new technology. “Every time I went in and came out, there was like three new iPhones,” she says. Without the structure of an institutional environment, she had no idea when she should shower or go to bed. Would her foster mom think it was weird if she ate a snack and was hungry again five minutes later? Old reflexes from her treatment life lingered. She found herself asking her foster mom for permission to use the bathroom. Sometimes, Edwards would stand outside her bedroom door, waiting for someone to let her in—only to remember that she didn’t need to wait for a staffer with a key card.

Edwards, like Nathon Pressley, met Jim Davis at a Facing Foster Care in Alaska retreat. Edwards was skeptical of this middle-aged white lawyer giving a presentation with pizza sauce on his chin, but when he talked about suing North Star, she remembers, “I was like, oh no way this man knows about North Star!”

By 2018, Davis was representing Edwards in a lawsuit alleging battery and false imprisonment against North Star and UHS. When Pressley sued OCS, the agency subsequently sued North Star, but in Edwards’ case, the blame-shifting reversed course: North Star turned around and sued OCS. Neither organization, it seems, is prepared to take full responsibility for the children in their care. (The defendants in Edwards’ case have denied the allegations.)

Davis remains just as incredulous about warehousing foster kids at North Star as he was when he first learned about it years ago. “There aren’t any foster homes available, so we’ll just lock them up?” he says. “I mean, we just can’t do that. You can’t take someone’s freedom away because you’re doing a shitty job at recruiting foster families.”

Related

Former foster youth recount their experiences at North Star and other UHS treatment centers

Mateo Jaime, 21 years old

“With North Star, once you’re there long enough, you want to be a juvenile delinquent. You want to cause trouble. Everything’s so gray. There’s no purpose to be there. Therapy’s once every two weeks—so-called therapy. During that time, they just want to send you to Nevada. They want to send you to Oklahoma, send you to California. It was this merry-go-round, merry-go-round.”

Read more first-person accounts here.

Paris Hilton returned to Utah’s Provo Canyon School on a sunny day in 2020 for the first time since her teenage years. She had the platinum blond hair and big sunglasses of her reality TV days—but wore a T-shirt reading “Survivor” on the back and “Breaking Code Silence” on the front, the name of a campaign to put an end to the troubled teen industry.

“When I was a teenager,” she said to the camera, “I promised myself that one day, I was gonna shut down Provo Canyon School and save all the children.”

The documentary This Is Paris, in which Hilton revealed the abuse she endured over her 11-month stay at the facility, had come out just a few weeks before. Since then, she has proved to be a powerful lobbying force. In 2021, after hearing testimony from Hilton and others, Utah lawmakers passed legislation aimed at increasing oversight, requiring facilities to document instances of physical restraint and seclusion and to allow contact with family members. Hilton testified to state legislatures in Missouri, Montana, and Oregon, all of which have since toughened regulations. Earlier this year, Hilton’s team helped push the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, a bipartisan House bill that would increase oversight and data collection of residential programs for kids.

But the progress is halting. Multiple staffers told me that Copper Hills has become more violent since 2020, when Ron Tuinei, the former executive director of Provo Canyon School, took over. Improper restraints from overaggressive employees, some of whom came from Provo Canyon, left children with black eyes and bruises, they said.

Four days after Utah’s governor signed the oversight measure Hilton championed, Idaho CPS sent a 12-year-old named Logan to Provo Canyon School—even though Logan’s aunt, Trisha Leon, who was close with Logan and had no criminal record, wanted to take him in. Despite the new law, Logan’s mother and aunt say they were prohibited from talking to Logan during his first two weeks there. UHS acknowledged in a statement that for “therapeutic reasons, family contact may be limited in the initial admission period to allow patients to adjust and focus on their treatment.” When Logan finally did speak with his aunt, he told her about being slammed against a wall by a staffer. He still had the high-pitched voice of a boy who hadn’t hit puberty. “He pushed me in it really tight, which sort of hurt,” he said. (UHS noted such an incident would’ve been reported to state regulators and law enforcement. In the event of allegations of mistreatment, it said, facilities investigate and take remedial actions.)

Leon contacted everyone she could to get her nephew out: CPS, the governor’s office, local news, and Breaking Code Silence. Hilton made a video for Leon to show Logan. “I just want to let you know that myself and so many others are out here fighting for you and all the other children in that horrible place,” she said in the video. (Hilton told me over email, “He is so young and it was sobering that his stories mirrored my own.” She added, “Provo hasn’t changed and never will.”)

