Minnesota police have failed to investigate dozens of rape suspects even though they had been accused of, charged with or convicted of previous sexual assaults.
Bruised and terrified, Amber Mansfield sat in a hospital room and described her assault to two Minneapolis police officers.
The man she was seeing had flown into a rage, choked her, beaten her and threatened to kill her. Then he raped her.
Mansfield gave the police his address and his name: Keith Eugene Washington.
A simple background check would have shown that Washington was a convicted rapist with a long criminal record. And it would have shown that the state had designated him a dangerous sex offender.
Police checked none of that, according to the case file. Mansfield’s case went nowhere.
Five months later, Washington was charged with attacking two other women in Minneapolis, just hours apart. Both had been choked until they blacked out and were left lying on the ground, partly undressed.
Only then did Minneapolis police check his background and realize they needed to hear Mansfield’s account.
Today, three years later, the officer who oversaw the sex crimes unit acknowledges that Mansfield’s case was mishandled.
It was hardly the first time that happened in Minnesota. Public records reviewed by the Star Tribune from 2015 and 2016 show dozens of rape cases in which police failed to investigate suspects even though they had been accused of, charged with or convicted of sexual assault in previous incidents — sometimes more than once.
In late 2015, a young woman walked into a Duluth police station with her mother and said that, three months earlier, a friend’s boyfriend had raped her on a couch after a party. Court documents show the suspect had pleaded guilty four years earlier in Wisconsin to fourth-degree sexual contact without consent. The Duluth officer noted that and forwarded the case to the department’s sex crimes, abuse and neglect unit.
Duluth police said they closed the case for lack of evidence and because the victim declined to proceed. The case file, however, doesn’t say she wanted to drop out or indicate that an investigator ever tried to question the suspect.
In October 2016, a Brooklyn Center woman told police she had been raped at a Motel 6 by a man she met on a dating site. Contacted by police, the man said he was innocent. Court records show that he had been convicted of criminal sexual assault in 2001 and charged in 2004, though those charges were later dismissed. There is no sign in the file that police examined that record. They sent the case to county prosecutors, who declined to charge him.
In 2016, a young woman going home from Uptown reported being raped, and possibly drugged and trafficked, after getting into what she thought was a ride-sharing car. A Minneapolis police detective wrote that she couldn’t reach the victim for an interview and closed the case. Later, DNA results identified the suspect as a felon from Illinois — a man whose DNA had also turned up in a Brooklyn Park rape. The detective spoke with her counterpart in Brooklyn Park, and they agreed to contact one another if there were new developments. But she didn’t reopen the case, contact the suspect or try to notify the victim of the DNA results, the file shows.
Minneapolis police reopened her case after inquiries by Star Tribune, but said they couldn’t discuss it.
The FBI makes it easy for an officer to conduct quick criminal background checks through the National Crime Information Center database. So does the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, whose criminal history database includes predatory offender status.
But out of more than 1,000 sexual assault cases reviewed by the Star Tribune, police documented conducting a background check just 10 percent of the time.
Justin Boardman, a former police sex crimes investigator in Utah and a nationally known consultant, examined Mansfield’s file at the Star Tribune’s request. Failing to check a suspect’s background is like doing “half an investigation,’’ he said.
Sitting in her living room in Mora, Minn., her face framed by long brown curls jammed under a baseball cap, Mansfield seems at once street-smart yet vulnerable. Now a 38-year-old single mom, she said she knew Washington growing up in north Minneapolis. She hung out with his brothers, she said, recalling with a smile how they went to all-night skating parties at the Rhythmland Roller Rink in northeast Minneapolis.
Eventually they lost touch.
Washington’s adult criminal record begins at 18, with charges that included assault, robbery and drug possession. In 2000, he was convicted of first-degree rape after he repeatedly choked a woman in her home, assaulting her while her children watched.
Mansfield had her own scrapes with the law. By 30, she had convictions for drug possession, receiving stolen property and one for prostitution. Most reflected her own bad choices, she said: “Wrong place, wrong time, wrong people.”
