“Safety in the jail has been compromised, and not just for the staff alone. Even among the inmates, they don’t feel safe like they used to be,” said Olajide Oshiyoye, one of five current officers to speak with the News4 I-Team for this story.

“It’s a runaway machine, and we don’t have the wheel anymore,” added John Dewitt, a former officer who also spoke to News4.

The officers stressed they spoke out under the protection of their union rights and their views do not represent jail leadership. Some of the officers have worked at the jail, which largely houses people awaiting trial, for decades and say the change is stark.

“We’ve lost so many officers,” Oshiyoye said. “We are losing more than we are getting.”

Corrections facilities across the country are grappling with a shortage of personnel – a problem officers say only worsens as more head for the exit door, leaving those behind to shoulder tougher and longer shifts alone.

But records obtained by News4 show that, while corrections staffing is down in every local jurisdiction the I-Team asked, the pain is felt acutely in Prince George’s County.

There, data show staffing has dropped from 446 at the start of 2020 to just 310 officers this year, with the county now seeking to fill about 175 vacancies.

Comparatively, records show Fairfax County lost nearly 60 officers in the same time frame, dropping from 474 officers in early 2020 to 416 this year. As of April, the county had 84 vacancies.

Montgomery County reported losing just 17 officers over the three-year period, from 285 to 268, with 30 open positions.

D.C. did not respond to the I-Team’s request.

“They’re going to other jurisdictions. They’re going to a lot of different jurisdictions, too,” said Brad Hudson, who said he’s worked for Prince George’s County for more than 25 years. “What does that say? It says it’s not the profession … It’s our county, in particular.”

The officers said the shortage has led to them routinely being required to work 16-hour days, multiple days a week – a problem they said has led to exhaustion and increases the risk of an officer falling asleep on the job.

“We really need some type of relief, some type of help,” said Tammie Owens, a veteran with more than 30 years at the jail.

Jail administrators declined an interview but in a statement said, “Public safety agencies across the nation have seen personnel shortages and this is true as well for the Prince George’s Department of Corrections.”

The statement continued, “As an essential agency, PGDOC is never closed and must be staffed around the clock, throughout all three shifts. Because of this, mandatory overtime is sometimes necessary to ensure the jail is appropriately staffed and the safety of inmates and employees is maintained.”

But some of those still on staff say their safety feels tenuous, at best, with officers accustomed to working in pairs often now working alone. As a result, they said the jail often operates on lockdown, like a prison.

A jail spokesman confirmed visitation was canceled at the jail this past weekend due to short staffing. Asked about the frequency of lockdowns, the spokesman directed the I-Team to file an open records request.

Hudson said inmates historically dislike lockdown but now “they might accept maximum security conditions, because it protects them.”

In February, jail leaders assembled a special team to sweep the facility for contraband and recovered more than 66 makeshift weapons, pills and unauthorized medication.

The officers applauded the work of the special unit that recovered the weapons over a two-week period, but said it was “terrifying” to see the reality of what the inmates had stored inside their cells. Some blamed short-staffing for not having caught the weapons earlier.

“We had seen them before, but not this quantity of them at one time,” Hudson said of the contraband.

“It signaled how unsafe they must feel,” Stephon Blalock said about the inmates. “We just don’t have the staff to maintain that security.”

In the past year, the jail has had a series of troubling incidents. Last June, an inmate was stabbed to death inside the jail. Then in December, four inmates were sent to the hospital after a physical altercation.

Blalock says he feels especially worried for inmates held on nonviolent charges.

“Some are just people that just got caught making bad decisions and they’re having to serve a little time,” he said, adding, “Why should they come in and feel like their lives are threatened and not safe simply because we’re understaffed?”

In a statement jail officials said, “As the Prince George’s County Department of Corrections (PGDOC) adapts to post-pandemic times and transitions back to what is known as pre-COVID-19 jail operations, a facility-wide shakedown was conducted to identify if any contraband items existed that could compromise the safety of the inmate population, employees and the public.”

A jail spokesman said 47 inmates were departmentally charged and added “PGDOC will continue to conduct routine shakedowns throughout the facility to maintain everyone’s safety.”

Faye S. Taxman, founding director of the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence at George Mason University, said while jail staffing nationally has always been lean, the field is now suffering from a confluence of factors.

“You have people who are retiring out of the system. You have people who do not want to work in that environment. You have high demands on staff to work multiple shifts. And therefore, people, you know, get frustrated and exhausted,” she said.

Taxman said the solution is multi-pronged and includes reducing jail populations. But she also said governments should increase pay and supports for officers, such as with programs to rotate them in and out of tough assignments.

“We don’t invest in our frontline staff very well – police officers, correctional officers, teachers – and there are techniques we can do to really build up those frontline staff,” she said.

Taxman said the conditions of jails should be a concern for everyone, noting roughly 20% of the American population has had some experience with the criminal legal system.

“A lot of people are impacted now,” she said.

In a statement, the county said it’s been “aggressively recruiting” through career fairs, school visits, community events, social media and word of mouth. It now also offers a sign-on bonus of $3,000 for rookies – a figure that will soon increase to $5,000 – and $5,000 for correctional officers with experience.

The current officers pointed out that is less than what is offered to new cops in the county, who are eligible to receive up to $10,000.  

Hudson said he used to tell new officers that things would improve.

“I believed things were going to get better because I saw how they were before,” he said, then paused. “I’ve stopped telling them that. I can’t tell them that anymore.”

This story was reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Katie Leslie, shot by Steve Jones and Anthony Pittman, and edited by Jeff Piper.

But the News4 I-Team found most of those students likely have no idea exactly what their education will cost them, because – according to a study by government researchers – the majority of colleges aren’t transparent about the true cost of attending.

According to a November 2022 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an estimated 91% of American colleges fail to tell students the full cost of their college education.

“Students and their families deserve to know that price,” said Melissa Emrey-Arras, who heads up the GAO team that examined more than 500 aid offers from nearly 200 colleges across the country. “It took quite a while for our own staff to decipher them, and these are people that are trained looking at these. It was still very difficult to figure out what the cost was.”

The GAO, which did not name any of the colleges it examined in its report, found 41% of the offers it examined did not estimate the net price of attending and about half understate the net price by excluding costs such as living expenses and books.

It also found roughly 75% refer to aid as “awards,” which the GAO slammed as confusing as aid packages with loans will need to be repaid.

Emrey-Arras said federal higher aid officials created and recommend ten best practices to make these financial aid offers more transparent, but “colleges are choosing not to follow them.” 

Asked why, Emrey-Arras said, “We heard from people during our work that they have an incentive to not tell people what the full cost is, because if they do so, it will make their school look more expensive.”

Though the U.S. Department of Education created a financial aid offer roadmap for colleges, federal law doesn’t standardize how colleges must present their financial offers to students.

The GAO, which serves as the spending watchdog for lawmakers, has recommended Congress fix that, though legislation to increase transparency in those offers has so far stalled on the Hill.

Justin Draeger, the president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, told the I-Team that while “we can’t make any excuses for schools that are purposefully trying to hide or disguise their costs,” the majority are doing the best they can.

Draeger said, in most cases, confusion on these offers isn’t intentional.

“Paying for college is a really complicated issue in this country …  There are just so many entities involved in helping students and families pay for college,” he said, explaining financial aid officers are trying to organize information from government entities, scholarship providers and families.

“The financial aid office is trying to put together a single package with all of these funding … and it’s really complicated. And I sympathize with students and families who are trying to figure all of this out,” he said.

Draeger welcomed some congressional action on the issue, noting lawmakers could mandate minimal standards on financial offers to make the bottom line easier to understand.

“But I also don’t think that’s going to be a panacea,” he said. “This is going to take all stakeholders coming together and trying to figure this out because the complexities aren’t going to end today or tomorrow.”

The transparency matters more than ever. The Education Data Initiative reports the average four-year college now costs about $35,500, including the cost of books, supplies and living expenses. The EDI reports that average cost has more than doubled in the 21^st century.

The same group reports the average federal student loan debt is about $37,000, and students in the District, Maryland and Virginia have some of the highest average debt loads in the nation.

“Have we done enough? No,” U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said in an interview with the I-Team about college cost transparency.

Kaine, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, supports efforts to expand loan forgiveness for public sector employees, increase the Pell grant for low-income students and make it available for job-training programs. He’s also behind bipartisan legislation that would require colleges to provide more in-depth information about student outcomes, such as graduation rates or post-college earnings. So far, however, none has passed.

“We’ve done a lot of different things, but sometimes it’s one step forward, two steps back,” he said.

Kaine said he’s hopeful Congress will eventually tackle an overhaul of the 1965 Higher Education Act – a behemoth bill which he said could address many of these issues – though it hasn’t been reauthorized since 2008.

“The Higher Ed Act gives us the opportunity to look at it comprehensively, and it is my hope on the committee that we will tackle that. It’s long overdue,” he said.

Until then, families like Christine Collins’ are doing their best to prepare for the college bills headed their way.

Collins’ daughter, Taylor, who recently graduated from Magruder High School in Montgomery County, is planning to study neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder this fall.

Collins said that, while her family expects annual costs will exceed $30,000 for out-of-state students like Taylor, “We don’t know really the actual bottom line as of yet.”

The Maryland mother isn’t convinced Congress should determine how schools prepare financial offers, but agreed more should be done to make it easier for parents and students to understand the bottom line.

“I think in all areas of higher education … it should be a more transparent process,” she said.

This story was reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Jeff Piper. NBC Boston contributed to this report.

The I-Team has tracked Metro fare evasion citations for months. Metro’s CEO pledged an increase in citations late last year and agency data shows enforcement is way up this year over last. Despite the increase, citations in the District of Columbia are still far behind those in Maryland and Virginia.

Metro statistics show a nearly 600% increase in the number of citations issued for Metro fare evasion in the first five months of 2023. In May alone, officers patrolling the transit system issued 681 fare evasion citations. An I-Team analysis however found just 29 of those citations were issued in D.C. itself – despite Metro’s insistence that the vast majority of fare evasion happens in the District.

Metro has not replied to repeated requests for explanation or an interview over the past two weeks.

D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto wants to make it easier to enforce fare evasion in D.C. Pinto, the chair of D.C.’s Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, introduced a new bill she says will close a persistent loophole and could cut violent crime on the system.

Pinto explained to the I-Team current D.C. law makes it easy to evade a fare evasion ticket.

“Right now, if somebody jumps the turnstile and transit police say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that. I need your name,’ the person can just walk away from them,” Pinto said.

Under her proposed bill, offenders must give officers their name and address (not necessarily an ID). If not, they can be detained and possibly face a fine of $100, twice the current $50 fare evasion fine in D.C.

Maryland and Virginia already have tougher fare evasion laws.

Metro CEO Randy Clarke backs the bill, believing it will increase enforcement further, saying in a letter to Pinto, “When (Metro) increases fare enforcement, our Part I (serious) crime number is lower,” adding, “the vast majority of persons who commit criminal acts within Metro fare evade.”

Pinto shared Clarke’s sentiment.

“I believe we will be more successful in stopping some of the violent crime when we could have an enforcement mechanism for fare evasion,” she said.

The bill is likely headed for a D.C. Council hearing later this summer. If it passes, fare evasion would still be a civil penalty in D.C. The D.C. Council voted to decriminalize fare evasion in 2018.  

Metro (WMATA) Mar 21

Metro Says Riders Aren't Paying for 13% of Weekday Trips, Eyes New Gates to Cut Fare Evasion

Metro (WMATA) Jan 3

Two Tickets in DC? Metro Says ‘Pleasant Surprise' as Fare Evasion Crackdown Starts Slow

Former mayor and Councilman Vincent Grey and Council Chairman Phil Mendelson support the bill. 

Plenty of people in D.C. believe Metro should be free, especially for low-income riders. The I-Team heard from them reporting on the start of the fare evasion crackdown months ago.

The D.C. Council decided not to move toward that with a free bus plan this year but will soon give discounts to SNAP recipients.

Pinto also said she wants to make it easier for young people to access their free passes, which are already available.

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough and Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

“We are political refugees in our own country,” Camille Rey said.

The Reys’ journey began three years ago when Leon, now 10, revealed something to his parents they never saw coming.

“Leon pipes up in the background, and he says, ‘But I don’t love myself,’ and I was like, ‘What?’” said his mother, Camille Rey.

“He voiced that he basically has a boy brain in a girl body,” said Homero Rey, Leon’s father.

Camille and Homero Rey, who are both scientists, realized they needed to learn how to raise their transgender child.

“Mentally, you have to, like, rewire yourself, because, yeah, you’re thinking girl, girl, girl, and now it’s boy and it is a mental shift,” Homero Rey said. “I did it gladly because I knew that’s what he needed.”

Camille Rey said she never thought about losing her little girl.

“No, I don’t go there. No,” she said. “And I’ve met other parents of transgender kids who go through that mourning process or whatever. I was like, No, we misgendered him. He’s always been him. I didn’t lose anything.”

The family did all they could do to support Leon – beginning therapy, using male pronouns and starting gender-affirming treatment, which came under attack in Texas.

“I was like, OK, not on my watch,” Camille Rey said.

She went from mom to advocate, spending weeks protesting anti-trans bills at the state capitol in Austin and testifying in support of children like Leon.

“Access to age-appropriate treatment for transgender youth is an immediate issue for my family,” she told a state senate committee on state affairs.

“Many of these parents never signed up to be activists, but they feel like they have to to protect their child, because their child’s life and happiness is on the line,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director for The National Center for Transgender Equality.

He said they’re hearing from families around the country that are desperate for help.

“With all of the rising attacks, especially in state legislatures, it has really sent a message to young transgender people that the world doesn’t support them, that the world doesn’t love them back, and that’s an incredibly isolating burden to have to bear,” Heng-Lehtinen said.

“There’s something very callous about going after such a vulnerable community like that, you know, kids and their families who are just trying to support them,” he said.

That’s why the Reys left Texas. They picked Maryland after Camille Rey googled “best places to raise LGBTQ families.”

“It’s good,” Leon said. “I like that there’s, like, all four seasons.”

Camille Rey said Leon is a different kid in Maryland.

“He doesn’t think about this issue every day,” she said. “We don’t think about the issue every day.”

But the family’s fight for all transgender children continues, selling T-shirts to raise awareness.

“Leon had the courage to stand up and be himself, and he’s giving the rest of us permission to do the same,” Camille Rey said. “[What] I’ve learned from Leon is to be myself.”

“He is a gift,” she said.

Texas along with more than a dozen states have banned gender-affirming care for minors. The American Medical Association, along with other major medical organizations, opposed the bans and supported the care for youth when administered appropriately.

Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

“It’s a First Amendment issue,” he said.

Leydon was refused access to Greenwich Point Park in Connecticut in the mid-1990s because it was open to residents only. A law student at the time, Leydon filed a court challenge testing the constitutional bounds of the beach ban.

“Beaches are just a subset of parks,” he explained. “Streets and sidewalks are deemed quintessential public forums for people to communicate on whatever they want to.”

In other words, by closing off a park or a beach, he said Greenwich was violating his freedom of speech. In 2001, the Supreme Court of Connecticut agreed, issuing an opinion stating: “We conclude that such a restriction is prohibited by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” The court also found the restriction was in violation of several articles of the Connecticut constitution.

That’s why Leydon was interested to see the News4 I-Team’s recent report about what’s happening now in Chesapeake Beach.

Citing the public health emergency, town officials voted in 2020 to restrict access to Bayfront Park, which includes the less than half-acre-size Brownie’s Beach, to residents only. This year, town leaders voted to extend the ban to 2025.

But it was a comment from the local mayor, made in response to a councilman who suggested reopening the beach to tourists this year, that prompted questions over its intent.

“I’ll be the voice of the south side now. Quote-unquote: We don’t want them people down here,” Mayor Pat Mahoney said during a March meeting.

“The way that he said it, it is definitely perceived as a discriminatory term,” longtime Chesapeake Beach resident Denise Plater previously told the I-Team.

Mahoney has not responded to News4’s repeated interview requests, but video recordings show he apologized for the remark during an April town council meeting.

“To be honest and sincere, there was no malice on my part or any particular demographic group or groups targeted when I referred to non-town residents as ‘them people,’” he said.

“As mayor, I should and must be careful, mindful and responsible for what I say,” he continued. “For anyone hurt, offended and the citizenry in general, I sincerely apologize and promise to do better.”

Still, former Chesapeake Beach Councilman Bob Carpenter, who now owns a travel agency in the area, worries those comments and the beach restrictions could have long-term economic impacts on the town.

“We are a town that that needs tourism. We need people coming here,” he said.

He said tourism dollars help Chesapeake Beach maintain its property.

“It’s important that we have those tourist dollars, and to shut that down is going to affect us all,” he said.

In recent days, one councilman suggested revisiting the issue.

At a June 6 work session, Councilman Greg Morris asked for support in re-evaluating the policy and exploring ways to mitigate some of the complaints residents raised in prior years, which include beach crowding, lack of parking for out-of-towners and unsafe crosswalks.

In the meeting, Morris suggested a few ways to address those problems, such as by limiting the number of people on the small beach at once or by imposing access fees, as some nearby towns do.

Reached by text message this week, Morris told the I-Team that, after meeting with residents who voiced concerns the restrictions are discriminatory, he believes “there is a model that could give everyone what they want.”

Leydon, the Connecticut attorney, calls the beach restrictions “non-resident discrimination” and added the principle against the bans is important, regardless of the size of the beach.

“Legally, parks and beaches are deemed similar to streets and sidewalks. And likewise, this town has a duty to maintain streets and sidewalks,” he said. “That hardly means they can say, ‘Only our residents can drive on our streets and sidewalks.’”

The town administrator previously pointed the I-Team to its town code, charging officials with maintaining “public parks, gardens, playgrounds, and other recreational facilities and programs to promote the health, welfare, and enjoyment of the inhabitants of the town.”

Similarly, according to the Supreme Court of Connecticut ruling in Leydon’s case, Greenwich had argued a 1919 special act authorizing the town to “establish, maintain and conduct public parks [and] bathing beaches for the use of the inhabitants of [the ] town” meant “for the exclusive use of its residents.” The state Supreme Court sided with a lower court, however, in rejecting that argument.

Like many experts the I-Team interviewed, Leydon also said it’s hard to ignore the role race has played in beach access battles across the country, saying many cases he’s reviewed involve “white enclaves near other urban, diverse areas that seem to suddenly need to protect the environment … One wonders what the real motivation is.”

Fighting the beach access case in Connecticut took Leydon seven years and thousands of hours, a fight he said people shouldn’t have to undertake.

“I think people should just relax and enjoy the beach,” he said.

The I-Team sent multiple requests for comment to the town administrator regarding the Greenwich case and what it could mean for the Chesapeake Beach restrictions but did not receive a reply.

In the meantime, Plater has begun an online petition to re-open Brownie’s Beach to outsiders, though a search of Maryland court records indicates no legal challenges against the Bayfront Park restrictions have been filed.

This story was reported by Tracee Wilkins and Katie Leslie; produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Jeff Piper. NBC New York photographer Will Caldwell contributed to this report.

“We’re going into month 14 of the condo being in this condition,” condo owner Merry Wiley said. 

News4 first visited Wiley’s top floor condo at Treetop Condominiums in Largo, Maryland, in April 2022, just a few days after the ceiling collapsed, trapping and injuring her elderly renter. A year later, it looks the same as it did then. 

Wiley said nothing has changed, and her neighbors said nothing’s changed for them next door or across the hall.

Cynthia Lowry, who also lives on the top floor, said she’s had warping floors for years.

“Merry lives next door to me, so usually what happens with her is going to directly affect me,” she said.

Across the hall, Dale Evans has holes in her roof and has been repairing the ceiling over and over. She said she’s paying for her own repairs. 

After News4’s report on Merry’s cave-in in 2022, the condo association sent an email to tenants saying they had already hired a structural engineer to inspect her unit and had already started reviewing all the buildings.

The email obtained by the News4 I-Team said, “The engineer concluded that the issue with (Merry’s) ceiling was the same issue that the Board had notified the community about in 2015 and 2018, that the ceiling drywall boards were attached with nails that were spaced too far apart.” The email went on to say that’s how top floor condos were originally constructed in the complex.

After earlier incidents of collapsed ceilings, the condo association asked residents to look for cracks. Wiley said she did that. 

“I find it difficult to believe that they would have built this building in a manner and not done every other building on the property in the same manner,” she said.

After Wiley’s incident, the county’s Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement inspected and concluded ceiling drywall had become wet, causing the ceiling to fall.

According to a report obtained by the I-Team, the county inspected three of the four top apartments and found sagging ceilings and warped floors, all signs of water entry and penetration from the roof, and permits would be necessary for repairs.  

After months of going back and forth with the condo association and management, Wiley filed a lawsuit for repairs in February.

In April, the condo association agreed to pay for repairs but only if she dropped the lawsuit, signed a confidentiality clause and didn’t talk to the media, meaning News4. 

Wiley said she also was surprised to find out the condo was offering to make repairs since it had no permits to do the work.

“I found that not only did they not have permits, at no time did they put in the appropriate paperwork to request the permits,” Wiley said. “They had no permits in hand and none were pending.”

Wiley and her attorney said they have tried to find out how many other top floor condos have had collapsed ceilings but have not been told. When the News4 I-Team contacted attorneys for the condominium, they told us they do not comment on pending litigation. 

The I-Team checked with the Prince George’s County Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement, which wouldn’t talk on camera.

But the county did put a stop work order on the condo door and released a statement saying, “At this point, no proof of permits has been submitted to DPIE. Repairs may not start until the appropriate steps, as outlined to the HOA, have been followed.”

Attorney Dwight Clark, who is not connected to the case, has represented both condo associations and owners for 35 years. He said agreeing to the terms the condo has presented to Wiley could be risky.

“Who knows what kind of work they did without the proper inspections from the county,” he said. “So, I would say, no, don’t go that route.”  

As for signing a non-disclosure agreement, Clark said, “I would definitely advise her not to sign anything like that, not to let them off the hook, because that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for a way out and also to hire the work done without a permit.”

Because cases like this can be messy, he suggests people reach out to the Consumer Protection Division of their Attorney General’s Office which is a free option.

“They usually hire an investigator, listens to both sides, and tries to mediate the situation,” Clark said. 

Attorneys for the condo responded in Wiley’s lawsuit denying all liability and asked for a jury trial. 

For now, her unit sits empty as she waits to see if she will ever be made whole. 

Since the I-Team talked with Wiley, she received an update from the attorney for the condo’s board of directors, who said engineers they hired could not all agree on what made the ceiling collapse.

But they had approved repairs to be done to her ceiling and were awaiting access to her unit.

The I-Team checked back in with county inspections; they said the condo still has not requested the permits they recommended for the repairs.

The I-Team confirmed the D.C. Inspector General is investigating as well. Depending on what the OIG finds, DCPS staffers could be disciplined all the way up to termination, and some could be criminally charged. Since some of the special education contracts are covered by federal law, any violations can result in a two-year prison sentence.

DCPS did not reply to the I-Team’s requests for comment on the OIG investigation.

