THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, January 25, 2025
|
|
|
Hello! In this issue:
- A police officer chased a Native teen to his death. Days later, the police force shut down without explanation.
- A Marine unit reckons with the legacy of a war based on a lie, 20 years later.
- Reveal was honored this week with two duPont Awards.
|
|
THIS WEEK’S PODCAST
After the Crash
|
|
|
Blossom Old Bull visits a memorial where her son Braven Glenn died on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Credit: Tailyr Irvine
|
|
In 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team.
That November, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn was killed in a police car chase that resulted in a head-on collision with a train. Desperate for details about the accident, she went to the police station, only to find it had shut down without any notice.
“The doors were locked. It looked like it wasn’t in operation anymore—like they just upped and left,” Old Bull said. “It's, like, there was a life taken, and you guys just closed everything down without giving the family any answers?”
This kicks off a yearslong search to find out what happened to Glenn and how a police force could disappear overnight without explanation. This week on Reveal, in an update to a story that first aired last year, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels investigates the crash. The result is at once an examination of a mother’s journey to uncover the details of her son’s final moments and a sweeping look at a broken system of tribal policing.
|
|
🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
|
|
|
“They still have these internal wounds that are born of combat, and then we kind of throw them to the wolves a little bit.”
|
|
|
Rob Bracknell spent 22 years in the Marines and later became a staff judge advocate, advising commanders on decisions around court martials and nonjudicial punishments. Often, the cases were for Marines who experienced combat, lost friends, and might be struggling with substance abuse. Bracknell said he had to weigh competing factors in recommending punishment: A Marine who’s struggling still has to conform to the law and the norms of Marine Corps culture.
|
|
|
|
|
|
🏆 The duPont-Columbia Awards recognize the best in audio and video journalism, so we were deeply honored to win two duPonts this week: for 40 Acres and a Lie, our three-part audio series with the Center for Public Integrity, and for We Regret to Inform You, which was reported by Brian Howey in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley and the Los Angeles Times.
Congratulations also to the Murder in Boston podcast from the Boston Globe, a fellow winner that will be familiar to Reveal listeners, as we featured their reporting in a recent episode.
|
|
|
This issue of The Weekly Reveal was written by Kate Howard and edited by Nikki Frick. If you enjoyed this issue, forward it to a friend. Have some thoughts? Drop us a line with feedback or ideas!
|
|
|
|
|
