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29 May 21
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Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal | A Resolution to End Poverty in the World's Wealthiest Country
Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal, Newsweek
Excerpt: "This week, we introduced a congressional resolution asserting that we can end poverty in the richest country on Earth."
We've had the opportunity to study poverty deeply. Rep. Lee has chaired the Congressional Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity since 2013. Rep. Jayapal chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Both of us worked closely with the Poor People's Campaign to produce a "People's Agenda" for pandemic recovery.
Even before the pandemic, more than two in five people in this country were poor or low-income, just $400 or less away from financial ruin. That's 140 million of us. During the pandemic, it got even worse. By the fall of 2020, 8 million more Americans had been pushed into poverty.
The American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration's COVID-19 relief package, brought crucial relief. But millions of jobs that were lost have not returned. An astounding 30 million people were put at risk of homelessness, and experts warn that the American Rescue Plan will fall short of helping them all.
But being poor in this country means more than going without money, a job or a home. It also means experiencing the brunt of climate disasters. It means mass incarceration—and frequent contact with militarized police forces. And it means ever-increasing restrictions on your right to vote, join a union or see a doctor.
Poverty, in short, intersects with every other injustice in our country.
For instance, poor communities—especially Black, Latina/o, Asian and Pacific Islander communities—are more exposed to air pollution that makes COVID-19 more dangerous. And they're more likely to work the front-line jobs that expose them to the virus.
While vaccines may eventually contain the pandemic, our costly and ineffective health care system will still leave us with the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant and maternal mortality rates among our peer countries. These crises most acutely affect poor and low-income Americans.
Meanwhile, poor people and communities of color are much more likely to be incarcerated or abused by police. Yet ballooning military spending and endless wars have siphoned resources from these same communities—while sending billions of dollars' worth of military equipment to civilian law enforcement, bringing the violence of those wars to our own streets.
And finally, with each passing day, new laws make it harder and harder for these impacted communities to vote. Hundreds have been introduced this year alone.
None of these problems stand alone. We can't end poverty without attacking the interconnected injustices of systemic racism, inequality, militarism and the climate emergency. That's why our resolution calls for a comprehensive response that prioritizes the needs of these 140 million people.
Alongside expanded social welfare programs and unemployment insurance, we're calling for a national, universal single-payer health care program that puts people before profits.
We're calling for a living minimum wage, the right to form unions and a federal jobs guarantee.
We're calling for a housing guarantee that ends evictions and expands affordable housing options and accessible quality education at all levels.
We're calling to transform our climate chaos to a green and renewable future—with equitable public transit, dramatic reductions in pollution and green jobs and infrastructure.
To root out systemic racism, we're calling on Congress to protect the right to vote, establish commissions on reparations for slavery and genocide and ensure the rights of Native people to their sacred lands. We must also enact comprehensive immigration reform that ends detentions, deportations and family separations. And we must end mass incarceration and the militarization of law enforcement.
Our nation has vast wealth and vaster inequality, which is why we're calling for fair taxation on the wealthy—and cuts to our enormous military expenditures. We're calling to end our wars and reconsider the harm done by sanctions and forward military deployments—and to transfer at least 10 percent of the Pentagon budget to fund community needs.
We call our resolution the "Third Reconstruction." During the First Reconstruction after the Civil War, Black Americans joined hands with white allies to build the power to rewrite state constitutions in most of the former Confederate states, winning the right to public education for all and other measures of progress. Multi-racial fusion coalitions were also key to the victories of the Second Reconstruction of the civil rights era in the 1960s.
Our current moment demands action of similarly historic proportions to heal and transform the nation. We need a Third Reconstruction.
A resolution is just the first step. Actually fulfilling it will require pressure from faith communities, unions, workers, immigrants and the racial justice, climate and peace movements. The Third Reconstruction is backed by the Poor People's Campaign, which will not rest until we achieve this goal.
Let's be clear: poverty exists because we allow it to exist. But in November, the people of this country gave their elected officials a new mandate to change that. With this resolution as a roadmap, we can do what needs to be done and deliver for people across America.
Mitch McConnell. (photo: CNN)
How Mitch McConnell Killed the US Capitol Attack Commission
Hugo Lowell, Guardian UK
Lowell writes: "Days before the Senate voted down the creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, was adamant: he would oppose the bill, regardless of any amendments - and he expected his colleagues to follow suit."
The story of how Republicans undermined the 6 January inquiry is informed by eight House aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
The commission that would have likely found Donald Trump and some Republicans responsible for the insurrection posed an existential threat to the GOP ahead of the midterms, he said, and would complicate efforts to regain the majority in Congress.
McConnell’s sharp warning at a closed-door meeting had the desired effect on Friday, when Senate Republicans largely opted to stick with the Senate minority leader. All but six of them voted to block the commission and prevent a full accounting into the events of 6 January.
But it also underscored the alarm that gripped McConnell and Senate Republican leadership in the fraught political moments leading up to the vote, and how they exploited fears within the GOP of crossing a mercurial former president to galvanize opposition to the commission.
The story of how Republicans undermined an inquiry into one of the darkest days for American democracy – five people died as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and sought to hang Mike Pence – is informed by eight House aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The prospect of a commission unravels
Surrounded by shards of broken glass in the Capitol on the night of 6 January, and as House Democrats drew up draft articles of impeachment against Trump, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, made her first outreach to canvas the prospect of a commission to investigate the attack.
In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, Pelosi had reason to be hopeful. Spurred on by the threat felt by many Republicans to their personal safety, a swelling group of lawmakers had started to agitate for an inquiry to reveal how Trump did nothing to stop the riot.
But what was once heralded as a necessary step to “investigate and report” on the attack and interference in election proceedings unravelled soon after, with the commission swiftly reduced to an acrimonious point of partisan contention in a deeply divided Capitol.
The main objection from House and Senate Republicans, at first, centered on the lopsided structure of Pelosi’s initial proposal, that would have seen a majority of members appointed by Democrats, who would have also held unilateral subpoena power.
And only weeks after the riot, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was already advancing the complaint for his ultimate opposition: that the scope of the commission did not include unrelated far-left violence from last summer, a political priority that stalled talks.
With little progress three months after the Capitol attack, Pelosi made a renewed effort to establish a commission on 16 April, floating a revised proposal that mirrored the original 9/11 commission with the panel evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
Pelosi briefed her leadership team that included the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, the assistant speaker, Katherine Clark, and notably, the chair of the House homeland security committee, Bennie Thompson, about the proposal the following Monday.
During that meeting, Hoyer first raised the prospect of also extending equal subpoena power to Republicans – a concession that would allow Democrats to meet all of Republicans’ demands about the structure of the commission – which Pelosi adopted a few days later.
By the penultimate week of April, Pelosi had deputized Thompson to lead talks as she felt the homeland security committee was an appropriate venue, and because the top Republican on the committee, John Katko, was one of only three House GOP members to impeach Trump.
With the House on recess, Thompson made enough progress in negotiations to brief Pelosi and her leadership team on 8 May that he secured a tentative deal on the commission, though Katko wanted to wait on an announcement until Liz Cheney was ousted as GOP conference chair.
Tensions within the House Republican conference had reached new highs the previous week after Cheney continued her months-long criticism of Trump’s lies about a stolen election at a party retreat in Florida, and Katko was wary of injecting the commission into the charged moment.
“As soon as the vote on Liz Cheney is taken, he will be prepared to do a joint statement,” Thompson said in remarks first reported by CNN.
Minutes after House Republicans elevated Elise Stefanik to become the new GOP conference chair on 14 May, Thompson and Katko unveiled their proposal for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission.
McConnell cracks down on the bill
The ouster of Cheney solidified Tump’s outsize influence on the Republican party, and set the scene for the weeks to come.
McCarthy almost immediately sought to distance himself from the commission and was non-committal about offering his endorsement. Asked whether he had signed off on the deal, McCarthy was direct: “No, no, no,” he told reporters in the basement of the Capitol.
By the following Tuesday, top House Republicans were urging their colleagues to oppose the commission bill, with McCarthy positioned against an inquiry on the basis that its scope focused narrowly on the Capitol attack.
As Hoyer had anticipated when he suggested that Pelosi also offer equal subpoena power to Republicans, McCarthy struggled to demonize the commission, and several House Republicans told the Guardian that they found his complaints about the scope unconvincing.
The Senate minority leader, meanwhile, had until then denounced Trump, who he faulted for inciting the insurrection, and publicly seemed open to a commission. But as it became clear the scores of House Republicans would vote for the bill, his calculus quickly changed.
Two days after the Senate returned for votes on 17 May McConnell informed Senate Republicans at a private breakfast event that he was opposed to the commission as envisioned by the House, and made clear that he would embark on a concerted campaign to sink the bill.
Underpinning McConnell’s alarm was the fact that Democrats needed 10 Senate Republicans to vote in favor of the commission, and seven had already voted to impeach Trump during his second Senate trial – a far more controversial vote than supporting an inquiry into 6 January.
Cognizant that Senate Democrats may find three or four more allies in uncertain Republicans, McConnell cracked down.
After announcing at the breakfast event that he would oppose the commission, McConnell railed against the bill as being “slanted and unbalanced” on the Senate floor, in biting remarks that represented a clear warning as to his expectations.
He kept up the pressure all afternoon on that Wednesday, so that by the evening, McConnell had a major victory when Senator Richard Burr, who voted to impeach Trump only four months before, abruptly reversed course to say that he would reject the commission.
In the end, only six Senate Republicans – Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Rob Portman, Lisa Murkowski and Ben Sasse – voted to move forward on the commission.
As the final vote hurtled towards its expected finale, the Senate minority whip, John Thune, who also switched his position to side with McConnell, acknowledged McConnell’s arguments about a commission jeopardising Republican chances to retake majorities in the House and Senate.
Summarising his concerns, Thune said: “Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections I think is a day lost on being able to draw a contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical leftwing agenda.”
The Bufford family poses for a portrait at their home on May 16, 2021, in St. Louis. (photo: Michael B. Thomas/The Intercept)
A Police Killing in St. Louis Remains Shrouded in Darkness
Alison Flowers and Sam Stecklow, The Intercept
Excerpt: "'They got him in the darkness.' This is the poetry of trauma parents like Antoine and Tammy Bufford have learned to speak. They are describing how their son was gunned down in the narrow gangway between a red-brick cottage and a weathered farmhouse in the Carondelet neighborhood of St. Louis on December 12, 2019."
“He waited until Cortez got in the darkness,” Antoine Bufford said. “You couldn’t see nothing there. Nothing.”
The 4-foot-9-inch space between 535 and 533 Bates Avenue is remarkably dark. Like a black hole, or a tunnel with no light at the end of it, the narrow grassy space runs about 32 feet before it dead-ends into a wood fence. That is where 24-year-old Cortez Bufford, chased by a man with a gun, couldn’t run any farther on that Thursday night around 9:30 p.m.