The questions started in February when DCPS tried to get a food service contract approved despite already paying on it. Any contract over $1 million must be approved by Council before any money is spent. DCPS then found 36 such contracts.

At the same time the OIG is investigating, the D.C. Council is considering stripping DCPS of its independent authority to enter into contracts. At a hearing Thursday morning, DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee told Councilwoman Brianne Nadeau the fault for the contracting errors lies within DCPS.

Nadeau and Chairman Phil Mendelson introduced the bill that would give DCPS contracting control to D.C. Office of Contracting and Procurement.

Ferebee told the hearing he took “full responsibility” for the errors but wants DCPS to maintain control.

In testimony, Ferebee told Council, “DCPS fully respects the role of Council approval in the contract review process, and on behalf of the district, I sincerely apologize for DCPS’ noncompliance with the requirements to submit contracts for approval. It was unacceptable. I take this issue very seriously and am committed to ensuring our process is fully corrected moving forward… Over the past few months, we have been working urgently to completely overhaul our contracting practices.”

He called it “critical” that DCPS maintain contracting authority.

Under questioning, Ferebee and DCPS told committee members:

• He has started a “complete overhaul” of the contracting process, including hiring a cabinet-level staffer to oversee fiscal operations at DCPS and direct a newly formed Office of Fiscal Strategy.
• Nine of 21 positions in the DCPS Procurement Office are currently vacant.
• Until recently, contracts were kept at DCPS in paper form – including one $7.5 million special education contract, which now cannot be found.
• There is no “checkbox’’ in DCPS systems to indicate a contract has been approved by Council.

After initially not saying anything about who or how many staffers were punished in the ongoing investigation, Ferebee finally admitted four people connected to contracting are “no longer with DCPS.” Ferebee wouldn’t say who they are, what their positions were, what their discipline was, if any of them were terminated or when the investigation may be over. As for a timeline, he only said it will be complete this summer. When pushed, Ferebee said he would have DCPS’ General Counsel reply to Council.

DCPS did not answer any of the I-Team’s questions about staffer discipline.

After the hearing, a spokesperson at a Council office called the chancellor’s answers on discipline “evasive.”

A second Council hearing is scheduled for May 30 to examine how the contracts slipped through the process.

Under Mayor Muriel Bowser’s initial budget proposal, their school — Takoma Elementary – lost $256,000 compared to last year’s budget.

“Any loss of funding means positions; means people,” Simbana said of the Title 1 school in Ward 4. “And every single person in that building does two or three jobs already.”

Simbana said the proposed cuts were surprising as Takoma has gained students in recent years. But that isn’t the only reason she was taken aback.

“I thought it was a mistake,” Simbana said, adding she thought “there was no way that, after there is a law in place, that we would purposefully break the law and take more away from students.”

By law, she means D.C.’s Schools First in Budgeting Act — legislation passed last year by the D.C. Council that requires DCPS to maintain a school’s funding level unless enrollment steeply drops.

But Bowser’s initial budget was criticized by many parents and education advocates earlier this year because – despite boasting a roughly 5% increase to the city’s per-pupil spending formula – it slashed many schools’ overall budgets.  

As a result, “the amounts that the schools’ got came nowhere near” what was expected under the new law, said Mary Levy, who has been tracking DCPS budgets for decades.

Levy’s analysis of the initial budget proposal shows 58 of D.C.’s 116 traditional public schools would get less money next year, with those schools projected to lose between around $11,000 to more than $550,000.

At the same time, Levy said, her analysis shows nearly half of those schools are expected to gain students.

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson blasted school leaders for willfully ignoring the law he says was designed to bring stability to school funding. According to his team, 79 schools’ budgets do not comply with the new law.

He’s vowed to restore the cuts by moving millions from the school’s central office back to the schools when the council finalizes its annual budget next week.

“The mayor and the chancellor chose to disregard” the law, Mendelson told the I-Team. “They just simply said, ‘We’re not going to comply with it.’”

School officials haven’t disputed they aren’t in compliance with the law, noting some schools are seeing a decline in their budget if they’ve lost students, are serving lower needs students or due to the ramping down of one-time federal relief funds. And they’ve said no school is seeing more than a 5% cut to last year’s overall budget.

D.C. Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn told the I-Team the law isn’t sustainable “because it only allows school budgets essentially to go up.”

Despite those concerns, the mayor didn’t veto the bill, and Kihn said he didn’t encourage her to, telling the I-Team, “I didn’t weigh in on that question.”

In a lengthy interview with the I-Team, Kihn explained DCPS bases its budget on each student – instead of per school – and directs additional money toward at-risk students, as those students tend to have greater learning needs.

“What we’re trying to ensure is that students with the greatest needs get the greatest amount of money,” he said.

He continued that, while the Schools First bill allows DCPS to reduce a school’s budget if a school’s enrollment drops, it doesn’t allow it to the degree he said is necessary.

“You’d have to lose a lot of kids in the same grade, in the same school” to make the allowable budget cuts, he said.

In a contentious February hearing, an exasperated Mendelson pushed back on that argument, saying, “Your model is more complicated than this is, and yet you’re saying this is too complicated. That’s really irritating.”

Now, the Council is expected to finalize its budget and move roughly $24 million from DCPS’s central office budget and direct it toward the schools slated to lose money.

Kihn called the cuts “dramatic and arbitrary reductions to vital services” that will slow the school district’s ability to hire teachers or procure necessary school resources.

Still, Kihn said the district will adhere to the final budget, but left open the possibility the District will challenge the law in court as it may violate the District’s Home Rule Act.

In the meantime, Simbana said her daughters’ school is bracing for a smaller staff next year as the budget cuts settle in.

“The city does have plenty of money,” she said. “We just need to show where our priorities are.”

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Steve Jones and Jeff Piper.

Long ago, Langston knew the family who lived there. Now that family is a memory, the property is abandoned, and Langston is worried.

“It’s a danger, but I just pray every day that won’t come by me,” she said.

Across D.C., the News4 I-Team found 291 blighted homes in D.C. property records – homes that, by law, are unsafe, unsanitary or a threat to our health, safety and welfare. The property on 50^th Street NE is one of them and has been on the D.C. list for 10 years. That, too, isn’t rare. The I-Team found 95 D.C. homes listed as blighted for a decade but still standing in neighborhoods all over the District.

Vershelle Robinson-Ross lives nearby, just two doors down from another of the decade-long eyesores. She said she’s called the city worried about safety.

“I had to call and have it boarded up because kids go in and out the house,” she said.

The property is just across from a school. Now, after what she says is a 15-year wait for change, she’s fed up.

“It matters to everybody else who lives around here, but there’s nothing that is being done about it,” she told the I-Team. “At some point, you just … you get tired.”

Both Langston and Robinson-Ross are in D.C.’s 6^th Police District where the I-Team found the most blighted buildings. Thirty of them in a small area; almost a third of them on the problem list for a decade.

That property on 50^th Street has a $190,000+ tax bill after not paying for years. In 2018, a D.C. inspector hung a sign on the fence of that property that the home could soon be torn down. Five years later, the sign is still there and so is the blighted house.

The problem is larger than just what neighborhoods look like. D.C. has a housing shortage. According to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report last year, as many as 36,000 families in D.C. alone could be waiting for affordable housing. The official waiting list however has been closed for a decade, so the real need could be even larger. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson is insistent homes like those on the I-Team’s map can be cleaned up and once again made useful.

“The inspector should be looking and saying, ‘That property shouldn’t be like that, and we’re going to make sure that it’s taxed, and we’re going to look at other tools to see if we can get that property back in use,’” Mendelson said.

He said he was alerted to the problems of blight on a visit to a decrepit Northwest D.C. apartment building. Forty units, he said, that “could be rental housing.”

Years later, the building he first saw years ago still isn’t in usable condition, and neighbors there are fed up as well.

“It’s been derelict for way longer than seven years,” neighbor Heather Williams said. 

These days bricks are missing up high, windows are broken down low, and a sign says the city stopped work on some project in 2017. D.C. records show it was noted vacant since 2014. 

“Let’s shame the government, because this is wrong,” Williams said. “This is very, very wrong.”

D.C.’s primary tool to clean up vacant and blighted homes is higher property tax rates. Livable homes pay the lowest rate. Vacant homes pay five times the normal rate, and a blighted property is billed 10 times the normal property tax rate. That is supposed to incentivize owners to clean up these eyesores, but it doesn’t always work.

D.C. has almost 3,000 vacant properties that could be put back in use with less effort than a blighted property. Vacant properties are just empty, but not on the rental or sales market.

Complicating enforcement even more, D.C. has been criticized in the past for not always keeping up with the higher rates.

The I-Team found that, too. In the example on 50^th Street, the home has been listed in tax records as blighted, vacant and residential all without any noticeable repairs. Once the I-Team brought it to Mendelson’s attention, the Department of Buildings once again listed it as blighted and taxed it accordingly.

“They can fix it retroactively, but it shouldn’t be on you (the I-Team) to figure this out,” Mendelson said.

The I-Team asked D.C.’s Department of Buildings repeatedly over weeks via email how that occurred. It is correct now, but we never heard how or why it was wrong in the first place.

As for the larger issues, a spokesperson for the Department of Buildings said, “At this time, the average length of time for a property to remain on the vacant list or returned to productive use is 2.9 years. Despite higher tax rates being applied, some property owners choose (to) keep properties vacant.”

On the larger issue of persistent eyesores, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is comfortable with her record.

“I think to suggest that vacant and blighted buildings are a part, are a problem specific to the district is quite wrong,” she told the I-Team at a recent Department of Buildings event.

“I have a long history of working on vacant and blighted property in the District,” she added.

But the I-Team found if Bowser has her way, there will be fewer inspectors to catch these homes.

Her budget proposes cutting inspectors from 10 to eight.

The Department of Buildings says don’t worry, they don’t need more. A spokesman said, “The mayor’s proposal to eliminate unfilled inspector positions has no impact. D.C. has one of the highest number of inspectors per capita with 14 vacant building inspectors and supervisors and an additional on demand pool of 34 contractors.”

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Steve Jones and Jeff Piper, and edited by Steve Jones.

But when the family arrived to Brownie’s Beach in Bayfront Park – a stamp-size beach in Calvert County – they were surprised to be greeted with a sign stating non-residents weren’t allowed to enter. In June 2020, the Chesapeake Beach Town Council voted to close the beach to out-of-towners because of the public health emergency. The following year, they voted to allow the county’s first responders, too.

Hodge said while he found the policy unusual, it wasn’t until the town voted this year to extend the restrictions to 2025 that he became upset.

“I was immediately a bit skeptical as to the actual motivation behind it” in 2020, Hodge said. “It turns out, three years later, some of my suspicions were supported by some of the statements that were recently made by the lawmakers in town.”

In a March meeting, after a councilman raised concerns from businesses about prohibiting their guests or other tourists on the beach, Mayor Pat Mahoney countered by saying, “I’ll be the voice of the south side now. Quote-unquote: We don’t want them people down here.”

Hodge wasn’t the only one concerned by the comments.

“The way that he said it, it is definitely perceived as a discriminatory term,” said longtime Chesapeake Beach resident Denise Plater.

Plater, who is Black, said she doesn’t know if the mayor was referring to a specific demographic, but she knows it didn’t sit well with many of her friends and family. Census data shows Chesapeake Beach is more than 80% white, with African Americans making up less than 10% of its residents. Plus, she said, many of the town’s tourists come from predominantly Black areas.

“I’m not quite sure if [local leaders] fully understand or if they actually have the knowledge to understand how it’s perceived to the people in the community, especially the people in the Black and brown community,” she said.

The local teacher said while she supported the restrictions at the start of the pandemic, she doesn’t now.

“I have family who live in D.C., Prince George’s County, St. Mary’s County and Charles. And when those family members come to visit, I don’t want them to feel like they can’t go down to the beach without having me with them,” she said.

The I-Team made multiple attempts to ask Mahoney about those comments, but he did not respond.

In a statement to The Southern Maryland News, however, he said that by “them people,” he meant “tourists” and “fossil hunters.”

Chesapeake Beach Councilman Greg Morris defended his colleague to News4, telling the I-Team he believes the mayor’s comments have been taken out of context.

“I don’t feel that the mayor had any kind of malice or intent with that,” Morris said. “He was speaking for us, too, to a limited extent, and it was in the context of limiting folks at Bayfront Park and limiting it to municipal taxpayers.”

Morris echoed some of the concerns local residents who told News4 in past years, tourists would crowd the narrow residential streets by the beach and cause parking problems. Plus, at less than a half-acre wide, Brownie’s Beach is small and ecologically fragile and located next to dangerous cliffs that have collapsed in the past.

Tourists are also able to drive just a short distance to other, larger beaches in the area, many noted, where they can pay for access.

“Decisions that are made here at this town hall are open to reevaluation from time to time, as all policies should be, which include previous policies that have allowed thousands of out-of-town visitors to mob our small beach over there,” Morris said.

Mary Lanham, whose family has owned the local Rod ‘N’ Reel Resort for generations, worries the policy isn’t just harming businesses, but sending a troubling message.

“I feel like it’s the mentality that, once people come to town, they want to shut the gate and keep everybody else out,” Lanham said. “And I want to work with leadership that the message is ‘we’re open for business.’ We want people to come to this town. We want to show them the town that we love so much.”

Legal experts told the I-Team they aren’t familiar with case law challenging this exact issue in Maryland but said in other states people have sued over towns restricting access to public spaces and won.

In 2001, for instance, the Connecticut Supreme Court sided with a man who sued the Town of Greenwich for closing a beach to non-residents, ruling the public has a constitutional right to exercise free speech in such a space.

Andrew Kahrl, a University of Virginia professor who has studied the history of segregation and exclusion along the country’s shorelines, said, “The battles and fights over beach access are about beaches, but they’re about more than beaches. They’re about public rights to public space.”

At the start of the pandemic, Kahrl wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times predicting beach towns would use the public health emergency to close or restrict access to its shores.

“It’s sadly ironic because, I mean, beaches and these types of public spaces should be places to bring people together. And I think that’s something that, sadly, in the history of shorelines, has often been the opposite,” he said.

When the I-Team asked the town about the extension to 2025, the town administrator provided town code charging officials with maintaining “public parks, gardens, playgrounds, and other recreational facilities and programs to promote the health, welfare, and enjoyment of the inhabitants of the town.”

To that, Kahrl said, “Think about the implications of this … Are we looking at a world where you have to sort of present your local tax receipt or some sort of proof of residency to walk through a public park, or to walk down sidewalks?”

The town’s website states the beach is monitored and “guests found to be on site will be required to provide a government issued photo ID confirming their resident status.” It also states “any violators will be trespassing.”

The town administrator told the I-Team the town has only issued one trespassing violation since the start of the restrictions.

This story was reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Katie Leslie and shot and edited by Jeff Piper.

According to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, the actual signed contract is missing.

Any D.C. contract worth more than $1 million must be approved by the D.C. Council. DCPS admitted earlier this month there are 36 contracts at the schools that were never approved. Despite that, millions were paid out on the deals since 2019. Altogether, D.C. Public Schools says the 36 contracts are worth $260 million.

As investigations into how this happened continue, companies still need to be paid for the work they did. The Council is taking the rare step of authorizing payment this week on three of them. Those contracts were never approved initially and are still not going to be approved, but the services were provided, and Mendelson says they are owed the money under D.C. law.

According to a memo Mendelson released, the contract with Milestone Therapeutic Services cannot be found.  Milestone provided special education services to DCPS.

Last week, the I-Team learned DCPS has already punished at least one staffer over the issue. 

Mendelson called the DCPS contracting issues “scandalous” and told reporters he does not believe DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee intended to mislead the Council by not sending the contracts for approval, but added “that does not let him off the hook” as Ferebee remains in charge.

Later this month, the Council will host two hearings on the growing contract issues. Depending on how the Council acts on a bill Mendelson authored, DCPS could lose the right to issue its own contracts.

Investigations continue, Mendelson said Monday.

“The Washington Commanders sent me an email basically saying that Beyonce’s coming and suites are available,” Maquel Miller told the News4 I-Team.

Miller, Tico Clark and Liana Johnson Suarez have shared many memories at past Beyonce concerts. “Twice for me,” said Suarez.

“I think I’ve been three or four times,” said Miller, who says she’s a superfan.

So, she jumped at the chance to see her idol from one of those VIP- or company-owned suites that can cost thousands of dollars. During some events, including concerts, at FedExField, the Commanders will work with their suite partners who might want to rent them to fans.

Miller said the email was pretty clear: “Placing a $500 deposit would lock in your original price.”

It even included a price list.

“Within three minutes, someone called me from the Washington Commanders asking, ‘Are you interested in the suite?’ And I’m like, yeah,” Miller recalled.

She said the person who identified himself as the manager of premium hospitality for the Commanders told her the 10-person suites were already sold out.

“So, I’m like, ‘OK, well, what’s the price for the 20?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, they are about $450 a person. It ends up being $9,000 at the end.'”

Miller said — knowing she could easily get 20 friends to pay $450 for Beyonce tickets — that she agreed to the deal and paid her deposit to lock in the deal.

“I thought that we were going to see Beyonce,” she said.

In Bowie, Maryland, at the Top Curl Beauty Academy, another BeyHive was buzzing over the same suite deal. Owner Shanay Dudley was planning to give away suite tickets as a way to drum up business and thank her students.

“We were just going to pull the students’ names out and be able to make the announcement public that they would be able to enjoy the suite life with us as a, you know, just as a showing gratitude and thank you for them choosing us as their education and beauty,” Dudley said.

She said she also received an email from the Commanders and paid $500 to lock in the $9,000 cost she was quoted for the suite. “We were just ecstatic about, ‘Wow, we get to experience Beyoncé from the suite life. Phenomenal’.”

This suite deal, as you might have guessed, ended up being too good to be true.

Two months after paying their deposits, both Dudley and Miller told the I-Team, the Commanders informed them that the $9,000 suite would now cost between $20,000 and $25,000. To sweeten the deal, they said they would throw in a Commanders game. But, according to these fans, even that had a catch.

“‘You cannot go to the Eagles or the Cowboys game. Those are not part of the deal,'” Miller said she was told. “So I tell him, ‘Well, how much is it just for the Beyonce tickets?’ Because we just want to go to Beyonce. He says, ‘We’re not going to do that. We’re not doing Beyonce alone anymore,'” according to Miller.

The sting of the jacked-up price tag was too much for even these diehard members of the BeyHive. “We wanted to be together as a group and enjoy this experience. And I feel like we were robbed of that,” Suarez said.

A Commanders spokesperson said they ended up having far greater interest in suites for Beyonce’s two shows than available suites, but admitted, “Our rep erred in communicating a price to her, as pricing is not set until inventory is determined, and for that we apologize. Should there still be suites available when we get to her place in line, we of course will honor the price quoted to her.”

The Commanders also said when people put down a deposit for a suite, it holds a place in line, but it’s not a guarantee that a suite will be available.

As for Dudley, she gave up on the suite idea but said she didn’t want to give up her promise to her students. She ended up buying individual tickets for her students, but won’t be attending herself.

“I was just in complete disbelief that they could operate business like this,” Dudley said.

But there was good news for Maquel Miller and her friends: They ended up getting off the waiting list. A spokesperson for the Commanders told the I-Team, “We were able to accommodate Ms. Miller at the previously quoted price, as we did get to her spot in line.”

The Commanders also said they’re taking the same approach with other clients who may have been quoted a price prematurely. Should they clear the waitlist, they will honor it or provide them an opportunity to purchase individual tickets.

A fair ending, Clark said. “We’re not asking for anything extra. We just want what we agreed upon at the initial start of the whole thing.”

DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee, however, would not say who made the payments, how they were punished or how high level their position is. The chancellor also would not say definitively that the punishment would prevent unauthorized payouts from happening again.

In the District, any school system contract over $1 million must have council approval. The D.C. Council discovered a few that didn’t and demanded to know how many more there were. 

After weeks of looking, DCPS released a list of 36 deals covering school meals, special education, technology and more. In all, they represent more than $260 million worth of contracts. 

Some of them go back to fiscal year 2021, or three budget years ago. DCPS admitted that some of those older contracts are completely paid out–all without council approval.

On Monday, Ferebee told the I-Team that “preliminarily from our investigation, it appears that there was a priority to maintain continuity of services to students, critical services,” but added that nothing prevented DCPS from doing that and getting council approval as the law requires.

“Absolutely not. I want to be clear, I do not authorize staff to execute on contracts out of compliance with the process in terms of council approval,” he said.

Ferebee pointed out that some of the deals in question were paid at the height of the pandemic. He would not comment on the intent of those involved in paying contracts without approval.

He added that DCPS has taken “corrective action,” which legally, could be anything from re-training to termination.

Ferebee wouldn’t specifically confirm what action has been taken, but the I-Team learned that in addition to individual discipline, the agency is looking at its entire procurement process.

But, changes to that process may eventually be out of the school district’s hands. D.C. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau will hold hearings on the issue later this month, as the council considers changes to the school district’s contracting process. According to Nadeau’s committee, that would “repeal the independent procurement authority of the District of Columbia Public Schools.”

The I-Team also repeatedly asked Ferebee if any of the staffers involved are still in a position to sign off on contracts today. He would not answer that direct question, but said several times his team is “still investigating.”

News4’s Mark Segraves contributed to this report.

“I didn’t mean to surprise you in the dark,” we told Johnson, who was out for a walk — but the lack of light is what brought us there.

When we told Texas tourist Christian Jayme, “We’re working on a story about lights in the national parks,” Jayme offered, “Or the lack thereof,” without prompting.

A tip to the I-Team let us know lights were out in the park and some light poles were completely missing. The tipster, who didn’t want us to share his name, went on to tell the I-Team about lights out along Constitution Gardens, Constitution Avenue and on other park land, too.

This is just part of what we read in the tip:

“I counted 29 lights that were flickering on and off or completely burnt out on Constitution Ave. between 17th and 23rd streets NW and numerous lights at the Washington Circle and Dupont Circle Parks that were no longer working. In addition, on the north side of Constitution Garden I identified ten light poles that were knocked down years ago and never replaced. Rather the NPS’s solution was to cover the base of each pole with an unsightly wood box. Let me emphasize, this is not a complete inventory of unacceptable lighting conditions, just a sample that I noticed while walking on National Mall grounds. These conditions represent serious safety issues whose resolution should be a NPS priority.”

The I-Team doesn’t expect that much surveillance from every tipster, but we were happy to get it, and when we checked for ourselves many of the lights were still out.

News4 found streetlights blinking on all four sides of an intersection along Independence Avenue.

At the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the light at the entrance was out, at least on the night we were there. Along the wall of the memorial, Dr. King’s words are still powerful as ever, but the lights under some of them were not.

At Dupont Circle, a park under National Park Service (NPS) control, the fountain is under repair again, and so were some of the lights. A few days later, we caught crews working the weekend to light up the park again.

The NPS admits they just don’t have enough staff electricians to keep up with the outages. Spokesperson Mike Litterst told the I-Team the NPS had 10 electricians before the pandemic, but is now down to just two. Litterst said the NPS can’t compete with post-pandemic electrician wages in the private sector.

