Florida law allowed dangerous driver back on roads

Nancy Chancey, 59, was killed after she hit another car and was thrown from her vehicle. Two days later, a resident nearby found the body of 60-year-old Art Stroud in the brush near his home. Stroud was struck by the airborne car and thrown out of sight of the police who responded to the crash.

The story of the horrific crash and Chancey’s driving record seemed to universally spark the question “How was this woman still driving?”

The answer is simple.

Because state law allowed her to.

Before he turned 21, Blaec Lammers had seen the inside of mental health facilities at least seven times.

One of those visits stemmed from following an employee for two hours at the Bolivar Wal-Mart wearing a Halloween mask and wielding a butcher knife.

None of that stopped that same supercenter from selling the 20-year-old a pair of AR-15-style, semi-automatic rifles in November 2012. Lammers was not in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System deployed to deny the wrong people access to firearms.

More than half of the 27 pedestrians killed by cars in New York City this year died on major roadways. That’s just one of the findings of a new WNYC analysis of traffic deaths, Mean Streets. 

WNYC worked with the NYPD to compile an accurate list of traffic deaths after finding discrepancies between its statistics and those kept by advocacy groups.

The station is tracking each death using an interactive database that includes names, dates, locations, street view maps and brief descriptions of the deaths.

Oil moving through Oregon has contained six times more propane – the same stuff in backyard gas grills – than comparable types of crude.

Despite the risks, the oil isn’t required to go through simple steps to stabilize it when it’s extracted from the ground. Producers can flare off the propane and other gases in it. But then they have less to sell and their profits suffer.

Following a report by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the City Council of Richmond, Calif. voted to give residents of the Hacienda public housing complex vouchers to move into private housing. Tim Jones, executive director of the Richmond Housing Authority, called the bulding uninhabitable, and dozens of residents have complained of health problems due to mold.

Jones has blamed deteriorating conditions in public housing on the lack of federal funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The city said it will ask HUD for voucher funding. But if the city can't get the money from HUD, it will pay to relocate Hacienda residents with money from its day-to-day budget. Relocation fees are estimated at more than $480,000.

Read the full story.

Across the United States, police and prosecutors are allowing tens of thousands of wanted felons — including more than 3,300 people accused of sexual assaults, robberies and homicides — to escape justice merely by crossing a state border, a USA TODAY investigation found. Those decisions, almost always made in secret, permit fugitives to go free in communities across the country, leaving their crimes unpunished, their victims outraged and the public at risk.

Read the USA TODAY report. Check out some of the local reporting that’s come out of the project.

The number of Louisville companies storing dangerous quantities of toxic chemicals has dropped significantly in the past decade, but hundreds of thousands of area residents remain at risk of being sickened or killed in the event of a catastrophic leak.

Federally required safety records analyzed by The Courier-Journal show that 21 firms report storing deadly or explosive toxic substances such as chlorine, formaldehyde and anhydrous ammonia in amounts large enough to require disaster plans — with some danger zones stretching from Southern Indiana to northern Bullitt County.

Global News obtained 11 years of collision data and found that “Torontohenge,” when the setting sun aligns with Toronto’s east-west street grid and forces drivers to squint through salt-crusted windshields, coincides with the third-worst day of the year for car accidents.

Get the full story and graphic.

City officials are moving more than 400 children and their families out of two city-owned shelters in the wake of a New York Times series about homeless children.

“For nearly three decades, thousands of children passed through Auburn and Catherine Street, living with cockroaches, spoiled food, violence and insufficient heat, even as inspectors warned that the shelters were unfit for children,” the Times wrote today.

“State and city inspectors have cited Auburn for over 400 violations — many of them repeated — for a range of hazards, including vermin, mold, lead exposure, an inoperable fire safety system, insufficient child care and the presence of sexual predators, among them, a caseworker.”

Read more here.

Less than two dozen of Virginia’s roughly 300 law enforcement agencies filed a required drug destruction report to the state’s Board of Pharmacy in 2012, according to a report by Richmond, Va. television station WRIC.

“Since the ABC 8 News investigation first aired in February 2013, the number of law enforcement agencies complying with the drug disposal law has more than tripled—from 19 in 2012 to 60 in 2013, but stills falls significantly short of 100 percent compliance,” according to the story.