Logan stayed there for more than three months. He now lives with his mom.

Experts note that long-term fixes come down to reducing the need for inpatient psychiatric facilities to begin with. “The rate of institutionalization in what we used to call orphanages has gone down,” says Marcia Lowry, who founded the legal advocacy groups Children’s Rights and A Better Childhood. “But the need to stow kids someplace—to get them basically out of sight and pretend that we’re dealing with their problems—continues to exist.” The statistics are staggering: West Virginia CPS, for example, institutionalizes 71 percent of kids age 12 to 17 in foster care; in New Hampshire, more than 90 percent of older foster youth with a mental health diagnosis are placed in group homes or institutions. Lowry notes that solutions will require more community-based mental health services and support to families to prevent kids from entering the foster system in the first place. To that end, advocates have filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of foster children against state CPS systems.

In some places they’ve succeeded—though it takes time. After Lowry’s team sued New Jersey in 1999, the state’s child welfare system transformed, thanks to two decades of court oversight, pressure from A Better Childhood, and an unflagging court-ordered monitor. Today, the state has among the lowest rates of children in foster care in the country. Only 5 percent of those foster children are in group homes or residential treatment centers—roughly half the national average.

On a windy spring day, Katrina Edwards and I drove to North Star. She had passed by the facility many times since her return to Anchorage, where she lives in an apartment on the outskirts of town and works at a JCPenney, but this was her first time resting her full attention on its gleaming facade. Edwards’ daughters, both toddlers, sat in the back seat watching The Lorax, oblivious to the tears in her eyes.

“This is...intense,” said Edwards. “This is my childhood in one building. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to take in.”

She later told me she felt awkward on that visit. It was our first in-person meeting. I was a stranger to her, she said, just like the foster parents who’d driven her to North Star. She still struggles to trust people, from grocery clerks offering their help to reporters and lawyers asking about her experiences. “I’m a very friendly person,” she said, “but I hate humans.”

She’s not the only one grappling with the lingering effects of being, as one former foster youth put it, a “treatment kid.” For years, Nathon Pressley, now 26, brought a gun everywhere he went—not because he intended to use it, but because he’d noticed people left him alone when he was carrying. Alexies Ezell, 20, seemed so anxious when I met her at a coffee shop—her voice quivering, her legs crossing and recrossing—that I stopped the interview to make sure she was okay. She explained that social anxiety was a product of treatment facilities. “I used to be really social. I’d come up to people and—just like, strangers—and make friends super easy,” Ezell said. Now, she constantly second- and third-guesses herself, and worries that if she says the wrong thing or expresses any strong emotion, she’ll face consequences.

“The system—we adults—put them in a place like North Star, and literally almost throw away the key,” Davis says. “If you don’t, as a youth, lose faith in the world and all the adults running the world if that kind of thing happens to you, you’d have to be a saint.”

As we visited North Star, Edwards pointed out the familiar spots: the bank across the street; the cement area surrounded by a fence where the kids used to play; the door that she once tried to escape from; the grassy median where a moose gave birth as Edwards and the girls on her unit gaped from inside the facility.

But it was North Star’s wall of mirrored windows her gaze kept returning to, as if she were searching for something. These were the windows she spent countless hours staring out of and banging on in a futile attempt to catch the attention of anyone who might be passing by. “There’s probably a child in there looking at this particular parking lot,” she wondered aloud, “and wishing that she wasn’t in there.”

This article has been updated with additional reporting from medical and public records received since the story published in our September+October 2023 issue.

But a yearlong Mother Jones investigation tells a different story, shedding light on a large, profitable, and often-overlooked patient base: foster kids.

Thousands of foster kids have been admitted in recent years to UHS’s psychiatric facilities, where they typically stay for weeks or months, sometimes leaving far worse off than when they arrived. Some of their claims echo allegations that have come up in damning government and media investigations about UHS for years: that the facilities improperly use physical force and chemical restraints, fail to provide adequate treatment and staffing, admit patients who don’t need to be there to begin with, and bill insurance for unnecessary services over excessive lengths of time. (In a statement, UHS denied these allegations, pointing to its positive clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction scores.)

