Jack Healy

But when you are one of just two Democrats in the House to vote against the impeachment inquiry, the subject is impossible to avoid. As a conservative Democrat in a rural district that voted for President Donald Trump by a 30-point margin, Peterson is a man in the lonely middle, now besieged on all sides — by Republican rivals determined to yoke him to impeachment and by Democrats who want their congressman to stand up to a president they detest.

As public testimony begins Wednesday in the impeachment hearings against Trump, it is all very awkward for Peterson and other elected Democrats in Trump-supporting corners of the country. In a statement, Peterson criticized the closed-door depositions being run by fellow Democrats as opaque and “hopelessly partisan.”

“I don’t have a lot of confidence in what they’re up to,” he said one frozen morning last week after he met with 100 potato and sugar-beet farmers.

Many farmers from the Red River Valley who crowded into a hotel meeting room to discuss how weeks of cold, rainy weather had devastated their crops agreed with Peterson about impeachment. They had voted for Trump, and even as new revelations tumbled out that morning indicating that the president had demanded that Ukraine investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, as a condition for getting military aid, many of the farmers brushed off the entire investigation. Instead, they saw it as a political distraction while their livelihoods were being strangled by Trump’s unpopular tariffs and a bad harvest.

“It gets sickening at times,” said Erik Bakke, 44, a sugar-beet farmer in Ulen, Minnesota, who said he still supported Trump and Peterson. As farmers got ready to head back to their fields, a few said the anti-impeachment vote had probably made Peterson more popular with his farmer constituents.

Still, Republican rivals smell blood. One Republican hoping to unseat Peterson labeled him a “puppet” of Democratic leaders trying to take down the president. Another held an anti-impeachment rally outside one of Peterson’s local offices.

But Peterson’s stance on impeachment puts him in a precarious spot with another constituency that rural Democrats also desperately need — the small but committed clusters of progressive voters galvanized by Trump’s election who now breathlessly follow every twist and news alert in the saga.

They fired off outraged emails after Peterson joined Rep. Jeff Van Drew, D-N.J., in voting against endorsing the impeachment inquiry. They called Peterson’s office to demand answers. A few liberal voters even flirted with not supporting him again.

“It’s almost inexcusable,” said Sally Suby, 70, a retired teacher from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, who has begun posting roadside signs with slogans like “Demand Truth” to counter the Trump signs that speckle fields.

With conservative groups already attacking Democrats who voted for the impeachment inquiry in more conservative districts in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Michigan and elsewhere, western Minnesota has become another battleground in how impeachment might — or might not — sway rural and small-town voters.

Peterson, a pro-gun, anti-abortion politician who frequently votes with Republicans, is one of the few rural Democrats standing in a state that has followed the country’s bifurcation between bluer cities and suburbs and red rural areas. He is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and has won endorsements from the Minnesota Farm Bureau, whose president called him “a champion for agriculture.”

His district spans almost the entire length of the state, from the Canadian border through lakefront tourist towns and soybean, corn and potato fields. He is on a first-name basis with voters who talk about “calling Collin” and tell stories about getting Collin’s help with a medical bill or Collin’s advice about a complicated farm program.

But his margins of victory have dwindled like winter daylight. Even as Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, Dave Hughes, an Air Force veteran endorsed by Trump, came within a few points of beating Peterson. In neighboring rural districts, conservatives flipped two Democratic-held seats in mining country and a white, rural stripe of southern Minnesota, raising Republicans’ hopes of winning Minnesota in 2020 for the first time in a half-century.

The first campaign rally Trump held after the House’s impeachment inquiry began was in Minneapolis, where he condemned Democrats for trying to “erase your vote like it never existed” and stoked the crowd’s anger over Minnesota’s large population of Somali immigrants.

Michelle Fischbach, a former lieutenant governor running in the Republican congressional primary, has turned impeachment into an attack line. She blamed impeachment for bogging down the passage of a trade deal between the United States, Mexico and Canada, even as Peterson (who supports the deal) tells farmers he expects it to pass within weeks. She said other votes by Peterson had been a tacit endorsement of impeachment.

“The Democrats have been so obsessed with impeachment that they haven’t been doing anything to help the farmers,” she said. “I know Collin’s out meeting with people, but he’s not standing up to Nancy Pelosi and saying, ‘We’ve got to stop this impeachment.’”

Kevin Paap, president of the Minnesota Farm Bureau, said that while impeachment was consuming Washington and die-hard partisans, many Minnesota farmers were too busy trying to salvage what crops they could after a muddy slog of a harvest season. Some potato farmers have lost 90% of their crop to the cold. Farm machinery is getting mired in the mud. Some farmers have abandoned Trump because of his trade policies, but others say they still support him.

“No disrespect, but quite frankly, if you’re not on the radio I’m listening to in a truck or a tractor combine cab, I’m not paying a lot of attention,” Paap said. “We’re on Day 23 of harvest.”