Eight shots were fired. Five, possibly six, of them hit Bufford’s body, front and back, from his left fingertip to the right thigh and upper back. Three shots to his face and head, one in each cheek, and the fatal shot to the upper left forehead.
“It was like he was target practice,” his father recalled thinking, as he looked over his son’s body at the family’s funeral home to “see everything that they had did to him.”
Wearing a yellow Missouri Tigers T-shirt, Bufford had been out that night with a good friend from his neighborhood, Terell Phillips. “Just a regular day,” Phillips said. “We was just chilling.”
In the course of the evening, they stopped at a BP gas station in the rental car his friend was driving for gas, a juice drink, and cigarettes.
The BP sits across the street from a vacant lot, close to the Mississippi River, right by a highway overpass. Threatened with closure by the city, it had been hanging on two years after being hit with a public nuisance notice for its high number of 911 calls, more than 800 calls for service in the last five years alone. Just two nights before Bufford’s death, a 14-year-old boy had been shot there multiple times during an argument.
When danger came, Bufford was standing behind the store, perhaps to smoke a cigarette away from flammables. He wouldn’t have wanted to stink up his friend’s nice rental car, his mother Tammy Bufford speculated. Or maybe he was taking a leak, as reports suggest, though no evidence of public urination was found.
“Hey man, stop pissing in public,” said a man in a white Chevy Tahoe. He was riding with another man. They pulled up alongside Bufford, according to reports. “Put your junk away.”
Bufford grinned and adjusted his gray sweatpants, but when one of the men opened the door of the Tahoe to approach him, his eyes widened and fear spread across his face, according to a video statement by one of the men.
That’s when Bufford fled.
Within seconds, the man chasing him pulled out a gun, video outside the gas station shows. Bufford, running for his life, collided at one point with the Tahoe driven by the other man. Bufford fell to the ground.
“They hit him with the truck. He got up and kept running,” Phillips said.
Bufford ran in between two homes on Bates but couldn’t clear the fence. He scuffled with the man who was after him, scratching him in the process, and broke free again. He ran across the street into another gangway until, unable to jump the fence, he couldn’t run anymore.
“I heard the first shot. It was a pause,” Phillips said in an interview. “Then after that, it was like Boom! Pause. Then it was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom … they just killed him.”
The medical examiner who performed Bufford’s autopsy ruled the manner of his death a homicide. That’s what forensic pathologists write, as a matter of course, when one human being dies at the hands of another human being. That part is no mystery. Bufford’s shooter has always been known to police. Because he is the police. Or, as reports refer to him, Officer #1.
In those reports, Bufford is “the suspect,” and what began as a “pedestrian check” swiftly turned deadly.
Two people, a white police officer and a Black man, each carrying a strong internal narrative about the other, are both reportedly, and legally, carrying guns.
They both carry something else, too: trauma.
In the blackness of the gangway, their fears collide. As space and focus narrow, it is hard to discern who, exactly, is in control of their actions anymore and who is captive of a neurological train of events with lethal momentum — an incident mired in political and sociological implications, where perspective dictates who plays the roles of the victim and the offender.
Law enforcement officers like Officer #1 are taught to preempt. To shoot first. To make it out alive in a society flooded with guns. In the close space between the two houses, there was no cover for either of them.
“They call it the old fatal tunnel, basically,” Officer #1 said in a video interview with force investigators about a month after the shooting. He fidgeted his fingers, as though uncomfortable about what he had just said. Experts in close-quarter combat often refer to such situations as the “fatal funnel.”
What happened in the gangway was also a kind of perceptual tunnel. Despite the implausibility of Officer #1’s ability to see within this space, his “tunnel vision” certainly took over, distorting reality by making him believe that Bufford was shooting at him, he would later claim. And within our current mode of aggressive policing, this space between perception and reality can produce, and will continue to produce, tragic, absurd — and avoidable — outcomes.
“How do you fear for your life if he’s running away from you?” Tammy Bufford, Cortez’s mother, asks. “At what point was there a threat? At what point was there a threat?”
Your Son Was Murdered
For a year and a half, the Bufford case has been suspended in the purgatory of unresolved police shooting cases. No charges filed. No determination made. Left in darkness, in a city with the highest rate of police killings in the country.
“That police officer needs to go to jail,” said Tammy Bufford. “You took an oath to protect and serve the community. You did not take an oath to be judge, jury, and executioner.”
Many fatal police shooting investigations around the country can take years to conclude, but the Bufford case is joined by more than 20 others in St. Louis — including seven in 2019 alone, Bufford’s among them — that have yet to receive a determination on filing criminal charges from Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner or, as the Riverfront Times and The Trace reported earlier this year, a review of any kind from the Civilian Oversight Board.
This inaction comes nearly seven years after a system was established to probe these cases, following the killings of Michael Brown by nearby Ferguson police and Kajieme Powell and VonDerritt Myers Jr. by St. Louis police. A byproduct of this flurry of reforms is a convoluted process, in which added layers of review can leave a case to crumble in the pipeline of investigations.
In 2014, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department created the Force Investigation Unit, or FIU, tasked with focusing solely on criminal investigations of police shootings. (Previously, there was just a review by Internal Affairs for policy violations.) Shortly thereafter, the Circuit Attorney’s Office entered into an agreement with the police department to review these investigations for criminal charges. After a ruling, the cases are supposed to head back to Internal Affairs and another internal board for policy and training review and, finally, to the police chief. Then, and only then, can the Civilian Oversight Board, established as the third prong of review for police shootings in 2015, receive the investigation.
This stands in contrast to how police shootings are investigated in many other large cities, as well as best practices from organizations like the Police Executive Research Forum, which recommends that the administrative and criminal reviews of shootings happen simultaneously.
“If you ask one entity, they’ll say it’s the other entity,” said Civilian Oversight Board Commissioner Kimberley Taylor-Riley, who reports that she has yet to receive a single police shooting case, not even shootings that are unquestionably closed.
This bureaucratic limbo is compounded by the fact that the Deadly Force Review Board, which reviews cases before they go to the oversight board, has not been convened in over two years. A new report released by Taylor-Riley this month points to Gardner’s office as the bottleneck.
Since taking office in 2017, Gardner has charged officers in at least three shootings: a nonfatal case from 2018 in which an officer shot an unarmed carjacking suspect in the back, a nonfatal 2019 case in which off-duty officers got into an altercation with a man at a bar, and another 2019 shooting in which an officer killed another officer in a game of Russian roulette.
“I don’t believe police can investigate themselves, and I have prosecuted police officers during my tenure and will hold them accountable just like anyone else,” Gardner said while campaigning for reelection in 2020. Otherwise put, as she told the Missouri Independent and Reveal, she cannot rely on investigations conducted by an officer’s “friends.”
Yet Gardner’s reluctance to make determinations in cases brings the investigative process to a standstill. Most cases remain indefinitely open when charges are not brought against an officer. This results in a backlog of cases. Despite there being an attorney and investigator within Gardner’s office to review these cases, there is no timeline to conclude them.
In a post-George Floyd reality (Bufford’s police killing preceded Floyd’s by five months), St. Louis elected Mayor Tishaura Jones, a progressive figure who quickly issued an executive order directing the SLMPD to share years of Internal Affairs data and other records with the oversight board. But ensuring civilian review of fatal police shootings, which activists have been calling for since the 1980s, may not be so simple. New legislation to streamline the review process would need to be passed by the Board of Aldermen. Despite a swing to the left, the board is still led by Lewis Reed, who has been criticized for proposing “stunt” police reforms that have done little to enact structural change. (Recently released records show that Gardner is facing state Supreme Court disciplinary proceedings for her handling of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens’s criminal investigation.)
And so the vast majority of these cases, like Bufford’s, remain in the dark, unable to move forward.
“We look at the news, and it’s constantly still happening to young Black kids and brown kids,” said Antoine Bufford, who protests with family members in marches for Black lives. “It’s just not going to stop.”
With the city silent on the Bufford case, police investigators have not reached out to the family with updates. Not since they were first called in.
That’s when they sat across from Lt. John Green, the commander of the FIU, a veteran homicide investigator. They remember the lieutenant telling them something rather peculiar for someone in his position, something that would constitute a rupture in the code of silence: Your son was murdered.
“I don’t know if he would agree with it again, but he said it,” Antoine Bufford insisted in an interview for this story last December, on the anniversary of his son’s death. Tammy Bufford, who was present during the police meeting, heard the same thing.
In fact, today, Green does not agree with it. He denies making the utterance at all: “I didn’t say that their son was murdered. I said he was killed. I said he was shot. … No, I don’t know where they got that from.”
Green declined to address any specific questions about the Bufford case, deferring to Gardner: “It’s her shop. She can do whatever she wants to do. … We’re not going to surpass her. That’s not good business.”
But, Green mentioned, he has inquired about the status of the Bufford case since delivering his findings to Gardner’s office.
“We’ve asked several times,” he said. “The ball is in her court. I can’t push her to do anything. She doesn’t work for the police department. She’s an elected official. We just have to wait.”
Baby Child
The youngest in a tight-knit family, Cortez Bufford spent all 24 years of his life in South City St. Louis, where he loved playing basketball in the backyard. They had a full court.
He was still living at home when he died.
“This is our baby child,” Antoine Bufford said of his son. “Can’t get rid of that last one.”
Cortez always loved fast cars. “I don’t think he knew how to drive slow,” said Monisha Merrill, his sister. His last car was a 1994 Firebird, which Antoine is trying to fix.
A “dork” with glasses who got teased in grade school, Cortez took his first job — apart from his neighborhood lemonade and hot dog stand operation — as a dishwasher at the Old Spaghetti Factory. He loved working there, his parents remember, and was upset with them when he had to quit to take a big family vacation to New Orleans. Photo ops with alligators during a swamp tour cheered him up, but it was a sore spot for years.
He would eat ice cream and watch movies with his nieces and nephews and house-sit for his sister, Ericka Freeman, who described him as her sidekick who “always went for what was right.”
Cortez later took warehouse jobs at FedEx and UPS, earning employee accolades for his forklift operation skills. But he lost his job of several years after failing a drug test for smoking weed, his father said.
One of his last jobs was working at Henry’s Funeral and Cremation Service, a business his cousin Brandon opened in late 2017. It was there that his parents would view his body for the first time and his homegoing service would be held.
The Buffords, like many Black families, had “the talk” with Cortez when he was young — the one about the police, what his rights were, and the potential dangers ahead. He didn’t have any trouble with law enforcement until April 2014, four months before Michael Brown’s police killing in Ferguson. Driving the speed limit, and after making a legal U-turn, Bufford was pulled over. One officer demanded that he get out of the car. After Bufford protested and asked why he was being detained, two officers pulled him out of the car using an “armbar” technique, a painful attack on the elbow joint. Eventually nine officers came to the scene.