To UHS and its competitors, foster kids are “a gold mine,” says Ron Davidson, a psychologist who spent two decades investigating psychiatric facilities.

Foster children make for profitable patients for the same reasons they’re so vulnerable: There’s rarely an adult on the outside scrambling to get them out, and often, they don’t have anywhere else to go. Plus, Medicaid typically foots the bill. Over time, a symbiotic relationship has developed between overburdened child welfare agencies, which have more foster kids than foster homes, and large, for-profit companies like UHS, which have beds to fill. “The sales pitch—‘We can offer solutions to your overwhelming caseloads of high-needs children’—appeared irresistible to frantic agencies in need of more beds,” Davidson says.

Our investigation tells the story of Katrina Edwards, a former foster child in Alaska who spent more than three years during her adolescence at facilities owned by UHS, including 891 nights at North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage. Medical and court records show that she was repeatedly physically restrained, forcibly injected with a sedative, held in seclusion, and put on potent psychiatric medications. At times, she stayed at North Star for months after she was ready for discharge, simply because there was no foster home available for her. “They got a lot of money from me,” Edwards says. She’s right: Alaska’s Medicaid program paid more than half a million dollars for Edwards’ care at UHS facilities.

Our reporting found that Edwards’ story is one of many examples of foster kids spending long stretches locked in scandal-plagued UHS facilities. The investigation is based on records requests to each state, interviews with more than 50 people, and thousands of pages of medical and court records. Here are some key takeaways:

Foster kids are revenue generators.

The sheer scale of UHS’s operation is difficult to fathom: Foster children from 38 states were admitted to UHS’s psychiatric facilities more than 36,000 times between 2017 and 2022. Over the same period, 31 states spent more than $600 million on the treatment of foster children at the company’s facilities.

Alaska, Edwards’ home state, exemplifies the company’s dominance: Two-thirds of the foster kids sent to psychiatric facilities go to places owned by the company. These placements disproportionately affect Black and Indigenous kids, who are more likely to enter the foster system and more likely to be sent to residential treatment facilities.

States turned a blind eye to problematic facilities.

Child welfare agencies routinely send foster kids to UHS treatment centers with alarming track records.

“It is a huge, huge market, dollarwise," Davidson says. "And the thing that irritates advocates and people like me is that so much of this market­place is either unnecessary or patients could far more easily be treated at far lower cost in outpatient care.”

Over the past six years, foster kids from more than a dozen states were sent to Utah's Provo Canyon, perhaps the most infamous UHS facility. Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton experienced physical and sexual abuse at the facility as a teenager, before it was under UHS ownership, and has taken aim at the facility in her work advocating against the so-called "troubled teen industry." Under UHS ownership, damning allegations about the use of physical restraints and sedative injections at the facility have continued. Hilton told me over email, “Provo hasn’t changed and never will.”

UHS noted that, in the event of allegations of mistreatment, facilities investigate and take remedial actions. The company also said it complies with regulations related to “restrictive practices.”

Foster kids were warehoused at UHS facilities.

In some cases, employees of child welfare agencies have admitted that children in state custody are being unnecessarily institutionalized. Take the case of Nathon Pressley, who was sent to North Star again and again as a foster child, starting when he was just 5 years old. As an adult, he sued Alaska’s Office of Children's Services for negligence. In a 2018 deposition, then–OCS director Christy Lawton admitted that foster children stay at North Star—even after Medicaid stops paying—when the agency can’t find a placement for them. In a deposition the following year, the agency’s expert witness, Lindsay Bothe, acknowledged that Pressley “did have some longer stays while they were looking for a placement for him to discharge to.” Pressley’s lawyer, Jim Davis, then pressed Bothe:

Davis: Nathon didn’t really belong at North Star anymore because he didn’t meet that level of care, and he was already stabilized, at least as far as North Star goes, but there wasn’t anyplace else with the right level of care to put him?

Bothe: Correct.

Davis: So he just stayed locked up in a psychiatric facility?

Bothe: Yes.

Davis: For months.

Bothe: Yes.

Data suggests that Pressley's situation isn't an isolated case. Over a three-year period, OCS paid North Star more than $1 million for the care of foster children whose stays weren’t covered by Medicaid.

In a statement, OCS said that it strives to find appropriate placements for foster kids with behavioral health needs, but some children do experience delays as they wait for a lower level of care.

