In the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, I went to New York to report on a story about Johanna Sigmund, a young woman from Wyndmoor who perished after one of the hijacked planes rammed the north tower.
Over the course of my career, I’ve spent more time than anyone would want writing pieces about people whose lives were cut short prematurely. One of the most memorable was Johanna, whose story and positive spirit remain seared into my soul.
Johanna’s parents invited me, a stranger, into their home at their worst hour. They took the time to tell me about their only daughter, and shared photograph after photograph after photograph — Johanna smiling after she ran the New York City Marathon, Johanna posing with her girlfriends at a wedding, and so on.
One image stood out.
It was a photo of Johanna, 25, and her brother, John, 23, smiling while standing arm in arm at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. The photo was taken two months before the terror attacks. In the background loomed the twin towers.
An article by Paul Davies about Johanna Sigmund in the Oct. 19, 2001, edition of the Daily News.Staff
Johanna’s story has stuck with me for a quarter century, but her life is emblematic of the promise and potential of so many others who were lost. At least 40 people with ties to Philadelphia and its western suburbs were killed in the attacks, including 18 from Bucks County, 11 from Montgomery County, five in Chester County, eight from Delaware County, and three from Philadelphia. It may be impossible for any of us to fathom how many other lives were forever impacted by the horrors of that day.
I wondered how Johanna’s family and friends had fared over the years.
So much has been lost in the 25 years since 9/11. Johanna would have turned 50 on the first day of summer — the longest day of sunlight. Her elegant beauty remains frozen in time, and — all these years later — her life remains a catalyst for good.
A scholarship fund set up in her name continues to help students attend St. Malachy School in North Philadelphia, as well as another at her alma mater, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy.
Johanna packed a lot into her brief time here. She was the captain of the field hockey, lacrosse, and squash teams in high school. She studied economics and played field hockey at Fairfield University, and spent a semester in Paris before moving to New York in 1998 with three friends from Philadelphia.
When I met with Johanna’s roommates a few weeks after the attack, they shared stories of her love of cooking, dancing, and listening to U2, often replaying the song “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” that begins, “I’m not afraid of anything in this world.”
From left: Johanna Sigmund, Rory McDevitt, and Kim Ongaro were all bridesmaids at the wedding of their friend, Lexie Beatty, in May 2001. Sigmund was one of the victims in the 9/11 attacks.h
Johanna cared for others. She distributed pizza and McDonald’s to the homeless people in her neighborhood. She helped a woman who was thrown from a taxi get to a hospital. Johanna spent the night by her side and returned home in the morning with blood on her clothes.
Kimberly Ongaro, a roommate and friend from Springside, called her “an angel.”
The toughest interview in the weeks after the attack was with Johanna’s boyfriend, Joe Bonavita. They had dated for several years and had discussed marriage.
Their final weekend together was a whirlwind. They went to the Yankees game Friday night and drove to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., on Saturday, met up with friends, attended the Army football game, and walked through the cemetery for soldiers, which included Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
On Sunday, Johanna competed in a 5K race down Broadway before continuing on as part of her training for the Philadelphia Marathon. She and Joe shared dinner that night.
Johanna Sigmund and her boyfriend, Joe Bonavita, at the wedding of her friend Lexie Beatty Morris.
Johanna did not feel well on Monday, but went to work. When she was still under the weather on Tuesday — Sept. 11 — Joe urged her to stay home.
But she went into the office at an investment firm on the 93rd floor of the north tower.
Joe worked near the Trade Center. As he exited the subway, he saw the first plane smash into the north tower.
A life upended
I located her brother, John, and emailed him. He responded a few minutes later and graciously agreed to speak. When we connected after 25 years, it almost felt like old friends catching up.
John told me how 9/11 upended his life.
He had planned to move to New York after college, but lost interest after the attack. He visited ground zero to commemorate the first anniversary. President George W. Bush greeted families, including John’s aunt, who offered veiled advice regarding the plans to invade Iraq. “I hope you are making a prayerful decision,” she told the president.
Bush was taken aback, but continued shaking hands before circling back to tell John’s aunt that he prayed every day.
A photograph of Johanna Sigmund running in the New York City Marathon in November 2000.
After college, John, a Spanish speaker, spent a year with AmeriCorps teaching literacy to second graders in Kensington. After he explained to one class’s teacher why he wanted to take off for the anniversary of 9/11, she had her students write notes of support. John was struck by how many kids shared stories of loved ones they had lost to violence.