“The [lights are] vitally important,” Litterst told the News4 I-Team. “They provide not only scenery, if you will. You know, a walk through the National Mall after dark is one of the most beautiful places in the city, but they’re also important for the safety of our visitors.”

When the I-Team obtained records from the NPS on broken lights, the records showed just one open maintenance item. Even Litterst knows that’s not true. He says a recent inventory shows 93% of their 2,400 lights poles are working, but admitted, “That means you’re dealing with 160 or 170 that are probably out at any given time.”

An NPS superintendent responded to our tipster about the lights being out. The superintendent didn’t find as many in the dark along Constitution Avenue but admitted in an email to the tipster shared with the I-Team, “We’ve had problems with the lighting in this area as our contractor went bankrupt and abandoned their contract.”

Constitution Gardens was the worst spot we found. Litterst said the last time that section of the mall was renovated was in 1976 for the United States’ bicentennial. That was nearly 50 years ago now, and the gardens are showing their age.

Around the pond, we found a dozen lights or more were out, some light poles didn’t have lamps, others were broken but still there, and plenty of plywood boxes marking the trail.

Those boxes, painted black and striped with yellow tape, stand out along the trail. Underneath are what remains of light poles that once lined the pond. Time took some, and a lack of maintenance brought more down. The poles haven’t been replaced. The boxes were a temporary solution. Even Litterst admits it may be the best one: “The boxes certainly aren’t as attractive as the light poles that should be there, but they’re more attractive and they’re safer than an exposed light base.”

“I feel like they could fix them,” Johnson told the I-Team. “They probably have the money.”

The NPS does have the money to buy new poles and now has the supplies to fix them, Litterst assured us — but they don’t have the workers to do it.

However, the NPS recently signed on a contractor to do electrical repair, and this summer, a group of retired union electricians, the United Sportsmen Alliance, will volunteer the labor to get those light poles back up. A full renovation of the park and the outdated and dysfunctional wiring underground won’t be finished until 2026, the country’s 250th birthday. An NPS superintendent wrote our tipster, some of the wiring and lighting was “beyond [its] useful life.”

The NPS says they will continue to work with contractors and may partner with business improvement districts.

The plan shows progress but may take some time. Johnson, the college student, urged the NPS: “Please fix it. Seriously. Like, it could definitely be an issue at some point.”

The NPS not only controls areas around the monuments and the National Mall, but NPS crews also are responsible for more than 130 parks all over Washington, D.C.

Litterst acknowledged that the NPS can’t see all the broken lights as fast as Washingtonians or tourists can. The District’s 311 system doesn’t go to the NPS, but social media does. Litterst says tagging them in a post about a broken light is the fastest way for them to find out. Their handle is @NationalMallNPS, and Litterst says that gets their attention.

CORRECTION (May 8, 2023, 1:37 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the NPS’ National Mall social media handle.

The federal intercept of calls concluded in mid-January 2023, two weeks before court documents confirm the feds seized $10,000 from Jenkins’ campaign accounts. The I-Team does not know if the two are connected.

Sheriff Jenkins did not return an email from News4 asking about the development. His D.C. attorney declined comment.

At least three sources in and around Culpeper are aware of several people who received the document notifying them their calls were caught in the surveillance.

It’s unclear if Jenkins knew about it at the time.

Photos obtained by the I-Team show a carefree Jenkins smiling as he sat on Santa’s lap, celebrated with the Grinch and recognized volunteers during the time the phone was tapped in December.

Months later, documents related to the seizure and wiretap remain sealed at federal court.

At the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, elected and appointed leaders wouldn’t say anything to the I-Team about the investigation or Jenkins — or if it was becoming so much of a distraction that the Sheriff should step aside, even temporarily.

County Administrator John Egertson walked away from the I-Team and through a back door as we attempted to ask him about the “ongoing investigation.”

Gary Deal, the Chair of the County Board of Supervisors, insisted he had to get to a meeting and refused to answer questions on his way into the building before the meeting started.

Jenkins, the county’s top cop, remains on the job and in charge of a staff of 70 along with his $8 million budget.

You can read the I-Team’s previous report about the Sheriff and his Auxiliary Deputy program here.

In a lawsuit filed earlier this year in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on behalf of Larry Cook’s estate, Janine Satterfield is suing Wells Fargo and Navy Federal Credit Union for negligence and other claims.

According to the complaint, Cook sent 74 international wires through Navy Federal over a six-month period beginning in late 2022.

The complaint also alleges Cook, of Herndon, Virginia, sent one international wire through Wells Fargo to the Bank of Bangkok, though a second attempt at sending money overseas through that bank was denied.

Satterfield, who is serving as the administrator of her uncle’s estate, told the I-Team Cook was a decorated Navy commander and nuclear submarine officer who was known in the family as a meticulous record keeper. In the complaint, she said that began to change when he suffered a stroke in 2019 that left him cognitively impaired.

When he died two years later at age 76, Satterfield had a chance to review his once meticulous records and said she discovered “mind-boggling amounts of wires, mostly to Thailand.”

She believes her uncle was duped into an elaborate wire fraud scheme that may have begun with a phishing email from a scammer pretending to be Amazon, alerting her uncle to a purchase he never made. The complaint indicates that, soon after receiving that email, Cook began sending wires worth nearly $50,000 each overseas. They were earmarked as “loan repayment.”

Though Satterfield says she may never know who was behind the scheme, she believes her late uncle’s banks should’ve done more to prevent him from sending millions overseas.

“Not one wire should have gone out. There were red flags,” Satterfield said.

Navy Federal and Wells Fargo declined to comment on the case because of the pending litigation, but both filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit.

In a statement, Wells Fargo said it “takes financial exploitation very seriously” and is “committed to helping our customers avoid fraud and scams through various resources, including ongoing education efforts.”

A spokesperson from Navy Federal told the I-Team, “Our members are always our first priority, and we handle all member transactions with great care.”

Report to APS

According to Satterfield’s complaint, after 28 wires had been sent through Navy Federal, a representative for the company reported Cook to the Fairfax County Adult Protective Services, writing, “Wires were conducted in a manner indicative of possible elder financial exploitation.”

The I-Team reviewed the APS report that shows the agency conducted an investigation and communicated to his bank there was “a risk for financial exploitation and asked that his accounts continued to be monitored.” 

According to Satterfield’s complaint, even after alerting APS, Navy Federal “continued to process at least another 42 wires” for Cook.

“We’ve argued that once somebody knew something was wrong, it should have stopped,” said Kimberley Murphy, the attorney representing Satterfield.

In the filing, Murphy wrote the credit union “had every ability to shut down the account” or ask a judge to appoint a conservator.

“In any of these circumstances, what we would want to see is somebody stepping in and just stopping it and saying, ‘Look, we can’t do this for you,’” she said.

In Navy Federal’s motion to dismiss, it wrote it warned Cook “numerous times that he is the victim of a scam, but he still wanted to proceed with the wires.”

It also pointed to the APS report, which stated, “Mr. Cook refused to meet with APS” and “became angry that anyone had suggested that he was being victimized.”

The same APS report noted the agency “was not able to obtain any information about Mr. Cook`s support network and as a result, did not speak to anyone within his social circle who may have been able to privately address the concern.”

Records show APS referred the case to the FBI “due to the amount of money transferred to international accounts.”

Elder Fraud on the Rise

According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, more than 88,000 people over age 60 lost a cumulative $3.1 billion to scams last year. That’s an 84% increase in losses from 2021. The most common type of scams were tech support, non-payment or non-delivery scams, as well as personal data breach and romance schemes.

Genevieve Waterman with the National Council on Aging said senior citizens too often are in denial they’re being scammed.

“The scammers are really using a lot of psychology on them to convince them that this is real,” she said.

She continued that while banks can notify authorities, they aren’t always required to do so. In Virginia, for example, financial institutions are not mandatory reporters.

What’s more, Waterman said, their hands are typically tied when it comes to contacting family unless they’re listed on their account.

“If an older adult has maybe a power of attorney, there is a way is to stop the transaction by having to get the power of attorney to sign as well,” she said. “It really just depends on their situation and whether or not they have someone on file that the bank can reach out to.”

Virginia Del. Michelle Maldonado, a Democrat who represents Prince William County, said she’d like to see changes to the law to require financial institutions to report concerns of possible elder financial exploitation, akin to federal law requiring them to report suspicions of crimes like money laundering.

“There should be a duty to report if we suspect there is elder financial fraud occurring,” she told the I-Team. “How do we create those policies and procedures to make sure that the banks are safe and protected and the people they serve are safe and protected?”

According to the “2021 Older Americans Benchmarking Report” by the American Bankers Association Foundation, 93% of banks surveyed about elder financial exploitation reported filing a suspicious activity report, flagging or closing accounts, or reporting their concerns to APS. The number of banks reporting to APS has risen from 62% of those surveyed in 2017 to 78% in 2021, according to the ABA.

Other consumer advocacy experts pointed out that, even if a bank closes a customer’s account, that customer could simply move their money elsewhere.

That’s why they advise having conversations with relatives about adding a trusted contact to their bank accounts so financial institutions have someone to call should they have concerns about possible exploitation.

Satterfield said she’s heartbroken her uncle’s proud legacy has been tarnished by this tragedy and hopes that by sharing his story, others might avoid the same pain.

“It’s just sad,” she said. “It’s sad on so many, so many levels.”

This story was reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Katie Leslie, shot and edited by Jeff Piper. News4 I-Team photographer Steve Jones contributed to this report.

Prior convictions for drug-related crimes can still make jobs, apartments and loans hard to get. In some cases, even volunteering at a child’s school events can be difficult.

After weed is legalized, convictions don’t always go away despite many state reforms that set up ways to seal those criminal records, expunge them from databases and in some cases review convictions for re-sentencing.

Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia all included methods to do some form of that in their marijuana legalization laws.

In Virginia, the marijuana advocacy group NORML says state police have sealed more than 394,000 cannabis-related possession and small distribution cases since Virginia legalized small amounts of weed and cannabis plants in 2021.

Maryland and D.C. also have expungement laws, but they’re not having that effect yet.

Maryland voters approved automatic expungement, which allowed convictions for simple possession to be wiped off the books. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has until July 2024 to get it done. Critics however point out there’s no legislative framework for how they’re supposed to do it or who’s exactly eligible.

In D.C., courts are supposed to automatically seal records of convictions so bosses, landlords, banks and the rest of us can’t penalize people for them. Though the law went into effect last month, funding isn’t approved yet. That may happen in the next fiscal year depending on the D.C. budget.

“When a state legalizes, the job is not done,” Gracie Johnson with the Last Prisoner Project told the I-Team.

LPP is a nonprofit dedicated to cannabis criminal justice reform. Johnson, who works with state lawmakers across the country, told the I-Team it’s too soon to know when expungement may happen for everyone in our area.

“In a couple of different states, unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that it’s taken them a couple of years to get those records completely cleared from all of the disparate criminal justice databases”

On the federal side, President Joe Biden announced automatic marijuana pardons last October. That pardon applies to possession cases in D.C. courts as well. It wasn’t until March that the feds posted a form to even apply for the automatic pardon certificate people were entitled to months ago.

The National Council of State Boards of Nursing calls it “the largest, most comprehensive study of the nursing workforce since the pandemic.”

“We could be headed towards a national health care crisis,” NCSBN’s Maryann Alexander told the News4 I-Team. “If we don’t have enough nurses who are our most valuable resource in the health care industry, we will not be able to take care of all the patients that may need help.”

According to the survey, a quarter to half of nurses reported feeling emotionally drained (50.8%), used up (56.4%), fatigued (49.7%), burned out (45.1%) or at the end of the rope (29.4%) “a few times a week” or “every day.”

For nurses it means more work in harsher conditions. For patients, it has serious effects. One nurse told researchers in the report, “There have been many times I thought I was in danger or a patient was in danger.” 

It mimics what the I-Team found recently examining nursing shortages and workplace safety that patients are feeling the pinch.

Katie Sheketoff, a cancer survivor, told the I-Team earlier this year she’d seen it first hand.

“A couple of the times that I went into the ER, I would go hours without seeing a nurse or I’d have different people come in or they’d come in and seem really distracted,” she said.

The study of tens of thousands of nurses nationwide, including those in the Washington area, found nurses experiencing higher stress, burnout, increased workloads all contributing to high levels of retirements and early career departures.

The survey showed nurses with 10 or fewer years of experience are leaving the industry at a faster pace than nurses with more experience.

That, researchers say, is a particular concern for the future of care. They called for “urgent action” to reverse the trend.

At a news conference in D.C. on Thursday, Gay Landstrom, the senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Trinity Health said, “Those working nurses need a different environment which is safer, that is more flexible, that is more supported.”

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Jeff Piper.

“They can do so much,” said Baetsen, a junior in the special education preparation program. “They can make so much progress.”

Rodriguez Fernandez, a junior who said she plans to use her Spanish-speaking skills to help special needs students with language barriers, added, “You’re doing what you can to help these students with all these different, diverse needs and disabilities.”

The college students are a rare breed these days as future special educators preparing to enter the field at a time schools need them more than ever.

The I-Team recently found critical shortages of special educators in just five local school districts, with nearly 1,000 unfilled special educator jobs in schools across the region. The I-Team also found almost 600 teachers, specialists and aides have quit so far this year.

“We recently went to a job fair … and at every booth, every school, county, every district was like, ‘Oh yes, come to us. We need special educators,’” said Waltz, a senior who plans to work in self-contained classrooms for students with moderate to profound disabilities.

The shortage of special educators is a problem playing out across the country, making it harder for schools to provide services to millions of children in the U.S. who have individualized education programs, or IEPs. Under federal law, schools are required to help develop and provide services – outlined in an IEP — for students with disabilities. According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 7 million eligible children receive that assistance.   

Experts say one of the biggest headwinds in alleviating that problem is the declining number of special education majors.

“The greatest concern is that we’re not developing that pipeline of qualified personnel to fill the open positions that we have or fill open positions we may have in the future,” said Laurie VanderPloeg with the Council for Exceptional Children, an organization dedicated to improving outcomes for children with disabilities.

VanderPloeg calls the national staffing shortage a “crisis” that was worsened by the pandemic, which saw many teachers leave the field. At the same time, she said the U.S. has seen a 38% average decline in enrollment for educator preparation programs across the country.

Education Apr 13

Educators, Families Worry About State of Special Education With Hundreds of Unfilled Jobs

DC Public Schools (DCPS) Sep 2, 2021

DC Parents Describe Annual ‘Fight' Securing Special Education Services

“I’m worried for the staff that have the responsibility providing support and I’m worried for the families,” she said.

That’s why UMD associate clinical professor Dawn Jacobs Martin, who oversees the special education teacher certification programs, said she not only prepares future special educators, but tries to recruit more into the field.

“I think in those conversations, I lead with impact,” Jacobs Martin said. “As a teacher, you are changing lives, you are inspiring. You are literally like a conduit to support learners in their future.”

But there’s no getting around heavy and stressful workloads the job can bring, she said.

The National Coalition on Personnel Shortages in Special Education and Related Services blames the turnover on excessive paperwork, unmanageable workloads, inadequate support and professional isolation.

Experts who study the field of special education told the I-Team many new teachers are spending just three-to-five years in the profession before leaving. That’s part of the reason Jacobs Martin said UMD is not only preparing its special ed teachers for the field, but also supporting them with mentorship after they begin.

“I think the biggest thing that teachers need who are in the field is support,” she said. “They need support from the folks in their building. They need ongoing support in the form of coaching.”

The students said they’ve already seen the toll of staffing challenges inside some local public schools, where educators are struggling to manage heavy workloads with fewer people to help.

“I think it’s important to recognize how overwhelmed they are and the workload” they have, Rodriguez Fernandez said.

“We’ve also seen cases where a student really would significantly benefit from one-on-one support but just doesn’t have it because of a lack of staffing,” Baetsen added.

They’ve also heard warnings from those in the field. Waltz said, while attending an event with current teachers, one pulled her aside and said, “Don’t do it. You don’t want to do this.”

But for now, the students say their desire to help students with unique needs is what propels them forward.

“I know that I want to enter this field. I know I will be good at it,” Baetsen said. “I’m passionate about working with students with disabilities and I want to be the person that stands up and fills those vacancies.”

Waltz said she is just one of three students in her UMD cohort set to work with the most vulnerable students – those with severe disabilities.

“This is a physically, emotionally demanding field, but for me, it’s so much more than that,” she said. “It’s about teaching these students who have not a lot of people in their corner and who have not a lot of resources available to them. For me, it’s all about the kids.”

Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

“From the day he was born, I just knew he was going to be something. I still believe that,” Tashna Morris-Daley said.

But as their little boy grew, they noticed he wasn’t hitting some of the milestones his older brother did. Luke was eventually diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Luke is now a kindergartener at a public school in Prince George’s County, where he qualifies for what’s called an individualized education program, or IEP. That means, under federal law, the school is required to help develop and provide the special services – such as speech and occupational therapy – Luke needs to thrive.

DC Public Schools (DCPS) Sep 2, 2021

DC Parents Describe Annual ‘Fight' Securing Special Education Services

BACK TO SCHOOL Aug 18, 2022

Montgomery County Offers Incentives for Special Education Teachers

But Luke’s parents said he’s not receiving those services as regularly as he should and that he’s being sent home far too often. They also said they haven’t been able to get Luke an aide to help him stay on track in the classroom.

“Because of the shortage in the school system, we were told that, in the beginning of the school year, the aide never showed up to the interview and it’s just not happening,” Tashna Morris-Daley said.

The lack of qualified special educators isn’t just a problem at Luke’s school. The News4 I-Team found nearly 1,000 unfilled teaching positions for special education teachers, related service providers – the people who provide services such as speech or occupational therapy – and teaching aides, called paraeducators, in school districts across the region.

Through open records requests, the I-Team found the most openings in Prince George’s County, with more than 300 open special education-related positions this school year. In Luke’s school alone, where 51 students have IEPs, officials report two of three full-time special education teaching positions are currently unfilled.

D.C. Public Schools reports 250 open positions for special education teachers, related service providers and aides, followed by 173 in Fairfax County Public Schools, 113 Montgomery County Public Schools and 57 in Alexandria City Public Schools. On Friday, Arlington Public Schools responded to the I-Team’s inquiry and reported it has 41 unfilled jobs. 

The crunch has left schools scrambling to fill the gaps with people who often don’t have the qualifications required to teach students with special needs.

For example, the I-team found more than a quarter of all special education teachers in Montgomery County — 570 of them — aren’t certified to teach in that field. MCPS has not yet responded to questions about whether those instructors are in the process of seeking certification in the special education field.

Experts said few schools can meet certification requirements given the ongoing shortage of special educators.       

“With the significant decline in enrollment in the educator preparation programs, we are not meeting the supply and demand that is necessary,” said Laurie VanderPloeg, the associate executive director of professional affairs with the Council for Exceptional Children, an organization dedicated to improving outcomes for children with special needs.

She added any district using non-certified personnel should provide coaching and professional development opportunities for those instructors “to ensure higher level of results and student achievement.”   

The shortage of special education teachers is no doubt a longstanding problem. According to the National Coalition on Personnel Shortages in Special Education and Related Services, 49 states report a shortage of teachers and specialists. The coalition cites reasons for the churn on excessive paperwork, unmanageable workloads, inadequate support and professional isolation.

Experts say that perennial churn was worsened during the pandemic, however, as many educators left, retired or otherwise struggled to provide services to students with disabilities during periods of remote learning.

Meanwhile, the number of children needing special education services has grown to more than 7 million, according to U.S. Department of Education.

Suzie Djidjoli, who has spent 12 years as a speech-language pathologist for MCPS, said the current staffing shortage is “by far the worst that I’ve ever seen it.”

As part of the county’s Assistive Technology Team, Djidjoli travels to classrooms across the county and said she’s seeing staffing deficits everywhere she goes.

“The job is already challenging, but when you are trying to accomplish that job with less people in the classroom to help support you, it really kind of pushes it over the edge to an untenable situation sometimes,” she said, adding, “I know some teachers who say that their job has really been boiled down to making sure everyone is safe.”

Djidjoli said pay is part of why people are leaving, but so is the heavy workload facing special educators, in particular, between teaching students with diverse and unique needs, intensive meetings, and filling out the paperwork required to document student progress.

She also said she’s especially worried about the impact the shortage has on students who are non-verbal or whose families may have English-language barriers.

“The impact that it’s having on the students, we may not really know until they get to the end of their school journey and we see the ways in which we failed them as educators,” Djidjoli said.

She told the I-Team she knows of several educators who have quit midyear.

The I-Team found, so far in this school year alone, roughly 650 special educators in the districts the I-Team queried have walked away. About half of them are paraeducators, or aides who assist teachers, like Wendy Calhoun.

Calhoun said she loved being a paraeducator under a certified teacher several years ago – before budget cuts ended her job in a special needs-intensive classroom.

But Calhoun said when she returned to a classroom for preschoolers with special needs this year, she found a revolving door of substitutes due to the ongoing shortage of certified special education teachers.

“When it became clear that it would be a series of long-term substitutes and not a permanent teacher, that was the final straw for me. I felt the class was not being supported in the way that it should be,” said Calhoun, who added, “I love those kids. I miss those kids every day.”

Calhoun cited several reasons she believes teachers and aides are leaving and what needs to change to keep them, noting she believes school districts should stick to guidelines regarding special education classroom sizes so that teachers are better able to help students make progress.

She also said school systems should reevaluate critical staffing, noting some key roles are considered temporary and part time, which she said translates to low pay and few to no benefits.

Asked what she misses the most about the job, Calhoun said, “The children’s faces when they learn something new; when they accomplish something for the first time.”

School districts across the region said they’re doing their best to recruit and retain these educators.

Margaret Browne, the director of recruitment and retention for Alexandria City Public Schools, said that means thinking outside the box at a time fewer college graduates are getting special education degrees.

The decline in graduates has “meant we had to look out for career switchers, individuals who may not have a traditional education degree or prior experience but were passionate and excited about getting into the classroom,” Browne said.

Staffing special educators is her top priority, she said, alongside hiring dual-language teachers. ACPS is trying to entice those educators with increased pay and benefits, while working to make personal connections it hopes will get people on board and keep them there.

“These kids still need these services, and our schools are absolutely dedicated to making sure they [receive them] day in and day out,” Browne said.

Elsewhere, Montgomery County said it’s offering incentives to new teachers, as well as current ones who are certified and willing to switch into special educator roles. Arlington said it’s offering hiring incentives for special education teachers, as well as relocation assistance. And many districts across the region said they offer “grow-your-own” programs to help current employees or long-term substitutes become special education teachers. Many are also partnering with colleges to train the next generation of teachers and aides.

But in Prince George’s County, Luke’s parents worry additional help won’t arrive for kids like him soon enough.

“These are the pivotal years for their education,” AJ Daley said. “If he’s not getting the help and support now, what does that mean for his future?”

The I-Team asked Prince George’s County Public Schools about the family’s concerns, and while officials didn’t discuss the specifics of Luke’s case, they acknowledged his school has just one special education teacher and two vacancies. A spokeswoman also said the school is getting support from the Department of Special Education, two itinerant special education assistants and others.