When she became pregnant, life changed. Mansfield said she wanted to be a good mother: She got sober and made a new start in Windom, Minn., where her father owned a small house. A few years later she began seeing a therapist for the anxiety and depression that she had battled for years.
One day in 2011 her phone rang. It was Washington, calling from prison. Mansfield said she took his call and found him to be engaging and intelligent. They began exchanging photos and letters, and talked frequently.
Washington got out of prison in May 2015. Authorities designated him a Level 3 sex offender, considered the most dangerous and likely to reoffend, but did not impose supervision because Washington had completed his sentence.
Mansfield’s relationship with Washington soon turned romantic. She said she never knew the truth about his rape conviction.
Her ordeal began on a July evening in 2015. In her account to police, Mansfield said she and Washington were standing outside his sister’s apartment in north Minneapolis when her cellphone rang. Washington demanded to know who called. When she wouldn’t tell him, he smashed her phone, took her car keys, pulled her inside and began beating her. He knocked her to the floor, she said, and placed his hands around her neck.
“This is where you die,” she recalled him saying.
When she came to, she said Washington was crying. She begged him to take her to a hospital. He did, but warned her to tell the nurse that she was drunk and had hurt herself falling down. Spooked by the security guards, he made her leave without treatment and took her to his mother’s house.
Limping and barely able to swallow, she went into a bedroom and lay down.
It was there, she said, that the rape took place. She lay frozen, too injured to fight and too frightened to scream.
“Nobody’s coming to save me,” she remembered thinking.
In early 2015, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio began a large study of untested rape kits to see what they might show about the behavior of rapists. Examining a subset of 433 rape kits from closed cases in the Cleveland area, they documented a startling pattern: More than half the assaults were linked to repeat rapists.
Today, it’s widely accepted in law enforcement that most sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders.
Rachel Lovell, one of the lead researchers, said she was “astonished” by the extent of the damage caused by these predators. She said the findings hold lessons for the way police investigate rape. “Law enforcement should likely start from the assumption that this person has committed another one,” Lovell said.
That is how police approach most child sex crimes, said David Lisak, a retired University of Massachusetts psychologist widely known for his work training law enforcement officers. Rape investigators should do the same, he said, moving beyond the incident at hand to the suspects and their histories.
When the Case Western researchers looked closer, they noticed something else: Repeat rapists were much less methodical and more opportunistic than expected.
Lisak and other researchers said the only pattern is that repeat rapists prey on vulnerability in all its forms: Women who are intoxicated, mentally ill, lacking self-esteem or separated from their friends.
“If you’re a cheetah on the savanna, you’re picking off the weak to survive,” said Boardman, the consultant. “It’s the same with these guys.”
A few days after the incident with Washington, a traumatized Mansfield drove to her sister’s house,then picked up her daughter from her grandmother. Her sisters and her mental health caseworker persuaded her to file a police report and go to the hospital.
They were at North Memorial Medical Center when two Minneapolis police officers arrived. Mansfield and her sister said one of the officers treated her disrespectfully, asking what they felt were accusatory questions that made her feel like a criminal, not a victim.
“I wasn’t very happy about a lot of things I did in my life, but I also was never ashamed of myself,” she said. “It made me a great person in the end. But they kind of stripped me of that that day.”
In their report, the officers noted that Mansfield’s sister told them Washington had been in prison for criminal sexual conduct, but there is no mention that they checked his history. Reached recently, the officer who wrote the report said he couldn’t recall running the background check, even though that would have been normal procedure. They gave Mansfield a blue card with resources for victims and said someone would be in touch.
Days went by and the police didn’t call. But Washington did, she said. Police had gone to his mother’s house looking for him, and he was furious. Over the next several days, Mansfield said, he called and texted constantly with threats against her life and her younger sister. She called police repeatedly for an update on the case, and filed for a harassment restraining order, writing in her petition that she feared he was “going to come to Windom and get me.”
Mansfield said she was so frightened she stashed knives under her bed. When she finally reached the supervisor of the sex crimes unit, two weeks after the assault, her frustration boiled over. She said she was in such danger that they should drop the case if they weren’t going to arrest Washington.