The encounter received national attention due to a viral dashcam video of his beating and arrest. The video shows two of the officers kicking, stomping, and tasing Bufford as he screams. Then, almost two minutes into the beating, an officer says, “Hold up, hold up y’all, hold up, hold up. Everybody hold up. We’re red right now, so if you guys are worried about cameras, just wait,” before shutting off the video.
Only after the officers subdued him did they realize that Cortez had a gun. He wasn’t old enough to be carrying it. He was arrested and charged, but after the public fallout, the case was dropped.
The Buffords were in Chicago visiting family when they got the call that their son was hurt. When they returned to St. Louis, he was in bad shape. They observed gashes across his head and taser marks on his body. They took Cortez back to the doctor to get his hand recast. Physically, he survived, but “mentally, he was crushed,” Tammy Bufford said.
In 2015, Bufford filed a lawsuit against several officers, earning a $20,000 settlement. He had won, but, the family remembers, his lawyer warned him that he would be a target in the future.
In the four years that followed, Bufford was pulled over, stopped while walking, and harassed, his parents say. While there are no publicly accessible records or complaints documenting these events, there are reports of two arrests, one in 2017 for apparently not leaving a MetroLink station when asked and “pulling his arms back” (resisting arrest, trespassing, and marijuana possession) and one about three weeks before his death.
In that case, police reported that Bufford was driving a stolen car, an allegation not supported by the charges. When they tried to apprehend him, “the defendant began to flee on foot,” court records show. The officers caught up with him and made the arrest, putting a felony drug charge on his record.
Quite Rational Fear
Dr. C.C. Cassell, a licensed clinical psychologist in California who specializes in trauma, has worked extensively with survivors of community violence, sexual violence, and combat veterans who have experienced war-related trauma.
Cassell is acquainted with the Bufford family, though she never knew Cortez. In 2020, she helped the Buffords file a sunshine law request with the SLMPD. Then she brought the case to the Invisible Institute and The Intercept for further investigation.
Cassell recalls how the hypervigilance of her veteran patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder often manifests itself by carrying guns. Not one gun, but multiple guns hidden throughout their homes, with at least one on their person at all times.
“Having these weapons made them feel safe,” Cassell remembers. “They felt naked without them. For me, the surprising part was how familiar this behavior was.”
It reminded her of the Black men she knew, who did not carry weapons with an intent or desire to harm anyone, but simply because they never felt safe anywhere: “Even in their own homes. … Having a weapon was the only way they could regain a sense of safety, albeit a fragile one.”
Undoubtedly, Bufford was a trauma survivor. According to Cassell, the way he reportedly turned away from the police vehicle when he first saw it, which Officer #1 later described as “kind of suspicious” — that action alone, from a psychological standpoint, foregrounds his desire to avoid police interaction.
Phillips had seen Bufford’s fear of the police play out before. “Every time he seen them, I mean, like, every time he seen them, he just wanted to get away.”
Cassell says Bufford’s flight from police is “quite possibly a survival instinct driven by quite rational fear.” This leaves her to wonder: “What protections do we as U.S. citizens have when the very individuals who are employed to protect us pose a threat to our lives?”
Building on her deep experience working with trauma survivors, Cassell now focuses on helping people of color cope with race-related trauma.
“The concept of PTSD is meant to capture the aftereffects of trauma, hence the name ‘post’-traumatic stress disorder,” Cassell notes. “However, Black people in this country are facing continuous traumatic stress.”
Both Bufford and Phillips experienced such trauma. For Phillips, disturbingly, Bufford isn’t the first friend of his who has died from police gunfire after running down a St. Louis gangway: “When it’s constantly happening, I’m not going to say you get immune to it, but you don’t go through what you would go through if this was your first childhood friend.”
Cassell says it is “a sad reality” that Black men are often not given the opportunity to learn how to understand their ongoing trauma, “despite how pervasive this problem is.”
In Bufford’s case, Cassell could not diagnose him, but she does have a deep knowledge of his history and is struck by a pattern: He had no record of violence. Even during his previously documented police encounters, including one in which he was severely injured, he never attempted to use a weapon.
Also, notably, during his struggle to escape Officer #1 in the first gangway, when the officer pointed his gun at him “to protect myself,” Bufford did not pull the weapon then either, according to reports.
“What he wanted to do was get away,” said Phillips, who has his own problematic history with law enforcement, from a resisting arrest charge to drug and weapon convictions. Phillips insists that Bufford would not have pulled a gun on an officer: “He wanted to go home.”
Cowboys
Officer #1 and his partner that night, Officer #2, were part of the Mobile Reserve Unit, a crew of roving tactical officers that responds to hotspots. “Looking for trouble,” as one news article described it.
The unit has been around for more than 60 years. When MRU debuted in 1959, a writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described it as “the new shock-unit troop organized to back up district officers in the ceaseless war against crime.” Reports from its early years suggest a history of unconstitutional practices: In its first five months of existence, MRU officers questioned more than 28,000 people, the Associated Press reported. Over the years, the unit has worked alongside the SWAT team.
“They’re sort of the cowboys of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department,” said Rich McNelley, a former public defender whose cases at times involved MRU officers in the early 2000s.
The MRU has “historically been known as the jump-out squad,” said activist John Chasnoff, who has worked on policing issues in St. Louis for more than two decades. “There’s been many complaints over the years of them suddenly descending on people, harassing people, holding guns to their head, and other heavy-handed tactics.”
The fact that the unit has for decades also functioned as the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s SWAT team — for which they receive highly militarized training — is, “structurally, a big mistake,” Chasnoff said. An analysis by his group, the Coalition Against Police Crimes & Repression, found that in at least eight shootings between 2013 and 2018, the officers involved were either current or future members of the MRU and SWAT teams.
The mobile officers are not assigned to a district. They can go anywhere in the city, a style of hotspot policing that appears to have changed little over the years. A review by a risk assessment firm published last December found that the SLMPD lacks a coordinated crime plan, as the targeting of crime hotspots results in officers flooding already over-policed and under-resourced neighborhoods. Operating like a blunt tool on violent crime, SLMPD’s “broken windows”-style policing within the MRU creates “significant blind spots,” according to the risk assessment report.
It Was Very Dark
When mobile officers roamed the area near the BP the night Bufford was killed, several of their in-car video cameras were rolling. For Officer #1 and Officer #2, their car video was never pulled. Investigative reports do not say whether it ever existed.
The only police shooting video saved on December 12, 2019, came from a different part of the city earlier in the day where a white man was robbing a White Castle. He pointed a gun at officers before running away, the video shows. Police then shot the man. In the knee. He survived.
In Bufford’s case, investigators retrieved scraps of dispatch tape that depict the killing and its aftermath. The audio quickly escalates into chaos, after the police-citizen encounter has already turned into a pursuit.
Within about a minute: “Got shots fired! Shots fired, shots fired!”
The dispatcher asks if it’s the officer or suspect who is down.
“We need EMS urgent!” an officer says.
“For an officer or suspect?”
“For the suspect. The officer’s OK,” one of them says.
“EMS is responding. District One’s en route. Are all mobile officers accounted for?”
“Everybody is OK.”
“That’s good,” the dispatcher responds.
But what happened in the gangway, in between these frantic dispatches, only Officer #1 survived to say.
While there are no known eyewitnesses, there are earwitness accounts from people in nearby homes and businesses. Their accounts of the verbal commands they heard Officer #1 give differ. Where they align, however, is that at no point did Officer #1 identify himself as a police officer, tell Bufford he was under arrest, or tell him that he had committed a crime.
Even if there had been eyewitnesses, the gangway was too dark to see anything, according to Officer #2.
“How was the lighting in the gangway?” police investigators asked.
“It was very dark,” Officer #2 said in a video interview.
“Did you have to use your flashlight to see down?”
“Yes, I did.”
“When you first got to the gangway, did you have your flashlight on?
“No, I did not.”
“How far could you see?”
“I could not see in the gangway” Officer #2 said. “It was very dark.”
The investigators asked Officer #1 the same.
“It was dark back there,” Green, the lieutenant, said. “Did you have any light or anything?”
“No, I did not have a chance to retrieve my flashlight … because the fact that he had a firearm was more important for me to have control with both my hands free,” Officer #1 answered.
Later in the interview, another investigator returned to the point.
“I noticed it was pretty dark,” he said. “How was your vision in that?”
Officer #1, along with his attorney, seemed to register the point of emphasis.
“I could see,” he said, nodding. “I could see.”
The FIU report documents the lighting conditions as being “during the hours of darkness” yet notes that “commercial grade streetlamps” were on at the time of the shooting. The report also mentions the existence of a neighbor’s doorbell camera that captured video of the gangway just after the shooting for several minutes. The video was turned over to the Circuit Attorney’s Office, according to the FIU investigation. The footage is reportedly not “very good quality,” which itself might testify to the poor lighting conditions. In response to records requests, the SLMPD said it didn’t have a copy of the video, and the Circuit Attorney’s Office denied the request, saying it is still investigating the case.
Whatever Officer #1 claims to have seen in the darkness, including Bufford looking at him “eye to eye,” what he says he thought happened in the gangway did not, in fact, occur.
He remembers Bufford shooting at him. He didn’t.
“To my mind, I thought he did shoot at me,” Officer #1 told investigators. “In my mind, I thought he was shooting at me too.”
The sequence of it was weird, he said: “I remember pop-pop [pause] pop-pop. … It wasn’t a smooth pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.” Then, he reiterated: “I do, I believe that he was shooting at me.”
“Do you think he fired first, or did you fire first?” the investigator asked.
“I think we were both about the same time,” Officer #1 chuckled.
Bufford’s six gunshot wounds, front and back, tell their own story, though it is nearly impossible to determine the sequence of shots.
“Most of the time you can’t reliably order the sequence of the gunshot wounds based on medical evidence,” said Dr. James Filkins, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy in this case. With respect to the question of whether Bufford was facing or had his back to the officer, based on the medical evidence, according to Filkins, “either scenario is possible.”
The first gunshot identified in the medical examiner’s report was the fatal one to the head. Some of the other wounds, the one in the right thigh and the two in his face, are consistent with Officer #1’s account. But it’s the gunshot to Bufford’s back that complicates his story. Based on the resting position of Bufford’s body — according to interviews and handwritten renderings of the scene, he was on his stomach, meaning that he would have fallen forward — a shot to the back complicates Officer #1’s statement that Bufford was facing him when he fired his police weapon at him.
Another complication to Officer #1’s narrative is the shell casings from his gun. While Officer #1 reports shooting from the mouth of the gangway, many of the casings were found toward the middle of the pathway, indicating that he may have been closer than he claimed.
Manbag
When Officer #1 attempted to stop Bufford behind the gas station, he noticed his “manbag” under his jacket.