Update (April 15, 2023 at 5 p.m.): This story now includes data and information provided by Arlington Public Schools.

This story was reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Katie Leslie, shot by Steve Jones, and shot and edited by Jeff Piper.

The News4 I-Team learned the FBI seized $10,000 from the campaign account of Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins in January. According to campaign filings at the time, it was nearly the entire balance.

The FBI won’t comment, but the seizure was posted in a federal notice April 5.

It came just two weeks after sources with knowledge of the investigation told the I-Team a number of Culpeper County employees have been subpoenaed to testify to a federal grand jury. It is unclear if the seizure and grand jury investigation are related.

The FBI is not commenting on either the seizure or the subpoenas, and despite numerous requests to both Jenkins and his D.C. lawyer, neither are they.

Jenkins is no stranger to controversy.

In late 2019, as the Virginia General Assembly was considering changes to the commonwealth’s gun laws, Jenkins said several times he would deputize thousands of so-called auxiliary deputies.

Auxiliaries are volunteers who typically work a few hours a month to help support law enforcement.

Jenkins’ plan, however, was to deputize the volunteers, allowing them to maintain the gun rights the General Assembly may have curtailed.

Those gun law changes did not pass in Richmond that session, and Jenkins’ plan to deputize “thousands” of auxiliaries didn’t come to pass, but today there are dozens of them in a department with roughly 130 full-time deputies.

Dozens of Volunteers Deputized

In searches of court records, the I-Team found 46 auxiliary deputies appointed by Jenkins and sworn in by a circuit court judge. That is more than double the number of auxiliary deputies authorized by a Culpeper County ordinance “not to exceed fifteen (15) percent of the paid force.”

The number of deputies is far from the only question the I-Team has about the program.

According to the sheriff’s own general order, auxiliary deputies are supposed to be trained. According to the results of a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services only has training records for three of the 46 auxiliaries.

It is unclear if that is a violation of state law or rules, but it would be a violation of the sheriff’s own general order, which lists specific training to auxiliary or reserve deputies.

Professor Adam Dobrin, an expert on volunteer policing, told the I-Team, “They (auxiliary deputies) should be only doing what they’re qualified to do.”

Dobrin, who teaches courses in law enforcement at Florida Atlantic University, is a reserve officer himself in Florida.

“The public should have a certainty that this is someone who has had the training commensurate with their authority and responsibility,” he said.

A Culpeper sheriff’s general order explains auxiliary deputies will get the same equipment as full-time deputies. The sheriff’s office told the I-Team it could only find records of five auxiliary deputies getting any equipment at all. There are no records of any firearms issued to auxiliary deputies, despite the general order stating the equipment is the same whether deputies are full time or auxiliary.

The general order is clear that each auxiliary deputy is to work 16 hours a month. The sheriff’s office could not provide a single time sheet proving any of the auxiliary deputies had worked even a single hour.

‘Proper Screening Must Be Done’

A Culpeper County ordinance states auxiliaries should be of “good character.” The sheriff’s general order states auxiliaries will go through the same hiring process as full-time deputies, which involves an “extensive background check,” including searches for convictions of both felonies and “crimes of moral turpitude.”

Jenkins didn’t shy away from the background check requirement. In 2019, he told county supervisors at a public meeting, “Proper screening must be done.”

Given that, it is unclear how Rick Rahim, a Fairfax County business owner, passed his.

Rahim currently runs a financial advice service, but in 1992, he pleaded guilty to three felony counts of obtaining property under false pretenses in Fairfax County and was sentenced to serve six months.

In 1997, Federal Trade Commission documents posted online show the agency settled with Rahim over allegations he made deceptive claims about his credit repair company.

In 2009, Rahim pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of illegal assembly after Fairfax police busted an allegedly illegal poker game at his home.

Court records show Rahim agreed to forfeit $328,000.

The I-Team’s questions to Jenkins about Rahim’s history went unanswered. Rahim referred the I-Team back to the sheriff, told the I-Team to stay off his property, and wrote in a text message, “My hands are tied. I’m very sorry. Cannot talk. Yet.”

In 2020, court records obtained by the I-Team show Rahim, who’s long called Fairfax County home, went to Culpeper County to file a petition to get his right to own a gun restored, which he lost in that earlier felony conviction.

According to a court transcript the commonwealth’s attorney inquired about where Rahim lived. Residency, the commonwealth’s attorney explained, is one of the requirements for gun right restoration. According to the transcript, Rahim swore under oath he lived in Culpeper. In the same transcript, his “dwelling place” is listed as the very same street as the sheriff’s brother – the same street where the sheriff’s office holds its annual Halloween charity event.

​Even more curious are court documents from a pending lawsuit filed when Rahim allegedly stopped paying for two Lamborghinis. A U.S. Marshals Service form showing addresses where those cars might be located for seizure includes one house the I-Team found is owned by the sheriff himself. Rahim and the sheriff did not answer questions about that.

‘It’s Greatly Concerning’

A second Culpeper County auxiliary deputy, John Guandolo, caught the I-Team’s attention as well. Caleb Kieffer of the Southern Poverty Law Center calls Guandolo’s participation in the auxiliary program “greatly concerning.”

Guandolo was once an FBI agent. He’s now a law enforcement trainer who lives in Dallas and touts being a Culpeper auxiliary deputy on his company biography.

The SPLC tracked Guandolo and his “Understanding the Threat” training program for years, saying it uses anti-Muslim rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

“We view him as one of the leading anti-Muslim figures in this country,” Kieffer said. “We designate his organization as a hate group.”

He went on to say the auxiliary badge helps “legitimize” Guandolo and his work.

Neither Guandolo nor Jenkins answered any of the I-Team’s questions about his service. 

Calls to several county supervisors about the I-Team’s questions didn’t yield any answers either.

Dobrin, the volunteer policing expert, summed up his concerns reminding the I-Team the only people the sheriff really answers to are the people of Culpeper.

“The sheriff is second in command,” Dobrin said. “The voting public is the top of that chart. And so, in an elected official like a sheriff, the answer is that they answer to the public.”

In 2017, the I-Team investigated allegations of bullying and high turnover inside the sheriff’s office. Jenkins wouldn’t give an interview but said the complaints were from disgruntled ex-employees and politically motivated.

In 2019, the I-Team examined questions about whether an annual Halloween event used to raise money for a charity inside the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office violated federal tax rules by helping support the sheriff’s reelection campaign. The director of the charity said nothing was inappropriate.

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Jeff Piper and Steve Jones, and edited by Steve Jones.

“In the hospital, in the emergency room, it’s already like a tense, high-pressure situation,” he told the News4 I-Team.

But he never expected what happened to him while caring for a patient one night at Adventist HealthCare Fort Washington Medical Center.

“I was giving him lifesaving treatment, and next thing I know, I found myself with hands around my neck, being choked,” he said. “I had a bite taken out of my shoulder.”

Fortunately, another nurse was able to call for help and get the patient off of him.

It wasn’t the first time he or his coworkers have felt threatened.

“Almost every, every shift we get verbally attacked and threats. This is my first actual one that kind of crossed the line here for me,” said Stone.

“It is a problem that it is very, very challenging to solve,” said Dr. Patsy McNeil, chief medical officer for the Adventist HealthCare system.

McNeil said they’ve definitely noticed a spike in attacks against workers, leading some hospitals to increase security.

“I’ve had chairs thrown at me. I’ve had people swing at me and people spit at me. I have had people just take containers of body fluid and throw them at me,” she said.

The News4 I-Team heard similar stories from other health care workers in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Jason Richie with the American Nurses Association (ANA) said it’s one of the top issues they’re hearing about from their members across the country.

“One out of four nurses have reported being attacked during their career, and essentially that’s an underreported number by about 50%,” said Richie.

The Labor Department says it is a growing concern with health care workers accounting for 73% of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence. That’s led hospitals in the D.C. region and around the country to make safety changes.

“People bring their issues from the outside to the inside,” said Toni Ardabell, chief of clinical enterprise operations with Inova Health System.

She said they started noticing an uptick in incidents as we came out of the pandemic.

“Our staff did start reporting more, and we definitely saw the numbers going up. We started working with, first of all, training and education for our staff. Understanding what workplace violence is, understanding how you might deescalate a situation,” said Ardabell.

Ardabell said they increased their security by about $28 million, putting two officers, one armed and one unarmed, in each emergency department. They also installed new weapons detectors at all of Inova’s 11 ERs throughout Northern Virginia.

“We’re picking up handguns, coming into facilities. We’re also picking up a lot of knives and edge weapons coming into the facility as well,” said Rodney Miller, who leads the system security and emergency management for Inova.

In 2019, Virginia toughened up penalties for those who threaten health care workers.

“We would like to see it be more than a misdemeanor in Virginia,” said Ardabell.

Legislation making assaults a felony in Maryland went nowhere last year.

Richie with the ANA supports the federal Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Act, which would require all hospitals implement prevention plans.

Right now, according to Richie, only eight states, including Maryland, require employers have them.

But those laws can only help when nurses report incidents. Another big challenge is getting them to come forward, said Jessica Volz, a former ER nurse who now heads the Forensic Medical Unit at Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center, which offers resources for those assaulted on the job.

“This is not a part of your job. It’s not a part of it. It’s not an expectation that this behavior is acceptable,” said Volz.

She said violence against health care workers can impact the care of every patient in the hospital.

“There is not a lot of research out there, but it would make sense that this could impact patient safety beyond the patient that is having this physical with the health care worker,” she said. “For example, if a health care worker experiences physical violence or even verbal aggression and then has to go on and care for the next patient, how does that affect their ability to concentrate and do their job as effectively as possible?”

Stone did file charges against the patient he said attacked him. Months later, he’s still caught up in court.

“I think that’s why a lot of people just don’t even press charges, because it’s such a cumbersome process. I’ve been to court for probably three or four times now,” he said.

McNeil said for many nurses who have been attacked, seeking justice can be just as traumatizing.

“To be able to report these to law enforcement and go from there, the legal system requires these overtaxed, very tired, very hardworking people to take their day off, to go sit all day, often down in the courthouse to report this. And so it adds another burden to being attacked,” said McNeil.

Stone said he worries the increased violence is pushing some nurses out of the field. But he’s not planning to go anywhere.

“At the end of the day, we still take care of that patient, and, you know, their level of care can’t be compromised just because they attacked the nurse,” he said. “I really just think public awareness of the situation should be known and that this behavior is not okay.”

• Response from Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association
• Response from Maryland Hospital Association
• Response from DC Hospital Association:
  “The issue of violence against health care workers continues to be a top concern of hospital team members and leadership within the District. The violence our associates experience is unacceptable and jeopardizes their ability to care for patients and feel safe at work. Our member hospitals have increased security, provided safety training, implemented de-escalation techniques, and encourage all employees to report assaults. The DC Hospital Association and its members have an ongoing partnership with the Metropolitan Police Department to ensure that cases of violence against health care workers are documented to allow for the US Attorney to prosecute the perpetrators. Our dedicated health care workers should not be subjected to violence for doing their job. Assaults on health care workers are serious and should be fully prosecuted.”

Reported by Tracee Wilkins; produced by Rick Yarborough; shot by Lance Ing, Jeff Piper and Carlos Olazagasti; and edited by Jeff Piper.

Relli, who asked News4 not to use her last name, said she heard her father say, “Hello.” What she heard next had her reeling with terror.

“This sound, like he’s like choking or being punched or something, but it was 1,000% his voice,” she said. “So, my heart just drops immediately because I’m scared that my dad’s calling me out of distress.”

Seconds later, she said another voice got on the phone and started making demands, telling her he had a gun to her dad’s head. She said the person told her he would “blow out his brains” if she didn’t wire money to him.

“So, immediately I’m like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Like, what do you want? What do you need?’” Relli said. “This is my dad and, and I hear the struggling kind of still in the background of his voice. And like I said, there is not a doubt in my mind it’s his voice.”

The caller was so convincing that Relli followed his orders and sent money through a cash payment app using a phone number he gave her. While all of this was going on, Relli’s boyfriend quickly called her family to ask about her dad’s whereabouts. Fortunately, they confirmed he was safe at home. But Relli’s money was gone.

The News4 I-Team does not know for sure whether Relli’s dad’s voice was actually cloned, but James Lee with the Identity Theft Resource Center said he’s heard of this exact scam before and the technology to do it is readily available.

“This is one of those areas where technology has gotten ahead of our ability to understand the unintended consequences,” said Lee.

In March, the Federal Trade Commission sent out a consumer alert warning people how scammers are now using artificial intelligence to enhance their family emergency schemes, also known as “grandparent scams.” According to the FTC, all scammers need is a short audio clip of a family member’s voice, which they could get from content posted online, and use a voice cloning program.

How Voice Cloning Works

It took just a few quick searches online to find numerous voice-cloning websites. To see how this technology works, the I-Team set up a free account with Resemble AI, a voice-cloning platform. Susan Hogan had to first record a verbal consent, which was also used to capture her voice. Once that clip was uploaded, the I-Team was able to type anything for the AI voice to say.

There are legitimate uses for this technology, such as personalizing customer service experiences by using a recognizable voice of a popular actor. Voice cloning can also be used for chatbots. Zohaib Ahmed, founder and CEO of Resemble AI, said his company, unlike other voice cloning platforms, have safeguards in place to prevent abuse.

“We have to be very careful deploying these models out and how they’re being accessed. We also have to be aware that these models are going to be used by everybody,” said Ahmed.

Lee warns people who overshare on social media could be a target for those scammers taking advantage of this technology.

“It can be anybody with just as little as three seconds of audio,” Lee said. “You can create a deepfake that’s going to sound just like you.”

He suggests only allowing people you know to follow you.

“Keep it to only the people that you know and trust because that way you don’t have to worry about somebody taking that Instagram reel or that TikTok video and pulling the audio off of that and creating your voice that they can use to impersonate you,” he said.

In the end Relli, sent $500 to the scammer. She said while it wasn’t a huge financial loss, it was the emotional toll that was overwhelming.

“Like, my dad is OK, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that it was so incredibly traumatic and scary,” she said.

Relli said the other frustrating part is that she wasn’t able to get her money back since the bank said she authorized the transaction. Another reason she’s speaking out so it doesn’t happen to others.

If you get one of these calls, the FTC said:

• Don’t trust the voice on the call.
• Call the person who supposedly contacted you and verify the situation.
• If you can’t reach them, contact them through other family or friends.

If you spot a scam, report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

Reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Steve Jones and Jeff Piper, and edited by Steve Jones. Katie Leslie also contributed to this report.

“I could see his eyes were welling up, and then mine were, too,” said Lopez, who moved from Florida to join the force.

She’s one of roughly 100 new officers the USCP has added this year – an enviable achievement as police departments across the country and in the D.C. region work to rebuild rosters decimated by retirements, resignations and lackluster recruiting.

Many departments are turning to large signing bonuses just to get applicants in the door. Lopez, however, said she didn’t care about the lure of bonus money when she decided where to apply.

“I glanced at them … but it wasn’t the thing that tipped it over to me making a decision,” she told the I-Team. “I was more worried about getting a job and getting my footing.”

Though the USCP doesn’t offer a bonus to entry level officers, an increasing number of departments in the D.C. region do, with bonuses ranging from $3,000 in places like Arlington County to as much as $20,000 in Montgomery County and the District. Many places only began implementing such bonuses in the past year.

An I-Team review of recent hiring data shows mixed signals about whether the incentives are or will pay off.

In Prince George’s County, data shows hiring has steadily increased since the county approved $3,000 signing bonuses for all new recruits in late 2021, eventually increasing the amount to $10,000 for entry level officers and $15,000 for experienced officers.

Data shows the department hired 44 officers in fiscal year 2021 and 58 in 2022. A spokesman for the department told the I-Team it’s already hired 36 officers so far this fiscal year, with a goal of graduating a class of 40 by year’s end.

Hiring is also up in Fairfax County, which added 98 people in sworn positions last year – an increase from 89 in 2021.

The I-Team found it’s now on pace to exceed last year’s hiring totals since its $15,000 signing bonus was approved last fall. According to a spokesman, the department has hired 37 so far this year with another 23 expected to start in coming months.

In D.C., Police Chief Robert Contee III said during a February council hearing the money has helped some, but data shows it hasn’t been enough to off-set resignations and retirements.

In the first four months of this fiscal year, data show the Metropolitan Police Department added 61 officers but lost 141.

The result of the crunch, Contee said, means officers are each answering more calls and taking longer to do it. Response times in 2022 were one minute and 40 seconds longer for the most serious calls than they were in 2019, he said.

He told Ward 6 Councilman Charles Allen he doesn’t expect to hit MPD’s hiring targets, even with the five-figure bonus now in place.

“I’m very concerned about it. You know, we got our other surrounding jurisdictions with a lot of the same incentives in place. I’m very concerned about not being able to safely hire in that space,” he said, adding he’s unwilling to compromise on hiring standards.

An I-Team analysis found many departments in the D.C. area are smaller than they were two years ago, part of what experts call a nationwide staffing crisis that began in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and other high-profile incidents. The staffing shortage has been exacerbated as post-9/11 recruits have begun retiring and low unemployment has sent potential new recruits looking elsewhere.

“It is a nationwide crisis,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “If you pick up the phone and you call San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston, New York City — they are all looking for the same thing. They are looking for cops.”

Wexler told the I-Team it’s too soon to know whether hiring bonuses will be enough to help police agencies rebound and doubted any recruit motivated by the bonus would last. But he also said most departments can’t afford to not offer them.

“You have, in terms of hiring, big problems; in terms of retention, big problems,” he said, adding, “You don’t have the luxury of deciding what’s best.”

Fairfax Deputy Police Chief Brooke Wright also said it’s too early to know just how big a difference her county’s $15,000 signing bonus will make.

In the meantime, her department is holding targeted recruitment events as part of an outreach to specific communities. For example, Fairfax is among the departments participating in the nationwide “30×30” initiative to increase the number of female recruits to 30% by 2030.

“We just want a good person who wants to do right,” she said. “We’ll make a cop out of them when they get here.”

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Katie Leslie and edited by Jeff Piper. Photographer Anthony Pittman contributed to this report.

Victims like Carly Hurt, a 22-year-old Virginia woman who said she lost $12,000 to someone posing as a bank employee on a spoofed phone call earlier this year. 

For Hurt, the saga began when her phone rang in January, showing a Chase Bank number. She said the man on the line said he was with the fraud department and proceeded to verify her banking information without her needing to provide her personal details. 

He knew “my address, my debit card number and my account and routing numbers for both of my accounts,” she told News4, adding, “I did not have to confirm anything with this individual.”

The caller said the bank had spotted fraudulent activity on her account. Hurt checked her banking app and found an unapproved charge. Next, the man told her someone was trying to withdraw the $12,000 she and her husband had been saving for a new house. And that to protect it, the bank needed to “reverse wire transfer” the funds to a new account in her name. 

“My guard was let down at that point because there was fraud,” Hurt said, referring to the unapproved charge. 

The man walked her step-by-step through the process of wiring the money from her old account into a new one, she said. Once she hit send, the man hung up. When she called the number back, Hurt said she was connected to the real Chase fraud department.

The bank did try to recall the funds, but Hurt said that’s where the help ended, because – to Hurt’s surprise – there’s little relief for people tricked into sending money to scammers. 

“They said, ‘We acknowledge that you are a victim of fraud but we will not credit you the money because you voluntarily sent it,’” Hurt said. 

By clicking send on that transaction, Hurt not only lost her money, but lost her protection under federal law when it comes to banking fraud. That’s because under a 1978 law called the Electronic Fund Transfer Act (EFTA), only certain unauthorized charges are protected, such as when someone steals a debit card to make purchases. 

Experts explain the law doesn’t cover people tricked into sending money, because that’s considered an “authorized” payment. Nor does it cover wire transfer fraud. 

“There are unfortunate gaps in this law that leave consumers at risk,” said Rachel Gittleman, the financial services outreach manager for the Consumer Federation of America. 

Gittleman said even though scams have evolved, the laws protecting consumers haven’t kept pace. She said that’s especially troubling in a time of data breaches, which can leave a person’s financial privacy at risk. Her organization is pushing to update banking laws like EFTA to include wire transfers and protections for people tricked into sending money. 

“They’re being coerced and deceived into giving consent and transferring funds, so it’s an unauthorized transfer because they’re not in good faith giving consent,” she said. 

Consumer fraud continues to rise, with Americans losing nearly $8.8 billion to scammers last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. In 2022, consumers lost $2.6 billion alone to impostor scams like Hurt’s. That figure is up from $2.4 billion in 2021. The FTC also reports that of the 2.4 million consumer fraud reports it received last year, imposter scams were the most common.

The American Bankers Association declined an interview but pointed News4 to its prior statements on why reimbursing customers who lose money to this type of fraud is complicated.

“Banks …  typically have no knowledge about the relationship between the sender and the recipient, the reasons the consumer is sending money, or the context of the payment,” the ABA said in an October 2022 letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The ABA added, “Shifting liability for payments the customer has authorized and later claims were made to a scammer will harm consumers in the form of higher costs, fewer options and less competition.”  

That’s why banks have so far focused on educating their customers about how to spot these schemes, such as through the ABA’s #BanksNeverAskThat campaign. 

Hurt, who said she and her husband hoped to use the money toward a new home with their baby, still doesn’t know how the fraudster obtained her private banking information or if it was part of a breach. She said she also knows it’s unlikely she will see her money again. 

Though Chase tried to recall the wire transfer, Hurt said it was only after News4 got involved that Chase filed what’s called a “hold harmless letter” required by the other bank to try to recover her funds. 

In a statement to News4, Chase said her case is “ongoing” and “if funds are obtained, we will automatically credit her account.” 

Until then, the stay-at-home mom and fulltime student said she’s gone back to work to try and recoup what her family lost. 

This story was reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Katie Leslie, shot by Lance Ing and Steve Jones, and edited by Steve Jones. 

A newly surfaced 2017 internal Veterans Affairs report shows Black veterans were more often denied benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder than their white counterparts. 

The analysis crunched claims data from fiscal year 2011 through 2016 and showed that Black veterans seeking disability benefits for PTSD were denied 57% of the time, compared to 43% for white veterans. The report emerged as part of an open records lawsuit filed by an advocacy group for Black veterans.

Terrence Hayes, a spokesperson for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the agency did not immediately have current data on a racial breakdown of PTSD disability benefits awards and said the agency “is gathering the data and will share it once fully compiled.”

Hayes wrote in an email that the agency could not comment on any ongoing litigation but that VA Secretary Denis McDonough is committed to addressing racial disparities as it relates to VA benefits.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The landlords said after getting little help from D.C. agencies, they turned to the I-Team for help.

John Jones is one of those landlords. He owns a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in Southeast D.C. His tenants have been there for years, but Jones said they haven’t paid rent since September 2020. As COVID-19 set in, Jones and his tenants both applied to the STAY DC program.

STAY DC was a $352 million program designed to keep vulnerable D.C. residents from being evicted. The money, awarded to cities across the country by the US Treasury Department, was supposed to be used to pay rent and other housing related costs during the pandemic.