“Everyone has their 9/11,” he said.
Along the way, we all pay a price. Some more than others. But how one responds is a lesson for all as we navigate these trying times 25 years after 9/11.
John said he wonders how his life would have been different if not for Sept. 11. After a year teaching in Philadelphia, he moved to Texas, in part to get away. He earned a master’s degree in art education at the University of Texas in Austin before going on to teach at Say Sí, an after-school arts program in San Antonio.
John’s attempt to get away brought him back to New York. One of his students won an art award that included a trip for the student and teacher to Carnegie Hall. The artwork was displayed at the Winter Garden located near ground zero in May 2010.
“My heart sank,” John said. “I didn’t want to go anywhere near ground zero.”
Even then, nearly a decade after the towers fell, ground zero remained little more than a giant pit with the Freedom Tower slowly rising alongside it. In a macabre daily scene, tourists jammed the sidewalks, gawking and posing for pictures in front of what John could only see as a mass grave, while street hustlers sold photos of the hijacked planes crashing into the towers.
John tried to maintain his composure as he made his way through the gauntlet to the Winter Garden, but a man stepped in front of him and tried to sell him a fiery photo from the attack.
John snapped. He grabbed the stack of photos from the man, threw them in the air, and cussed him out. The two got into a tussle. After the fracas, John tried to gather himself by channeling his sister’s unflappable spirit.
John Sigmund (center) holds a picture of his sister, Johanna, as he and his family run down Kelly Drive toward the finish line of the Philadelphia Marathon in November 2001.d
“Johanna, help me,” he said to himself while overlooking ground zero. “I need to get it together.”
‘Beyond coincidence’
John calmed down and carried on. After the event, he met friends at a nearby bar. John was telling them about the run-in with the street hustler when he suddenly saw Johanna’s old boyfriend, Joe Bonavita, across the bar.
Joe had moved to New Orleans but, in a twist of fate, was in town for a 9/11 event. The two were not close but quickly bonded. John viewed the reunion as his sister’s handiwork.
“Some things are beyond coincidence,” he said.
Eventually, John did move to New York. The city helped him better find himself. After years of worrying about disappointing his parents or adding to their suffering, John told them he was gay. His parents, who have a deep Catholic faith, were supportive.
Twelve years ago, John returned to Philadelphia and fell in love with the city, and especially Fairmount Park.
After running the Philadelphia Marathon in November 2001, John Sigmund holds a photo of his sister, Johanna, and wears two medals around his neck — one he earned after finishing the race and another his sister won after completing the New York City Marathon in November 2000.Courtesy of Tony Webb / Office of the City Representative
But tragedy struck again in September. Three days after the 20th anniversary of 9/11, his father died.
For John, September remains the cruelest month. But he credits a strong support network of cousins and friends for helping him navigate life’s challenges — and added that Johanna always feels close by.
“I have a thing with the wind,” John said. “When I think about her, the wind will kick up.”
After losing his sister and father in September, John and his partner, Jaime, decided to add some positivity to the month. They got married last Sept. 26 and are planning an anniversary party in a couple of weeks.
On Sept. 11, 1990, President George H.W. Bush gave a speech to a joint session of Congress with his vision for a “New World Order.” He promised that instead of the spheres of influence and deadly competition that had dominated international politics, there would now be a future where “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.”
For a while, it seemed like this could be true. War and conflict did not end in the 1990s, but peace seemed plausible.
A United Nations-sanctioned coalition pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Israeli and Palestinian leaders signed the Oslo Accords, which promised a shared future of two states for two peoples. Genocidal leaders in Rwanda and Serbia were removed from power. Even the Irish conflict, famously “800 years” old, was ended with the Good Friday Agreement.
The United States reigned as the world’s sole superpower, and the next strongest militaries and economies mostly belonged to our allies. The Pax Americana seemed to have reached an unassailable zenith.
Then it all came crashing down.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, most of us did not realize it was the first step in the dismantling of the world we knew. I certainly did not. After all, I was only 12 years old.
My seventh-grade classmates and I initially had no idea what had happened. We knew that our teachers were upset, and we caught a glimpse of maneuvering warships on the faculty lounge TV. The next thing we knew, we were being told to head home. For me, that meant hopping on SEPTA’s 67 bus. My younger brother and I watched news coverage of the devastation from our living room couch.