“That right there kind of indicated in my mind that he might be carrying something,” Officer #1 said.
Video shows that Officer #1 pulled out his gun and pointed it at Bufford, after Bufford took off running. But he told investigators that he didn’t pull his gun out until after he saw Bufford’s weapon, an account contradicted by the footage. When Bufford and the Tahoe collided, on the front right passenger side of the vehicle, both Officer #1 and Officer #2 say in their video interviews, they first saw an extended magazine of a gun protruding from Bufford’s shoulder bag.
The two officers were only officially interviewed about a month after the incident, allowing ample opportunity to collect themselves, as well as potentially align and inoculate their accounts from criminal implications. And, due to Fifth Amendment protections, officers cannot be compelled to make any statements in the criminal investigation, or else their testimony is off-limits in court. In cities such as Philadelphia and Phoenix, however, officers have to give statements in an administrative investigation within hours of a shooting to determine if it was within policy, which happens alongside the criminal investigation.
But not in St. Louis: “Whenever he’s ready to be interviewed, that’s when I can interview him,” Green said. “There’s nothing you can do about that. I have to wait until he makes a statement.”
Officer #2’s statement is nearly identical to Officer #1’s account, but it is doubtful that he could have seen Bufford’s gun, on the opposite side of the Tahoe from the driver’s seat, when it — if it — became visible from his bag when he fell to the ground. Video from inside the BP station, which reportedly shows Bufford making a purchase, does not indicate that a gun was visible at any point. Also, two other officers who pulled up as Bufford ran away and collided with the vehicle did not say they saw a gun in statements made to investigators less than 24 hours later.
After the shooting, Officer #2 approached the gangway and rolled Bufford over, allegedly finding a gun underneath his torso, according to his interview. Officer #2 either threw or kicked it out of the way, he can’t remember.
The crime scene evaluation does not indicate how Bufford’s arms were lying when he hit the ground. It is not documented whether the satchel was already opened or if investigators had to unzip it themselves. It is also unknown whether Bufford was holding the gun as he fell, if he dropped the gun, or if the gun was still in his shoulder bag when he was shot.
Photos show a grisly scene, with unexplained blood smears on Bufford’s box of cigarettes, the reported gun he was carrying, and ambiguous blood impressions on Officer #2’s police uniform shirt and shoe. Prescription drugs appear sprinkled about the ground. According to Filkins, the forensic pathologist who reviewed Bufford’s autopsy for this story, Bufford had a “therapeutic level” of prescription Tylenol and codeine in his system, as well as marijuana, but “not a significantly high level.”
The detail that Bufford had a gun beneath him, however, corroborated by another responding officer, cements Bufford as a suspect in the police version of events, the “guy with a gun,” the “bad guy,” described in dispatch audio. Woven into the tight choreography of codes and signals, this narrative begins to take shape.
That Bufford was a “bad guy” is certainly the impression police left with lifelong Bates Avenue resident Randy Prater, former owner of the Tin Cup bar across the street from the incident. Prater is listed as a witness, though he didn’t see or hear anything take place. In an interview for this story, Prater said he heard that Bufford was “robbing a place.”
But when someone’s body has been riddled with bullets, it can be hard not to recognize their victimhood. The communications supervisor almost slipped up on the police radio herself: “If you guys didn’t hear, the victim — er, oh, not a victim — suspect is remaining on the scene,” she said.
Later, when Police Commissioner John Hayden came to the scene, where the TV news had set up, he sidestepped the Buffords, who were pleading to see their son, they say. Hayden wouldn’t stop to talk to them.
“The officer fired,” Hayden told reporters, and the people of St. Louis, on the news that night. “The officer’s not sure whether or not the suspect fired.”
By the time paramedics took Bufford’s body away, the winter grass was soaked with blood.
You Could Have Killed Me
Officer #1 has a name: Lucas Roethlisberger. He is in his mid-30s, married with kids, originally from Nashville. A strong runner, Roethlisberger was a cross-country and track standout in high school and college, and he is a Saint Louis University alum.
A 13-year veteran of the SLMPD force, he holds the department’s highest honor, the Medal of Valor, and colleagues picked him as their Officer of the Year in 2010.
“We have a great department,” Roethlisberger told the St. Louis Fox affiliate in 2012. “Leadership, integrity … you live with it right in your chest, where your badge is.”
Roethlisberger earned these distinctions only a few years into his career after nearly dying from an on-duty shooting. A bullet ripped through the carotid artery in his neck. He was in a coma, had two strokes, and went through nine months of rehabilitation.
“He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t write, couldn’t feed himself,” his wife Courtney told the TV news. For weeks, she slept by his side on a cot in his hospital room.
In 2010, Roethlisberger and a partner stopped a car for traveling with its headlights off. When Roethlisberger tried to search Kim Cobb, a Black driver, he pulled a gun on the officers, shooting Roethlisberger in the neck. He fired again, hitting Roethlisberger’s bullet-resistant vest and his right arm. Roethlisberger’s partner was hit in the leg and returned fire, shooting Cobb in the back.
Cobb had no record, other than a marijuana possession arrest, and he was under the influence of marijuana the night he shot the officers, his attorney said.
Both officers survived. Cobb pleaded guilty to the assaults. His attorney proposed a sentence of 18 years. Cobb got four life sentences instead.
Circuit Court Judge Dennis Schaumann, in explaining his decision to the court, had his own theory for why Cobb shot his gun. “The officers were wearing blue, and no other reason,” Schaumann said. “This is happening too much in society. It’s got to stop.”
During his victim impact statement, a “palpably angry” Roethlisberger spoke with “clipped words,” a journalist reported.
“You are a coward,” Roethlisberger told Cobb. “I have kids, for God’s sakes. You could have killed me.”
Schaumann had more to say, scolding Cobb: “In this life, Mr. Cobb, we all have to make choices, and you made a horrible choice, first of all, by carrying a gun and second of all, for using it.”
Staring down Cobb, Courtney Roethlisberger asked him: “Was it worth it?”
After the hearing, Roethlisberger told reporters: “We got justice.”
On A Mission
In the years since Cobb’s sentencing, Roethlisberger has stayed out of the news, despite shooting at another Black man on St. Louis’s North Side.
A separate FIU investigation from January 2018 indicates that Roethlisberger fired at — and missed — Tremayne Silas after he allegedly pointed an assault rifle at him, according to Roethlisberger. After Silas fled his car during an attempted traffic stop, admittedly carrying a gun, Roethlisberger alone chased him on foot as other officers chased the car’s passenger and tried to cut Silas off. Roethlisberger told investigators that Silas pointed the gun at him before jumping a backyard fence. In an interview with investigators, Silas denied ever pointing his gun at officers and said that officers tased and “kicked the shit out of” him after he had surrendered. Civilian video footage obtained by investigators, which captured only part of the incident, shows Silas running away from Roethlisberger. The incident, which also took place at night in a residential area, was never publicly reported.
Even after Roethlisberger killed Bufford almost two years later, local reporters didn’t pick up on the fact that he was the shooter. His name appears in public records about the case, but he wasn’t otherwise identified as Bufford’s killer.
His public-facing reputation still intact, Roethlisberger’s interactions with Black citizens have remained fraught. He is one of 343 officers named in an ongoing federal lawsuit for “kettling” — a controversial law enforcement tactic that prevents people from dispersing — during the 2017 protests that followed SLMPD officer Jason Stockley’s acquittal for the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, a Black man.
Roethlisberger has also received two citizen complaints that the department released. The first came from Colette Taylor-Moore in 2016, who said Roethlisberger called her teenage son off her mother’s front porch, harassing and threatening him with tasing if he didn’t come to him.
“He was just on a mission,” Taylor-Moore remembers. “He had a chip on his shoulder, an arrogance, like, ‘You can’t tell me anything.’ He was brash, if you will. I would have understood his attitude more if he were being taunted or disrespected, but there was no need for any of that.”
The SLMPD would not release the outcome of Taylor-Moore’s complaint, but she reports that nothing happened in the case, except a call from someone who sounded high-ranking and explained that Roethlisberger had been investigating a disturbance on the block.
“That was not the truth,” Taylor-Moore said. “There was no one else there.”
In the complaint, Taylor-Moore says that Roethlisberger also harassed three other young men walking down that block, as her son later observed.
In a second citizen complaint filed by LaVictor Wallace in 2017, Roethlisberger was one of several officers accused of ripping out dreadlocks from the man’s head, after kicking in his girlfriend’s front door and forcing him to dress in her clothing.
“I was called a ‘bitch,’ so they said they’re going to dress me like one and gave me my girlfriend clothes,” Wallace wrote in the complaint. “I was beat and charged with a gun and drugs and they knew that I was innocent.”
The criminal charges stemming from Wallace’s arrest did not hold up in court. His complaint against Roethlisberger was withdrawn pending resolution of his criminal case, according to Civilian Oversight Board records. It does not appear that it was refiled. Roethlisberger did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Wallace did not respond to requests for comment.
Cream of Wheat
The morning before Bufford died, his dad made him breakfast. Oatmeal, turkey sausage, cream of wheat, toast.
“I’m up every morning fixing him breakfast,” Antoine Bufford says, speaking in the present tense, as though Cortez is still there beside him. “That’s what I do every morning for him, seven days a week, make sure he has his breakfast.”
They ate together. Antoine Bufford was leaving that day to visit Cortez’s brother in Texas. He tried one last time to get his son to come with him, to leave town.
“You should go,” he pushed. A fresh start, he said. It’s not safe here, he warned.
“I’ve just got some things I need to do,” Cortez told him.
His son didn’t want to leave home. But when Bufford gets to thinking about it, he feels that he should have made him leave.
“You’re his father,” he tells himself. “Don’t let him make those kinds of decisions, even though he’s grown.”
But Cortez didn’t want to be forced out. He would try to reason with his parents. “Why do I have to uproot my life?” he said. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
Just Put Him in Handcuffs
“Please stop! PLEASE stop!”
That’s what Roethlisberger said he remembers shouting as he chased Bufford into the gangway. Bufford turned around and faced him, Roethlisberger told investigators.
“At that time, I’m making a quick reaction in my mind that I need a back-up. I need the back-up. And then before I know it, that I’m backing up, I see him pulling the firearm from the bag and then turning over towards me and then at — ” Roethlisberger’s voice cracks with emotion in his police video interview.
He tries to start again: “And then at that time — ”
Another voice crack. Roethlisberger sits in silence with investigators for more than 30 seconds as he tries to regain his composure.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Then another 15 seconds or so pass before he resumes.
“So, I know he’s pointing the gun at me. The first thing, I pull out my gun. I’m left-handed, grab hold of the gun. I run. I’m aiming with my sights, and I’m backing up, and I said, ‘Drop the gun! Drop the gun!’ as loud as I could. And then, fearing for my life, shot a round, and I’m just backin’ up, shooting, backing up, backing up, because there was no cover at all.”