Jones’ tenants were approved. Despite clear program rules that checks were to be sent to the “housing provider” or landlord, in Jones’ case, the $14,300 in back rent was sent to his tenants. D.C. records obtained by the I-Team show a D.C. Department of Human Services (DHS) investigator believed Jones’ tenants “misused STAY DC program funds.” A DHS email Jones provided the I-Team said the tenant cashed the check on Oct. 5, 2021.

The I-Team’s calls and texts to Jones’ tenants went unanswered. During two visits to the apartment, the I-Team was unable to locate them.

“The level of indifference … is truly disappointing”

Jones hoped someone within the program would help him get the money STAY DC said he was owed. So far, no one has.

“The level of indifference that I’ve just been met with is truly disappointing,” Jones said.

As he waits, he said the tenants still haven’t paid any rent. Jones said he has now documented nearly $40,000 in unpaid rent. STAY DC is only responsible for $14,300 of it.

The I-Team wanted to know how it happened, why and what DHS, the program’s sponsor, was doing to correct the errors. The last email from DHS to the I-Team said, “Your request (for an interview about STAY DC issues) is still being vetted internally. We will follow up as soon as definitive guidance is shared regarding next steps.”

That was weeks ago. There’s been no follow up from DHS.

The DHS records we obtained show the list of 71 cases flagged by their own investigators where funds were potentially misused and sent from DHS to the D.C. Office of the Inspector General. Months after that, neither Jones nor the I-Team can figure out what the OIG is doing with the cases.

In 55 of the cases, DHS investigators suspected tenants misused the money. In a handful of others, it was the landlord. In roughly a dozen, DHS couldn’t determine.

The I-Team obtained OIG documents showing the agency – D.C.’s internal watchdog – has closed five STAY DC cases. They found no wrongdoing in any of those.

“You can’t overlook one case”

After reviewing the I-Team’s findings, David Williams, president of the D.C.-based Taxpayers Protection Alliance, told the I-Team, “You can’t overlook one case of potential waste, fraud or abuse in any system.”

Williams suggests even though STAY DC may have helped thousands, overlooking any wrongdoing cheats tenants, landlords and all taxpayers.

“Just knowing the money was misspent is the first step in the process, but people want to know what’s the second step,” Williams said. “How do we get that money back and how do we prevent it from happening again?”

“That’s not on their agenda”

Robert Butler is another D.C. landlord caught in the STAY DC cycle. 

The News4 I-Team first profiled Butler last spring when he said he almost became homeless himself after his tenant wouldn’t pay rent, cashed a STAY DC check for $23,488, but only gave him $5,000. Butler described it as “devastating because, like I say, it has a relatively bankrupt(ed) me.”

Butler said he’s losing hope D.C.’s $352 million program might ever find a way to get him the money he’s owed.

“That’s not on their agenda,” he told the I-Team.  

Despite contacting D.C. council members, DHS administrators and OIG representatives, none of those departments has identified a source for funds that could be used to pay Jones, either.

The I-Team found there might not even be a process to pay these landlords back.

“This issue is bigger than me,” Jones said. “There are plenty of other landlords and residents of Washington, D.C., who are dealing with this massive fraud.”

After two-and-a-half years of nonpayment, Jones is trying to evict his tenants. He couldn’t get a hearing for months.

The I-Team checked at DC’s Eviction Courts. As of early March, the court says there are 6700 pending evictions.

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

The action comes the same week NBC Washington, NBC News Now, as well NBC stations in Philadelphia, Connecticut, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, debuted a series of online and televised investigative reports exposing serious disparities within the VA’s benefits program.

At a Thursday press conference, VA Secretary Denis McDonough acknowledged the agency has not always kept its promise to deliver care and benefits, especially to Black veterans, saying, “We have been wrestling with disparities based on race in VA, benefits, decisions, and military discharge status.” McDonough announced he directed his staff to immediately form a new equity team, which will focus on investigating discriminatory practices at the VA and to eliminate them.

“We’re asking the equity team to dig into why,” McDonough said. “And not only dig into answering why that’s happening, but then to put in place a series of policies and procedures going forward that will allow us to address those differences to ensure that they don’t keep happening.”

He noted the timing of the announcement stems from the importance his office has placed on addressing the issue as well as President Joe Biden’s executive order, issued last month, which required “embedding equity into government-wide processes” as well as developing “equitable outcomes through government policies.”

McDonough commended the role the media is playing, including the joint NBC News investigation, to give a voice to veterans and holding the agency accountable.

“We won’t rest until every veteran gets the world class care and benefits that they have earned,” he said.

Earlier this week, Reps. James Clyburn, D-S.C., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., reintroduced the GI Bill Restoration Act, which would compensate World War II vets and their descendants for education and housing loans they were promised but denied.

Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

The documents, obtained by the I-Team from a nursing union, lay bare how many nurses say they’ve struggled to care for their patients and themselves as their ranks fell during the pandemic.

The I-Team reviewed nearly three years’ worth of complaints filed by unionized nurses in assignment despite objection (ADO) forms, which many unions use to document safety concerns on the job.

In one report, a nurse wrote, “Every nurse has an unsafe assignment. All but one RN has three babies, each with at least 1 ICU status.”

In another, a person described five nurses managing five patients each, noting, “We can’t provide adequate care.”

One nurse reported being left to manage six patients alone, calling the shift “grossly unbalanced” and “a safety risk to self and patients.”

The forms also show the lengths to which nurses have gone to help their peers and patients, documenting how one nurse worked 17 hours.

The I-Team is not naming the hospital where these nurses work because News4 asked unions representing nurses at several hospitals for the forms, but only one provided them. Further, experts say the scenes depicted in the documents are just a snapshot of what’s happening across the country.

“A nurse’s role is patient advocate, and when they’re filling out one of these forms, they’re doing it because they are worried about their patient,” said Jessica Brown, a union nurse familiar with the ADO reporting process. 

An I-Team analysis of the union data shows nurses filed nearly three times as many of the ADO forms in 2022 as they did in 2020, with 79% citing “RN shortage” as a factor last year.

At the same time, data show the number of registered nurses at this hospital was steadily falling, from more than 2,000 at the start of 2021 to just above 1,700 last summer.

“When hospitals are not staffed appropriately, patients suffer,” Brown said.

Brown said the nurse staffing crisis, which worsened for hospitals across the country during the pandemic, is preventing nurses from delivering the standard of care patients need while also leading to burnout and driving many of her colleagues from the profession.

Asked if lives have been lost as a result of the staffing crisis, she paused before replying, “I think they have been. Yes.”

Experts say the pandemic exposed and then accelerated an already brewing staffing problem in the industry, with an aging boomer population driving increased demand.

The crisis was then worsened as nurses retired or left the industry, exhausted or demoralized by the COVID-19 crisis. Some of those who remained followed the lure of higher paying temporary travel nursing jobs, worsening the shortage in places they left behind.

Silver Spring, Maryland, resident Katie Sheketoff has felt the toll of the staffing shortage. The married mom of two was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022 and suffered complications that landed her in the emergency room multiple times.

In one instance, Sheketoff said she needed an emergency blood transfusion and waited six hours for a bed. She said she later learned the hospital couldn’t locate a nurse who knew how to administer the transfusion through her mediport – something she said would’ve been far more comfortable than directly in her veins as they had shrunken during chemotherapy.

“It was incredibly painful. I was screaming. I mean, I’ve had two kids. It was as bad or worse than the worst of the labor pain,” she said.

While there, she said, a nurse confided her frustrations.

“She told me that they were so understaffed; she wasn’t supposed to be there. She didn’t have a background in ER nursing,” Sheketoff said, later adding: “It’s a broken system, and the reality is that there just aren’t enough nurses. They don’t get the support that they need.”

According to a report on NBCNews.com, there were nearly 100,000 open registered nurse positions nationwide before the pandemic began. By September 2022, that number jumped to 203,000.

What’s more, a May 2022 report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts the U.S. could see a shortage of up to 450,000 registered nurses by 2025.

Deborah Burger, the president of the labor union National Nurses United, blamed hospital corporations for why so many nurses are dropping out of the profession, saying cost-cutting measures have cut too deeply into their ability to provide their standard of patient care.

“They’re not willing to put their license on the line. They’re not willing to cause harm to patients, so they remove themselves from the workforce,” she said.

She contends the country has enough qualified nurses to meet the demand, with data from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing showing more than 4.5 million registered nurses have active licenses as of March 1. But Burger said not enough are willing to work in hospitals.

“Hospital corporations have cut staff so badly that we just cannot humanly do it,” she said.

Like Brown, Burger also blamed the lack of widespread law mandating the minimum number of patients a nurse can care for at once. Her state, California, is the only one that has such a legal requirement.

“When we improved the staffing ratios in California, there was no longer a nursing shortage,” Burger said.

Those who have remained on the job are speaking out.

Last year, nurses at Howard University Hospital in D.C. held a one-day strike to demand better pay and more nurses. In January, 7,000 nurses walked off the job in New York, calling for increased staffing, too. And in February, nurses at George Washington University Hospital announced a push to unionize, citing a desire for “safer patient care” and “adequate staffing.”

Julian Walker, spokesman for the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, said there’s no doubt the shortage “has an impact on how care is rendered.” But he said Virginia has managed to maintain good care.

“Outside observers who were evaluating patient safety, patient quality, clinical excellence in Virginia continue to rate the Virginia hospital community and Virginia hospitals as among the best in the nation,” he said.

But it hasn’t been easy. He said his organization worked to bring retired nurses back to hospitals during the pandemic and is now behind a campaign called “On Board Virginia” to attract new healthcare workers to the commonwealth. As of now, the state has more than 11,000 job openings for healthcare workers, he said.

“We’re trying to get to people at a young age; trying to appeal to them and say there are real values and benefits to careers in health care,” he said.

In statements, other hospital associations described their efforts to recruit and retain workers.

The Maryland Hospital Association said its members are raising nursing wages by 25% on average. The DC Hospital Association said it’s working to recruit nurses through higher wages, referral and retention bonuses, as well as childcare and elder-care help.

The American Hospital Association said in a statement it’s urging Congress “to enact federal protections for health care workers against violence and intimidation, to invest in nursing schools, nursing faculty and hospital training time, and to reauthorize, expand, and fully fund nursing workforce development programs.”

News4 photographer Carlos Olazagasti contributed to this report. 

CORRECTION (5:31 p.m., March 2, 2023): An earlier version of this story overstated the number of registered nurses with active licenses in the U.S.

When Lawrence Brooks turned 110, the cupcakes at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans were festooned with tiny American flags. Lipstick on his cheek showed where one of the Victory Belles, a trio that performs 1940s tunes, had given him a kiss. And when the national anthem was played, he stood before his wheelchair and saluted.

But if Brooks was fêted by the museum, the same was not true of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Like many other African-American veterans, Brooks did not receive benefits under the GI Bill that sent millions of white veterans to college or helped them to buy homes or businesses. He got only his U.S. Army pension.

Today 75 years after the U.S. military was desegregated, the country is grappling with how to right a wrong that lifted many more white veterans into the middle class while exacerbating the wealth gap with which Black Americans still struggle.

An NBC News Black history special, American Vets: Benefits, Race & Inequality, will stream tonight at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on NBC News Now.

The issue already has become a political fight.

One approach, the GI Bill Restoration Act, would award those lost benefits to the descendants of Black veterans. It was introduced in Congress in 2021 but with a price tag of $70 billion as estimated by one of its sponsors, Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, it faltered. 

Another of its sponsors, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, has vowed to reintroduce it to honor veterans who fought for American freedoms, but he doubts the bill will pass in the newly Republican controlled House.

In the meantime, he is supporting a compromise that might have a better chance of passing. It would make home loans available to descendants of all veterans, regardless of race, who did not receive them. And rather than education benefits paid by the federal government, it would provide no-money-down, low-interest home loans backed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“These were the people who made sacrifices to guarantee these freedoms,” Clyburn said. “And they ought to be treated fair.”

The new Republican chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Rep. Mike Bost of Illinois, said the committee would review any legislation that attempted to right the Department of Veterans Affairs’ discriminatory practices.

“The past discrimination experienced by World War II veterans at VA – or any veteran – is deplorable and does not represent the words of President Lincoln that are enshrined on VA’s walls, ‘to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan,'” he said in a statement.

Another approach, playing out in the federal courts, would try to hold the Department of Veterans Affairs accountable for discrimination against Black veterans. That is the basis of a lawsuit filed in November by Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic on behalf of Conley F. Monk Jr., a Vietnam War veteran.

“The negligence of VA leadership, and their failure to train, supervise, monitor, and instruct agency officials to take steps to identify and correct racial disparities, led to systematic benefits obstruction for Black veterans,” the complaint says.

The Oldest World War II Veteran

When Brooks died last year at the age of 112, he was the oldest known living U.S. veteran. One of 15 children, he was raised in Norwood, Louisiana, a village about 40 miles north of Baton Rouge, according to his obituary. He was drafted into the U.S. Army when he was 31, and spent the war in the mostly African American 91st Engineer Battalion in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. A private 1st class, he cleaned and cooked for three of the battalion’s white officers. 

Back in Louisiana after the war, he worked as a forklift operator and retired when he was in his 70s. He married, had children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even a great-great-grandchild.

But one dream remained elusive, his daughter Vanessa Brooks told NBC. He had always wanted to return to school and learn a trade, something he hoped his military service would make possible. It didn’t.

“Because it wasn’t offered to him, because we lived in the South and we were under the Jim Crow law,” Vanessa Brooks said.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says Lawrence Brooks never applied for education benefits under the original GI Bill of 1944.

Historians say those government records are not always reliable indicators. Chad Williams, a professor of history and African and African American studies at Brandeis University, said that some Black veterans reported that their paperwork disappeared or that they simply never heard back from what was then the Veterans Administration.

Nor was the Department of Veterans Affairs able to find any information in its records for a home loan to Brooks, it said.

Vanessa Brooks — who grew up with her mother and stepfather after her parents separated but began living with her father again in 2009 — says he was unable to read or write. But she wonders whether being able to complete an application would have made any difference. 

Few GI Benefits, Segregated Housing

Discrimination against Black veterans especially in the South was systemic, according to Richard Rothstein, a former New York Times education columnist who wrote “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” U.S. Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi, the chairman of the committee that drafted the original GI Bill, made sure that the funds were distributed at the local level. 

“In practice, African Americans have very, very little opportunity to use the GI benefits that the GI Bill provided throughout the South,” he said. “In the North, it was somewhat better, although in the North even, there were many, many colleges and universities that would not admit African Americans.”

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, veterans accounted for 49% of college admissions in 1947, the peak year for the original GI Bill. By the time it ended in 1956, 7.8 million of 16 million World War II veterans had taken part in an education or training program. In addition from 1944 to 1952, the VA backed nearly 2.4 million home loans for World War II veterans.

But the experience of the more than 1 million Black men who served in World War II,  who technically were eligible for the same benefits, was markedly different. Only 6% of African American veterans of World War II earned a college degree compared to 19% of white veterans, according to the GI Bill Restoration Act. Counselors channeled Black applicants to industrial and vocational schools.

Colleges and universities in the South were segregated, limiting their choices to about 100 public and private schools, according to a 2002 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the GI Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans.” The historically black colleges in the South were small, underfunded and ill-prepared for the returning veterans. More than a quarter were junior colleges and few offered an education beyond a bachelor’s degree.

It was even difficult for African Americans to attend vocational schools, Rothstein said. Most employers would not employ them to do skilled work so they accepted the most menial jobs.

Discrimination through housing in the post World War II period also was egregious, Rothstein said. Developers building homes in the suburbs, for example Levittown on New York’s Long Island, begun in1947, could not get bank loans without guarantees from the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, he said. And both administrations enforced a racially explicit requirement, spelled out in a Federal Housing Administration manual: no sales to African Americans. The manual even forbade loan guarantees for white developments near where African Americans lived because that would run the risk of “infiltration by inharmonious racial groups.”

“The Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration in an entirely unconstitutional fashion imposed segregation on the housing market throughout the country, North and South, East and West,” Rothstein said. “And that’s why we have metropolitan areas that are so segregated today.”

In a statement the Department of Veterans Affairs said it was working to ensure that Black veterans received the VA services that they had earned and deserved. 

“Throughout history, there have been unacceptable disparities in both VA benefits decisions and military discharge status due to racism, which have wrongly left Black Veterans without access to VA care and benefits,” it said.

A Pension of $91 a Month

For Lawrence Brooks that meant that he received only his pension, which was $91 a month in 2009. Though eligible for GI Bill benefits, he was a poor Black man in the South with a limited education. It was only after his daughter Vanessa Brooks questioned the amount that it jumped to $788 a month in 2014, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Its records show that Brooks first submitted a claim for his pension in 1975, when he was awarded $69.23 a month. The amount varied each year due to a variety of factors — his income, dependency status and cost of living adjustments — until 2014, it said. That’s when he elected instead to receive what is called an “improved pension” and made a claim for “aid and attendance” benefits for help with daily living. Then in 2019, he added unreimbursed medical expenses, which resulted in further increases.

In the last years of his life, his payment went from $1,482 in 2019 to $2,050 at the end of 2021, a week before his death.

The department did not provide a breakdown for increases before 2014.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it is now reaching out to Black veterans to ensure they know what benefits they are entitled to and is providing one-on-one assistance to help them apply. It also is studying racial disparities in benefits claims decision, which it says will be published when available.

A New Era of Benefits Denied

Conley F. Monk Jr. spent his service in Vietnam driving troops and supplies through fierce fighting in the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ. His truck was shot through and he watched a fellow Marine run over a Vietnamese man who had jumped in front of their vehicle. The second Marine was unsure whether the man was an attacker.

Memories of the grisly death haunted Monk, according to his lawsuit.

He was pulled out of Vietnam and sent to Okinawa, where he got into two fights. Sent to the base prison, he was told he would stay there until he agreed to an undesirable discharge and so signed the discharge papers.

He said he was angry at the VA, suffering from severe nightmares, and so traumatized he dove to the ground whenever a car backfired. He sought help but his discharge status hindered him, he said. 

“You couldn’t even join a veterans organization,” he said. “You couldn’t get any services from the VA.”  

But his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, says that a veteran who receives an undesirable discharge may be eligible for VA benefits. Once a veteran such as Monk applies, the VA must conduct an assessment that takes into account military records and other evidence, the lawsuit says.

Monk was later diagnosed with PTSD, and the lawsuit alleges that he was denied benefits improperly for nearly 50 years. It was not until 2020 that the VA confirmed that he was eligible for education, housing and disability compensation as a result of injury suffered during his military service.

Monk’s legal team obtained records from the Department of Veterans Affairs in response to Freedom of Information litigation that show the VA denied Black veterans disability compensation at statistically higher rates than their white counterparts. Between 2001 to 2020, the average denial rate for disability compensation was 29.5% for Black veterans and 24.2% for white veterans, a statistically significant difference, according to his legal team.

“Should Mr. Monk prevail, not only will this victory provide justice for him, but it could provide a legal pathway for the thousands of Black veterans like him who have suffered because of the VA’s discriminatory actions,” the lawsuit says. 

Vanessa Brooks is happy that her father was so celebrated at the end of his life. The National World War II Museum had hosted birthday parties for him since 2014. When the coronavirus pandemic began, the party came to him, with a car and Jeep parade, the Victory Belles singing troupe, a military flyover and a New Orleans jazz band.

But she said that Congress must compensate families like hers, veterans like her father who did not apply for benefits he was eligible for, whose lives could have been changed had they received them.

When she was girl, her father was angry, she said. He did not want to talk much, but sat in a chair and watched the news on television.

“Now, I see why he always watched the news,” she said. “I guess he was hoping that something would change in this situation. But it never did.”

This article was reported by Lucy Bustamante at NBC Philadelphia, Kyle Jones and Katherine Loy at NBC Connecticut, Tracee Wilkins and Rick Yarborough at NBC Washington, Bigad Shaban and Michael Bott at NBC Bay Area, and Mark Mullen and Mike Dorfman at NBC San Diego. It was written by Noreen O’Donnell.

“It’s a heavy pace,” Barnes told the I-Team recently at the scene of an unsolved carjacking from September 2022. Barnes said “it’s likely” the group of seven suspects has attacked again while MPD works on the case.

“We’re seeing carjackings virtually every day,” Barnes said.

According to MPD’s own reporting, D.C. is seeing on average more than one carjacking per day this year. The latest report on the MPD Carjacking Dashboard shows 82 carjackings in 2023 as of Feb. 22. The department says they’ve closed 14 of the cases. They report just eight arrests. Some suspects are charged in more than one.

While MPD reports overall carjackings are down about 15% in 2023, the number of arrests is also down compared to last year, according to the department’s dashboard.

“It’s ridiculous,” Lisa, a recent carjacking victim, told the I-Team in reaction to the low number of arrests.

The suspects who ran up on her with a gun outside her Capitol Hill home in September are still on the loose. News4 agreed not to use her last name.

“Unless there is some kind of deterrent to this, it’s not going to stop,” she said.

“I have complete and utter faith in my team. They’re doing absolutely everything they can,” Barnes told the I-Team, although she admitted she could use more officers on the District’s Carjacking Task Force. One investigator recently left the task force for another assignment in the department, leaving her with 11 detectives. Barnes says she “would love another 10 (detectives),” insisting she has work for them right away. MPD says detectives outside the task force investigate some carjacking cases.

The department has repeatedly said in recent months that MPD staffing is at a historic low number of officers and trying to strengthen units from patrol to criminal investigations. The carjacking task force is just one of the units looking for help.

An MPD spokesperson told the I-Team, “Our goal is to deliver quality policing across the District of Columbia, and we will not deviate from that goal based on staffing.”

“We need more (detectives),” Barnes said. “The depth and the pattern cases that we’re seeing … there is a connectedness between the offenses that are occurring to our victims. It’s just not one offender is doing one carjacking. What we’re seeing is that the same vehicle is being used in a number of offenses.”

In Lisa’s case from September, she said an MPD detective told her the department is still waiting on fingerprint analysis from the scene of the crime. It’s been five months.

“(It) could be more,” Barnes admitted. “No one (has time to wait). Not even our victims.”

Issues at the D.C. crime lab have been well reported as have delays on evidence testing. The lab is still trying to regain its accreditation. The D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences told the I-Team outsourcing of some evidence is speeding up analysis and carjacking cases are turned around in an average of 66 days, although that is not what Lisa and Barnes experienced.

Barnes said evidence delay is just one of the frustrations her team is up against as D.C. faces a serious and violent rash of carjackings. At court, Barnes said it feels like her detectives are facing higher standards. Suspects are still wearing masks, including surgical masks. They move fast and are most often armed with a gun.

In her case, Lisa told the I-Team suspects “came after me and put the gun to my head while I was on the ground and kept screaming at me.” She admits all she focused on was the gun and couldn’t get a good look at the suspect’s face until after she saw surveillance video from a neighbor’s camera.

Barnes says those understandably fraught moments make it hard for her team to make cases without good suspect identifications. Video – even hours of surveillance video – oftentimes is not enough said Barnes, who called it “absolutely not fair” to victims.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes adults accused in the District, told the I-Team, “While police only need probable cause for an arrest, a successful prosecution requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

D.C. is not alone in seeing unsolved carjackings. However, not every department is as transparent as MPD when it comes to listing statistics.