In small towns such as Morris, population 5,300 and home to a liberal arts campus of the University of Minnesota, the political fissures created by impeachment are often right next door.

One afternoon, Tom Collins, 63, and his family were lugging floor tiles into a cafe they are turning into a nutritional-supplement club. It was 25 degrees out, and Collins wore a black Trump 2020 sweatshirt that read “Screw Your Feelings.” His wife’s son, Tanner Gross, 25, was ordering a liberal-baiting T-shirt that said “Trump-eached.”

They said they have been following the impeachment news through church friends and social media, and planned to vote against every Democrat on the ballot next year, no matter how the farm economy was faring. “I think it’ll be a landslide this time,” Collins said.

On the other side of the brick wall, four women who lead the local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible were ordering salads and wraps at a recently opened restaurant that specializes in local fresh food.

Judy Flicker, 67, said that they had a “messy relationship” with Peterson, but that they had knocked on doors for his campaigns and would most likely vote for him again. Still, they were frustrated that the impeachment debate was leaving out people who did not fit into neat categories of urban liberals and rural conservatives, and said they would keep calling Peterson’s office to press him to support impeachment.

“We live in a small town,” said Sara Lam, a professor of elementary education. “We are a part of rural America just as much as a farmer.”

This article originally appeared in

For a Rural Democrat, Talking Potatoes Is Easy. Impeachment Is Really Hard.

CROOKSTON, Minn. — Collin Peterson just wanted to talk about soybean prices and dying potato crops when he flew home to the western Minnesota farmlands that he has represented in Congress for almost 30 years.

In June, the Jefferson County Public Schools in suburban Denver asked for community input on what, to many, was a radical idea to reduce Columbine’s morbid allure. The district proposed razing most of the school building and rebuilding it farther from the road, where unwanted visitors now pull over to take photos or traipse onto school grounds.

While the plan was supported by Columbine’s former principal and the school district’s head of security, it hit an emotional nerve for many in the community. Some said the plan was too expensive and disruptive and would not solve the problem of so-called Columbiners, people obsessed with the April 1999 school shooting that killed 12 students and a teacher. Others said tearing down Columbine — even 20 years later — would be a capitulation to school shooters.

“It was very emotional,” said Frank DeAngelis, who was principal at Columbine during the attack and for years after. “There’s a lot of history at Columbine.”

Nearly 60% of those who replied to a school district survey opposed the idea and indicated they would not vote for a bond needed to pay for the $70 million project.

Jason E. Glass, the Jefferson County superintendent, said in an open letter Wednesday that the district would instead try to strengthen the perimeter around Columbine to make it safer and more private as part of a $15 million renovation. One possibility was a new fence around the school or changes to how people enter the building, said John McDonald, the school district’s director of security.

“We understand the community isn’t ready to say goodbye to Columbine; I get that,” McDonald said. “But we still have to do something.”

Fears about Columbine’s enduring appeal to those fascinated by school shootings reached a fever pitch this April, in the days before the 20th anniversary of the shooting. At one point, law enforcement began an extensive search for an 18-year-old woman who they said had been infatuated with Columbine and had flown to Colorado from Florida. She killed herself in the mountains west of Denver.

Other schools have wrestled with what to do with the buildings where mass shootings have occurred.

The school district in Newtown, Connecticut, demolished Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 people were killed in 2012, and built a new school elsewhere on the property.

At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, a facility replacing the building where 17 people were killed last year is expected to open for the 2020 school year.

The proposal to replace Columbine High divided the tight-knit community of students and survivors of the attack.

While many Colorado residents are fed up with the fascination around the Columbine campus, some survivors and victims’ families said that they still found meaning there and that their memories of hurt and healing still lay within Columbine’s concrete walls. Others said the tens of millions of dollars needed to pay for a new school would be better spent on other causes, like mental health treatment or community centers.

“It is a place of memory for a lot of people,” said Craig Scott, who survived the rampage while his older sister, Rachel, was killed. Scott now speaks to high schoolers about mental health issues. “I know a lot of people — good-hearted people — who go there to pay respect and honor. And that’s a good thing.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/columbine-tear-down.html" id="a474e131-f2c0-3e0b-a13a-ac584c4f8925">The New York Times</a>.

Facing community opposition, a Colorado school district said Wednesday that it would drop a proposal to tear down Columbine High School, which has been confronting growing threats and thousands of curious trespassers since the 1999 massacre there.

Columbine High School Will Not Be Torn Down and Rebuilt

In June, the Jefferson County Public Schools asked parents, students and others in the suburban school district that includes Columbine to weigh in on a plan to rebuild the school farther away from the road, where security officials could better control who entered the grounds.

Nearly 60% of those who replied to the district’s survey opposed the idea and indicated they would not vote for a bond needed to pay for the $70 million project.

Some said the proposal was too expensive and would not solve the problem of so-called Columbiners, people obsessed with the April 1999 school shooting that killed 12 students and a teacher. Others said tearing down Columbine — even 20 years later — would be a capitulation to school shooters.