Smoke rises from the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, seen from the west and framing the Woolworth Building in the distance, in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.TING-LI WANG
At first, the attacks seemed to make the country stronger. We heard the inspiring story of the passengers who fought back on United 93, their plane crashing into a Pennsylvania field instead of its intended Washington target. When President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 30 during the World Series, it felt like everyone was cheering him on, Republican or Democrat, Yankees fan or not. When he delivered a strike despite wearing a bulletproof vest under his pullover, it seemed like a promise that everything would get back to normal.
Much of what went wrong can be traced to our initial efforts to avenge the dead.
When the U.S.-led international coalition invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to destroy al-Qaeda and bring its leader, Osama bin Laden, to justice, it seemed like a moral and strategic necessity. In March 2003, the Bush administration expanded the war on terror to Iraq under dubious claims of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. A year later, as the justification for the war was falling apart, revelations of brutal torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq destroyed what little credibility and international goodwill Bush had left.
The reaction to 9/11 itself also presaged what was to come. While most Americans rallied to the flag after the attacks, a persistent subculture insisted they were faked in some way. The so-called 9/11 Truth Movement may have been a collection of cranky conspiracy theorists, but they represented a model for where America was heading — a time when people increasingly cannot agree on basic facts and no longer inhabit a shared reality.
President George W. Bush speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast on May 1, 2003.J. Scott Applewhite
It isn’t just failures abroad that have fostered this sense of cynicism. In the ’90s, there was a great spirit of optimism about new technologies. The internet was heralded as a way to break down barriers and foster international cooperation. Initially, this also seemed to be true.
On message boards, once-lonely hobbyists found one another, sharing knowledge about topics as disparate as model trains, hiking, or fashion. Even fierce political opponents like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich could agree on letting the internet mostly regulate itself.
Today, 41% of Americans report having little to no confidence in tech companies. Instead of democratizing access to information, social media has flooded the zone with nonsense. Online ad revenue is reaped by tech companies while content providers fight over the scraps. Many local newspapers, their economic model upended, have either disappeared or been hollowed out. More and more, people are getting their news from short-form video apps like TikTok or Instagram, or from influencers who rarely cite their sources or explore the nuance behind any issue. The public’s distrust of Big Tech has somehow not spread to the figures the companies’ algorithms have pushed to the forefront.
The 2008 financial crisis also took a toll. Americans have disagreed over just about everything in our history, but the wave of foreclosures, stagnation in wages, and continued affluence for the country’s wealthiest sapped the public’s faith in the American dream. During the Great Depression, some wealthy figures like Charles Schwab and the Vanderbilts saw their fortunes shrink. During the Great Recession, the big banks received a $700 billion bailout, while 10 million ordinary Americans lost their homes.
Republican senators explain their opposition to President Barack Obama’s financial stimulus package during a news conference at the Capitol in January 2009.
In the 2000 election, both Democratic candidate Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush were viewed favorably by most of the American electorate. These days, a more divisive politics rules. Supporters of Donald Trump, convinced by the president that the 2020 election was stolen, stormed the U.S. Capitol. While it is true the 2000 election was itself controversial, with lawsuits about recounts in Florida ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore conceded “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy.” Both Gore and President Bill Clinton attended Bush’s inauguration.
Of course, given the failures of the last 25 years, that establishment deserves to be questioned. The mainstream leaders of both parties share responsibility for the erosion in public confidence. Not only have they failed to anticipate the challenges of the 21st century, but their relentless partisanship has also made crafting sustainable solutions impossible. Nor have they offered new ideas that can compete with pledges to put every American on Medicare or claims that all our problems will disappear if we simply deport enough people.
That doesn’t mean the next 25 years can’t be better.
The beautiful thing about government of the people, for the people, and by the people is that we are in control. Just as our predecessors freed themselves from British rule, destroyed the power of slave holders that was corrupting our republic, reined in Gilded Age trusts, defeated fascism, and marched to finally make good on our nation’s stated belief that all men are created equal, those of us charged with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship today can also change our nation for the better. We must.
Even as the Russian invasion of Ukraine drags toward year five, radical Israeli settlers seize land meant for a Palestinian state, and our nation divides itself over every ginned-up bit of culture war ephemera, we retain the same qualities that made us the world’s hegemon in the first place — ingenuity, openness to risk, and drive.
Like the brave passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, we must recognize our predicament, find our resolve, and fight to ensure terror doesn’t win.