Mansfield’s police file shows two brief entries in that period. The first one, undated, says only “cannot prove sexual assault.” The second is dated August 10. In it, the sex crimes supervisor, Lt. Mike Sauro, wrote that Mansfield contacted him and “stated she did not want to go on with this investigation.”
In an interview, Sauro said he doesn’t remember that conversation, but explained the overall logic: “We’ve got 700 cases. If you don’t want anything done, I’m not going to beg you.”
In fact, there wasn’t much of an investigation. Records show the department never assigned her case to a detective. No one visited the scene of the incident to find witnesses or collect evidence. No one questioned Washington.
“To them I was probably just some crack whore,” Mansfield said. “They did nothing.”
Mansfield and her daughter moved to Mora, a small town north of Minneapolis, to be closer to her foster mom. One night five months after her rape, her sister called. Turn on the news, she said. There, on the screen, was Washington’s face. He had been arrested for assaulting two young women on the same night in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis.
According to the police report, one of the women said she had gone out after midnight to get a few groceries, including cayenne pepper and strawberry sherbet. Walking home, she noticed a man in a leather jacket trailing her and saying he was new to the area. She tried calling her boyfriend, but he didn’t answer. Suddenly the stranger grabbed her by the throat and dragged her into an alley. According to the police file, he kept saying, “You’re not going to make it, you’re not going to make it.”
When she regained consciousness, she was lying in the mud, her pants and underwear pulled down her legs. Disoriented, she grabbed her shoes and ran. She flagged down a passerby, who called 911.
Officers were still on the scene when a second call came in. Just blocks away, a 28-year-old St. Paul woman had been found unconscious. She’d been waiting for a ride outside her sister’s apartment when a man in a dark leather jacket approached and began asking for directions.
Then he began strangling her, the police report said.
A couple walking nearby saw the assault and called 911. When officers arrived, they found her lying unconscious on the ground, her shirt up and pants unzipped. Lying nearby, they noted, was a new container of cayenne pepper.
A few moments later, police spotted Washington crossing an intersection. He fit the description and was carrying a plastic grocery sack. Examining the bag, the officers found some slightly thawed strawberry sherbet. He also had one woman’s ID and cellphones belonging to both victims.
Mansfield watched the television in disbelief.
“I felt just broken” for the two women, she said. “Right away I just knew, this happened because that officer didn’t take my case seriously.”
It wasn’t long before Washington called Mansfield from jail. Frightened again, she called the Minneapolis police and unloaded: It’s your fault that two more women were attacked, she said. To her surprise, she soon received a phone call from Minneapolis detective Stot Dunphy. He had been assigned to the Uptown assaults and had checked the paperwork on Washington.
He asked whether she was OK, Mansfield said, and apologized for the way police had handled her case.
One week after the Uptown attacks, Mansfield drove to Minneapolis for a police interview. “At that point I wasn’t as much worried about my own [case], as I felt an obligation to make sure that these two other ladies got the justice that they needed to get,” she said.
In February 2016, a grand jury indicted Washington on 13 felony counts of first-degree attempted rape, attempted second-degree criminal sexual conduct, aggravated robbery, first-degree assault, and kidnapping — all stemming from the two Uptown attacks.
In Mansfield’s case, prosecutors charged Washington with first-degree rape.
Sauro, now retired, ran the sex crimes unit at the time of Mansfield’s assault. He said he doesn’t remember her report or the two Uptown cases, which occurred after he transferred out of the unit.
After the Star Tribune e-mailed him copies of the cases, he expressed regret.
“I’m highly confident that for whatever reason — whether it was my error or whatever — I did not know that he was a Level 3 sex offender, or I would have assigned the case [to an investigator], even if it was shaky,” he said.
Sauro could not explain why he didn’t know about Washington’s past. The state Department of Corrections confirmed that it notified the Minneapolis police about Washington on May 5, 2015. A spokesman said Corrections followed up with a phone call. The state’s one-page fact sheet on Washington, dated May 4, 2015, identifies him as a Risk Level Three.
Sauro said he doesn’t know whether the officers who took Mansfield’s report ran a check on Washington. He said he doesn’t fault them if they didn’t, because the Fourth Precinct is so chaotic: “Those guys are running from call to call.”