Jason E. Glass, the Jefferson County superintendent, said in an open letter Wednesday that the district would instead try to strengthen the perimeter around Columbine to make it safer and more private.

“While Columbine High School is now arguably one of the safest schools in the world, the ‘unauthorized individuals’ problem at the school must be addressed,” he wrote.

While many Colorado residents are fed up with the morbid fascination around the Columbine campus, some survivors and victims’ families said that they still found meaning there and that their memories of hurt and healing still lay within Columbine’s concrete walls. Others said the tens of millions of dollars needed to pay for a new school would be better spent on other causes, like mental health treatment or community centers.

A Colorado school district said Wednesday that it would drop a proposal to tear down Columbine High School, which has been dealing with growing threats and hundreds of curious trespassers since the 1999 massacre there.

She had done it countless times. But that night in July 2018, as the man veered off course toward a deserted parking lot, as he cranked up the radio and ignored her questions, as her real driver called her wondering where she was, Suarez said she realized with horror: This was not an Uber.

“That’s when he said, ‘Give me your wallet, give me your phone, give me everything you have,’” Suarez, 28, said.

On busy streets outside bars or clubs, people often hop into a car without a second thought. But the killing of Samantha Josephson, a 21-year-old college student in South Carolina who was stabbed to death after getting into a car she mistook for her Uber last weekend, has brought national attention to a rash of kidnappings, sexual assaults and robberies carried out largely against young women by assailants posing as ride-share drivers.

There have been at least two dozen such attacks in the past few years, according to a tally of publicly reported cases, including instances where suspects have been charged with attacking multiple women. In Connecticut, a man was arraigned last week on charges that he kidnapped and raped two women who believed he was their ride-share driver. In Chicago, prosecutors said a man who posed as an Uber driver sexually assaulted five women, climbing into the back seat and pinning them down.

These attacks turn a simple mix-up into a nightmare, showing how easily bad actors can exploit the vulnerabilities of a ride-sharing culture that so many people trust to get them home safe.

The drivers troll nightclubs and bars late at night to find people scanning the dark for their ride, according to law enforcement descriptions of the assaults. They wave to passengers and say, “I’m your driver.” Some even hang ride-share decals in their windows.

The attacks represent a tiny fraction of the millions of uneventful rides that Americans hail every day. But Josephson’s murder has forced ride-sharing companies to address renewed safety concerns, led to legislative proposals and public efforts to reduce future attacks and prompted passengers across the country to weigh the risks of climbing into a stranger’s back seat.

“It could be any one of us,” said Kate Lewis, a junior at the University of South Carolina, where Josephson had been a senior about to head to law school.

State lawmakers in South Carolina have proposed a law named for Josephson that would require all ride-share drivers to display a lighted sign from their company. Her father, Seymour Josephson, has become an outspoken advocate for stronger safety measures, saying at a vigil this week, “I don’t want anyone else to go through it as a parent.”

At the University of South Carolina, students have started a new safety campaign that urges riders to ask, “What’s my name?” to ensure they are talking to their actual ride-share drivers before getting into a car.

Students described the campaign as one constructive action they could take amid a week of stunned grief and candlelit vigils, after the police announced on Saturday that they had found Josephson’s body in the woods 70 miles away. She had last been seen at 2 a.m. Friday in a busy downtown neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina, getting into a black Chevrolet Impala.

The security footage of those moments is haunting: As Josephson gets into the back seat, there are people everywhere, tapping on their phones, hugging one another’s shoulders, enjoying the night.

The police charged Nathaniel David Rowland, 24, with kidnapping and killing Josephson. They said they had found Josephson’s blood and her cellphone in Rowland’s car, along with bleach and cleaning supplies. The child-safety locks had been engaged.

Rowland has not entered a plea, and his lawyer declined to comment. He was not an Uber driver, the company said.

“Everyone at Uber is devastated to hear about this unspeakable crime,” Grant Klinzman, a company spokesman, said in an email. “We spoke with the University of South Carolina president and will be partnering with the university to raise awareness on college campuses nationwide about this incredibly important issue.”

In the wake of reports of Josephson’s death, Carla Westlund, 30, thought once again about the night in 2017 when she was raped in Los Angeles by a man she mistakenly thought was her Uber driver. She said she fell asleep in the back seat of the car and woke to him beating her head against the seat.

“He had an Uber sticker,” she said. “He was pretending to be an Uber driver.”

After three hours in his car, Westlund said, she was able to convince the man to let her go outside her boyfriend’s house, and she immediately reported the attack and went to the hospital. Westlund said she felt revictimized by reporting the crime — a common complaint from sexual-assault survivors. She said that she had given additional details of the attack as she remembered more with each retelling, but that the officers had characterized this as changing her story.

“I felt like I was definitely being treated like I did something wrong,” she said. She now volunteers with PAVE, a nonprofit that works to end sexual violence.