SCHUYLKILL HAVEN, Pa. — Brett Sell had a bad feeling about coming to work on July 28. The painting contractor was part of a small work crew rehabbing a two-story commercial property in Orwigsburg — a borough of just over 3,000 people in the heart of east-central Pennsylvania’s coal country — and workers had seen what looked like an unmarked law enforcement vehicle circling the site the day before.
“Yo, look up!” Sell said to his fellow painter, Orlando Rivera.
Police cars from Orwigsburg and neighboring Schuylkill Haven, lights flashing, blocked off the street while agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in tactical vests swarmed the work site. Sell was stunned as he and four other workers were quickly handcuffed by ICE agents — even though Sell and Rivera are native-born U.S. citizens.
Rivera, a biracial Puerto Rican who grew up in Bethlehem and now lives in another Schuylkill County borough, Tamaqua, said he was “embarrassed” as he stood in handcuffs while locals came out into the street to gawk. “I do a lot of work in that town,” he said, adding that “it made me feel like I was portrayed as a criminal.”
And he’s convinced he was handcuffed — even after offering to show the agents his ID — because of his race. “I get that my skin tone is tan,” he said, “but with the Fourth Amendment, they can’t go off my skin color, you know?”
Two workers were detained. One was later released, but the other — Catarino Hernandez Velasquez — a Mexican native who’s lived in Pottsville for at least 14 years, and a well-known contractor who poured concrete for the just-reopened 1928 Miners Hotel — was taken away and sent to ICE’s Moshannon Valley Detention Center in Central Pennsylvania, known for its overcrowding and complaints about lousy food and medical neglect. Kevin Medina, a leader of the local Latino community, bemoaned the arrest of a “very hardworking gentleman with a stable contracting business in the area … very busy.”
Now, gone … in a matter of minutes.
Painting contractors Brett Sell (left, white painting outfit) and Orlando Rivera are handcuffed during an ICE raid on a job site in Orwigsburg, Pa., on July 28. The men — both native-born U.S. citizens — were released without charges.Facebook
The Orwigsburg raid was a dramatic moment, yet such scenes are becoming increasingly common this summer in Schuylkill County, Pa., a constellation of rusty boroughs where coal was king in the 20th century, and Donald Trump got 71% of the vote in 2024.
‘In Schuylkill Haven, they can’t go there’
Since the start of the year, ICE — flush with a whopping windfall of $170 billion shoveled by Congress to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to amp up immigration raids and detention — has dangled pledges to many tiny police departments. In Schuylkill County, which locals call “the Skook,” more than $1.5 million has been distributed to law enforcement. The police chief and pols all but publicly salivated at the chance — under the controversial program known as 287(g) — to buy a desperately needed new cruiser or other cop tools in return for working with ICE to arrest and hold local immigrants for the feds.
Some 14 law enforcement agencies — the most of any of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties — have inked 287(g) pacts with ICE, launching a new era of beat cops making immigration arrests that has roiled daily life in Schuylkill County. Practically overnight, cops were setting up truck inspections on a busy rural bypass or running checkpoints at places like the Freeze, a popular ice cream joint on the main drag, Route61. Officers were pouncing on immigrants who showed up at the county courthouse in Pottsville, or assisting ICE on workplace raids like the one in Orwigsburg.
Arrests leading to ICE detention and deportation cases skyrocketed across Schuylkill County — more than 100 since the start of the year, with most the result of ICE cooperation under 287(g) — leaving families torn apart while creating a climate of fear among what had been a rapidly growing Latino community in and around Pottsville. Suddenly, essential workers or their loved ones grew terrified that a busted taillight or failing to signal while shifting lanes could turn their world upside down.
One borough with just over 5,000 residents — Schuylkill Haven — has seen at least 59 immigration arrests in about four months, a staggering number. The figures come from Chicago-based ICE watcher Andrew Thrasher, a law-firm staffer and data expert who regularly crunches federal statistics obtained by the Deportation Data Project through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
“People are afraid to go out,” Medina — who immigrated to Schuylkill County from Honduras, became a U.S. citizen and a notary and insurance agent, and formed a local Latino support group, Puentes de Apoyo — told me when we met in a Hispanic-owned Pottsville pizza joint. “I’ve got one contractor who told me they’ve got to change routes because now they know that in Schuylkill Haven, even they can’t go over there. And the stress, mentally, that I’m seeing in these families of, ‘What am I goingto do if this happens?’”