The fatal tunnel.
Roethlisberger backed up all the way to the corner of one of the Bates houses, but he still had his gun pointing at Bufford when he saw his partner in the Tahoe pull up. He kept holding down the position “because he could start shooting at us,” Roethlisberger said.
Officer #2 — his name is Martinous Walls — was the first to come to the gangway. Other officers soon followed. He had originally tried to cut off Bufford’s path by driving close to the other side of the wood fence. After hearing the shots fired, he looped back around to Bates.
“Luke, where are you?” Walls called into the darkness from the Tahoe.
“I’m over here,” Roethlisberger said.
When Walls hopped out and walked the length of the gangway, all the way to the end, he found Bufford’s lifeless body. He could tell he wasn’t breathing and figured there wasn’t anything he could do to render aid other than call EMS, Walls later told investigators in a video interview. Walls did not respond to requests for comment.
Two other responding officers showed up to the gangway.
“What should I do?” Walls asked.
“Just put him in handcuffs,” one of the officers said.
Roethlisberger offered to do it himself: “If you’re going to put handcuffs on him, then I’m going to put handcuffs on him.”
“No, no, no,” the officer told him, pushing him away, according to Roethlisberger’s video interview. “Back up.”
Shortly after his lieutenant came to the scene, Roethlisberger retreated to the Tahoe. Then, when EMS arrived, he was shepherded to the ambulance so the paramedics could take his vitals. To make sure he was OK, Roethlisberger remembers. He took off his duty belt and uniform shirt. And his bulletproof vest.
While paramedics evaluated him, his lawyer had quickly arrived to counsel him, beating force investigators to the scene. Then he had to go back to police headquarters to take a drug test and breathalyzer, before being relieved of his duties, Roethlisberger says.
“I went back home,” he concluded his statement.
It was time to take the investigators’ questions.
“When he pulled out the gun, was that something you were expecting?”
Roethlisberger told them he was hoping it wasn’t going to happen like that, but the situation was getting serious. Worse and worse, he said, and Bufford just wouldn’t give up.
In response to a request for comment, the SLMPD emailed the following statement: “As to your request regarding the case involving the two officers mentioned, the department does not speak on prior or pending litigation.”
Trigger Point
“We all carry out our prejudices,” said Alexa James, a police trauma specialist and CEO of Chicago’s chapter of the National Alliance for Mental Illness. “Fear is protective in many ways. It keeps us from things that have harmed us historically. But fear also reduces our opportunities to grow and expand and be uncomfortable.”
James has served on the Police Accountability Task Force in Chicago, created in 2015, in the wake of the dashcam video release of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times front and back by former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who was convicted for murder in 2018. In an interview for this story, James spoke in general terms about police mental health issues and trauma, though she did not review the Bufford case specifically.
Trauma changes the way we relate to other people. “Every single interaction you have and every experience you have, it colors the way that your lens of the world is. Period. End of story. It changes your perspective,” James said.
But trauma does not equal traumatized, nor does it lead to violence or reactivity, James explains. Individuals have different capacities for resilience: “We never know the trigger point of somebody, right? What is going to harm somebody and what is going to build resilience.”
Historically, police mental health services have not been well funded, but late in 2020, James became the new “senior advisor of wellness” to the Chicago Police Department, where she had previously provided trainings of officers for more than a decade. She also helped change the department’s policy for its Traumatic Incident Stress Management Program, where on-duty cops are referred after certain incidents.
“That cumulative trauma without any space in between to really debrief and process is not going to allow their brains to operate effectively because they’re in crisis mode,” James said. “They’re in fight or flight.”
A public safety issue itself, unaddressed trauma in officers is dangerous for both the individuals they engage with and themselves. Moreover, the collective trauma of officers interacts with that of communities they police, or over-police.
“When you put two groups of people together that both feel really impacted by not having ownership and power and control, it gets really messy,” James said, noting also the significant equity issues for communities of color. “One group is starting with a deficit.”
In St. Louis, the police chief and then-mayor put out a joint statement in mid-2020, expressing support for the hiring of mental and behavioral health specialists to assist their officers. They added that de-escalation training, implicit bias training, and racial equity training had been mandatory since 2014 at the SLMPD and that officers are taught to use the least amount of force possible to bring an incident under control while protecting life. The use of deadly force, they wrote, is a last resort.
“The reverence of human life is paramount,” the statement reads. “The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department strives to serve the community by protecting life, preventing crime, and maintaining a peaceful culture through respecting the humanity, dignity and constitutional rights of every person.”
To that end, the department mandates that whenever possible, officers must identify themselves as police and state their intention to shoot — neither of which happened in the Bufford case.
In his video interview with investigators, Roethlisberger indicated that he had undergone some type of counseling after the shooting, saying that he had spoken to his “shrink” about what happened.
You Better Not Shoot Him!
Today, there is one streetlight near the gangway where Bufford was slain, but it only sheds light on the pavement directly below it, not on the space between the two houses on Bates. At night, that space remains inky black and impenetrable to the eye.
“Can I see him? Let me identify him. Let me make sure that’s my son,” Tammy Bufford pleaded with officers on the night of December 12, 2019. She tried to cross over the police tape. They kept her away.
No one confirmed to the Buffords that the man killed by police was indeed Cortez until inadvertently, a day later, a detective called her, seeking information: “Do you have any witnesses? he asked. Do you have anything?”
“First of all, I don’t have anything because you haven’t even verified whether or not it’s my son,” she told them. “So, you’re calling me on the phone talking about ‘let me verify some information,’ instead of saying, ‘Is that my son? Can I see him?’”
It wasn’t until Lt. John Green stepped in and asked Antoine Bufford to come to the station that police confirmed that Cortez was dead. The Buffords weren’t allowed to identify him at the morgue, they say. Instead, they had to wait even longer for the morgue to transport the body to the family funeral home. But Tammy and Antoine Bufford didn’t have to see their son to know what had happened to him.
Right after the shooting, Phillips came to their door. He told them: “The police just killed Cortez.”
Investigators never spoke to him on scene, even though they interviewed other earwitnesses. No one, not the police, not the Circuit Attorney’s Office, has ever reached out to Phillips, he said.
When he saw Roethlisberger, gun drawn, chasing a Black man, he didn’t realize at first that it was Cortez. Nonetheless, Phillips yelled out to try to stop what was about to happen: “Don’t shoot him!”
The last thing he saw was the two men disappearing into the darkness.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents make an arrest. (photo: Charles Reed/AP)
"Shadow Wins": How ICE Avoids Judicial Accountability by Quietly Releasing Immigrants Who Challenge Being Detained
Dara Lind, ProPublica
Lind writes: "A new study from Louisiana shows that immigrants who challenge their detention in court are much less likely to prevail before judges than to quietly get released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement while their cases are pending."
The study, conducted by Tulane University Law School’s Immigration Rights Clinic and shared with ProPublica, makes the case that what it calls “shadow wins” may allow ICE to uphold a status quo that frequently goes beyond the Supreme Court’s 2001 ruling that indefinite detention is unconstitutional.
Federal court challenges can be a detainee’s only hope of mandated release after months or years, especially in Louisiana, which has recently become a major detention hot spot. But the study finds those filings remain “complex, time consuming, and currently inaccessible for many detained immigrants.”
The report offers new evidence of the need for clear guidelines on how long immigrants may be detained without overstepping the Constitution. Under the Fifth Amendment, it is unconstitutional to hold immigrants without due process, but the Supreme Court has not clearly defined how long someone can be held without being deported before their detention becomes unconstitutional.
The Tulane researchers analyzed 499 federal court petitions filed by Louisiana detainees between January 2010 and June 2020. The filings, known legally as petitions for a writ of habeas corpus (or habeas petitions), asked federal judges to order their release.
In the cases, immigrants had been held in custody for an average of 13 months by the time they filed their petitions in federal court. While the study’s authors cautioned that they don’t have full records for all detainees’ immigration cases, because those happen in separate immigration courts run by the Department of Justice, their data shows that about three-quarters of detainees had been ordered deported but were still being detained.
By the time the legal cases were resolved, an additional several months had passed — often because ICE officials delayed filing responses for months. In one case analyzed by Tulane, an ICE official told the court that the detainee would be deported imminently. Seven months later, the deportation still hadn’t happened, though ICE once again said it was “imminent.” The detainee was ultimately held for an additional nine months — then released.
The Deep South has become a center for the detention of immigrants, and Louisiana is known as a state where detainees often languish in prolonged detention, partly because local ICE officials rarely grant parole. From Oct. 1, 2020, to May 13, 2021 (the most recent date for which ICE has data available), there was an average of 1,819 ICE detainees in Louisiana — the most of any state after Texas — accounting for 12% of detainees nationwide, according to data analyzed by ProPublica. But while the average detainee in Texas had been in ICE custody for 45 days, the average Louisiana detainee had been held for over 90 days.
In 2001, the Supreme Court suggested that detaining someone for six months after they received a deportation order could be unlawful. But the court has not set a firm standard for when prolonged detention turns into indefinite detention, either for immigrants who’ve been ordered deported or for those who are still fighting their cases through a backlogged immigration court system.
Without a clear legal standard, it falls to individual detainees to challenge their detentions. One of the detainees whose case was covered in the Tulane report told ProPublica that he found out about the option to file a petition when studying in the detention center library. He’s now assisting current detainees with habeas petitions, while awaiting a final decision in his immigration-court case; he spoke anonymously to avoid affecting his case’s outcome.
Immigrants almost never got favorable rulings; judges ordered a release in five of the nearly 500 Louisiana cases analyzed. In 112 of the cases, ICE released detainees while their petitions were pending, allowing the judge to dismiss the cases. These “shadow wins,” as the study authors call them, were almost as common as cases that ended because the immigrant was deported.
“Shadow wins” are good for the person getting released, but from the government’s perspective, they limit potential damage. They “avoid a precedent being set that would compel them to act in certain ways in future,” the detainee, whose case was covered in the report and who was trained as a lawyer in his home country, told ProPublica, “and that way they maintain the discretion that they enjoy.”
The Tulane study concludes that “because the releases end the legal case challenging detention, ICE may be using these releases to avoid negative court decisions that make formal rulings regarding prolonged, indefinite and punitive detention.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, “shadow wins” also allowed government officials to avoid testifying about the real conditions in their facilities. The detainee said he was released from detention before an ICE official testified in his case. In other recent cases analyzed by ProPublica in Louisiana and Texas, “shadow wins” preempted disclosures about COVID-19. Chris Benoit, an El Paso lawyer who represented a group of women who were released after filing a habeas petition last summer, told ProPublica his clients were also released shortly before ICE officials were slated to testify. “In our case, there was a clear desire to not have a record on the part of ICE,” he said.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns about COVID-19 have compelled judges around the country to order ICE to release some detainees, and there are thousands fewer immigrants in detention than at the pandemic’s beginning (largely because of a policy in place since March 2020 that immediately expels most migrants caught entering the U.S. without papers, rather than detaining and deporting them). But those who are still detained are being held longer, as the pandemic has slowed both immigration courts and deportation flights. In fiscal year 2019, according to ICE statistics, the average detainee was held for 34 days; in fiscal year 2021 to date, the average is 72 days.