In February 2018, Nicolas Morales was arrested and charged with raping her and six other women by posing as a ride-share driver. He pleaded not guilty and has a preliminary hearing scheduled for April 8.

Uber and Lyft have been criticized in the past for not adequately vetting their drivers or doing enough to ensure passenger safety, which has led to temporary bans or restrictions on the services in some cities. A 2018 CNN report found that 103 Uber drivers and 18 Lyft drivers had been accused of sexual assault or abuse. The companies conduct background checks and say passenger safety is their top priority.

Uber said it has worked with law enforcement since 2017 to teach riders how to avoid impostors. It urges people to double-check their ride’s license plate, make and model and verify the driver’s identity. Last year, it added a panic button that lets riders tap their screens and dial 911 directly from the app.

Uber and Lyft also distribute glowing dashboard lights in some markets called the Beacon and Amp that change color to match a hue on a passenger’s app. The lights are in limited distribution and not available to all drivers.

Harry Campbell, a driver for Uber and Lyft who hosts a podcast called The Rideshare Guy, said it was common for people to hop into the wrong car in the crush outside bars, airports, games or concerts, where hundreds of people are jostling for their cars.

“These sorts of mistakes are happening all the time,” Campbell said. “But there are some bad actors who realize this and take advantage.”

It is not hard to fake, safety experts and law enforcement authorities said.

Knockoff decals and light-up signs saying “Uber” and “Lyft” are easy to buy from major online retailers. Impostors trawl night spots when people have often been drinking and are particularly vulnerable, as they part with friends for the evening and search the dark for an unfamiliar car.

“They’re taking advantage of an individual who’s intoxicated and doesn’t have all their senses. They’re going to overlook little warning signs,” said Lt. Harrison Daniel of the Athens-Clarke County Police in Georgia, where a man was charged with posing as an Uber driver and raping a college student last year.

Identifying the attackers can also be difficult. Unlike actual ride-share drivers, they do not register their personal details in a ride-hailing service’s database, so police have to pull security footage, look for witnesses and search the streets for cars matching a suspect’s vehicle.

The driver who abducted and robbed Suarez in an empty parking lot behind a grocery store early that morning in July 2018 still has not been arrested, though police said the investigation was active.

Suarez escaped by jumping out of his moving car. She cracked her skull and broke her wrist and ankle. When she reported the attack, she said, police had seemed leery of her story and asked her about how she was dressed and what she had been doing out at 4 a.m.

She decided to speak out about the attack, posting photos of her injuries on social media and talking to a local television station. Some people responded by saying she was “crying wolf” and was to blame for getting into the wrong car.

Suarez said she believed that the man who attacked her was not there by coincidence that night.

“He was waiting for the right person,” she said. “He knew exactly what time to be out there. I think he’d done it in the past, and he’ll continue to do it. Because he’s still out there.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/us/fake-uber-driver-assaults.html" id="f2979416-2af2-31a8-ab5a-c4480a359841">The New York Times</a>.

The black sedan glided up to the Las Vegas hotel where Elizabeth Suarez was waiting to take an Uber home after a night of gambling. She recalled asking the driver: Are you waiting for Liz? Yeah, he responded. Get in.

They Thought It Was Their Uber. But the Driver Was a Predator.

Antonsen and his wife were lifelong churchgoers who sent their children to Sunday school and counted themselves as members of a parish in the archdiocese. The priest Antonsen was accusing had spent 14 years working at Chicago-area Catholic high schools.

But Antonsen, who is now 72, said reporting the allegations dropped him into a maze of church bureaucracy, in which his accusations were passed from one office to another before being quietly set aside.

The reason: The priest in question happened to be an Augustinian — one of dozens of religious orders that are overseen not by bishops, but by religious superiors in regions around the country and in Rome. Antonsen said archdiocesan officials told him to take his complaint to the Augustinians.

“They said because it was a religious order, they didn’t handle it,” Antonsen said.

Jesuits, Franciscans, Benedictines, Augustinians: the names are iconic, their founders immortalized by sainthood, their members often bound together by vows of poverty and obedience.

But when a priest or brother in a religious order is accused of abuse, victims and advocacy groups say their accusations are often mishandled because they are caught between separate institutions within the church: the dioceses that say it is not their responsibility to investigate, and religious orders that then fail to handle the claims.

Survivors said the bureaucratic distinction has turned them into second-class victims who frequently fall between the cracks.

In Illinois, an attorney general’s investigation into clerical sex abuse found widespread failures to investigate claims — and singled out the way diocesan officials forwarded accusations against religious order priests to the orders and then often closed the books.

“Little to no follow up from the dioceses was commonplace, leaving survivors without answers or resolutions,” the report said.

In Pennsylvania, a grand jury report highlighted abuses by members of religious orders and found sloppy record-keeping about order members. Victims of religious order priests are also specifically excluded from a compensation fund set up by archdioceses in Philadelphia and New York.