A map, provided by immigration statistics expert Andrew Thrasher, showing 13 current Schuylkill County localities that have signed 287(g) cooperation agreements with ICE. A 14th, Mahanoy Township, is inactive.Andrew Thrasher
The wave of arrests has put Schuylkill County — mostly rural, mostly conservative, and far removed from the glare of media or the kind of organized ICE resistance you see in big cities — on the cutting edge of an aggressive new strategy for mass deportation. This approach is bringing a xenophobic Donald Trump regime closer to fulfilling its once-unthinkable goal of removing one million immigrants from the United States every year.
Trump Country embraces 287(g)
The tag team of local cops and tactical-gear-wearing ICE agents is the biggest reason why federal immigration arrests spiked in July to a Trump-era high of 49,571, or about 1,600 every day. Statisticians who are tracking mass deportation said that 287(g) arrests — named for the section of a 1996 law that authorized the program — involving local police went from less than 3% of the total under Joe Biden to about 15% now, and will only climb higher as hundreds of new departments sign up.
This year, about 58% of the people nabbed by cops and turned over to ICE under 287(g) have no criminal record or pending charges, a higher rate than the typical ICE arrestee. Thrasher found the number for Pennsylvania is even higher, about 70%.
While not as numerous as inbig and heavily conservative states like Texas and Florida, the Keystone State’s 1,216 arrests under the 287(g) program in the first seven months of 2026 rank the commonwealth fourth in the nation — on a Top 15 list made upof states almost exclusively south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Pennsylvania’s outlier status is punctuated by the fact that two large bordering states — New York and Maryland — have moved, with some bumps, to ban their police agencies from signing 287(g) agreements. Almost all of the Pennsylvania arrests came from smaller cities, exurbs, or rural areas — especially the south-central and northeastern regions of the state, and a smattering of western localities — that voted heavily for Trump and his anti-immigrant message.
The small-town nature of this renewed push for mass deportation is a defining feature of the Trump regime strategy, and not a bug. The race among Schuylkill County’s police departments — many with just three or four cops, including the chief — to sign up for 287(g) and its pumped-up pile of cash came exactly as the two Minneapolis murders of U.S. citizens by immigration cops were fueling growing public outrage.
As a brutal ICE winter ended, the Trump regime ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the notorious field general Greg Bovino, and ended an era of loud, publicity-seeking operations with catchy names in large blue cities that stirred up local protesters who blew whistles and filmed every move by the masked, armed agents.
Immigrants’ rights advocacy group members and their supporters hold up letters that read “The people vs 287(g)” during a rally last September in Doylestown against the Bucks County sheriff’s efforts to implement a 287(g) program.Daniella Heminghaus | Bucks Coun
Under new DHS boss Markwayne Mullin, ICE and its allies are focused on what you might call small-batch immigration busts — in courthouses or on airport security lines, and thanks to 287(g), at local traffic stops or truck inspections. No one is blowing whistles, and few of these busts get caught on video. Yet, even here in blood-red Trump Country, some locals are troubled by the intense police focus on immigrants and what it’s doing to the moral fabric of their community.
‘Arrest them like the Gestapo’
“No one’s telling you not to arrest people — I’m telling you not to hunt for them, to do stops on the side of the road and arrest them like the Gestapo,” a Democratic city council member in Pottsville, Andy Wollyung, told me after he tried and failed to stop the county seat from joining 287(g). He later fretted that immigration arrests “will drive a wedge in people, you know? These aren’t unknown people. These are our neighbors.”
“When local police officers serve as a force multiplier for ICE, we know that people become more afraid to report crime,” Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told me. “They become less willing to cooperate with local law enforcement when it comes to investigations, including things like homicides. And there’s an overall mistrust of public institutions.”
The irony is that today’s Schuylkill County was built on the backs of immigrants — initially a wave of Irish who dug the 19th-century coal mines and were also persecuted, including six members of the infamous Molly Maguires who were hanged in Pottsville in 1877. They were followed by Eastern Europeans who filled the local mining towns like Mahanoy City and Shenandoah.
Those who stayed behind after the mines started closing in the 1950s and kept its hillside towns of striking Victorian architecture and utilitarian rowhouses alive got a booster shot in the 21st century with an unexpected new wave: Latinos. Many landed in Schuylkill County when seeking a place with cheaper housing and more job opportunities for hard workers than big cities like New York or Philadelphia.