Sauro also acknowledged that Mansfield’s criminal record might have played a role in the decision to not assign her case to a detective.
Boardman, the retired Utah detective, said he can’t understand that decision.
“Not assigning the case because they are not upstanding citizens?” Boardman said. “That’s discrimination.”
Washington's charging document
In December 2015, Hennepin County prosecutors charged Washington with attempted rape in connection with an assault in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood. While investigating that incident, Minneapolis police took a new interest in the rape report Amber Mansfield had filed a few months earlier.
In April 2016, Mansfield sat in a Hennepin County courtroom and stared down the man who had terrorized her. Washington was on trial for one of the Uptown assaults because one of the victims was not available to testify. Prosecutors wanted Mansfield’s testimony to prove that he intended to commit rape.
Washington was convicted of several felonies, including first-degree robbery and two counts of attempted rape, and was sentenced to life in prison. That was reduced on appeal to 15 years, and he’ll likely serve about 10.
After Washington’s conviction, Mansfield and prosecutors agreed to dismiss the charges in her rape case. She reasoned that he was headed back to prison anyway. Just walking into the courtroom for the other trial, facing Washington and telling a jury the truth was redemptive, she said: “The look on his face … he couldn’t believe it.”
On a recent afternoon in Mora, the playful shouts of Mansfield’s 8-year-old daughter and her friends drifted in from the leafy yard as she talked about her life now. She can’t help feeling that if she’d just been a better person, without her troubled past, maybe police would have taken her rape more seriously. Maybe it could have spared the other women their horrific ordeals.
Her life has improved. Her daughter is thriving in school, and can pedal around town on her bicycle without fear of gunshots.
Mansfield said she’s proud of all she has overcome, describing herself as “built for life.” She said she regained some of the dignity that she felt the police had taken from her.
“I feel like I gained it back by doing what I needed to do for these ladies … to make sure that they knew they were safe and he was gone,” she said. “I gained … some pride, a whole lot of pride.”
Then tears spilled onto her cheeks.
“I can tell my daughter … that out of horrible things I still got something good out of it.”
Brandon Stahl has been a journalist for six years at the Star Tribune, where he currently covers federal courts and agencies. His stories at the Star Tribune on nursing care failures, child protection and law enforcement handling of sex crimes have resulted in numerous calls for reform and changes in state laws.
He previously worked as the investigations editor at the Duluth News Tribune, where his stories on physician malpractice and medical errors, drug abuse, tax-dollar waste and sex offenders won national and state awards, including from Scripps Howard (Community Journalism), the Association of Health Care Journalists (Investigative) and the Society of Professional Journalists (Investigative). In 2012, Stahl was named Journalist of the Year by the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists. Stahl graduated from Drake University in Iowa in 1998. He and his wife live in St. Louis Park, Minn., with their 13-year-old daughter.
Jennifer Bjorhus covers the environment for the Star Tribune. During her 12 years with the company, she has covered business and criminal justice as well as been an investigative reporter. She was a reporter on the newspaper’s 2018 “Denied Justice” series about systemic failures in the criminal justice system’s response to reported sexual assaults in Minnesota, a Pulitzer finalist and winner of a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the national Society of Professional Journalists. Her projects on police use of force and on discipline by the state’s police licensing board won national awards including the Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting and a National Headliner Award for investigative reporting. Jennifer was named Journalist of the Year in 2018 by the Minnesota chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She started in journalism as a general assignment reporter at the Seattle Times and covered a range of business beats at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Oregonian and the San Jose Mercury News. A native of Minnesota, she graduated from Carleton College in 1986 and the University of California-Berkeley in 1994 with master’s degrees in journalism and Asian studies. She lives in St. Paul with her husband, Ranjit. They have two sons.
MaryJo Webster has been data editor at the Star Tribune since 2015. She started her career as a reporter at small daily papers in Minnesota and Wisconsin before attending the University of Missouri-Columbia to specialize in investigative reporting and data journalism. While earning her master's degree, she also worked for Investigative Reporters and Editors, where she polished her data skills and taught others.