When most of the bishops have released lists of priests accused of abuse, they have omitted religious order priests who worked in their dioceses, leaving the public with a potentially incomplete view of the problem. Religious orders represent about a third of all U.S. Catholic clergy.

U.S. bishops in recent days were near Chicago on a weeklong spiritual retreat on the sex abuse crisis, where they were focused on prayer rather than formulating policy. Bishops do not oversee religious orders the way they preside over parishes and their diocesan priests.

But bishops do give order priests permission — called “faculties” — to work and minister in their communities. The order sends a letter saying the men are in good standing and face no misconduct allegations.

While bishops can pull that permission and restrict where religious-order members work, diocese officials have argued they do not have the power to investigate or remove priests from the order.

Advocates for victims said church officials become legally responsible once they grant permission for clergymen to work in a diocese.

“The religious orders have never gotten the scrutiny or the attention the Catholic bishops have gotten,” said Jeffrey Anderson, a lawyer who has filed suits against Catholic officials and religious orders on behalf of victims.

In an interview, William Kunkel, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s general counsel, and Leah McCluskey, its director of child abuse investigations, said the archdiocese reports every accusation to state attorney’s offices and follows up on allegations against priests from religious orders.

They said that while it was up to individual orders to carry out investigations, the archdiocese tracks their outcomes and sometimes acts as a go-between if a victim does not want any contact with priests from the same group as the accused.

“We deal with these allegations very seriously, and we follow up on them,” Kunkel said. “We certainly stay involved because they’re important issues to us.”

About 1,300 clergy from religious orders have been accused of abuse, according to tallies by advocacy groups, and the orders are now facing pressure to reveal which of their members have sexually abused children.

Last month, the Midwest and Maryland provinces of the Jesuits released 153 names of credibly accused clergy, and the organization said it would release more records this year detailing accusations against priests in the Northeast.

“It’s coming out piecemeal,” said Mark Padrez, president of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, an association of religious orders in the United States. “We want to be transparent, and we want to rebuild trust in the church.”

His own Dominican province in the western United States recently hired an outside law firm to sift through personnel records and release names of abusers stretching back to the 1930s. The Conference of Major Superiors of Men has encouraged orders to release names, but the group has no authority to force disclosures, Padrez said.

After the clerical abuse scandal exploded in 2002, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men adopted its own changes following the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Orders added victim assistance offices and background screenings for candidates, and hired accrediting companies to audit their sexual abuse responses.

The fate of abusers in religious orders can differ from diocesan priests. A 2013 update on the orders’ response to the crisis says that canon law requires orders not to expel abusers if they are repentant, but to instead try to keep them within their religious communities, under close supervision and away from children.

Last January, Robert Krankvich, 37, said he was gripped with terror when he picked up the phone to report his own story of sexual abuse to the Diocese of Joliet in Illinois.

Krankvich said it began when he was a freshman at Providence Catholic High School, and the school’s charismatic president, an Augustinian priest named Richard McGrath, befriended him. Krankvich filed a lawsuit, which is still pending, against the Augustinians saying that McGrath repeatedly abused him from the age of 13 to 15.

Years later, after suicide attempts, struggles with alcohol and drugs and depression, Krankvich saw news reports that McGrath had left the school after a student reported seeing him look at “potentially inappropriate material” on his phone. McGrath could not be reached for comment.

But when Krankvich called the Joliet diocese, he said church officials referred him to a priest who was Providence’s new president.

“It felt horrible,” he said. “Now you want me to talk to another priest from the school where this happened. I felt betrayed.”

It was the last time he tried to contact the church.

Antonsen said he decided to report his abuse in 2006, after blocking out the memories for years.

One weekend, when he was a sophomore at St. Rita High School, he said a priest named the Rev. Michael P. Hogan offered to take him to a camp in Milwaukee, and the two ended up drinking in a motel room. Antonsen said the priest started touching him, and he ran from the motel.

Antonsen said his life soon spiraled downward. He quit his high-school football team. His grades plummeted. He developed a drinking problem.

After Antonsen took his complaints to the Archdiocese of Chicago, he said he was connected with a priest from the Midwest Augustinians and told his story once again.

The Augustinian official said Hogan was living in a nursing home and denied the abuse. Antonsen said he pressed the order to put out a call for other victims or look deeper into his claims, but it demurred.

“That was the last they ever did,” Antonsen said. “They just believed him.”

A 2006 letter to Antonsen from the Rev. Jerome Knies, then the vicar provincial of the Midwest Augustinians, noted Antonsen’s request that the order conduct a wider search for victims and urged him to take up their offer of counseling “in the interest of healing and reconciliation.”

Hogan died in September 2008, and has never been named as an accused abuser by church officials. His obituary on the website of the Midwest Augustinians makes no mention of Antonsen’s claim or any others, and honors his work as a teacher, vice principal and substance abuse counselor.