As part of the Biden administration’s “reset” of immigration enforcement, acting ICE Director Tae Johnson instructed the agency in February to limit detention to immigrants who are enforcement priorities because of criminal history or other concerns. But advocates say they’re still struggling to win the release of people who are already detained, even if they don’t fit those priorities. In the absence of federal court precedent, ICE still has discretion over who gets detained and for how long.
'Without the intense cold and stress they experienced during the crisis, many of the victims could still be alive today.' (photo: Thomas Shea/AFP)
The Texas Winter Storm and Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than the State Says
Peter Aldhous, Stephanie M. Lee and Zahra Hirji, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far."
A BuzzFeed News analysis shows the catastrophic failure of Texas’s power grid in February killed hundreds of medically vulnerable people.
he true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days.
The state’s tally currently stands at 151 deaths. But by looking at how many more people died during and immediately after the storm than would have been expected — an established method that has been used to count the full toll of other disasters — we estimate that 700 people were killed by the storm during the week with the worst power outages. This astonishing toll exposes the full consequence of officials’ neglect in preventing the power grid’s collapse despite repeated warnings of its vulnerability to cold weather, as well as the state’s failure to reckon with the magnitude of the crisis that followed.
Many of the uncounted victims of the storm and power outages were already medically vulnerable — with chronic conditions including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and kidney problems. But without the intense cold and stress they experienced during the crisis, many of these people could still be alive today.
This was the case for 80-year-old Julius Gonzales, his family believes. As dawn broke on February 15, he made his way to one of his regular dialysis appointments, only to find that the clinic had lost power and was closed. So the retired maintenance worker turned his Dodge Ram around and headed back to the mobile home he’d shared with his wife, Mary, in the small town of Arcola, Texas, for nearly 20 years.
So began the last 24 hours of his life.
Inside the Gonzales home, the lights were out. The couple had lived through blizzards and hurricanes before, but had never lost power in such bone-chilling cold. As temperatures sank into the low 20s, they couldn’t get warm, no matter how many sweaters and blankets they piled on or how close they huddled to their generator-powered electric heater. Gonzales was compulsively shivering and complaining, his wife remembers, so she urged him to go to sleep.
At around 5 a.m. on February 16, dressed in two sweaters and jeans and socks, Gonzales made a loud noise in bed and didn’t respond to his wife’s pleas. A 911 call later, the paramedics arrived and pronounced him dead.
On paper, Gonzales’s death has nothing to do with the storm. When his wife finally received a death certificate months later, it said Julius died from cardiovascular disease, caused by high blood pressure and narrowed arteries associated with diabetes. It also listed his overactive thyroid gland as contributing to his death.
Mary, 74, knew that her husband had at least some of these problems. He wore a special vest to detect if his pulse became irregular. He weighed a frail 114 pounds. And he had recently recovered from a bout of COVID-19.
But Mary said he was stable up until the storm, pointing to the fact that he was able to drive himself to dialysis. She believes that the medical examiner’s explanation is incomplete, and that her husband of 58 years didn’t have to die that day. “I still believe the cold made him to where his heart just gave out,” she said.
The BuzzFeed News analysis of deaths during the storm is based on mortality data from the CDC. It relies on a method called “excess deaths” analysis, recently used to estimate the full toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our analysis, reviewed by three independent experts, suggests that between 426 and 978 more people than expected died in Texas in the week ending February 20 alone. Our best estimate is that 702 people were killed by the storm that week. Even the lowest end of the range is almost three times the number officials have acknowledged. Neighboring states that were hit hard by the winter storm but did not experience the widespread power outages seen in Texas did not show a spike in deaths.
Read more about the BuzzFeed News analysis of Texas storm deaths.
BuzzFeed News reached out to relatives of people who died during the power outages, identified from dozens of wrongful death lawsuits as well as death reports obtained from public records requests to medical examiners in eight of the biggest counties in Texas. Interviews revealed stories of anguish and confusion, as families struggled to find out exactly how their relatives died.
This confusion also poses real economic challenges for survivors. For Mary Gonzales, the delay in obtaining a cause of death for her husband meant she was unable to claim an income from his pension for almost three months. And without an official acknowledgment tying their loved ones’ deaths to the storm, families will be unable to claim federal assistance for funeral costs.
The high death toll adds pressure on state legislators, energy regulators, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to harden the state’s infrastructure to avert another deadly disaster.
Abbott’s press secretary, Renae Eze, did not respond to questions about the significantly higher death toll or whether the state would investigate further, but said Abbott was “working collaboratively with the House and Senate to find meaningful and lasting solutions to ensure these tragic events are never repeated.”
“The Governor joins all Texans in mourning every single life lost during the winter storm, and we pray for the families who are suffering from the loss of a loved one,” she said.
But with the state’s legislative session ending on May 31, lawmakers only have a week left to finalize a proposal to address some of the vulnerabilities that made the February storm so horrific.
“As it stands, nothing has happened,” said Michael Webber, a professor of mechanical engineering focused on energy infrastructure at the University of Texas at Austin.
As the storm approached over Valentine’s Day weekend, forecasts from the National Weather Service clearly showed that Texas and neighboring states would be hit by snow, ice, and several days of freezing temperatures. “The severity of the cold weather that is about to be experienced here in the coming days is unprecedented in Texas history,” Abbott warned at a February 13 press conference.
Hospitals put in place contingency plans to ensure that they could keep operating and ambulance providers prepared to work under hazardous driving conditions.
But while the governor warned Texans that demand for power to heat homes would potentially outstrip supply for a couple of days, he assured them that the state could manage the situation: “We do, as a state, have the ability to ensure that we do not run out of power,” Abbott said.
Nobody was prepared for the power to go out across so much of the state, for so long. Texas’s grid is largely separate from the rest of the country, so it couldn’t rely on power supplied from across state lines when the generators inside its borders started failing.
And a lot failed: A nuclear power plant failed. Coal plants failed. Wind turbines failed. Solar panels failed. But the biggest problem was the failure of the state’s natural gas infrastructure, which powers much of Texas’s electricity. This was partly because officials hadn’t required gas operators to protect their equipment, even after a winter storm in 2011 triggered widespread blackouts and revealed the power grid’s vulnerability to cold temperatures.
More than two-thirds of Texans lost power during the week of the storm, for an average of 42 hours, according to a University of Houston study. Some people went without power for up to five days.
With temperatures plummeting to the single digits across large swaths of the state, people resorted to warming their homes using their gas ovens or burning their furniture and other belongings to stay warm. Others used generators, barbecue grills, or their cars to create heat, resulting in the state’s worst carbon monoxide poisoning disaster in years. And power outages and frozen pipes left millions of people without access to water, leading some to resort to melting snow.
On the morning of February 16, Gerald Herring, an Army veteran who had just turned 70, was struggling with a power outage, burst pipes, and a cold home in Sugar Land, southwest of Houston.
Over the phone, Herring told his son Jonathan that he was carrying water in from a neighbor’s house. This mention of heavy lifting worried his son. Despite him seeming to be “in good health, all things considered,” Jonathan Herring, 36, told BuzzFeed News that he was worried because his father had undergone surgery a few years ago to repair a torn valve in his heart.
“From what I knew, it was going OK, and/or he hadn’t had any episodes or things like that,” said another son, Chris Herring, 33, who also spoke with his dad by phone that day and remembered that he seemed to be in good spirits. “He was always good about monitoring. If he didn’t feel good, if he didn’t feel well, he would tell my stepmom.”
But later that day, Gerald Herring became unresponsive. Though paramedics arrived to rush him to the hospital, the drive there and back took longer than usual on the icy roads, Chris recalled. Gerald was pronounced dead not long after. His death was officially attributed to cardiovascular disease caused by high blood pressure and narrowed arteries.
While he did have heart problems, his sons believe that the cold was likely the ultimate catalyst for his death. “Adding stress for someone who has a heart condition, no power, no water — it's not a good set of circumstances,” Chris said.
If the storm had not hit and the power had not gone out, Jonathan said, “We’re not going to get another 10 years — I’m not an idiot — but it wouldn’t have happened that day.”
Asked why the deaths of Julius Gonzales and Gerald Herring were attributed to natural causes, Stephen Pustilnik, the Fort Bend County chief medical examiner, told BuzzFeed News that “none of the history that you gathered was ever told to our investigators.”
“I don't necessarily deny these were storm-related,” Pustilnik said. “But if we had known — if the family had told us when we asked them what was going on with the deceased family members — we certainly would have included them. If we don’t know about it, we can’t act on it.”
Other families are also convinced their loved ones died as a result of the power failures and cold. But with no official confirmation of this, they are left with no clear answers and little hope of holding anyone to account.
The precise circumstances surrounding the final hours of many of those who died during the storm have not been scrutinized, since many deaths were never reviewed by medical examiners. Even when they were, the cause of death was often determined by an external examination of the body, rather than a full autopsy.
If you’re used to watching TV crime dramas where medical examiners deliver precise diagnoses after thorough autopsies, the fact that the causes of many of the deaths following the storm are mired in confusion may seem surprising. But for deaths linked to underlying medical conditions, autopsies are actually rare — in 2017, only around 7% of US deaths attributed to cardiovascular disease, for instance, were confirmed by autopsy, according to a study published last year.
Establishing a precise cause of death in Texas is particularly challenging. Only about a dozen of Texas’s 254 counties have their own medical examiner’s offices. In the rest, confirming the cause of death is the responsibility of elected officials who are not required to have prior medical expertise. And while these counties can refer deaths to a medical examiner in one of the larger counties for further investigation, they have to pay for each examination or autopsy that is conducted.
“There are certainly some [counties] that do a great job and others, you know, that might not do as good of a job,” Kathryn Pinneri, forensic director for Montgomery County, Texas, and vice president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, told BuzzFeed News.
Two deaths in Galveston County illustrate how deaths initially attributed to natural causes may, upon further consideration, be linked to the storm and power outages. After BuzzFeed News was sent a list of deaths following the storm from the county medical examiner’s office, we received an update noting that the primary cause of one of these deaths, that of 89-year-old Eula Piangenti, had been changed from heart failure to “environmental exposure due to Feb 2021 winter storm.”
Erin Barnhart, the chief medical examiner for Galveston County and a pathologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told BuzzFeed News that she reclassified this case after being contacted about it by a reporter with Texas Monthly, who was investigating deaths in Galveston when the storm and power outages hit.