After graduating in 2001, Webster became the first data editor at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., where she oversaw an investigation of soft money flowing from state political party committees to federal committees. She spent several years as sports data editor for USA Today, then moved home to Minnesota and spent nine years as data editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, followed by a short stint as a data reporter with Digital First Media. Webster, who also has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, teaches at the University of Minnesota, and is a regular speaker at journalism conferences. She lives in a Minneapolis suburb with her husband and two children.
Renée Jones Schneider is a multimedia journalist at the Star Tribune. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, and as a child moved to Minnesota with her parents. She attended St. Olaf College, majoring in studio art. Halfway through that major she discovered photography during two overnights on a documentary project at St. Paul’s famous Mickey’s Diner.
For the past 15 years at the Star Tribune, Jones Schneider has covered some of its biggest assignments. Her video and photography work on the 2014 project “Bees on the Brink” won several awards, including best explanatory reporting by a large news organization from the Online News Association, and best documentary in the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism Awards. She won two regional Emmy awards for videos on radicalization prevention and farming accidents, and she was named Journalist of the Year by the Minnesota Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2016. She won a World Press Photo award in 2005. She has also worked for the Owatonna People’s Press and the Faribault Daily News.
She lives in Savage, Minnesota, with her husband, Todd, and their four children.
Abby Simons is the Star Tribune’s Public Safety Editor. Her team covers crime and courts across the metro. She joined the Star Tribune in 2008 and previously reported on crime, courts and politics.
Dave Hage is an editor at the Star Tribune overseeing coverage of medicine, the environment and social services. As an editor, he supervised a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into child care deaths for the Star Tribune in 2013. As a writer, he has freelanced for the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation and The American Prospect, and is the author of two books: No Retreat, No Surrender: Labor’s War at Hormel (1989) and Reforming Welfare by Rewarding Work (2004). Hage is a 1977 graduate of Yale University. He and his wife, Therese, live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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Ophuls examines attitudes toward war in the Western media, and in the societies they inform. The 243-minute documentary interlaces stark realities of combat with mordantly hilarious references to Hollywood fantasy-versions of war, and includes over 50 interviews with some of the world’s leading journalists, commentators, historians, newscasters and many others.
An enthralling, deeply moving memoir from one of our foremost American war correspondents. Janine Di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, she has been under siege and under fire.
Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)
Echoes of Violence is an award-winning collection of personal letters to friends from a foreign correspondent who is trying to understand what she witnessed during the iconic human disasters of our time--in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and New York City on September 11th, among many other places.
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.
With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families.
Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide
This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signed a memo that authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how this memo set the stage for divergence.
Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.
Humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence. Edited by two of anthropology's most passionate voices on this subject, "Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology" is the only book of its kind available: a single volume exploration of social, literary, and philosophical theories of violence.
A gripping and insightful examination of the relationship between news-makers and news-watchers, looking at how images of war and tragedy are presented to us in the media and how we consume them
Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. Patricio Guzmán narrates the documentary himself and the documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists.
In his extraordinarily gripping and thought-provoking new book, Jeremy Bowen charts his progress from keen young novice whose first reaction to the sound of gunfire was to run towards it to the more circumspect veteran he is today
The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict
The Observer's chief foreign correspondent Peter Beaumont, takes us into the guts of modern conflict. He visits the bombed and abandoned home of Mullah Omar; discovers a deserted Al Qaeda camp where he finds documents describing a plan to attack London; talks to young bomb-throwers in a Rafah refugee camp. Unflinching and utterly gripping
France's leading sociologist shows how, far from reflecting the tastes of the majority, television, particularly television journalism, imposes ever-lower levels of political and social discourse on us all.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World
MINDFULNESS reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young and the old, the well, the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in today’s world. By using the practices described within, you can learn to manage chronic pain resulting from illness and/or stress related disorders.
Slee: A Very Short Introduction, addresses the biological and psychological aspects of sleep, providing a basic understanding of what sleep is and how it is measured, a look at sleep through the human lifespan, and the causes and consequences of major sleep disorders.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.
This is a new edition of the world's leading textbook on journalism. Translated into more than a dozen languages, David Randall's handbook is an invaluable guide to the 'universals' of good journalistic practice for professional and trainee journalists worldwide.