The archdiocese said it had followed up on Antonsen’s complaint by alerting the state’s attorney of Cook County and staying in regular contact with the Augustinian official handling his allegations.

The Midwest Augustinians and Knies did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, the order says it has taken rigorous steps to prevent abuse, and encouraged victims to come forward and “find us willing to address their needs with a pastoral response.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/us/catholic-church-sex-abuse-priests.html" id="f867cd68-29e7-31f2-ac7c-b88a96d9cc26">The New York Times</a>.

Victims of Abuse by Religious Order Priests Say Their Claims Fall Through the Cracks

When Larry Antonsen decided to report a priest who sexually abused him during high school, he believed the Archdiocese of Chicago was the right place to go.

Gonzalez was one of six innocent people who collectively spent 77 years in prison in the murder of a 68-year-old woman named Helen Wilson, whose death haunted this rural county for decades. Now, years after DNA evidence exonerated the defendants, they are about to collect a $28 million civil rights judgment against Gage County, which prosecuted them based on false confessions.

But because the county has limited financial resources and a dwindling population, nearly all of its 22,000 residents must foot the bill by paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in higher property taxes. County leaders have pleaded for help from state lawmakers and even flirted with declaring bankruptcy.

“Do I think it’s fair these people are going to have to pay us off?” Gonzalez asked. “No. But it wasn’t fair what they did to us, either.”

The $28 million jury award is one of the largest judgments ever levied against such a small place, say experts who study wrongful convictions. It has stirred resentment in the coffee shops and bars of Beatrice, a small town where suspicions about the defendants — known as the Beatrice Six — still linger like an oil stain on the road.

“There’s a feeling of, ‘Why us?’” said Myron Dorn, a state senator and former county supervisor who has introduced a bill that would allow Gage County to impose a sales tax to help raise money. “Why are we being held accountable for paying this off?”

The Beatrice case is an extreme example of the difficulties faced by those who have been promised compensation for being wrongfully convicted and spending years behind bars.

In Illinois, exonerated prisoners spent months waiting for compensation as state lawmakers dithered over passing a budget. Michigan’s wrongful compensation fund ran low on money earlier this year and exonerees told The Detroit News that they were left to wait for payments as a bill to replenish the fund with $10 million moved through the state Legislature.

Some in Gage County say the community has a moral obligation to compensate the Beatrice Six. Other residents say they should not be held financially responsible for an investigation and prosecution that unfolded more than three decades ago.

“I wasn’t even born,” said Nick Faulder, 25, who manages a paint store. He expects to pay an additional $3,500 in property taxes this year on his family’s 320-acre farm. “I’m unfortunate enough to have to pay for the mistakes of the past leadership.”

But a darker view also pervades conversations across Beatrice’s downtown among those who still believe that the six people who were convicted are guilty, despite the pardons, the DNA evidence and the state-run investigation identifying a different killer.

“They knew too much about it to be innocent,” Karen Probst said one afternoon as she chatted with customers inside her family’s quilting store. Her family owns hundreds of acres of precious irrigated land outside Beatrice, with tax bills that she said were likely to increase by $10,000 or more.

“They had some part in it,” her daughter, Ann Freese, said.

The tangled case began in February 1985, when Wilson was found inside the apartment where she lived by herself. She had been beaten, raped and suffocated.

Wilson was the heart of her family, recalled her grandson, Bob Houseman. She volunteered at a Methodist church in town, composed little poems for her grandchildren on their birthdays and was forever snapping photos and making tape recordings at family parties to preserve the memories.

“She’s the forgotten person in this,” Houseman said one morning, standing at the counter of his family’s dry cleaning business, where he has spent 30 years answering people’s questions about his grandmother’s murder.

As the official investigation went cold, a former Beatrice police officer, Burdette Searcey, was pursuing his own private investigation, and eventually took over the case after he was hired as a Gage County sheriff’s deputy in 1989.

Searcey, who did not respond to a request for comment, focused on six mostly poor, troubled people with loose ties to Beatrice. Some had substance abuse problems and criminal records. One of the three women charged in the murder said she had been sexually assaulted multiple times as a girl and had spent her life dealing with mental illness. Another had developmental disabilities and said she had been raped by her stepfather.

“None of us were living aboveboard lives,” Gonzalez said. “We were all partyers. We were all basically chemically induced idiots. That made us disposable. That made it OK for them to throw us away.”

Gage County built its criminal case against the Beatrice Six by drawing out false confessions and manufactured memories from three of the defendants, a state-run inquiry and court reviews would later find. Investigators showed them photos of the crime scene. They dangled cooperation as a way of serving shorter sentences and avoiding the electric chair. They even urged the defendants to reach into their dreams to recall “suppressed memories” of the murder.

It was enough to convince five of the six to plead guilty or no contest in Wilson’s murder. Only one, Joseph White, took his case to trial, and he was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to life in prison after three of his co-defendants gave false testimony against him.