Piangenti had Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular problems, and was living with her daughter, Sharon Stacy. She required oxygen to help her breathe, which went offline for about 18 hours when the electricity supply to Stacy’s house failed. She died on the morning of February 16, shortly after power was restored.
Although Piangenti was under remote hospice care, her daughter had not expected her to die so soon. “She wasn’t on her last breath. She was still functioning,” Stacy told Texas Monthly.
By the time Barnhart was told of the circumstances surrounding Piangenti’s death, the funeral had already taken place and there was no body to examine. But she decided she had enough information to rule that Piangenti and another case in Galveston were in fact victims of the power outages following the storm.
The second case was 68-year-old Shirley Napier, who collapsed in her home on February 15 after the power failed overnight. Her heart had stopped beating and was shocked back into rhythm by the EMT team who took her to a nearby hospital — where she was admitted with a body temperature below the threshold for hypothermia. Napier never recovered, and died the following Sunday. On the death certificate, her cause of death was recorded as a brain injury caused by a lack of oxygen following a heart attack.
“I didn’t agree with the cause of death when it first came out,” Steven Napier, Shirley’s husband, told BuzzFeed News.
He is now suing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which manages the state’s power grid, and CenterPoint Energy, the utility that supplied their home with electricity, for the wrongful death of his wife. He blames the state’s decision not to protect its power grid after the 2011 storm for his wife’s death. “They didn’t want to spend the money to fix the system,” Napier said. “It’s negligent homicide.”
In court filings, ERCOT has disputed Napier’s claims. The grid operator did not respond to repeated requests for comment from BuzzFeed News.
Barnhart, the medical examiner in Galveston County, was not surprised that many deaths caused by the storm had been missed in the state’s official count. “Did we capture all of them? Probably not,” she said.
To estimate the full death toll from the storm and power outages, BuzzFeed News used a statistical model to predict expected deaths in any week, given long-term and seasonal trends. Our estimate of deaths caused by the storm and power outages excludes deaths from COVID-19, which were declining steadily in Texas through February.
The three independent experts who reviewed our methods and findings all agreed that the CDC data shows a large spike in deaths in Texas during the week ending February 20, when the power outages and extreme cold were most severe.
“There appears to be a clear jump in deaths following the winter storm in mid-February that defies trends in Texas,” said Steven Woolf of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, whose team has used similar methods to estimate the total US death toll during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This spike in deaths was specific to Texas: No similar pattern showed up in neighboring states which were affected by the winter storm but didn’t experience such widespread and prolonged power outages.
To further probe the reasons for the high death toll in Texas after the storm, BuzzFeed News looked at the primary cause of death noted in the CDC data. More than 175 deaths in Texas in the week ending February 20 have yet to be assigned a cause. But even with this gap in the data, there were still spikes for diabetes and for “diseases of heart” — a broad category including heart failure, arrhythmias, and heart attacks — which had a sudden uptick of more than 200 deaths in that week.
That fits with previous research. “We have a huge body of epidemiologic literature that shows cold temperatures are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, hospitalizations, and mortality,” said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Two studies of hospitalizations in New York City, for example, have shown that admissions to hospitals with cardiovascular disease surge after winter storms — especially if the power goes out.
Some deaths attributed to underlying cardiovascular disease may have actually been caused by hypothermia. “Hypothermia is notoriously difficult to diagnose,” said Hannah Jarvis, assistant medical examiner at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. Unless core body temperature is recorded while a patient is still alive, she said, it is very hard to confirm as the cause of death.
Last July, Jarvis published a study of 10 years of hypothermia-linked deaths in New York City and Houston, showing that 32% of people listed as dying of hypothermia in New York City and 74% of those in Houston also had underlying cardiovascular problems.
Many of those dealing with power outages were under enormous stress, which may have contributed to their deaths.
Isla Laws, 92, was living in Dallas with her daughter Susan Petr, 72, when the storm hit. The power would go out for hours at a time, once going out for 15 hours, Petr said. Though they had a fireplace, they quickly ran out of firewood. Laws had to bundle up in extra layers of clothing and blankets.
“She was very anxious and very scared,” Petr said. “She didn’t even want to go to the bathroom because our power was out.”
Her mother died while the power was still out, on February 17.
Laws used a walker and took thyroid and blood pressure medicine, but despite those health issues, Petr said Laws should not have died that day. “I’m 100% convinced that it was because we didn’t have power,” she said. “It was just more than she could handle.”
According to the Dallas County medical examiner’s office, Laws died a natural death due to “hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”
The medical examiner’s office said there was nothing in Laws’ case file about the cold temperatures or the power being shut off.
But Jeffrey Barnard, the county’s chief medical examiner, acknowledged that the cold could have caused more deaths than his office has counted. “There’s no doubt you put an environmental thing like this and there are going to be people getting stressed that would not have been stressed if you didn’t have it,” Barnard said. Referring to the state’s total count of deaths caused by the storm, he said, “There’s no surprise to me that it’s higher. I just don’t know how much higher.”
Many people who were struggling at home during the week of the storm were unable to make it to the hospital. Despite the high number of deaths linked to cardiovascular disease, there was no clear surge in related ER visits. And ambulance services were struggling to cope with calls for a variety of medical emergencies.
Some patients with kidney problems were turning up in emergency rooms after missing dialysis appointments because their regular clinics had lost power. Ambulance providers were flooded with calls from patients with similar problems. “They're having a hard time breathing, their blood gases are all out of whack and they are having a real clinical emergency,” said Matthew White, assistant chief of the Houston Fire Department, responsible for emergency medical services. “They’re calling 911 to get dropped off at an ER.”
Darrell Pile, CEO of the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council, which helps coordinate trauma and disaster response in the Houston area, told BuzzFeed News that at times, ambulance providers were unable to respond to all the calls coming in. In part that was because hospitals that were on emergency power and struggling with disruptions to their water supply were not able to admit patients as quickly as normal.
“The calls kept coming in, but ambulances were tied up,” Pile said.
With first responders facing similar pressures across the state, the usual influx of help from other Texas cities after a disaster was unavailable.
“Even though we were activated for [Hurricane] Harvey for 18 days or longer, this storm, the Arctic blast, crippled the entire state of Texas. There was no one coming,” Pile said.
Rather than getting to the hospital, it seems that many of the uncounted victims of the February winter storm died at home, either because they didn’t call for emergency assistance or because help couldn’t get through in time.
In its count of deaths caused by the winter storm, the Texas Department of State Health Services is relying heavily on records submitted from officials in individual counties. Most are confirmed deaths from hypothermia. But the official count also includes accidents on the ice and carbon monoxide poisoning. So far, relatively few of these deaths are people with existing medical problems that were exacerbated by the storm and power outages.
Although government agencies have traditionally accounted for the impact of disasters using narrow counts like the one being run by Texas officials, there is a growing recognition that this method may vastly underestimate the true toll.
The problem came into stark relief in the weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, when news organizations, including BuzzFeed News, provided evidence that many more people had died as the island struggled with the collapse of its power grid than the official count of 64 killed by the storm.
Eventually, Puerto Rico’s governor commissioned a comprehensive analysis from researchers at George Washington University in Washington, DC, which estimated that 2,975 more people than expected died between September 2017 and February 2018, as large parts of the island went without power for months. This is now accepted by the authorities in Puerto Rico as the official toll from Hurricane Maria and the subsequent power outages.
The Texas Department of State Health Services did not respond to requests for comment on our findings on the death toll from the winter storm or whether they would investigate further.
According to the experts consulted by BuzzFeed News, “excess deaths” analyses like the GWU report on Hurricane Maria and our accounting for the Texas winter storm provide the best way to measure the full impact of major disasters.
Ariel Karlinsky, an economist and statistician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who is compiling the World Mortality Dataset to aid similar studies of the deaths caused by disasters and diseases, put it this way: “The graveyard doesn’t lie.”
In the winter storm’s aftermath, the governor, elected politicians, and the public demanded answers about how Texas’s grid could fail so spectacularly and who was to blame.
The Texas legislature grilled leaders at ERCOT, a nonprofit overseeing the state’s grid, and the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates ERCOT, about why more wasn’t done to prepare for power supply problems and warn the public about what could happen. Since then, ERCOT fired its CEO and at least seven of its board members have resigned. Additionally, the state’s three commissioners at the PUC all resigned.
Now all eyes are on the state legislature, which is debating a sprawling bill that would empower state regulators to require power providers, including some natural gas operators, to protect their equipment against cold weather or face financial penalties. The bill passed the Senate, and an updated version just passed the House. The chambers have a week to resolve their differences and send the proposal to the governor’s office to get signed into law.
But for many families who lost loved ones during the storm, none of these steps are enough. So far, the relatives of more than 60 people who died during the disaster have filed wrongful death lawsuits against ERCOT, the state’s primary grid operator, as well as specific power providers, according to the lawyers representing these cases. Dozens more families may follow suit.
The Dallas-based law firm Fears Nachawati, for example, is representing the families of about 80 people who died during the storm. “Some people just froze to death in their chair,” said lawyer Majed Nachawati.
“It’s astounding and it is disturbing, and our job is to make sure we hold the [power] generators, who we believe primarily responsible, accountable for the untimely deaths of these 80 deceased victims,” Nachawati said. “Those people being mothers, fathers, children, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters.”
In response, ERCOT has argued in court filings that “it is entitled to sovereign immunity due to its organization and function as an arm of State government.” But whether or not this is true is still an open question.
When an unrelated case challenging ERCOT’s assertion that it is shielded from liability went before the Texas Supreme Court in March, the justices punted on making a decision.
For some families, the failure to account for the full toll of the storm and power outages could have serious financial consequences. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is offering assistance with funeral expenses for families who lacked insurance or other help with the costs. But the deadline to apply was May 20, and to qualify, applicants needed to confirm that the death had been directly or indirectly attributed to the disaster by state, local, or tribal medical officials.
As of May 17, FEMA had paid out in just two cases.
In response to questions from BuzzFeed News about what happens if any deaths are linked to the storm after the May 20 deadline, the agency responded by email: “In order for FEMA to process late registrations, applicants must submit a letter to FEMA that explains the extenuating circumstances that prevented them from applying for assistance in a timely manner.”
Producing a more accurate count of the deaths linked to the storm may help bring closure to some grieving Texan families. It is also vital so that the authorities responsible for the state’s infrastructure, emergency services, and disaster responses can learn what needs to be done to prevent a future tragedy of a similar magnitude.
“We need to know who’s most at risk,” said Casey, the environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University. “Right now we’re missing big chunks of data and a lot of people are getting missed out of this accounting.”
In Arcola, Julius Gonzales’s sudden death has left his family with a host of financial problems. The trailer that he and his wife lived in was in his name, and Mary Gonzales wanted it transferred to hers. But for that to happen, she said, the bank told her that she’d have to pay off the mortgage in full right away. She decided that she couldn’t afford that, so she is surrendering the home. While she grieves, she is deciding which of a half-century’s worth of their possessions to keep when she moves into her son’s house next door.