An I-Team review found a yearly increase in some of our largest jurisdictions each year since 2020. Last year Montgomery County reported 79 carjackings, nearly twice as many as in 2020 when the county reported 40. As of mid-February, Montgomery County reported three times as many as that time last year.

A Prince George’s County police spokesperson told the I-Team there were 263 cases investigated in 2020. That number jumped to 480 last year.

In Fairfax County, a Freedom of Information Act request shows 68 carjackings since 2020.

Sgt. Barnes suggested four ways to avoid becoming a carjacking victim:

1. Trust your gut. If something doesn’t feel right about your parking spot or where you are walking, get out of there.
2. Park in a well-lit spot.
3. Don’t linger in your car scrolling on your phone. Barnes said the light from the device could attract a suspect who otherwise may not have seen you.
4. And if you are approached by someone demanding your car, give it up. Nearly 65% of D.C. carjackings this year involved a gun. It is not worth finding out if someone demanding your car has one, Barnes said.

In Lisa’s case, up on Capitol Hill, it wasn’t that late and it wasn’t a dark street. In the end, her neighbor’s scream appeared to scare the attackers off and Lisa’s screams alerted other neighbors to call 911. Police were there within minutes.

“I’ve been here for 20 years, and I have never felt more afraid,” Lisa said.

In the months since, her neighbors formed a What’s App group. If anyone on the street wants company as they walk to their door from the car, Lisa said a message posted in the group has always brought a neighbor out for help.

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

More than five years since Tayvon Eubanks’ incident, he’s still affected by what happened to him.

“It’s always there,” he said. “It doesn’t go away. There may be things to help you deal with it, but it’s there’s no end. There’s no end into it.”

The D.C. National Guard member said in 2017 he got lost leaving a friend’s house when he was stopped by what turned out to be an unmarked police vehicle in Seat Pleasant, Maryland.

“I was scared,” he said. “I was nervous. I was just hoping that everything was going to be all right.”

Court records obtained by News4 said he was speeding and had expired temporary tags.

“Thing that was going through my head was just comply. Be respectful, like you are,” Eubanks said.

But immediately, things escalated.

“When they came up to the doors and they were yelling and giving me different commands and I saw the weapon, my heart just dropped,” Eubanks said. “I didn’t know what to do.”

According to the records, the officers said Eubanks “was not compliant” and “took an aggressive fighting stance” when he got out of the vehicle. Body worn camera video obtained by News4 showed something different that night, images that look eerily the same as the encounter Memphis police had with Tyre Nichols.

“I just feel as though it’s time to speak up,” Eubanks said. “You know, what happened to Mr. Nichols wasn’t, wasn’t right, and I, I can’t sit, I can’t sit and see these things going on and know how the situation has affected me and how it’s still affecting me.”

The similarities between Eubanks and Nichols are uncanny.  Both young, thin Black men who skateboard. Both were pulled over by Black police officers. And both were tasered after the traffic stop.

Both also ran at one point.

“If I don’t run, I’m going to die. I’m going to die here tonight,” Eubanks said. “I’m not going to see my mother. I’m not going to see my family. I’m about to die.”

But unlike Nichols, he did survive. Eubanks successfully sued the Seat Pleasant police department winning a large settlement after a jury found one of its officers responsible for excessive force and violating his civil rights. But even though time has passed, his life is still changed.

“My anxiety levels are crazy,” he said. “Now, when I’m going in to work or even just out and about on my daily, I feel very uncomfortable, I feel uneasy. I don’t feel as confident as I as I used to be.”

Psychologist and Howard University Professor Dr. GiShawn Mance-Early has not treated Eubanks but told the I-Team she’s not surprised to hear how the event affected him.

“Clearly, it was very traumatic for him and it was life threatening and it resulted in PTSD to the extent that how he functions, how he engages in the world was reordered,” said Mance-Early. “And I’m specifically stating reorder versus disorder, because when we think about traumatic experiences, it really does reorder our brain and how we respond to what we perceive as threats.” 

She said reordering is not only true for victims, but for those who witness the brutalization on social media or TV screens.

“There is secondary traumatization,” explained Mance-Early.

The responses will depend on one’s own experience.

“The more we see it, the less heightened some will become, but those who have to live that experience and the possibility of living that experience, there is no desensitization,” Mance-Early said. “If anything, it’s more of a heightened response.”

 Eubanks hasn’t been able to bring himself to watch all of the Nichols videos.

“Whenever I come across even a bit of the audio or just a small snippet on my phone or on the TV, I have to turn away because it’s like it is,” he said. “This feeling inside of me is like I’m right back there and it hurts. It hurts a lot.”

There are still parts of his own story he couldn’t bring himself to share with the I-Team. He said he wonders, when stories like his own or that of Nichols will stop happening and if they ever would have been told had there not been those videos.

“I wouldn’t have seen the day of light, you know,” Eubanks said. “There wouldn’t have been no evidence of what happened to me. It would have been hearsay and my one word versus theirs.”

Eubanks faced numerous charges after his traffic stop, including resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, but they were eventually dismissed and expunged.

The officer involved in his case had a history of excessive force complaints and is no longer with the department.

The new police chief in Seat Pleasant told the I-Team his department has implemented dozens of new policies, including training for de-escalation and anti-bias policing.

Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Jeff Piper and Steve Jones, and edited by Jeff Piper.

A report prepared by Prince George’s County police and obtained by the News4 I-Team reveals that, between April and October 2022, no drivers photographed traveling 90 mph or more were issued a speeding citation. An I-Team analysis of that period also shows only about 41% of all photographed speeders were issued a citation.

“They’re not catching the people that are most dangerous to the rest of us, the people doing over 100 miles an hour,” said Ron Weiss, a member of the Maryland 210 Traffic Safety Committee. “Those are the people we need to get to change their behavior.”

Weiss was among those who spent years lobbying the Maryland General Assembly to change state law to allow automated enforcement on Route 210, a 14-mile roadway commonly known as the “Highway of Death” for its high number of vehicle and pedestrian crashes.

Though red light and speed cameras are commonly used in school and construction zones throughout Maryland, lawmakers had to approve their use outside of those zones. In 2018, lawmakers greenlighted a single speed camera on Rt. 210 and approved three mobile speed cameras the following year. 

“They’re working. They’re changing behavior, but they’re not changing the behavior of the really bad speeders,” Weiss said. 

The report, prepared by the police department’s Automated Enforcement Division (AED) last fall, raised a number of concerns with the speed camera program operated by the vendor Conduent. According to the report, the vendor was, at one point, “struggling to provide” comprehensive speeding and citation data on its website and “has still not fully addressed what appears to be a consistency problem in the data.”

The report went on to say: “We still see zero citations for speeds greater than 89 mph” and that AED is “actively working with the vendor to try and understand this issue.” 

It continued the enforcement division “wants to be sure that there isn’t some hidden technical limitation that prevents these cameras from capturing images of sufficient quality to generate citations for high-speed events. Issuing citations to these especially reckless drivers is critical.” 

The vendor, Conduent, referred the I-Team to the police department for comment. 

The police department declined a formal interview but said in a statement: “The ultimate goal of the program is to reduce speed on Route 210” and the program is meeting that goal “because the data has shown a reduction in speed in the locations that these cameras have been deployed.”

Police did not respond to the I-Team’s questions about whether they’ve addressed why no speeders going above 89 mph were cited, according to its report, or why only 40% of speeding events resulted in citations.

A November 2022 draft report about the program prepared by the department, however, states not all images of photographed speeders result in citations and that “there are several quality control measures in place to ensure that the data captured in the event is of high enough quality to justify a citation.” The same report explains an “event” is generated after the speed monitoring system records a vehicle traveling in excess of 12 mph above the speed limit. 

Former AAA Mid-Atlantic spokesman John Townsend said while studies show the mere presence of cameras is proven to reduce overall speeding, he was surprised so many potential citations are being tossed.

Townsend speculated a technical problem could be preventing police, who are tasked with reviewing data captured by the cameras before citations are issued, from being able to definitively ascertain which car in a photograph is speeding. 

“The most important thing is to have the camera – that is a deterrent,” Townsend said. “But when you have anomalies in the system where drivers are going 140 miles per hour and caught on camera … and they’re not ticketed, that shows a lack of confidence in the data.”

Kaan Ozbay, director of the C2SMART transportation research center at New York University, said he isn’t familiar with the 210 program and thus it’s difficult to speculate why cameras may not be catching the fastest speeders without knowing more about the program’s internal quality controls.

Still, Ozbay said it’s possible the problem is as simple as physics when it comes to the fastest drivers.

“Everything has a physical speed,” he said. “The sensor has to sense the speed. It has to trigger the camera. The camera has to take the picture. Meanwhile, the car is moving.”

Automated enforcement programs have grown in popularity over the past few decades, with red light and speed cameras operating in nearly 200 jurisdictions throughout the United States, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Baltimore unveiled a speed camera program last year on Interstate 83, where Department of Transportation Interim Director Corren Johnson said officials have observed speeds exceeding 170 mph.

Instead of mobile cameras alongside the road, Johnson said I-83’s design led them to mount two fixed cameras on a pole high above traffic.

“It’s most definitely having the impact that we hoped. We are seeing people slowing down,” she said of its early results.

Johnson, as well as the program’s operator, Verra Mobility, told the I-Team 97% of the violations captured by those two cameras have resulted in a citation being issued to motorists speeding 12 mph above the limit. The I-Team was unable to review the underlying data to understand how it may compare to Prince George’s County’s program.

“We’re constantly monitoring the speed sentries, the cameras and immediately addressing any type of issues that might occur to ensure that we’re getting that consistent rate,” Johnson said.

Traffic and law enforcement experts told the I-Team that, while research shows speed cameras help to reduce speeding overall, they’re just one tool in a multi-pronged strategy to combat dangerous driving. 

Some also quietly grumbled that, even if citations were issued to each super speeder, the current $40 citation – which doesn’t count against a driver’s record or budge their insurance premiums – isn’t likely to change their behavior. 

In a statement, a Prince George’s County police spokesman said the biggest challenge with the program has been that it’s only allowed to operate three mobile cameras, noting, “We believe the program could have a bigger impact if we could increase the number of cameras along Route 210.”

That could happen as the Maryland General Assembly is now considering two pieces of legislation that would increase the number of cameras on Route 210 and escalate fines for recidivist speeders.

Weiss said he’s also in favor of adding more speed cameras to the roadway but hopes changes can be made to help catch its most dangerous drivers.

“If we don’t fix this problem, more people are going to die,” he said.

Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot by Steve Jones and Jeff Piper.

Dr. David Allick, a dentist in Rockville, was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea in June 2022. Months later, he received a letter from the MVA requesting additional information about his diagnosis in order “to determine your fitness to drive.” The September 2022 letter noted failure to return the required forms, which included a report from his physician, could result in the suspension of his license.

“It was a big jump from a sleep study to a letter saying my license was going to get revoked,” Allick said. 

Allick is among an estimated 30 million Americans with sleep apnea, a condition in which one’s breathing repeatedly stops throughout the night, leaving people more prone to daytime fatigue and drowsiness. Left untreated, sleep apnea has been linked to other medical conditions, such as cardiovascular disease.

Allick said he isn’t clear how the state learned about his medical diagnosis. But more importantly, he said he was previously unaware of a little-known Maryland law requiring people to report their sleep apnea diagnosis to state driving authorities.

“I don’t want to downplay sleep apnea as a condition and prevent people from actually getting sleep studies,” he said. “But they should be aware that Maryland requires, if you are diagnosed with sleep apnea, to voluntarily submit that information.”

The I-Team found Maryland law lists sleep apnea among more than a dozen potentially serious medical conditions, such as diabetes, epilepsy or stroke, that can impact a person’s ability to drive safely. According to state law, “a driver must report the problem when it is diagnosed, or when he or she is applying for a driver’s license or renewing an existing driver’s license.”

The I-Team reviewed driving laws from across the country and found several other states – such as Florida, New Jersey, Maine and Texas – also list sleep apnea as a condition that may be subject to medical review by state motor vehicle authorities.

Virginia law requires its Department of Motor Vehicles to ask drivers applying for or renewing a license if they have a medical condition that could prevent them from driving safely but doesn’t specify sleep apnea as among them.  

D.C. code doesn’t specifically address sleep apnea either, but asks drivers with a condition that can “impair your ability to” safely drive to have their doctor submit a medical report.

But despite how common the disorder is, less common is how familiar sleep apnea sufferers may be with any reporting requirements.

“I’ve never heard of this requirement,” said Gilles Frydman, executive director of the American Sleep Apnea Association.

Frydman said while commercial trucking drivers are subject to medical examinations that may take sleep apnea into account, he was unaware of any state requiring regular motorists to voluntarily report their diagnosis. He told the I-Team he now plans to poll his organization’s members to gauge how many have encountered similar requirements across the country.

“We are definitely going to do a campaign trying to figure out what people know,” he said. 

Dr. Peter Whitesell, medical director for Howard University Hospital Sleep Disorders Center, said the law is based on reasonable science as untreated moderate to severe sleep apnea can have effects on safe driving. Whitesell cited studies that show some forms of sleep apnea can cause impairment that mimics alcohol-impaired driving.

“When one has gone 18 hours without sleep, the impairment is starting to reach a comparable level to what alcohol intoxication does,” he said. “The impairment is very real.”

But Whitesell stressed physicians like him aren’t asked to report their patients to motor vehicle administrations – though he said he tells his patients about any potential self-reporting requirements. Further, he said he wouldn’t want potential sleep apnea sufferers to delay seeking medical care in order to avoid a hassle at the MVA. Severe forms of sleep apnea, he said, can not only impact their ability to drive safely, but cause a host of other medical problems. 

“Hopefully people take the perspective that if I have a condition that makes me a less safe driver, wouldn’t it be better that I get it identified, get it treated and become a safe driver?” Whitesell said.

The Maryland MVA declined an interview but said in a statement the MVA can be notified about a diagnosis through self-reporting, or by a physician, concerned citizen or a police officer.

A spokeswoman added customers applying for or renewing a license are asked whether they’ve been diagnosed with “any physical or mental disabilities, other than vision, which may affect your driving.” Marking “yes” to that question prompts a medical review. 

The spokeswoman continued: “Once a medical condition is reported to MDOT MVA, a suspension may occur if a customer does not complete and return the medical review forms or if the [Medical Advisory Board’s] review of information provided by the customer and their physician indicates that a suspension is necessary.” 

Still, the I-Team found what happened in Allick’s case appears to be relatively rare. 

Through an open records request, the I-Team learned he’s among only 1,310 people whose sleep apnea diagnoses have led to medical reviews by the Maryland MVA.

The I-Team also asked the MVA how many Maryland drivers have had their license suspended in connection with a sleep apnea diagnosis, but the state said that data was unavailable.

In the end, Allick was able to keep his driver’s license after submitting required forms. He noted the process was even more stressful because the state initially asked for sleep data from his BiPAP machine, but he couldn’t immediately obtain the breathing machine due to a global shortage that has now mostly been resolved.

Allick said he still has questions about what prompted the ordeal.

“Everybody I talked to – nobody’s heard of anything like this,” he said, also acknowledging: “I’m sure they want to keep the roads safe.”

Reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

The News4 I-Team found a loophole that could allow thousands of older cars to avoid safety and emissions inspections. One traffic safety expert said Maryland lawmakers should act to close that loophole.

Starting during the pandemic and continuing today, cars are more expensive than they used to be. Buying an older car can save money, and in Maryland, registering a car as “historic” can save even more: The registration fee is lower, and under Maryland law, historic cars don’t need safety or emissions inspections. 

“Part of the safety inspection is checking the tires, checking the brakes, checking the windshield,” Montgomery County Police Lt. Adam Currie told the I-Team. “None of those things are done [on a historic car].”

Currie told the I-Team he hopes Maryland lawmakers would work quickly to close what he agrees is a “loophole” in state law.

The same Maryland law, however, prohibits those cars with historic tags from being used as daily commuter cars. As part of the application, Maryland requires the vehicle owner to “certify the vehicle will be maintained for use in exhibitions, club activities, parades, tours, occasional transportation and similar uses. The vehicle owner further certifies the vehicle will not be used for general daily transportation or primarily for the transportation of passengers or property on highways.”

The I-Team, however, found plenty of so-called historic cars outside of car shows. On recent mornings, some were found driving on D.C. roads before sunrise, several at Maryland Park & Rides, one at a grocery store parking lot, and more on side streets, including one pickup loaded with work tools.

Figures from the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) show 165,763 vehicles registered with historic tags across the state. Data provided to the I-Team shows the agency issued 46,215 historic plates in 2022 alone.  That means 28% of all historic Maryland tags on the road were issued last year.

“Has Maryland all of a sudden discovered classic cars?” the I-Team asked Mario Bruno, a classic car mechanic who owns Bruno’s Classic Muscle in Rockville. Laughing, Bruno replied, “No, I don’t think so.”

He walked past a 1940 Packard — “an unbelievable car,” Bruno noted — a ‘69 Mustang getting a final buff before its owner picked it up, and a ’57 T-Bird with historic tags.

“Now, that’s a historic car,” Bruno said.

But the law doesn’t distinguish between classic and historic. And long as the car is at least 20 years old, it qualifies for the historic tag and the perks that go with it.

The I-Team found some drivers who don’t appear to know that. One driver parked outside his Northwest D.C. office said, “If it’s over 20 years, the best thing to do is get historic tags, register historic, and then you don’t have to go through it all.”

Asked how he knows his “historic” Jeep was safe to drive, he said, “Well, ah, you take a chance.” In his case, he knows there are issues. He claimed a mechanic fixed it but the car would likely fail inspection due to a hole in the frame.

Safety experts also point to a concerning trend of advertising the safety-skipping benefits of historic cars.

“You’ll see a lot of people, advertising vehicles, you know, historic vehicle, you don’t need the safety inspection,” Currie said.

A quick look at Facebook found samples:

• a 21-year-old Honda that “can drive with historic tags”
• a 23-year-old Infinity “eligible for historic tags”
• a 20-year-old Volkswagen which “qualifies for historic tags … so no inspection required.”

“It concerns me,” Currie said. “The big point of the inspection is to make sure these vehicles are safe to be on the road.”

Virginia and D.C. have similar license plates, but they aren’t as easy to get or keep. D.C. checks mileage on some historic cars — which must be at least 25 years old — every two years. Virginia won’t give drivers a historic tag unless they have a traditional plate on another car.

There are no such limits in Maryland’s statute.

Maryland’s MVA turned down numerous interview requests from the I-Team to talk about the increase and any enforcement. In a statement, an MVA spokesperson said, “When a vehicle owner applies for a historic registration, the owner must certify specific requirements and limitations, which are laid out in the certifying document. Signing and submitting that document to the MDOT MVA is acknowledgement and understanding of those qualifications. Using a registered historic vehicle outside of those qualifications is subject to enforcement under Transportation Article §13–411 and Title 13-704 (b).”

The agency added it “is not the enforcing authority for historic plate misuse. MDOT MVA Investigation’s personnel are administrative investigators and cannot initiate traffic stops on violators misusing tags, or issue citations. If an investigator has suspicion of misuse, the investigator can flag the registration for additional documentation. The enforcement process is handled by local law enforcement.”

The MVA says, “The increase of registered historic vehicles is within expected range.”

In a separate email, the MVA noted anyone can submit a complaint about a misused historic tag. A spokesperson told the I-Team a manual search of cases found four complaints last year of historic plate misuse but said it was unaware of any investigations that resulted in historic tags being revoked stemming from a complaint through the Investigations Unit in the past five years.

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot and edited by Jeff Piper, and shot by Steve Jones.

Pipe continued that by allegedly shooting first towards a trio of young people outside his home, Lewis became the “first aggressor” and lost his right to self-defense.

The judge added that he could have walked back into his home. Through his attorney, Lewis said no crime was committed. Tuesday afternoon, Lewis was sent into custody.

Lewis held a valid concealed carry permit and had a legally registered firearm in D.C. the day of the shooting. The question of “reasonable fear” is an important one in the case.

It is what the law in D.C., and many other states, hinges on—whether a shooter reasonably believes they are in fear of imminent danger. Without it, the law says there is little basis for the use of deadly force.

According to teaching documents and jury instructions posted on the D.C. Police Department’s website, “the District is neither a ‘right to stand kill’ nor a ‘duty to retreat to the wall’ before killing jurisdiction.” Instead, D.C. law “established a ‘middle ground.’” In other words, do what is necessary to stay safe but avoid deadly force if possible.

It is what Calvin Wellington, a firearms instructor at D.C.’s Tactical Solutions Agency, teaches his students applying for a D.C. concealed carry permit.

“It’s not about pulling the trigger. It is knowing what you should do before you pull the trigger. First things first, always utilize verbal judo. My first thing is, I talk my way out of any fight,” Wellington told the I-Team in mid-January.

“Sometimes you go to the next step of creating space… and you try to talk (your) way out of it,” he said.

Wellington says concealed carry permit holders should use the gun as a last resort. In his words, gun owners, should “never go looking for a fight.”

Additionally, the law in D.C. gives gun owners virtually no right to use deadly force in protection of property. The same D.C. Police documents give gun owners instructions on using non-deadly force in instances when it’s about to be damaged or stolen.

A recent I-Team examination showed concealed carry permits are growing fast in the district. As of mid-January, there were 12,313 active permits in D.C. In 2022, D.C. Police issued 3,786 new permits issued last year alone —nearly twice the number issued in 2020.

In 2022, the Montgomery County Police Department reported 48 anti-Jewish bias incidents, up 55% compared to 2021 when just 31 were reported. It was far more than any other religious-based bias incident. Nearly half of the 2022 incidents were in the last four months of the year, according to police data.

The News4 review comes after recent examples in the county of antisemitic graffiti at schools and trails, hateful flyers mailed to community members and a recent attack of a man grocery shopping.

Community members in Montgomery County tell our News4 colleagues this is scary; one told News 4’s Derrick Ward said he feels there’s no way to escape it.

Reacting to the increase, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich and county leaders on Monday awarded $800,000 in grants to non-profits and places of worship to increase security and deter hate crimes.

“These are things we have to do. We don’t have a choice at this point,” Elrich told reporters at a Monday news conference as he encouraged everyone in Montgomery County to speak out. “This has gotten way out of control. This is not the kind of community we want to live in. We don’t want people to think we will sit back and just absorb it and go about our business. We have to do more to stomp that out… The only way it will stop is when we confront this in our communities live and in person… We can’t hide from this. I can’t build walls high enough and strong enough to keep you from getting assaulted.”

Montgomery County Jan 26

Man Charged in Attack on Jewish Man at Montgomery County Giant

Antisemitism Dec 17, 2022

Police Investigate Antisemitic Graffiti on Bethesda High School Sign

In the District, Metropolitan Police Department bias crime reports show far fewer incidents and a smaller increase in religious based bias crimes than in Montgomery County.

“We simply will not tolerate incidents of hate bias intolerance in our community,” MCPD Assistant Chief Mark Imada said Monday. “The Montgomery County Police Department does a great job documenting these events. In fact, we lead the region in reporting and investigating these events.”