White never stopped insisting that he was innocent, and in 2008 he and his lawyers were able to obtain DNA tests that cleared White and the other five.

A task force led by Nebraska’s attorney general then identified the real killer as Bruce Allen Smith, who had been 22 at the time of the murder and was seen heading toward Wilson’s apartment building the night she was killed. Smith died in 1992.

After the Beatrice Six were exonerated, they filed a lawsuit against Gage County and the investigators who had put them behind bars.

Gage County spent a decade and nearly $2 million in legal fees fighting the suit, rejecting offers to settle for $15 million, before its final appeals were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court early this month. The county’s insurance will not cover the judgment, which puts taxpayers on the hook for the full $28 million.

As people around Beatrice wait for this year’s tax bills to arrive, the case boils up constantly in conversation, said Dana Hydo, whose family runs the Gems and Junk shop downtown.

“I’m amazed at how many people believe they did it,” she said one afternoon as she was tagging inventory. “I truly believe we put them in jail illegally.”

One of her customers piped up: “No way,” she said. “I think they did it.”

The Beatrice Six are not there to be part of the debate. They scattered across Nebraska and the rest of the country after being released from prison and cleared, and they do not speak much to one another. White, who spent almost 20 years in prison, was killed in a workplace accident in Alabama in 2011. One of the six still believes the false confession she gave implicating herself.

“It ruined all of our lives,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez now works as a cashier at a grocery store in the tiny town of York, Nebraska, and said the $2 million she is owed could come in handy. She needs to buy a car, see a dentist to fix her teeth and install air-conditioning in her house before Nebraska’s summer swelter descends.

But in her view, the judgment is also poisoned, the money forever rooted in the murder of one innocent woman and the wrongful convictions of six others.

“This is not something you win at the lottery, something I’m inheriting from a rich relative,” she said. “Nobody wants this.”

Gonzalez, a voracious reader, often gets to work early to read the newspapers in the grocery store break room, and not long ago came upon a letter to the editor from a Gage County farmer who argued that his taxes should not have to go up on account of someone else’s actions 30 years ago.

Gonzalez said she was struck by the irony.

“Because I know about paying for something somebody else did,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/us/beatrice-six-nebraska.html" id="4106cebc-673f-3b9d-aefd-855b2a9117a5">The New York Times</a>.

A Rural County Owes $28 Million for Wrongful Convictions. It Doesn't Want to Pay.

BEATRICE, Neb. — Kathy Gonzalez knows that many people across the cornfields and cattle ranches of eastern Nebraska believe she is a murderer. It does not change the fact that they owe her millions of dollars.

A new pork processing plant was hiring workers for $15.95 an hour — nearly 10 times what Pretrick, 26, made. He would get a one-way plane ticket. A hotel room. Free meals. Cash to send home to his wife and two sons. Hundreds of other Micronesians had already signed up.

“It was big money for us,” Pretrick said. “We left.”

Poverty propelled the Micronesians to take jobs trimming pork carcasses, jobs that few Americans want in an era of record low unemployment. And a quirk of law made Micronesians like Pretrick uniquely valuable to employers who might be worried about becoming the next target of the Trump administration’s workplace immigration raids: They were legal, allowed to work in the United States without visas or green cards under decades-old agreements rooted in the U.S.’ atomic testing and military history in the Pacific.

But what unfolded after 200 Micronesians made the 7,000-mile journey over the past year to the cornfields and hog farms of western Iowa became a tangled migration saga of what the workers called mistreatment and broken promises.

The workers said their pay was siphoned off to repay their $1,800 plane tickets. They said a recruiter for the pork plant seized their passports and threatened to have the workers deported if they got sick or missed shifts. The workers struggled to find their footing in an unfamiliar city where they knew nobody, spoke little English and spent their days being shuttled back and forth between their hotel and 10-hour shifts at the pork plant.

“We were lost,” Pretrick said.

For decades, thousands of people from Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands have migrated to work in the United States at nursing homes, cleaning companies, coffee farms and food plants in Hawaii, Arkansas, Missouri and elsewhere. They arrive and can work legally under agreements called Compacts of Free Association, but they are usually ineligible for Medicaid or other federal benefits — an omission that advocates said leaves many islanders impoverished and sick in the United States.

Now, as the Trump administration slashes refugee admissions and arrests hundreds of immigrant workers in high-profile raids at meatpacking plants in Mississippi and Tennessee, Pacific Islanders are becoming an increasingly attractive option for businesses searching for entry-level workers.

“These employers understand we’re legal residents,” said Jocelyn Howard, program director for We Are Oceania, a Hawaii-based advocacy group. “For recruiters in America, it’s a good opportunity because we’re legal.”

The workers who landed in Iowa were recruited to work at a huge new pork plant operated by Seaboard Triumph Foods that employs 2,400 people and butchers about 21,000 pigs a day.