Another source of stress was the medical examiner’s delay in issuing an official cause of death. Having worked in maintenance for the nearby city of Stafford for more than two decades, Julius had accrued a pension that was supporting them both after he retired. But without a final death certificate to show the city, his wife said she was not able to access that money.
Three months after Julius died — after his funeral was held, after he was cremated — his family finally received the certificate on May 18.
While having it solves some problems, it still doesn’t answer Mary’s biggest question: Could her husband’s death have been prevented?
“When you’re middle-class and — not poor, but you don’t know a lot — you just stay in the dark,” Mary said. “Nobody hears about you.”
Nearly 30 epidermolysis bullosa patients in Iran - mostly children - have died since Swedish company Molnlycke stopped selling its special medical dressings to Iran. (photo: Atta Kenare/AFP)
Iranians With Rare Disease Dying Under US Sanctions
Mersiha Gadzo, Al Jazeera
Gadzo writes: "Hadi Keykhosravi is one of about 1,000 people in Iran stricken with epidermolysis bullosa (EB), a rare and deadly genetic disease that causes blisters, sores and wounds to form on the skin."
Iranian NGO files complaint against Swedish company for halting exports of life-saving medical dressings to Iran over US sanctions regime.
It is such a painful condition those with EB often compare their skin to third-degree burns.
“It [feels] like boiling water, drop by drop falling on your skin. You can feel this pain no matter the time of day; you can see how you’re losing your skin,” Keykhosravi, 29, told Al Jazeera from his home in Sabzevar, northeastern Iran.
But thanks to imports of special bandages from a Swedish medical company, Molnlycke, his pain was relieved for a few years and his condition was easier to manage.
The product, called Mepilex absorbent foam dressing, could easily absorb fluid from the wound, allowing it to heal faster and making life more bearable, Keykhosravi said.
“I could easily do my daily work, I could change my clothes without the sores getting stuck to my clothes,” he said.
But after the United States under former president Donald Trump withdrew from Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers in May 2018 and reimposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, Molnlycke stopped exporting the Mepilix product to Iran and his temporary relief was brought to an end.
The alternative in Iran is to use regular dressings with petroleum jelly along with medication to control the sores and prevent infection. But it is not as effective, Keykhosravi said.
Without Mepilex, Keykhosravi found himself unable to control a wound on his leg that continued to grow. The infection eventually spread to his bloodstream and on June 16, 2020, his leg had to be amputated from the knee down to prevent the infection from spreading further.
“It was a painful procedure and mentally frustrating to lose my leg because of this,” Keykhosravi said.
According to The Hague-based Iranian Centre for International Criminal Law (ICICL), nearly 30 Iranian EB patients – mostly children – have died since Molnlycke stopped selling its dressings to Iran. For EB survivors, the pain has increased by 70 percent.
Responding to an inquiry by the Iranian NGO EB Home, which helped provide patients in Iran with the Swedish dressing, Molnlycke said in a letter in March 2019 that because of US sanctions it “decided not to conduct any business with relation to Iran for the time being”.
“This also applies to business conducted under any form of exceptions to the US economic sanctions,” it said.
‘Harming Iranians’
While the United States has claimed it kept a “humanitarian window” open under its sanctions, Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated in 2019 the “overbroad” sanctions are still “harming Iranians’ right to health including access to life-saving medicines”.
That is why ICICL filed a complaint to the Swedish National Contact Point stating Molnlycke breached Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development guidelines “by failing to undertake appropriate human rights due diligence, adversely affecting the human rights of EB patients in Iran and failing to remedy its impacts”.
“Disengagement decisions” require mitigating “likely impacts” and if companies are required to disengage, it should be done in a “responsible manner”, the complaint said.
It called on Molnlycke to either find a way to continue selling its products to Iran by obtaining an exemption from US sanctions or to arrange a suitable alternative so children can get the life-saving product they need.
It also called for reparations for children impacted and families of EB patients who died from the disease.
Molnlycke did not respond to Al Jazeera for comment by the time of publication.
Mohammad Zakerhossein, director of the ICICL told Al Jazeera that the complaint “is not a political action, but an initiative for humanity and justice.
“We believe that unilateral sanctions may have adverse impacts on the human rights of the civilian population in the sanctioned country. The Molnlycke case is a clear proof of such adverse impacts,” Zakerhossein said.
“The irresponsible conduct of the Swedish company resulted in irreversible harm to Iranians. Taking into account this fact, we have approached the Swedish National Contact Point in hope of reparation and accountability.”
Tara Sepehri Far, an HRW researcher, told Al Jazeera “it’s not uncommon to see companies ‘over complying’ with sanctions that are very expansive and complicated due to fear of getting punished.”
After HRW reported on the issue in 2019, UNICEF – the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund – helped to bring the specific dressings to Iran, but there are still issues because of a “lack of transparency on the Iranian government side”, Far said.
“Unfortunately patients are at the end of a very complicated pipeline, whose problems are exacerbated by sanctions and lack of internal transparency,” Far said.
‘Intentional damage’
In April, the High Council for Human Rights of Iran also sent a letter to the Council of the European Union that said a number of EU member states have imposed “intentional damage on the health and wellbeing of the Iranian people, particularly children, women, the elderly, and persons with disability”.
It listed the names of more than a dozen children who died from EB because of a lack of access to vital drugs, and described how European countries refused to work with Iranian firms on medicine, medical equipment and vaccines.
Keykhosravi said everyone in the world should have access to the Mepilex dressing, no matter where they come from.
“Sanctions from governments shouldn’t cause suffering for people,” Keykhosravi said. “Or if they do [implement sanctions], they should make sure that people have access to medical products.”
Ahmad Mousavi, 30, from Ahvaz in western Iran, had a baby girl named Zeynab who died last July from epidermolysis bullosa, which doctors could not treat.
Her sores that started on her feet and legs spread over time throughout her body. The baby would cry and scream all day, as it was “unbearable” pain for a baby to endure, Mousavi said.
The only time she was silent was when she was sleeping or when her mother was feeding her, but even then you could see tears coming out of her eyes, he said.
They tried medication and some creams to help the sores, but the Mepilex dressing was the only treatment that helped.
Because of the American sanctions, they only had enough dressings to last a few days, but it instantly helped Zeynab as it had a cooling effect and she no longer felt any pain when she used Mepilex, Mousavi said.
“My wife has been suffering a lot since [Zeynab’s death]. She’s in therapy and she’s using medication for her mental situation at the moment,” Mousavi said.
“This experience was quite hard for me. I would only like people to know that everyone deserves to receive medication and dressings, whoever has such a problem,” he said.
“If the dressings aren’t coming into the country because of sanctions, then [the sanctions are] definitely affecting ordinary people – children. No one deserves to see their child suffering or dying because they couldn’t get this dressing.”
An Amazon worker delivers packages. (photo: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters)
Amazon Workers Demand Company Quit Polluting Near Communities of Color
Justine Calma and Zoe Schiffer, The Verge
Excerpt: "Hundreds of Amazon tech workers are pressuring Amazon to quit polluting - especially in communities near its warehouses. More than 600 workers signed a petition asking Amazon to bring its pollution down to zero by 2030. They also called on the company to prioritize deploying zero-emissions technologies near the communities hit hardest by Amazon's pollution."
More than 600 workers have signed a petition asking Amazon to bring its pollution down to zero by 2030
The petition was started after Amazon rejected a shareholder resolution asking the company to report how much pollution it emits in communities of color. Amazon says the proposal was similar to a resolution that was voted down by shareholders last year. Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting is scheduled for May 26th.
Amazon’s warehouses have mushroomed around working-class communities predominately made up of households of color, activists say. Those warehouses are magnets for pollution from diesel trucks, trains, and planes that are constantly moving goods to and from the warehouses for the e-commerce giant.
“Amazon shows up without informing the community about their encroachment. They show up with warehouses and delivery trucks that worsen our roads, our air.” Paola Dela Cruz-Perez, a youth organizer for the nonprofit East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice said during a shareholder briefing held today. “Amazon has been expanding their operations in Southeast L.A. neighborhoods like my own by exactly understanding how environmental racism works, and choosing to profit from this oppression.”
The workers organizing the petition are part of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. “As employees, we are alarmed that Amazon’s pollution is disproportionately concentrated in communities of color,” they said in a statement. “We want to be proud of where we work. A company that lives up to its statements about racial equity and closes the racial equity gaps in its operations is a critical part of that.”
It’s not the first time Amazon employees have pushed the company to create better environmental policies. In 2019, more than 7,500 workers backed a shareholder proposal asking Jeff Bezos to create a comprehensive climate change plan for the organization. While the proposal was ultimately shot down, it marked the first time tech workers had used their stock to push for real change.
Amazon workers have led a wave of employee activism in the tech industry, specifically related to Big Tech’s impact on the environment. In 2019, thousands of workers at Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook walked out of work to protest a lack of action on climate change.
Shortly before the walkout was scheduled to take place, Jeff Bezos announced he would be rolling out a fleet of electric delivery vans by 2024. The news did not change employees’ plans to protest, as they wanted to see stronger action.
In 2020, Amazon fired Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two key organizers with the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The company said the employees had violated a company policy which banned workers from speaking out about the business. The National Labor Relations Board has determined the firings were retaliatory and illegal.
Jeff Bezos has faced a lot of heat for flaunting Amazon’s environmental credentials and promoting his own climate action fund while his business continues to pollute neighborhoods. “He has an opportunity to do so much with the funds that he has provided out there, although I would still consider it chump change compared to the wealth that he has accumulated off the backs of our people,” Gabriela Mendez, a community organizer with the nonprofit Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ), told The Verge last year.
Amazon has pledged to reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2040, meaning that it won’t release more planet-heating carbon dioxide than it can capture or offset. But that commitment still leaves room for Amazon to keep producing some pollution, as long as it invests in carbon removal technologies, forest restoration, or other measures to cancel out its effects on the climate. The pledge also doesn’t address other harmful pollutants from tailpipes. Amazon workers are asking the company to completely eliminate emissions instead.
Amazon does have other initiatives that could cut down CO2 and other pollution. By 2030, the company wants to roll out 100,000 electric delivery vehicles. Amazon also plans to run its operations on 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.
“We’re committed to building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet, and using our size and scale for good. This includes investing heavily to build an environmentally-sustainable business and support the communities where we operate,” a spokesperson for Amazon said in an email to The Verge.
Amazon shareholders will vote on a resolution on May 26th aimed at tackling the company’s plastic pollution. The proposal asks the company to report how much of its plastic packaging ends up in the environment, and comes after Amazon disputed estimates from the nonprofit group Oceana that 22 million pounds of its plastic waste polluted freshwater and marine ecosystems.
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