There are damaging—and long-lasting—consequences.

As our investigation notes:

For some foster children, the results have been devastating. As Edwards endured her stay at North Star, a 12-year-old West Virginia foster child was placed at UHS’s Cedar Grove Residential Treatment Center, a program in Tennessee for sexually abusive and reactive boys, even though he wasn’t a sex offender. He begged his caseworker to let him leave but was held at the facility for 18 months, according to a subsequent lawsuit against the state’s CPS agency. In 2018, Oregon CPS sent a 14-year-old girl to Provo Canyon School, where she experienced 42 instances of peer assault, seclusion, or restraint—including being forcibly injected with the antipsychotic Haldol 17 times—over the course of three months, according to records obtained by state officials. The same year, Virginia’s CPS agency sent 17-year-old Raven Nichole Keffer to UHS’s Newport News Behavioral Health Center, where she collapsed after days of complaining of feeling sick. According to a lawsuit, a 15-year-old patient was the first to call 911; Keffer died of an allegedly preventable adrenal insufficiency. In 2021, Alabama CPS placed a 10-year-old at UHS’s Alabama Clinical Schools, where he was repeatedly assaulted by staffers over six months, resulting in a broken collarbone and black eye, in addition to being bitten by scorpions in his bed “many times,” according to a recent lawsuit. When he reported the injuries, staffers allegedly threatened to kill him.

In its statement, UHS noted it couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations, pending lawsuits, or specific patients, though it did say the incident at Newport News “was the only death of a patient while in the care of the facility.” The statement added, “Our facilities are highly regarded, trusted providers of behavioral health services in the communities we serve.”

The finger-pointing continues.

Experts like Davidson say there are two groups to blame for the unnecessary institutionalization of foster kids: the companies operating problematic psychiatric facilities, and the child welfare agencies who send foster kids to those facilities. In court, the two groups have blamed each other. When Pressley sued OCS, the child welfare agency subsequently sued North Star. Both ultimately settled with Pressley last year for an undisclosed sum.

Katrina Edwards sued, too; she's alleging battery and false imprisonment in an ongoing lawsuit against North Star and UHS. But in her case, the blame-shifting has reversed course: North Star turned around and sued OCS. (The defendants in Edwards’ case have denied the allegations.) Neither organization, it seems, is prepared to take full responsibility for the children in their care.

Leavitt isn’t alone. In recent months, a host of right-wing news outlets published enthusiastic defenses of Guo and attacks on his critics. Many of these opinion pieces closely echoed a set of talking points circulated among Guo’s fanatical supporters. Often, the writers used specific words or phrasing that the appear to have been lifted directly from the prewritten talking points. Guo’s backers, it seems, arranged for a number of conservative writers to use their platforms to repeat prefabricated arguments defending Guo’s conduct.

The op-eds were highly specific. In the far-right Epoch Times—as well as on a conservative site called Headline USA—Leavitt penned attacks on people involved in a 2017 lobbying scheme to force Guo’s extradition to China, where he faces fraud and rape charges. (Guo denies those allegations.) For Headline USA, Leavitt also wrote about a 2017 hack of computers at a law firm that was representing Guo in an asylum bid. She echoed a claim Guo made in a lawsuit against the firm, calling the obscure, six-year-old incident “a disturbing reminder of the lengths to which authoritarian regimes will go to silence dissent and suppress free speech.”

These were not random choices. Leavitt’s articles about Guo appear to have been researched and suggested to her by Guo supporters. According to a report published in May by journalist Walker Bragman in OptOut, an independent media outlet, Guo backers provided “prompts as well as pre-prepared drafts” to several far-right authors who agreed to publish the material—which they were free to edit—under their own names. According to Bragman’s report, those authors included Leavitt; Gavin Wax, who heads the New York Young Republicans Club; Matt Palumbo, who works for the Dan Bongino Show and writes for various right-leaning publications; and Natalie Winters, a co-host on Steve Bannon’s streaming show, War Room. Most of the op-eds ran prior to March 15, when Guo was indicted for allegedly defrauding his fans with phony investment schemes.

Mother Jones largely confirmed Bragman’s report, which cites a source involved in the effort and communications related to placing the op-eds. Some of the writers, including Leavitt, Wax, and Palumbo, published pro-Guo articles that hewed closely to a document featuring suggested topics and talking points prepared in advance by Guo supporters.