Seaboard Triumph touts its technological advances and community awards, but it is now facing an international public relations mess after a video went viral showing one of the company’s recruiters yelling at workers in a hotel lobby and then grabbing for a woman who had been recording him.

The embassy of the Federated States of Micronesia sent the State Department a letter calling for an investigation. The union that represents most workers at the plant began looking into the allegations. Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa said the state would temporarily block millions of dollars in incentives for Seaboard Triumph.

A spokeswoman for Seaboard Triumph said the company followed all labor laws and had not forced or coerced Micronesians to travel to Iowa. The company said it helped its Micronesian recruits adjust to life and work in the state by paying for temporary housing, meals and transportation after they arrived. It gave each worker a $100 gift card.

After the complaints erupted, Seaboard Triumph said it had suspended the recruiter who was seen on the video yelling at Micronesian workers and declaring that the female workers were “my women.” Last week, Seaboard sent a letter to its Micronesian employees saying it was canceling their obligations to repay their airfare.

“We’ll continue to support you as one of our valuable employees,” the letter said.

Micronesian recruits who arrived over the past year, some with little more than shorts and flip-flops, said in interviews they had no problem with their working conditions at the plant.

Micronesians were hardly the first immigrants to go to work in western Iowa’s packing plants. While much of the landscape is overwhelmingly white and conservative — voters here narrowly elected anti-immigrant Rep. Steve King to a ninth term in 2018 — a more diverse future is taking shape in meatpacking towns like Storm Lake and Sioux City.

At factory shift changes, a polyphony of dialects from Central America, Africa and Myanmar floats through parking lots. The Virgin of Guadalupe hangs from some rearview mirrors; pastel leis dangle from others. On Saturday afternoons, Latino families line up for tangy mangonadas at La Palapa, a food trailer in Sioux City. The Hong Kong Food Store stocks its shelves with dried shrimp, spicy kimchi, taro, palm oil and other flavors of distant homes.

“We’re a meatpacking town,” said Mayor Bob Scott of Sioux City. “They came, they assimilated, they’re coaches in our schools.”

Micronesian workers said their trouble began soon after they boarded flights from the island of Pohnpei for the two-day trek to Iowa. Many were nervous about traveling outside Micronesia for the first time, and they said that a guide who had been promised to them to navigate their airport transfers never showed up.

They landed at 3 a.m. for long layovers in Honolulu, often confused and hungry. Some did not have enough money for an airport meal. They were thirsty because they did not realize they could ask a flight attendant for more juice or soda. One worker kept visiting the airplane bathroom to refill a plastic water glass, said Mele Tataipu Arati, a Hawaiian Samoan relative of some workers who lives in northern Iowa.

Howard, the Hawaii-based advocate, said that members of Oahu’s Micronesian diaspora began rushing to the airport with food and water for arriving workers and helped them connect to their mainland flights.

“These people were so hungry,” she said. “In our culture we’re so trusting and respecting and caring for each other. We expect the same. But in America it’s different. You’re on your own.”

Several workers said that a recruiter for the plant took their passports, ostensibly to verify their legal work status and get Social Security numbers, but then refused to return them. They said they did not have any other identification to cash checks, open bank accounts or wire money back home. Seaboard Triumph said it was not holding any employees’ passports.

Outside the plant one afternoon, Danifer Mark said he felt stranded. He was bewildered by the U.S.’ immigration bureaucracy and was contemplating whether he should quit and try to move in with relatives in Cincinnati.

“How can I go back?” he asked. “I’m stuck. I don’t have money. What am I going to do?”

Curtis Weilbacher, a Micronesian citizen who helped hire many of the workers, attributed the problems to cultural divides, misunderstandings and misbehavior by workers who drank too much and caused trouble. (Weilbacher is not the recruiter who was suspended after being captured berating workers on the video)

“The mistake we made is we sent all of them at once,” Weilbacher said, as he headed into a workers’ meeting to discuss their grievances. “When you pick apples, the next day there are some rotten ones inside. You need to remove them.”

Some of the Micronesian workers said Seaboard and the local hotel that housed them had been fair and welcoming. The hotel provided dinners, karaoke nights and a free shuttle to take them to the plant. They said their countrymen and Micronesian officials had blown the complaints out of proportion on social media.

But others were adrift. They struggled to find apartments or come up with the advance rent and security deposits that U.S. landlords required, and felt as if they had no option but to stay on at the downtown hotel that had initially put them up free.

“There’s three of us, and it’s $1,500 a month,” said Jowain Alexander, 34, who trims pork shoulders. “They told us they’d find a house for us. They didn’t. They said they’ll provide food. But now we have to pay for our own food. I don’t want to go out on the streets, sleeping under a bridge.”

SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Anthony Pretrick was scraping by as a fisherman in his Pacific island homeland of Micronesia when he met a job recruiter with an irresistible offer: There was a fortune to be made slaughtering hogs in a faraway place called Iowa.

Jack Healy

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