Legends of People Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka
This provocative study of the political culture of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australia - is one of the few genuinely comparative studies in anthropology and in taking up such an important question as nationalism it reminds us that truly relevant anthropology questions deep-seated cultural beliefs, including our own
Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain
Family Secrets offers a sweeping account of how shame--and the relationship between secrecy and openness--has changed over the last two centuries in Britain. Deborah Cohen uses detailed sketches of individual families as the basis for comparing different sorts of social stigma.
During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks: Why?
The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan
Christina Lamb's evocative reporting brings to life the stories that no one else had written about: the abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war. Her unique perspective on Afghanistan and deep passion for the people she writes about make this the definitive account of the tragic plight of a proud nation.
House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe
Christina Lamb's powerful narrative traces the history of the brutal civil war, independence, and the Mugabe years, all through the lives of two people on opposing sides. Although born within a few miles of each other, their experience growing up could not have been more different.
Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Failure in Afghanistan
Butcher & Bolt brilliantly brings to life the personalities involved in Afghanistan’s relationship with the world, chronicling the misunderstandings and missed opportunities that have so often led to war.
Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Jerusalem 1913 shows us a cosmopolitan city whose religious tolerance crumbled before the onset of Z ionism and its corresponding nationalism on both sides-a conflict that could have been resolved were it not for the onset of World War I. With extraordinary skill, Amy Dockser Marcus rewrites the story of one of the world's most indelible divides.
They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq
Based on "Blood Brothers," the award-nominated series that ran in Army Times, this is the remarkable story of a courageous military unit that sacrificed their lives to change Adhamiya, Iraq from a lawless town where insurgents roamed freely, to a safe and secure neighborhood. This is a timeless story of men at war and a heartbreaking account of American sacrifice in Iraq.
The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle against America's Veterans
Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since. The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti
Kathie Klarreich's compelling memoir interweaves shattering political events with an intensely personal narrative about the Haitian musician Klarreich, who turns out to be as enthralling and complicated as the political events she covered.
In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times
Juvenile, photographer Joseph Rodríguez spent several years following several youths, from arrest, counseling, trial adjudication, and incarceration, to release, probation, house arrest, group homes, and the search for employment and meaning in their lives.
By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East Los Angeles gang warfare. This story is at times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.
Still Here, documents the ongoing expressions of hope, perseverance, and suffering in the still-devastated communities of New Orleans and Texas post hurricane Katrina. Rodríguez spent two years photographing and interviewing families and individuals who shared their daily struggles to rebuild their lives.
Breaking News, Breaking Down, Two journalists' emotional journey after 9/11 & Katrina - This program tells the hidden story of how traumatic news impacts the men and women who cover it. Mike Walter loved chasing the big story, but on one September morning, the biggest story of his career chased him down: a jet rained from the sky, piercing the Pentagon and shattering his emotional well being.
One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers
The debate about women and torture has, until recently, focused on women as victims of violence. The essays in One of the Guys challenge and examine the expectations placed on women while attempting to understand female perpetrators of abuse and torture in a broader context.
Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
Tara McKelvey — the first U.S.journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib — traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators. McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority, according to army documents, were innocent civilians.
Gogo Mama : A Journey Into the Lives of Twelve African Women
This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity; from the townships of Johannesburg, to the back alleys of Zanzibar; from the frontline of the war in the Sudan, to the nightclubs of Cairo. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the women who know it best.
Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
This is the first anthology of its kind, bringing together outstanding practitioners of the muckraking tradition, from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Ranging from mainstream figures like Woodward and Bernstein to legendary iconoclasts such as I. F. Stone and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the dispatches in this collection combine the thrill of the chase after facts with a burning sense of outrage
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions.
Ari Goldman’s exploration of the emotional and spiritual aspects of spending a year in mourning for his father will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, as he describes how this year affected him as a son, husband, father, and member of his community.
What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today.
Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today
In Being Jewish, Ari L. Goldman offers eloquent thoughts about an absorbing exploration of modern Judaism. A bestselling author and widely respected chronicler of Jewish life, Goldman vividly contrasts the historical meaning of Judaism's heritage with the astonishing and multiform character of the religion today.