The I-Team review also shows how few arrests are made in the reported bias incidents. In the 243 anti-Jewish bias crimes reported since 2016, Montgomery County police report just 10 arrests.

A recent survey from the Anti-Defamation League released just three weeks ago shows levels of antisemitism nationwide, in their words, “at the highest level measured in decades.”

According to the ADL, 85% of the 4,000 Americans surveyed believed at least one anti-Jewish trope or harmful stereotype. Twenty percent believed in six or more of them.

The director of the D.C.-area Anti -Defamation League referred to both the incidents and that recent survey and told the I-Team in an email: “While this finding and others are alarming, it allows us to get a sense of the features that drive antisemitic attitudes and begin to better target and intervene in these matters.”

While the number of breaches was lower than the previous year, the number of victims impacted increased by almost 41% with a total of more than 422 million.  

The ITRC said the U.S. averaged about seven breach notices each business day in 2022. Most of the incidents resulted from supply chain attacks rather than compromised links to malware as in past years. That’s when hackers gain access to a business through a third-party vendor.

“Rather than attacking 100 companies, they’ll attack one company that has the information from 100 companies,” said James Lee of the ITRC. “So, if you think about it for a second, it’s a lot more efficient if you’re the criminal. Let me just attack one group; if I can get through their security, I don’t have to worry about anybody else’s security.” 

The report also found data breach notices lacking in details as to the cause of the breach. “Not specified” was the largest category of cyberattacks leading to a data breach in 2022, ahead of phishing and ransomware. 

Top Data Breach Information Stolen:

• Name
• Full Social Security Number
• Date of Birth
• Home Address
• Driver’s License/State ID Number

There is some good news coming out of the 2022 report: The number of data breaches linked to unprotected cloud databases dropped 75%. Some states, including Maryland, updated their data breach laws requiring organizations to report more details about breaches. 

Numbers in Virginia have declined in recent years, but Virginia State Police report counties continue to issue twice as many permits every year than they did in 2017.

The I-Team’s examination comes nearly two weeks after 13-year-old Karon Blake was shot to death in Northwest D.C. by a still unidentified man. The Metropolitan Police Department says the man had a valid concealed carry permit. A D.C. grand jury is still considering the case. No charges have been filed.

Calvin Wellington, CEO of Tactical Solutions Agency, a D.C. police-approved firearms trainer, told the I-Team his classes are full of people who go to him telling him they are scared of what they see in the news.

“This (getting a concealed carry permit) is the way they’re going to try to fight back … The more crazy stuff we hear the world, the more clients are going to get,” Wellington said. “That’s literally how it works.”

Karon Blake Jan 14

‘The Nicest Boy in My Class': Community Holds Vigil For Karon Blake, 13-Year-Old Fatally Shot in DC

Maryland Jul 12, 2022

Concealed Carry Permit Applications Soar in Maryland

And recently, Wellington said his classes held at D.C.’s Security Associates are full several times a week.

“It is a very, very, very busy business,” he said.

D.C. saw a 189% increase in permits between 2019 and 2022.

In D.C., when residents meet the District’s requirements, including a class like Wellington’s, D.C. police really have no choice but to issue a concealed carry permit. Police agencies and courts can no longer ask “why” someone needs a permit. That was removed by a court decision in late 2017.  D.C. residents must register their firearms with the department as well.

A Supreme Court decision last summer removed the limitation from Maryland law. It resulted in a near immediate spike in permits there.

In Virginia, concealed carry permits spiked in 2018 after the same court decision that changed D.C. rules. While the number of permits issued statewide has fallen, it remains historically high.

Wellington told the I-Team training students isn’t solely about getting the most people through his class as possible. Education and safety are crucial components. He reminded the I-Team several times his goal of is to make sure students understand shooting the gun should be the last of several options.

“I want trained, knowledgeable people carrying guns,” he said. “I think that’s a smart thing.”

Experts who study the trend of increasing permits aren’t convinced putting more weapons in the community is increasing safety. A study released in September from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health found a 9.5% increase in the average rate of assault with a firearm after laws were changed to make permits easier to get.

Study authors pointed out there are ways to mitigate the increase in violence, including preventing people convicted of violent misdemeanors from getting permits and requiring concealed carry permit applicants to have live-fire training before getting their permit – meaning actually firing a weapon.

A RAND Corporation review released this month found similar safety concerns that concealed carry laws like in D.C., Maryland and Virginia may increase total homicides.

Researchers are split on why more concealed carry permits could lead to more violence. Permit holders are required by law to have training and clean records.

Researchers at Stanford Law School recently published work suggesting gun thefts rise as the number of concealed carry permit holders does. Gun thefts are linked to an increase in crime.

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough and Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Jeff Piper.

Donald Winslow would love to be enjoying retirement right now. The 69-year-old told the News4 I-Team most of his days are spent fighting an uphill battle with the VEC.

“I don’t have any money and I have specialty meds that I have to get and I had to pay for them out of my pocket, and they’re expensive,” he said. “So, the unemployment would help me.”

When his seven-year contract at the National Science Foundation ended in August, Winslow filed for unemployment, but his claim was denied. It was sent to appeals, and ever since he’s been waiting to get a hearing date.

“The first lady said four months,” he said. “The last lady said they’re a year behind.”

A newly released report by the Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) showed, as of November 2022, a backlog of 98,000 first-level appeals. That number could include multiple appeals from the same person.

The VEC’s ability to resolve those cases falls well below the national average of 218 days with appeal decisions in Virginia taking up to 307 days.

“We’re trying our best,” said Commissioner Carrie Roth, who took over the helm at VEC in January 2022. “It is a due process. So, there is an actual hearing that has to take place. It’s similar going to court.”

She said the appeals backlog has improved slightly but still sits around 96,000.

The ideal wait time from when someone is denied unemployment, appeals a claim and gets a hearing would be about 90 days, Roth said.

Roth said the VEC has eliminated most of the other backlogs it faced since the pandemic, involving fraud investigations and first-time claims, which, in turn, contributed to the appeals backlog.

“The big driver that we’ve had in the appeals is overpayments, but we also had a huge number of folks that filed appeals that was not a true appeal. It was a complaint,” Roth said.

The agency told the I-Team it has waived more than $221 million in overpayments and is currently recovering overpayments not approved.

But even as some gains are made, more challenges could be coming. According to that JLARC report, 55 contractors will stop assisting with appeals in March, and 37 temporary positions will expire in June.

“We have some budget requests in the governor’s amendments to address the appeals staff that will carry us through the end of the fiscal year,” said Roth.

That recent audit presented to lawmakers also showed the call center could also take a hit when 55 positions expire in a few months. And it highlighted continued problems with the new benefits website, which was down at least 39 times last year.

“I feel like, well, I should just give up. But me? No, I don’t give up. I keep going,” said Shana Marshall Graham.

She said she’s had continued problems logging in or getting anyone on the phone after filing for an appeal in May 2021. She said 20 months later, she’s yet to get a hearing date. Just this week, she said she did hear from someone with the VEC about a potential hearing date after the I-Team had inquired about her case.

“Why not help us and assist us when we need it, not make us wait over a year just to get your issues resolved?” she asked. 

Roth said they continue to make tweaks to the new website and now 60% of new claims are being filed online. They’d like that number to be around 90%.

Some of the problems with logging on could be because the system was unable to confirm the claimant’s digital identity.

“You have to have integrity in that system to make sure that folks are truly who they are,” she said. “That’s where we can go and help and they can go and use either the customer contact center or what have you. But we’ve continued to improve the rules around that.”

The agency handles on average 75,000 calls per month. The most recent data showed an almost eight-minute wait time, up from almost seven minutes in November.

“One of the things that we did last spring and through the summer is we had mandatory customer service training agency wide,” said Roth.

She said there’s a big push this year for everyone involved with claims – from employers to the claimants – to file electronically.

“We need our employers to fill out their separation reports, and now it’s mandatory for them to use electronic means for all their communications on claims, and we need employers to step up and help us with this,” said Roth.

She said that could likely speed up claims being approved and help prevent identity theft, which amounted to about $1 billion –something not seen pre-pandemic.

As for those appeals, Roth said, “Our goal is to have all of our appeals by November of this year, the backlog completely done. That is our goal. And that includes new ones that have come in.”

She also pointed out the reversal rate for first-level appeals is pretty low at about 6% of the cases.

But she wants those still waiting to know the agency understands their frustration.

“It’s really important to me that I am mindful of the human component of this and understand the challenges that these folks face,” she said. “That we’re doing everything we can to complete those claims, and we’ve done tremendous amount of work and realize, though, that there are still those folks that we need to continue to help.”

Reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Carlos Olazagasti and Jeff Piper, and edited by Jeff Piper.

“This got violent really quick and was just the speed at which got violent, and they started tearing out the barricades. It just surprised me,” Sund told the News4 I-Team this week.

That was two years ago. The next day, Sund was asked to resign.

“I think it was easy to point a finger at me and force me to leave because, you know, I think in the long run, they’re not going like what I’m saying,” he said.

In his new book, “Courage Under Fire: Under Siege and Outnumbered 58 to 1,” Sund tells readers, “The buck stops with me,” but he lays blame for multiple failures on many of the people he expected to help prepare and react that day.

Capitol Riot Jan 6

Biden Awards Presidential Citizens Medal to 12 Who Defended Capitol on Jan. 6

Capitol Riot Jan 6

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Capitol Riot Jan 5

Two Years After January 6 Attack: Jailed Rioters, Trump's Waning Influence and Accusations of Crimes

“People have no idea what went on on Jan. 6,” Sund told the I-Team. “They really have no idea.”

Two years later, he said he isn’t certain enough has been done to correct the failures within law enforcement and politics.

“I hate to say it. I think (Jan. 6 was) the middle of something,” he said. “I think our politicians need to think about, you know, how they use their words, because violent rhetoric can be dangerous. And I talk about on both sides, I talk about in the book. And we need to start acting like statesmen.”

The book, he said, is “a good way to start making sure this never happens again.”

Sund said intelligence failures in the days leading up to Jan. 6 left his team unprepared.

“We expected large, large groups,” he said. “I expected maybe some pockets of issues around the perimeter – not what not what I now know was being planned.” 

In his book and the News4 interview, he said federal agencies including DHS and the FBI were collecting information but not sharing it effectively with Capitol Police. Sund said his own intelligence analysts at the Capitol Police Department had important information but downplayed it. 

“We now see that DHS, FBI was sitting on tons of intelligence,” he said. “Some of that had gone over my intelligence division, and they had produced some internal documents that never made it up to us.”

News4 reached out to DHS and the FBI. The FBI declined comment. DHS did not respond.

This week, Julie Farnam, the Capitol Police Department’s assistant director of Intelligence and Interagency Coordination since October 2020 tweeted, “@ChiefSund, J6 was not an intelligence failure. Regardless of what the IC shared or didn’t, there was ample intelligence provided beforehand necessary to prepare appropriately. You did not.”

Sund declined comment on the tweet when News4 asked about it.

“How did you not know?” the I-Team asked. “You’re at the head of this agency. It seems there were a lot of people gathering this stuff, but you say you didn’t know all the details that they knew.”

“Absolutely,” Sund insisted.

Without commenting on Sund’s contention, Tom Manger, the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Department, said the intelligence issues have been corrected.

“Our intelligence operation is exactly, I think, where it needs to be … Prior to the 6th, in my estimation, we were purely consumers of intelligence. You know, people want to share with us information. We certainly listened to that information. But we were not, you know, gathering information. We weren’t analyzing information. We weren’t disseminating it to our troops. All of those things have been corrected.”

Sund doesn’t stop with issues over intelligence. Two years after his team fought for hours in and outside the Capitol, Sund is still furious it took four hours for the National Guard to come help. Sund said he made dozens of calls begging anyone who would listen to send the Guard, a group he calls “law enforcement’s 911.”

“They had 150 guardsmen, some within eyesight of the Capitol with the riot gear. They didn’t move an inch.”

Investigations since Jan. 6 confirm military leadership’s concern about deploying the National Guard – partly to avoid their improper use and partly to avoid the image of troops at the Capitol in all but the most urgent emergency circumstances. Sund said he begged leaders repeatedly for the Guard’s help, writing in his new book about a call at 2:43 p.m. that day as protesters were about to breach the House chamber.

“I am mad as hell at the repeated delays and stupid excuses,” Sund writes. “There are shots fired in the Capitol! Is that urgent enough for you now?”

He said he ended the call to deal with the shooting. The Guard was still not immediately sent.

“I was pissed. I was mad as hell,” Sund said about the delay. “I was watching my officers fight and think about it. The absurdity, because every office in the Pentagon has a large screen TV, and they’re watching the same thing. I’m watching my officers battling for their lives, and they’re concerned about the look of the National Guard on Capitol Hill. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Sund points out in his book the Defense Department’s Inspector General found military leaders “did not delay or obstruct” a response to the Jan. 6 mob. But he insists, “I think the American people are owed an apology.”

“We all raised a right hand, we all swore an oath to the Constitution, and I think, I believe it’s Article 12 that has to do with the certification of the election,” Sund told News4. “When they didn’t provide assistance to save lives and to help defend that process, I think they disregarded their oath.”

As he reflects on what his department went through that day, Sund writes, “The efforts of almost every single Capitol Police officer that day were heroic … They did not fail in their mission. The security apparatus on the Hill must be changed, or future leaders of the USCP will face the same issues. It is inevitable.”

“When I say ‘inevitable?’ They need to take steps to do their best to prevent it from happening, and do I think it’s going to happen, and I pray to God it doesn’t,” Sund said.

In the past two years, more than 950 people were arrested for their alleged actions that day – almost a third for assaulting or resisting officers. Forty of them have been found guilty at trial. Almost 500 more have pleaded guilty. Almost 200 of them have already been sentenced to federal prison.

This week, Manger insisted his department is ready, saying the department revamped its intelligence division, newly authorized the chief alone to call in the National Guard and mandated more detailed planning, addressing – and in some cases surpassing, the department said – post Jan. 6 recommendations.

Watch Chief Manger’s comments on changes made since the Jan. 6 insurrection here.

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Steve Jones and edited by Jeff Piper.

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Now, there’s a clearer picture of just how many people have been hit in the nation’s capital with no arrests in the cases.

When Brian Nelson bought his Northeast home, little did he know that the street parking he was lucky to get would also make him a target.

“I just remember coming home from one morning from a client call and there was no Prius in front of the house,” Nelson said.

His 2007 Prius with 165,000 miles on it had been stolen. It was recovered days later in Maryland missing one thing: the catalytic converter.

“I had to go pick it up in Prince George’s County and drive it home. Basically, I had my ears plugged while I’m driving because it was making so much noise,” he said.

The I-Team found that awful noise is one hundreds of drivers around the D.C. region have experienced, as reported in November.

Andy Cohen runs a Maryland recycling facility near D.C. and knows the value of those parts.

“People do call me all the time and say, ‘Hey, would you like to buy our converters from us? We have, you know, 20 of them. Will you give us some money for them?'” he said. “It’s illegal for you to do, so, I won’t do it.”

Cohen said he started noticing the theft trend in the past few years.

“I’m going to say, in the past three years, the prices of the precious metals have gone up, which in turn has created the theft of the converters, because that’s what’s in them,” said Cohen.

That’s what the I-Team found when analyzing theft data from D.C. police since 2019.

Just two were reported that year.

Thefts rose to 28 in 2020, then 238 in 2021.

There had been almost 300 in D.C. in 2022 as of October.

“This is a citywide problem,” said Capt. Jeffrey Kopp with the Criminal Investigations Division. He said no area is immune to the crime trend, but there are hot spots.

“They are more predominantly concentrated in, like, our northern and northeastern areas of the city, like along Eastern Avenue where we border Prince George’s County in the far north of D.C.,” he said.

The I-Team found the dog days of summer also heated up the thefts with 21 reported incidents over just two days in August.

Kopp said his detectives are working to track the stolen parts, likely sold to questionable mechanics or salvage yards interested in the precious metals inside the converters.

“Trying to track down exactly where they’re going has proven difficult,” he said. “Imagine how many salvage yards are in this area. And who’s to say that the criminals are even staying here in the D.C. area?”

That’s why his unit also works with outside agencies also seeing a spike.

“We’ve been working very closely with our regional partners as well as our federal partners on this to try to develop any nexus that we can between any suspects that have been arrested. And so far in the D.C. cases, we have not made any arrests,” Kopp said.

At Cohen’s business, he won’t even leave any vehicles outside on the streets overnight for fear of them being hit.

“This is a very difficult crime to crack down on,” he said.

Which Nelson found out after the first theft of his catalytic converter. Just three weeks after he had his catalytic converter replaced, it was stolen again. That time, he didn’t get the car back.

“They’re gone in 20 seconds,” he said.

To protect yourself, police say park in a well-lit area to discourage thieves. Also, install a car alarm and security cameras where you park.

Reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Rick Yarborough, and shot and edited by Steve Jones.

But a News4 I-Team analysis found fewer than two tickets were issued on average each day in the first two months of the campaign, with 91 issued systemwide and just two inside the District.

Metro leaders have acknowledged eliminating fare evasion is virtually impossible, but the I-Team’s findings have some questioning whether the enforcement push is making a dent in a problem Metro says costs roughly $40 million a year. 

“There are certain stations [where] I’ve never seen any police,” said Rick Brown, a commuter who recently spoke to the I-Team outside of the Silver Spring station. 

Brown said he sees people jumping the gates every time he rides the train, suggesting the volume makes it all the more difficult for transit police to enforce the rules.

“No one even cares,” he said of the fare skippers.

The I-Team found the bulk of the citations were issued in Virginia, where transit officers wrote 54 fare evasion tickets in November and December combined. The majority of those were handed out at the Pentagon City, Rosslyn and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport stations. 

Meanwhile, data show officers wrote 35 citations in Maryland – the majority at Hyattsville Crossing and Silver Spring – and just two tickets in the District. 

In Virginia and Maryland, fare evasion citations are up to $100, while D.C.’s citations, which are civil offenses, are $50.

While some commuters like Brown question whether Metro is doing enough to deter fare evaders, Metro General Manager and CEO Randy Clarke called the I-Team’s findings a “pleasant surprise.”

“It’s not about the ticketing as much as it is self-correcting behavior,” he told the I-Team in a December interview.

Clarke, who joined the transit agency in July 2022 and quickly announced combatting fare evasion as a top priority, said his goal was to rein in the problem “to a much more manageable level that feels more fair to everyone.” 

But he said D.C. law also inhibits how far Metro can go to address the problem. 

Clarke said officers operating inside the District must first give would-be fare evaders a chance to pay or leave the station. Only if they refuse to pay and refuse to leave would they be potentially arrested for trespassing and issued a fare evasion fine. The I-Team’s review of tickets issued in D.C., however, show just two for failure to pay in late December, with no accompanying arrest data.

“If the law was different in D.C., we’d be using it more similarly to Maryland and Virginia,” Clarke said.

Metro estimates at least 1,000 people have “self-corrected” since the crackdown began, thus avoiding a citation. When the I-Team asked for that data, a spokesman said it was based on “officer observations” that suggest about one third of self-corrections occurred in D.C., one half in Maryland and the remainder in Virginia.

WMATA Fare Evasions Cited

11/1/22 – 1/2/23

Source: WMATA Crime Data

Yesim Sayin, executive director of the nonprofit think tank D.C. Policy Center, told the I-Team it’s too soon to say what success looks like for the fare crackdown campaign. She noted the estimated money lost to fare evasion is tiny compared to Metro’s $4.8 billion annual budget. 

“This is not for money. This is generally to increase the sense of safety,” she said, later adding: “It’s about sending a signal that the system is trying to be fair to everyone who pays. I think that’s an important signal.”

The push comes at a time Metro desperately needs riders to return to its rails after the pandemic turned many commuters into teleworkers. WMATA has struggled to get them back as it’s dealt with a rail car shortage, long wait times for its trains and a spate of violence at its stations.

In addition to the fare enforcement campaign, Metro is also experimenting with new faregates designed to make it harder to hop over without paying. 

Just last month, Clarke unveiled a budget proposal that includes potential fare increases, but he has also proposed a reduced fare program for Metro riders who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. That program is separate from the D.C. Council’s move to subsidize Metrobus beginning in July, effectively making bus trips free for riders within the District.

“I think most people in society would say, ‘Hey, those are individuals that are down on their luck a little bit. Let’s help them out with 50% reduced fare,’” Clarke said of the reduced fare program.

Clarke is also mindful of diverse public opinions not just about whether transit should be free for all, but the social justice implications of a heavy police presence.

“We do not want to have a police confrontation over a couple of dollars. I don’t think anyone wants to see that,” he said.

I-Team interviews with commuters like Brown quickly demonstrated the tightrope Metro is walking in the court of public opinion.

“Punitive responses to economic problems often don’t solve the fundamental issue,” commuter Chris Bangert-Drowns said of the enforcement push.

Bangert-Drowns said he isn’t bothered by fare evaders.

“My thinking is: If I can afford to pay, it supports the system for those that can’t afford it,” he said.

Rider Ricardi Gaston said he supports the enforcement effort, but he wasn’t impressed with its early results.

“If you’re losing $40 million, you’ve got to do more to, you know, get that $40 million back,” he said.

Erica Lloyd said the campaign is a “waste of time” because “public transportation is a public good, and we should be subsidizing it and making it free.”

And a rider who identified himself as “Baby Static” agreed, saying, “I choose not to pay because I think that public transportation should be free.”

Clarke said he knows some of Metro’s users are unhappy with any type of fare enforcement but said he welcomes the big picture debate.

“People can debate what the rules of the future should be and that’s a healthy public policy discussion,” Clarke said. “But we have rules of today, and our job is to actually enforce the rules.”

Reported by Ted Oberg, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Carlos Olazagasti and Jeff Piper.

In past years, troubled teens would enter the criminal justice system for a minor crime such as vandalism, theft, or shoplifting. But now, D.C. police tell the News4 I-Team, they’re seeing a trend of teens jumping straight to gun crimes.

The Metropolitan Police Department shared data with the I-Team that shows 97 people under age 18 were arrested in D.C. in 2022 for violent crime as their first ever arrest. That is an increase over recent years.

In 2022, the number of murders and serious assaults overall in the city has been down, but police statistics show juveniles are becoming victims more often than in previous years. The most recent data show 90 separate times in which juveniles have been shot this year in D.C. That’s up 78% from 2021.

The statistics come just a day after a shooting allegedly committed by four juveniles on Pennsylvania Avenue SE injured three people.

Speaking to News4’s Paul Wagner, one resident of the neighborhood expressed concern about the level of violence, but especially for young people. “Our babies are dying,” the woman, who did not want to be identified, told Wagner.

D.C. police don’t have a clear answer as to why violent crimes have spiked among young people, but pointed out it is a frightening reality that gives police officers, social service agencies and families less of a chance to re-direct a troubled teen away from crime before it ends in violence.

Gates is thriving despite spending weeks in a coma after being struck in a hit-and-run in Southeast D.C. last year.

The D.C. Fire and EMS Third Battalion was there one night in January 2021 – when Gates needed them most.

