The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "shooting deaths" ...
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The Deadliest Place in Mexico
The Juarez Valley, a narrow corridor of green farmland carved from the Chihuahuan desert along the Rio Grande, was once known for its cotton, which rivaled Egypt’s. But that was before the Juarez cartel moved in to set up a lucrative drug smuggling trade. “The Deadliest Place in Mexico” explores untold aspects of Mexico’s drug war as it has played out in the small farming communities of this valley. The violence began in 2008, when the Sinaloa cartel moved in to take over the Juarez cartel’s turf. The Mexican government sent in the military to quell the violence — but instead the murder rate exploded. While the bloodshed in the nearby City of Juarez attracted widespread media attention, the violence spilling into the rural Juarez Valley received far less, eve as the killings began to escalate in brutal ways. Community advocates, elected officials, even police officers were shot down in the streets. Several residents were stabbed in the face with ice picks. By 2009, the valley, with a population of 20,000, had a murder rate six times higher than Juarez itself. Newspapers began to call the rural farming region the “Valley of Death.” This investigation uses extensive Freedom of Information Act requests, court documents, and difficult-to-obtain interviews in Spanish and English with current and former Juarez Valley residents, Mexican officials, narcotraffickers and U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials, to reveal that many of these shocking deaths were perpetrated with the participation of Mexican authorities. It shows scenes of devastation — households where six members of a single family were killed, without a single police investigation. It uncovers targeted killings by masked gunmen of community activists and innocent residents for speaking out against violence and repression facilitated by corrupt military and government officials. And it gathers multiple witnesses who describe soldiers themselves, working in league with the Sinaloa cartel, perpetrating violence against civilians. "The cemeteries are all full. There isn't anywhere left to bury the bodies," one former resident said. "You'll find nothing there but ghost towns and soldiers."
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Wilmington's Street Wars
Wilmington, Del., has become one of the most violent cities of its size in America. Nothing dramatized that fact more than several spectacular shootings in 2012, including one day in June when three people were shot to death in separate incidents, and a shootout a few weeks later at a soccer tournament that killed three people -- including a teenager waiting to play the game he loved. To document and study the violence he and other News Journal colleagues were covering, senior reporter Cris Barrish gathered information for a database detailing the 158 shootings, including 42 homicides, over a 20-month period. He learned that police made arrests in only one-third of the cases, many of which collapsed in court. His research into why police could not solve cases led to the revelation that both shooting suspects and victims had been arrested an average of about two dozen times, with many qualifying as habitual criminals -- a phenomenon that some authorities call "thugicide.'' His stories also explored the “don’t snitch’’ code of the streets that cripples prosecution of these cases, not only by the men on both sides of the gun barrel, but also by residents who are terrified of the gunmen and distrustful of law enforcement.
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Deadly Force: When Las Vegas Police Shoot, and Kill
In the wake of two controversial officer-involved deaths in the summer of 2010, the Las Vegas Review-Journal asked a simple question: Are Las Vegas police too quick to shoot? What reporters Lawrence Mower, Brian Haynes and Alan Maimon found in a groundbreaking analysis of all police shootings in Clark County since 1990 stunned even veteran police administrators: Local cops had shot at people 378 times, resulting in 142 deaths. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department alone was involved in 311 incidents resulting in 116 deaths. By any measure, Nevada's largest law enforcement agency uses deadly force more often than counterparts in the region and in other major cities surveyed.
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Deadly Force: When Las Vegas Police Shoot and Kill
"In the wake of two controversial officer-involved deaths in the summer of 2010 the Las Vegas Review-Journal asked a simple question: Are Las Vegas police too quick to shoot?"
Tags: law enforcement; multimedia
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"Brian Ross Investigates: CIA Shoot-Down - 10 years later
Ten years after the CIA "mistakenly ordered the shoot down" of a plane full of U.S. missionaries, Brian Ross and his team exposed a "major" cover-up by the CIA. The order to shoot down the plane resulted in the death of a mother and her young child and injured three other people. In an attempt to hide their mistakes, the CIA "misled the federal government and the public."
Tags: CIA; missionary; Peru; War on Drugs
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Blackwater
Continuing the coverage of Blackwater, a private military company, from 2006, the Pilot exposed "several unresolved issues surrounding the unprecedented privatization of warfare that has become a hallmark of the wards in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Tags: private military company; Blackwater; privatization of warfare; wrongful death lawsuits; shooting deaths; privatized warfare
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In deputy-involved fatal shootings, Riverside County tops LA County
"Riverside County sheriff's deputies may fire their duty weapons less than their LA County counterparts, but they killed more people in 2006." Bjelland created and analyzed a database on police shootings and a story on the effectiveness of purchasing Tasers.
Tags: police; shootings; death; database; Tasers; California
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Incident No. 1113
This in-depth investigation of a high school shooting finds that it was more than just a 'violent outburst' between rival gangs. Interviews and research revealed that the school had serious issues concerning violent incidents before the shooting. The school also failed to issue class schedules to their students for nearly two weeks, leaving them in the cafeteria all day. The student who shot his classmate to death was one of the students without a schedule.
Tags: school shooting; violence; gangs; teenagers; teens; guns
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A Shot in the Arm
Police arrested Darryl Burton on June 28, 1984, for the shooting death of Donald Ball, a notorious neighborhood gangster. Burton's trial in 1985 lasted two days, and a St. Louis jury found him guilty of capital murder and armed criminal action. Circuit Judge Jack L. Koehr sentenced the 23 year old Burton to life in prison. This story explores the murder conviction and the obstacles Burton has encountered in trying to get the conviction reversed. He was convicted on the strength of two eyewitness accounts. Gay finds that one of the eyewitnesses admitted perjury, and the other has had his character and testimony impugned by the arrival of new testimony.
Tags: Darryl Burton; reversed conviction; Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals; habeas corpus; FOI
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Evidence of Injustice
An exclusive i-team investigation shows how inconsistencies, mistakes and staffing problems are raising serious questions at the Maricopa County Medical Examiners Offices. This is a new forensic science center where coroners perform autopsies on people who have died on unnatural causes in this county. Investigators and legal experts rely on the information provided by this office, but the information is not always correct. Interviewees on this tape say that leads to having innocent people on trial for crimes that do not exist. In one case, the Sheriff's office began using an amended autopsy to defend a mysterious jail death. The Chief Medical Examiner changed his opinion about the jail death two years after the original autopsy, without any new information. Some Medical Examiners are doing many more autopsies per year than what is recommended.
Tags: TAPE; Chief Medical Examiner; Maricopa County Medical Examiners Office; autopsy; inconsistency; forensic; forensic science; legal; legal expert; coroner; investigator; trial; crime; jail death; kill; killing; shooting; shot; inconsistent autopsy.