For example, this document—which I obtained—calls for an article with the proposed headline: “Professional Communist Moneyman: How Chinese Billionaires Are Bankrolling the CCP’s Foreign Expansion.”

“This article should focus on three people: Bruno Wu, Shan Weijian, and Jho Low,” that prompt says. “These three CCP billionaires, or white gloves, are the primary source of illegitimate funding for the CCP’s unrestricted warfare abroad, including the CCP’s #1 priority goal of removing Miles.” 

On March 2, Leavitt published a story about this very topic in the conservative outlet Townhall, under the headline, “The American Denominator in CCP’s Global Dominance: Communist Moneyman and American Traitors.”

“There are many white gloves,” Leavitt’s column said, “but three individuals Bruno Wu, Shan Weijian, and Jho Low are the primary source of illegitimate funding for the CCP’s unrestricted warfare abroad, including the CCP’s number one priority goal of removing a key Chinese freedom fighter, Miles Guo.”

Wu is a Chinese businessman who has sued Guo for defamation. Shan is the CEO of a hedge fund that won a lawsuit against Guo in 2021. Both deny assisting the Chinese government, and no public evidence contradicts those denials. Low is a Malaysian businessman who has been indicted in the United States for, among other things, using funds stolen from the Malaysian state to finance a lobbying effort to have Guo extradited to China. He is currently a fugitive and is believed to be living in China. Representatives for Wu, Shan, and Low did not comment for this story.

Reached by phone, Leavitt claimed to have written her articles herself. When asked if Guo or his associates had paid her to byline the pieces echoing their claims, she did not answer directly. “I’m not going to comment to you about my clients or business relationships,” she said. She did not respond to follow-up questions noting the similarities between her articles and the prompts prepared by Guo supporters.

Townhall did not respond to my questions about Leavitt’s work, but it took down the “white gloves” article, along with another of Leavitt’s pro-Guo pieces, from its website after I reached out. Both stories now feature an editor’s note that says: “This column was removed for violating Townhall’s commentary submission guidelines.”

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The Guo supporters’ list of article prompts and talking points includes a story with the proposed headline: “Exposed: DOJ-Employed Attorney Secretly Met with Chinese Ambassador to sell out America.” On February 17, Wax bylined a Newsmax op-ed headlined: “DOJ-Employed Attorney Secretly Met with Chinese Ambassador.”

Wax—who previously worked for Gettr, a social media company with deep ties to Guo—did not respond to requests for comment. But Wax, a prolific tweeter, recently made a statement that fell short of a denial when a critic suggested Wax’s effort to defend Guo “in print” was related to his Gettr compensation.

“I was happy to write a few articles on the CCP,” Wax tweeted. 

Guo’s actual record as a CCP foe is questionable. He made a fortune in Chinese real estate through apparent Chinese state corruption. There is no evidence he was a CCP critic prior to fleeing China in the wake of charges against his political patron, a top security official there. After settling in the US in 2015, where he has unsuccessfully sought political asylum, Guo set about denouncing corruption among some CCP leaders, though his claims were unconfirmed.

In the US, Guo has often clashed with more established Chinese dissidents, repeatedly dispatching followers to protest outside the homes of his perceived foes. Multiple lawsuits have cited such harassment of prominent CCP critics, along with alleged continued ties between Guo and Chinese intelligence, to assert that Guo himself is a CCP agent—a charge he denies. In a 2021 decision in a lawsuit involving Guo, a federal judge wrote: “The evidence at trial does not permit the court to decide whether Guo is, in fact, a dissident or a double agent.”

The recent op-eds by far-right figures appear to be part of a larger, long-standing effort by Guo and his followers to cultivate support among conservatives and Trump supporters. Bill Gertz, a China hawk and conservative media fixture, has written favorably about Guo for the Washington Free Beacon, calling him a “leading Chinese dissident” in 2017. But Gertz revealed in a 2019 deposition that a Guo associate, William Je, had loaned Gertz $100,000. (Je was indicted for fraud along with Guo in March. He has denied the allegations.) The Free Beacon fired Gertz in 2019 for entering into “a previously undisclosed financial transaction with an individual or an affiliate of that individual whom Mr. Gertz had covered in some of his reporting.”