“When we pulled up and saw him laying on the ground, we knew as soon as we pulled up, before even getting out, Alright, this is the real deal,” said medic Mike Jones, who administered CPR.

The driver didn’t stop to help, leaving Gates lying on the road, suffering from broken bones and a traumatic brain injury.

 “To be honest, we run a lot of pedestrian struck,” Jones said.

Many of those calls end in death, but Jones and his team brought Gates back to life.

“That night, everything went well,” Jones said.

First responders don’t always know what happens to the people they save once they drop them off at the hospital.

“We do a lot of good in the city but rarely do we get a chance to see the good afterwards,” Jones said. 

Reuniting with survivors and their families shows them the enormous impact they have.

Whenever a survivor wants to reunite with their rescuers, D.C. Fire and EMS provides them with coins called “cardiac arrest saves” to hand out to first responders in recognition of their heroic work.

“Some crews have eight or nine of them, and some people get them for the first time,” said D.C. Fire Chief John Donnelly, who wanted to be there for the reunion. “It’s pretty amazing and it’s just a way to recognize that you made a difference that day.” 

Gates handed out six.

“I can’t express enough just how I had to come in here and to be able to say thank you, and the fact that this was able to happen is just something that I am personally, like, really overjoyed by,” he told his rescuers.

And he had one more gift to give – the gift of music.

For a brief moment, time stood still inside the fire station in Anacostia. Sirens and radios were replaced by the warm, rich sounds of a cello, which – if it weren’t for those brave men – would have been silenced forever.

Potential changes for who can be buried at Arlington National Cemetery were expected to be announced already, but that has not happened.

Between 25 and 30 burials happen each day at Arlington. Retired Navy Captain Lory Manning has witnessed many of the moving ceremonies in her career.

“It doesn’t relieve people’s grief, the family’s grief, but they feel that their relative is appreciated, that his or her service meant something, which helps,” she said.

And as she started planning for the future after serving more than 25 years, she made it clear to her family what she wanted.

“I’ve told them I want to go to Arlington Cemetery and full military honors,” said Manning.

But that could be in jeopardy for Manning and potentially thousands of others because the national landmark is running out of space.

Congress ordered the Department of Defense in 2019 to ensure the cemetery could continue well into the future.

The Army, which runs Arlington, recommended changing who is eligible to be buried there, which could extend operation for another 150 years.

“The majority of those who are currently eligible would no longer be eligible,” said retired Lt. Col. Mark Belinsky with the Military Officers Association of America.

Belinsky told the I-Team he continues to hear from worried veterans wondering if they need to make other plans.

“So, the potential changes really would reduce in-ground burial to a threshold of all the way down to Silver Star and above and Purple Heart,” he said. “So, a very small population compared to what is eligible today.”

A spokesperson for the Army told the I-Team there was no expected timeline of when new eligibility would be announced. An Arlington spokesperson said the proposed changes are still currently undergoing the “federal rulemaking process.”

However, there is movement on another front.

“We always knew that there was a finite amount of space here at Arlington Cemetery,” said Col. Thomas Austin, the director of engineering at Arlington National Cemetery. 

He’s overseeing the Southern Expansion project underway right now which will extend the life of the cemetery.

“We’re adding a total of 50 acres to the cemetery, which will yield about 80,000 new burial opportunities,” he explained.

With current burial standards that would keep this cemetery, which means so much to veterans, open for burials until the early 2060s.

“Well, there is only one Arlington National Cemetery. It is a shrine. It’s an icon for the nation. It’s some of the most sacred ground we have in United States,” Austin said.

The expansion project is expected to be completed by the end of 2027.

Belinsky said changing who’s allowed to be buried there could impact the military at a time when there’s already a recruitment challenge.

“Inevitably will have to move to a new location, and our proposal is to rather than reduce the benefit, but let’s slowly transition to the next location without reducing the benefit,” he said.

That’s why he supports another solution: identifying the next Arlington National Cemetery.

“What’s encouraging is senior leaders are looking at other options to include transforming an existing VA run national cemetery into the next location that will afford full military honors,” Belinsky said.

That would require action from Congress. Some potential locations tossed around include Quantico or somewhere on the West Coast.

“It’s certainly not a victory, yet. I do feel that we are going to win this one day, maybe not, certainly not this year. We’re out of time with this legislative session, but perhaps next year,” said Belinksy.

A spokesperson for the Veterans’ Affairs Committee told the I-Team, “Essentially, everyone is still in a holding pattern. Army is still developing new regs for burials at Arlington that will reduces the annual number and extend its life.”

“I’d feel puzzled that I can’t go there,” said Manning, as she and other veterans wait.

She worries the message those new recommended changes might send to those who have served.

“Because of the combat requirements, no woman, including some of the nurses from Vietnam who served before 1992 would ever be eligible for burial there unless she became the president and the vice president,” she said.

She said identifying a new location, before time runs out, makes sense.

“I think it’s a better solution than to tell people who are dying now that they can’t be at Arlington so we’ll have room there for somebody who’s not even going to be born for a hundred years,” she said.

Reported by Ted Oberg; produced by Rick Yarborough; shot by Steve Jones, Jeff Piper and Carlos Olazagasti; and edited by Jeff Piper.

In interviews with the I-Team, multiple people in D.C. and across the country accused Darrell Johnson of defrauding them out of tens of thousands of dollars in deals gone wrong. Some said they hired him to manage their personal crises, while others said they invested in real estate deals with him that either never materialized or quickly went bust.

Restaurateur Markell Johnson of D.C. said he’s out more than tens of thousands of dollars after hiring Darrell Johnson to help him recoup money from another bad business deal.

He said he first met Johnson while both were living in the same Navy Yard apartment building, where Johnson stood out for his flashy designer clothes and bragged about a rolodex of A-list clients.

“He said: ‘You know, I’m a guy who works behind the scenes. I can help you, potentially. I have opportunities, you know, and connections that you could benefit from,’” Markell said.

He said he asked Johnson for referrals or advice on how to recoup the $21,000 he lost when he invested in another man’s pizza franchise.

“He’s like: ‘We can get this back. Like, I’m very sure I can do this for you. I can help … let’s meet, though,’” Markell recalled. “And that’s the part where it starts to speed up.”

Johnson’s help didn’t come cheap, Markell said, and he was told to pay in cash.

Markell said he initially expected to pay Johnson $15,000, telling the I-Team Johnson convinced him he’d be able to recoup even more in interest and in damages.

But according to Markell, Johnson then told him he’d need to pay for extra “services” that quickly added up.

Though Markell signed a contract for “crisis management services” and agreed to pay Johnson $19,800, in the end Markell said he paid almost $70,000 – which included $40,000 Johnson told him he needed to hold in “escrow” but allegedly promised to return.

Markell said when he asked for those escrow dollars back, Johnson didn’t deliver.

“We had plans that we’ve worked hard for, that we’ve put so much effort into, and it’s squandered,” he said.

Markell isn’t the only one to tell the I-Team he lost money to Johnson, who declined multiple requests for an interview.

The I-Team interviewed almost a dozen other people who say they or their clients lost tens of thousands of dollars in deals with Johnson that went nowhere.

“It’s about taking as much money as he can get, as fast as he can get it,” Otis Lanier of Houston told the I-Team.

Lanier said he met Johnson in a chance encounter in 2011, and before long, Johnson convinced him to invest $30,000 in a restaurant with him. Lanier’s friend also invested $30,000 in the venture, he said.

Though the restaurant did eventually open, Lanier said things quickly went downhill, with customers even warning Lanier against doing business with Johnson. 

“Long story short, I found out that he was taking the money and spending it on his personal use, and he blocked me from the books,” Lanier told the I-Team. “He didn’t want me to have access.”

Lanier said he and his friend soon discovered they weren’t the only ones to invest in the restaurant.

The I-Team found civil filings brought by another man against Johnson in connection to the New Orleans Famous Chicken and Waffles restaurant. In the 2011 filing, the man said that, after he invested $5,000, Johnson wrongly used his credit card to charge more than $20,000 and failed to repay.

Lanier told the I-Team he didn’t sue Johnson because his attorney told him that even if he won, he’d be unlikely to collect.

Michael Harris of Philadelphia said he met Johnson on a flight from Atlanta to Houston in 2019.

“It was a friendly conversation,” Harris recalled. “He started telling me about what he does and all the people he was representing. I don’t know if any of it was true.”

When Harris mentioned an interest in real estate investing, he said Johnson told him he often worked with younger guys “and brought them in on a couple of really big deals.”

Before long, he said Johnson convinced him to invest roughly $22,000 in real estate transactions he later realized didn’t exist.

“He said several times, ‘I have your money; I’m going to pay you,’” Harris said. “He never did.”

Phyllis “Cola” Lewis said she was still grieving when – after a chance meeting – she hired Johnson after her mother passed away from an alleged medical error in Texas in 2019.

Johnson, she said, assured her he’d be able to reach an agreement with the hospital. 

“’I can help you get media attention; I can help you get your story and the injustice about how your mom was treated,’” she said Johnson told her.

Official court records indicate Lewis paid at least $16,000 to Johnson before she realized she was being duped, but Lewis said that filing didn’t include records of additional payments she made to Johnson. She said she’s out more than $28,000.

Now, she’s behind a social media campaign sharing stories from others who say they, too, lost thousands in deals gone wrong.

“I want him to be exposed,” Lewis said, adding: “I want him to be incarcerated.”

That could happen now in Texas, where Harris County Assistant District Attorney Sheila Hansel is prosecuting Johnson on charges of theft and credit card fraud in cases involving Harris, Lewis and another person.

“If you are lied to and you give your money to someone because they lied to you and you relied on that lie when you gave them the money, it’s theft by deception and it’s a crime,” Hansel said.

The I-Team found Johnson has several prior civil suits and judgments against him in Harris County. Hansel said it’s the years-long pattern of bad dealings that led her to pursue a criminal case.

“I can’t always stop con men, but I can slow them down every now and then,” she said.

Though Johnson declined to share his side of the story, citing his ongoing legal troubles in Texas, he told the I-Team in a text, “I am innocent and I will have my day in court.”

The I-Team has also reached out to multiple attorneys listed as representing Johnson in his ongoing trial. None has yet responded.

Markell said Johnson has paid him back almost $14,000 of that $40,000 “escrow” deposit – a couple hundred bucks at a time – but he isn’t confident he’ll see the rest. Nor has Johnson delivered on Markell’s initial request to help him recoup the $21,000 he lost in the first place.

In the meantime, Markell is planning on opening a second restaurant location in D.C. and said he’s learned from this costly experience.

“We’re going to get through this,” Markell told the I-Team. “Accountability is going to be had at some point for him, and hopefully this kind of brings closure, you know, to a hard lesson.”

Markell has filed a complaint with the Metropolitan Police Department, which told the I-Team it’s still investigating.

Reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot by Steven Jones, Carlos Olazagasti and Jeff Piper.

“We’re hearing about this more frequently than we ever have,” said James Lee with the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC).

Lee said past data breaches supplied those scammers with tons of personal information from millions of people. Criminals plant them on the internet, and for a few bucks, anyone with bad intentions can reap the benefits and use the information to create phony licenses.

“You go to a marketplace on the web two years ago, you pay $5 for it. Today, you’ll pay $150 for it,” said Lee.

Virginia State Police Trooper Marcus Johnson didn’t realize he had encountered one of those fakes when he responded to a traffic accident in July.

“Everything was normal,” he said.

Johnson said the driver’s license came back clean and the registration checked out. He wrote a citation for following too closely for the driver of the Audi, Matthew Pantaleno.

According to the police crash report, a black Audi driven by Pantaleno rear-ended a Nissan on Interstate 95 in Stafford County. There was no major vehicle damage or injuries – but that doesn’t mean people weren’t hurt.

Here’s the thing: Pantaleno told News4 he’s never been through Stafford County.

In fact, at the time of the crash, he was at work at News4’s sister station, the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia.

He found out about all of this when notices started showing up in the mail from Stafford County court.

“When I first got the notice, I immediately dismissed it because I said, ‘There’s no way this is me,’” said Pantaleno. “Maybe a week or two goes by, and then a second notice shows up, and I said, ‘Whoa, what is this? Let me take a closer look.'”

The name on the citation obtained by the I-Team matched his along with the driver’s license number and address. But a few other details did raise an eyebrow.

“They said it was a black Audi. I don’t drive — nor can I afford — a black Audi,” Pantaleno explained. “The court record says it was a Black male driving the car. I am not a Black male. I have never visited Stafford County, Virginia.”

Trooper Johnson said the photo on the ID he was handed matched the man driving the Audi. So, he was surprised to hear from the News4 I-Team.

“So, what went through my head was that was the most legit phony driver’s license I have ever seen,” he said.

And it worked.

The mystery driver drove the Audi back toward anonymity, and Pantaleno was stuck with the fines.

Pantaleno said he was told he would have to get an attorney to sort out the mess. Worried the debt would be sent to collections, he went ahead and paid while he tries to clear his name.

Lee with ITRC said his company has learned about more than 130 similar cases this year, and oftentimes, the perp gets away with the phony ID still in hand.

“It’s not just a one-and-done kind of crime. It has a very long tail, and chances are you’ll be hit multiple times,” said Lee.

Pantaleno now knows that. After his interview, he emailed the I-Team a copy of a letter from North Carolina’s DMV, notifying him if he doesn’t resolve an unpaid citation there, his “[North Carolina] driving privilege is scheduled for an indefinite suspension.”

“How much impact is this gonna have on my life that someone has a bogus copy of my license and decided to tailgate somebody hundreds of miles from where I live?” said Pantaleno.

News4 tried tracking down the owner of the Audi in North Carolina, where public records show he lives. All the numbers were disconnected. None of News4’s emails was returned.

Pantaleno said he’s reporting his compromised driver’s license to Pennsylvania’s DMV. He was just reissued a new real ID.

But he’s out the cash and cleaning up the mess, which Lee said is the only option anyone has.

“The only thing that can be done is you have to engage in the legal system, that this is not something anyone can fix on their own. You can’t call up the credit bureau. You can’t call up your bank. The only way to cure this is you have to go into the judicial system,” said Lee.

A spokesperson with the North Carolina Department of Transportation said it’s looking into the case and had been in touch with Pantaleno.

“Somebody with my license, bearing my name and my information, was pulled over by a state trooper, and to think someone’s out there posing as me is unsettling, and this was a traffic violation,” Pantaleno said. “What if it was something far worse?”

Reported by Drew Wilder, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Steve Jones and Jeff Piper, and edited by Steve Jones.

“We have extra officers that we assigned to the malls and shopping centers,” said 2nd Lt. William Arnest with the Fairfax County Police Department, who supervises a unit of officers who protect area shopping malls. “There was a decrease during the pandemic with people staying home, but shoplifting is now increasing.”

The News4 I-Team analyzed shoplifting data and found Fairfax County had the most cases in the area last year with more than 4,000 incidents. That’s among the 11,000 cases around the D.C. region in 2021.  

Areas including Fairfax, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties have seen an increase this year in the crime. Some of the incidents have turned dangerous.

“The crimes I see are far more brazen. The level of resistance, the aggression that some use,” Arnest said.

In October, a Metropolitan Police Department police report obtained by the I-Team reports someone “attempting to steal items” from a CVS in Southeast D.C. stabbed an employee in the neck as he tried to stop the suspect, sending that worker to the hospital.

Just this month, a security guard working at the Giant in Oxon Hill, Maryland, died after police say he confronted a shoplifter who pulled a gun from her backpack and shot him.

“I’m still just trying to wake up from a really, really bad dream, you know,” said Shaunte Tate, the wife of Willie Tate.

She said she knew his job came with risk, but she’s devastated to know he lost his life over something so trivial.

“If he knew that she needed help or that she was really hungry, he would have took her over to the restaurant, bought the food,” Tate said. “It didn’t have to go the way that it did at all.”

That accused shoplifter also died when Tate returned fire.

“It’s a very risky situation and it is problematic,” said Mark Mathews of the National Retail Federation.

He told the I-Team retailers have seen an 80% increase in violence associated with organized retail crime since the pandemic.

“It’s very difficult to ask your employees to step into harm’s way, because not only are they endangering themselves if there is a weapon involved, they’re endangering all the consumers who are in that store,” said Mathews.

He said there are generally two types of shoplifting: a crime of opportunity where someone swipes something they want just at that moment and more organized theft involving a team of crooks that enter a store, grabbing handfuls of items.

“There’s groups of organized retail theft that travel up and down the East Coast, stealing from different malls and shopping centers,” Arnest said.

According to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, this crime costs stores more than $45 million a day.

It’s become such a problem that some shops are taking desperate measures to crack down, turning to last resort solutions shoppers probably have noticed. Everything from laundry detergent, to deodorant, razor blades, electric toothbrushes and hand lotions gets locked up in cases. Customers who want those products must ask an employee to get them.

“Unfortunately, that has the side effect of really impairing the customer experience,” said Joe Budano, an expert in loss prevention with Indyme Solutions.

He said whenever a retailer locks up merchandise, it can expect a 25% reduction in sales. His company is working with major retailers around the country testing smartphone technology that would allow customers to unlock the cases without any assistance.

“You walk up to the case and you see a touchscreen display here,” he explained, showing the I-Team how it works. “We’re asking you to tell us who you are, either through your cellphone, your loyalty card information, or using a retailer’s app or even your face as a face ID. So, I’m going to enter my cellphone in there, and now I’m going to get a text message, I want to enter my code, and my case is unlocked.”

Budano said his company also is looking at using the technology in other retail locations – like fitting rooms and locked restrooms to increase security.

So far, he said, in their testing, customers have been open to providing some information.

“Face ID is clearly the least popular, and it’s viewed as a kind of an invasion of privacy,” he said. “But cellphone, loyalty card, retailer app, you know, in our survey data, we found that shoppers believe that retailers really more or less have that information already so that that value they’re giving up as a legitimate shopper against this convenience is quite a good trade.”

He said hopefully this is just one tool that could help prevent shoplifting.

“What offenders are going to want identify themselves right before they steal, right?” he said.

Experts agree it’s a tough crime to crack down on, and it’s escalating.

“Retailers are really scrambling to adjust their store operations to thwart this new threat,” Budano said.

Reported by Susan Hogan; produced by Rick Yarborough; shot by Steve Jones, Jeff Piper and Lance Ing; and edited by Steve Jones.

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He was among thousands of people struck by vehicles in the U.S. each year but considers himself fortunate because he survived. 

“Anybody who has been through an experience [like this] who is still with us … we’re all absolutely lucky,” he said. 

Now, with pedestrians dying in traffic collisions at the highest level in 40 years, auto safety advocates say more must be done to give people like Gates more than luck on their side. 

They’re calling on the federal government and automakers alike to address a gaping hole in vehicle collision avoidance technology – the inability of many automatic emergency braking systems to detect pedestrians at night. 

Researchers with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety began warning about the problem earlier this year when testing showed many vehicles equipped with pedestrian automatic emergency braking systems, which are designed to brake when a driver does not, failed to stop for a crash dummy in night-time conditions.

That’s even more troubling, IIHS representatives told News4, as an estimated three-quarters of pedestrian crashes occur after dark.

“It really hits you because you know that these are the types of crashes that are happening in the real world,” said David Aylor, vice president of active safety testing at the Institute. 

IIHS began testing the effectiveness of pedestrian automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems in daylight in 2019.But as pedestrian deaths have increased by nearly 80% during the past decade – with more than 7,300 people killed on foot last year – Aylor said the Institute expanded its testing. 

In an August report, the IIHS found 19 of 23 vehicles equipped with pedestrian AEB earned superior or advanced ratings for their ability to detect a specially designed pedestrian dummy in the roadway during the day. 

Only four, however, earned the IIHS’s highest rating of “superior” for either stopping or slowing down for the IIHS dummy in night-time conditions. More than half earned a “basic” score or no credit, according to the report. 

“The challenge for a lot of these systems is sort of predicting what the pedestrian is going to do,” said Aylor, adding AEB systems “can’t warn or apply the brakes until they’re confident the pedestrian is really going to step out in front of the road. Otherwise, they’d always be sort of warning or applying the brakes for pedestrians along the edge of the road.”

Only one vehicle in that August round of testing – a 2022 Nissan Pathfinder – avoided the Institute’s crash dummy in each testing scenario, which included multiple speeds and low and high beam settings. Three others – the Fort Mustang Mach-E, Toyota Camry and Toyota Highlander – also earned superior ratings for either avoiding the dummy or significantly slowing down before impact. 

The News4 I-Team was invited to watch as the IIHS conducted another round of tests on other vehicles, though those results have not yet been released.

“Our hope is, over the next two or three years, that we can really raise the bar and see more manufacturers get that top rating of superior,” Aylor said, adding, “We’ll continue to look at the real world data and what kind of crashes and fatalities are happening to really sort of push the manufacturers to the next step.”

As of now, auto manufacturers aren’t required to equip their vehicles with pedestrian AEB technology or ensure it works in all lighting conditions. That’s something Cathy Chase, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said needs to change.

“This is a solvable problem,” Chase said. “If they can’t work at nighttime, which is when most pedestrian fatalities happen, they shouldn’t be calling it AEB with pedestrian detection.”

Chase said she and other auto safety advocates have been pushing the U.S. Department of Transportation to require manufacturers to include pedestrian AEB and meet performance standards to ensure the technology works in all lighting conditions.

As of now, she said, “Even if the cars have them, there’s no standard. So, they could perform in any way. Some will perform better, some will perform worse. But there’s no minimum performance standard.”

That could change, as the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill signed by President Joe Biden included a mandate for automakers to eventually equip their cars with AEB technology. 

But, so far, it’s unclear when that will happen or what performance standards it will include. A spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told the I-Team the agency is still working on the proposed statute and should have more guidance for automakers by next fall.

In a statement, the spokesperson said NHTSA first “initiated rulemaking on pedestrian automatic emergency braking in spring 2021.” The infrastructure bill, the spokesperson added, “made critical investments in NHTSA that will allow the agency to accelerate its research and rulemaking activities related to pedestrian automated emergency braking systems that can help drive introduction of these technologies into all passenger vehicles.” 

In the meantime, Aylor said, the IIHS has a voluntary commitment from nearly 100% of auto manufacturers to include AEBs as standard equipment by this model year. Though that doesn’t necessarily include pedestrian-specific detection, Aylor said he’s hopeful most manufacturers will do so. 

Gates – who suffered a traumatic brain injury in addition to multiple fractures when he was struck – is now a pedestrian safety advocate with the public awareness campaign Street Smart. He said he hopes the pedestrian detection technology improves before it becomes commonplace – not just to protect people on foot, but also drivers. 

“Before it comes down to public and consumer use, I would ask that the manufacturers do absolutely everything that they can for quality checks and assurances before releasing those vehicles to the public,” he said. 

The person who struck him was never found, but Gates said he’s working through his physical and mental pain by focusing on his music. 

“We don’t always have the best of days, so sometimes it comes with being a little angry or something like that and just trying to express that through the instrument,” he said. “It’s definitely been a help in getting over some of the emotion from last year.”

Reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Katie Leslie, and shot and edited by Steve Jones and Jeff Piper.