This book is a collection of reflective crime pieces, often approaching the events from different angles, yet written by on-the spot observers and reporters. There is an emphasis on the victims, and as a result these stories are written with sensitivity and compassion rather than sensationalism.
Over twenty-five tales of grisly murders and suspicious killings are laid out for inspection, including the story of the Police Killers and tales of the seedy Melbourne underworld.
This fully revised and updated new edition of Smart Health Choices will provide you with the tools for assessing health advice, whether it comes from a specialist, general practitioner, naturopath, the media, the Internet, or a friend. It shows you how to take an active role in your health care, and to make the best decisions for you and your loved ones based on personal preferences and the best available evidence.
The Spanish-language version of the Dart Center's 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
9/11: Mental Health in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks
This book comprehensively describes the psychological response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and, to a lesser degree, Washington DC. The impact of what happened on the local and US national population is considered through various epidemiological studies, as well as personal accounts from some of those more directly involved.
Filled with astonishing personal stories, conflict, and drama, Feet to the Fire gives readers the rare opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of this nation’s most powerful journalists and news executives and experience their highly stressful environments. With each new and revealing interview, Borjesson gathers devastating details from national security and intelligence reporters, White House journalists, Middle East experts, war correspondents, and others. Like pieces of a terrible puzzle, these conversations combine to provide a hair-raising view of the mechanisms by which the truth has been manufactured post 9/11.
Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
Daring to Feel: Violence, the News Media, and Their Emotions
Daring to Feel is a bold, brave book. Jody Santos challenges the entrenched doctrine that journalists are neutral, dispassionate observers of 'fact.' Santos demonstrates how journalists themselves and society as a whole benefit from emotionally nuanced and emotionally engaged reporting. This is a beautifully written tribute to the passion of journalists and the heart-wrenching stories they cover.
The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War
In The Things They Cannot Say, award-winning journalist and author Kevin Sites asks these difficult questions of eleven soldiers and marines, who—by sharing the truth about their wars—display a rare courage that transcends battlefield heroics. For each of these men, many of whom Sites first met while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the truth means something different. One struggles to recover from a head injury he believes has stolen his ability to love; another attempts to make amends for the killing of an innocent man; yet another finds respect for the enemy fighter who tried to kill him. Sites also shares the unsettling narrative of his own failures during war—including his complicity in a murder—and the redemptive powers of storytelling that saved him from a self-destructive downward spiral.
Kevin Sites, the award-winning journalist, covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity.
Swimming with Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War
Using his trademark immersive style, Kevin Sites uncovered surprising stories with unexpected truths. He swam in the Kunduz River with an infamous warlord named Nabi Gechi, who demonstrated both his fearsome killing skills as well as a genius for peaceful invention. Sites talked with ex-Taliban fighters, politicians, female cops, farmers, drug addicts, and diplomats, and patrolled with American and Afghan soldiers. In Swimming with Warlords he helps us to understand this kingdom of primitive beauty, dark mysteries, and savage violence, as well as the conflict that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives--and what we might expect tomorrow and in the years to come.
The Price They Paid is the stunning and dramatic true story of a legendary helicopter commander in Vietnam and the flight crews that followed him into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever—and how that brutal experience has changed their lives in the forty years since the war ended.
What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars
Most Americans are now familiar with PTSD and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking book, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.
Collective Conviction: The Story of Disaster Action
Collective Conviction tells the story of Disaster Action, a small charity founded in 1991 by survivors and bereaved people from the disasters of the late 1980s, including Zeebrugge, King's Cross, Clapham, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Marchioness. The aims were to create a health and safety culture in which disasters were less likely to occur and to support others affected by similar events.
When Lynne O’Donnell met Pauline and Margaret in Iraq she could never have guessed the wealth of stories she’d discover. Over tea the two women tell Lynne of their lives in the country: each having married Iraqi men had then relocated from England more than thirty years before.
Trauma Reporting A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories
Trauma Reporting provides vital information on developing a healthy, professional and respectful relationship with those who choose to tell their stories during times of trauma, distress or grief.