By then, Gertz had introduced Guo to various right-wing Republicans, among them Bannon. Guo paid Bannon lavishly as a consultant for media companies Guo launched. Guo also allowed Bannon to use a private plane and a $30 million yacht, on which Bannon was arrested in 2020. Bannon helped Guo set up nonprofits that underwrite the New Federal State China, a supposed government-in-waiting for China that the men launched together in 2020.

Guo’s nonprofits arranged to pay Trump-linked figures like Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn large sums for speeches at a New Federal State event. As I reported last year, Guo used a company he controlled to spend more than $400,000 on the November 2020 “Million MAGA March,” which sought to overturn the presidential election. He also secretly funneled $100,000 to an organization suing to reverse Trump’s loss in Georgia.

Gettr, a right-leaning social media app over which Guo has exercised control, paid Jason Miller, now a top adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign, $1 million a year to act as CEO. Gettr has paid $50,000 a month to War Room. Gettr also paid right-wing commentators—including Charlie Kirk, Dinesh D’Souza, Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo—to use the platform, the Washington Post reported.

The pro-Guo op-eds published by far-right influencers appeared around the same time that Guo’s followers in the New Federal State of China were holding protests against lawyers and litigants in court cases involving Guo. Guo’s backers targeted Shan, the CEO of the hedge fund, Pacific Alliance, that had successfully sued him. They also harassed lawyers adversarial to Guo in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding he initiated after losing the Pacific Alliance case.

The protesters demonstrated outside their targets’ offices and houses. They also doxxed and picketed the homes and workplaces of family members and children of some of their targets, among them a third grade teacher and a graduate student.

The articles attacked some of the same people targeted in these protests, as well as other players in the legal actions against Guo.

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In February, Palumbo published an article on the Gateway Pundit site arguing that Barry Ostrager, the New York judge who ruled against Guo in the Pacific Alliance suit, should have recused himself because he previously worked for a firm, Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, that has business in China. That line of reasoning echoed one of the prompts included on the list I reviewed. The prompt also suggested that the story assert that Ostrager’s summary judgement against Guo served to “deprive the defendant of the right to jury or appeal” and that a fine Ostrager leveled against Guo for contempt of court was intended to “force…Miles to file for Chapter 11.” Palumbo wrote: “The purpose of the judgment was simple: so that Ostrager could deprive Miles Guo of the right to go to trial, and thus force him into bankruptcy.”

This allegation is baseless. There is no evidence that Ostrager knew that Guo, a purported billionaire, would claim that he could not afford to pay the judgment in the case. Ostrager declined to comment. Palumbo did not respond to an inquiry. 

Newsmax, Gateway Pundit, and Headline USA did not respond to inquires. Asked about the op-ed it ran under Leavitt’s byline, Epoch Times said: “We are not aware of this external author, from whom we have published only one opinion article, having not written the article herself or having been paid for it.”

Another writer helping spread highly specific pro-Guo arguments is Winters. On February 28, she bylined an article that repeated claims by Guo backers that they had been harassed by a Chinese drone while on the University of Maryland’s Baltimore campus to protest Shan’s daughter, a student there. Winters’ piece included zero evidence that the drone the protesters claimed flew close to them had been deployed by the CCP. 

Winters has also bylined articles personally attacking reporters who have written critically about Guo, including me. In January, Winters authored an article that falsely suggested a series of exclusive articles I published about Guo and Bannon were the result of the CCP funding Mother Jones. 

Winters, who identifies herself as a “investigative journalist,” did not seek comment from me or anyone at Mother Jones. I reached out to her for this story. She did not respond to my questions about Gettr’s monthly payments to War Room or about her articles supporting Guo. 

Winters’ articles did not appear to match any of the specific prompts that I reviewed, but Bragman reported that she was among the writers Guo’s supporters worked with to advance their talking points. According to Bragman’s story, Winters’ article about the drone circulated among Guo supporters in draft form prior to its publication.

Last month, the New Federal State of China held its third anniversary party in a mansion in Mahwah, NJ. Speakers included Bannon, fabulist congressman George Santos, Palumbo, and Winters, who stated that the New Federal State members in attendance might know of her reporting on CCP infiltration of US institutions.

“Really I’ve only scratched the surface,” she told the audience. “And a lot of what I know and what I’ve been so fortunate to see first hand has only been because of the work that your wonderful movement has done. So it’s always an honor to work with you guys.”