Schuylkill Haven, with a population of just over 5,000, has arrested at least 59 people and turned them over on federal immigration charges since signing a so-called 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this spring.Will Bunch
Four years ago, Pastor Luis Rivera and his wife bought a historic local church building in Pottsville and rechristened it as Iglesia Cristiana El Kairos, under the umbrella of the Evangelical New Life Church, to serve a Latino community now growing by leaps and bounds.
“You see a lot of traffic,” the pastor told me. “You see people remodeling more houses. And a lot of the stores are opening around here … It was really dead before, you know?” Today, it’s estimated that about 1,000 of Pottsville’s 14,000 residents are Latino.
A ‘stable’ life is upended
Six of the more recent arrivals were Venezuelan-born Carlos Moreno, his wife, Wendy Martínez, and their blended family of four teenagers. They’d been on the run from government persecution and armed conflict across South America when they came to America in 2023, and stayed in a cramped public shelter in New York City as the family sought asylum and obtained work permits.
When they moved to a narrow rowhouse on a rugged patch of Norwegian Street on the steep hillside up from downtown Pottsville, the couple found jobs at the county’s large Amazon warehouse and even started a small cleaning business, even though Moreno, 37, is legally blind and has severe hearing problems.
“For the first time in years, it felt like our lives were finally becoming stable,” Martínez would later write. “Then, in the fall of 2025, we learned that I was pregnant. It was an unexpected surprise, but a very welcome one.”
Wendy Martínez, whose husband, Carlos Moreno, a Venezuelan refugee, has been detained by immigration authorities since May after losing a misdemeanor noise complaint at the Schuylkill County Courthouse. She is holding her baby Noah, who was roughly 6 weeks old.Will Bunch
A bigger and less welcome surprise awaited. This spring, a neighbor called police to complain about noise —music from a small boom box — and Moreno received a summons. He decided to challenge it at the Schuylkill County Courthouse a few blocks away, and when he lost, he paid a fine, walked out of the courtroom — and right into ICE agents waiting to arrest him. He was sent to detention in the Cambria County Jail and stayed there as massive earthquakes halted deportations to Venezuela. He was locked up when his son, Noah, was born — on the Fourth of July.
Martínez was alternately rocking and bouncing her then-6-week-old son when I joined Medina in visiting their cluttered, narrow rowhouse in August. The windows were covered with thick blankets that let in only a sliver of light, and Martínez was bookended on a sofa by her two daughters, on their phones, who rarely leave home.
“They told him that he was a dangerous person,” Martínez said in Spanish, interpreted by Medina, as her baby babbled. “There hasn’t been any situation where he was against the law, or anything.” Struggling to pay her bills and support the five children, Martínez launched a GoFundMe page, but has only raised $2,695 of her $4,000 goal. Her husband was recently moved to ICE detention in Louisiana.
In August, Schuylkill Haven officials said they’re expecting a federal check for $152,000 — money the police department wants to spend on buying the currently leased police headquarters, pictured here.Will Bunch
Like most immigration arrests since 287(g) swept across Schuylkill County, there is an element of mystery about what exactly happened to Moreno. I twice called the Schuylkill County sheriff, Shawn Butler, to ask if his department — the first county agency to join 287(g), back in January — was involved, but he did not get back to me. Not once in a month of reporting did a police chief or municipal official return a call or email from this out-of-town columnist. Secrecy, and a lack of accountability, seems to be baked into the 287(g) program.
‘You don’t answer anything’
“Any Right-to-Know requests, any FOIA requests, anything — you defer that right down to the Department of Homeland Security,” Jody Long, the then-police chief in Mahanoy Township, told the Pottsville City Council when it was voting on a 287(g) agreement in May. “You don’t answer anything with that. That’s right from their legal team.”
In early September, I attended the bimonthly meeting of the Schuylkill Haven borough council hoping to ask Police Chief Jeffrey Walcott, Mayor John Williams, or other officials how and why their small borough just south of Pottsville had managed to make at least 59 immigration arrests since signing a 287(g) pact with ICE on April 5. I didn’t get very far.
In a brief conversation, Walcott suggested, interestingly, that commenting on 287(g) might bring protesters to Schuylkill Haven. When I asked Williams about the program after the meeting, the police chief interrupted our conversation to say there should be “a unified response,” and then later told me any information would need to come from Homeland Security or a FOIA request.
Schuylkill Haven Mayor John Williams (left) at a borough council meeting on Sept. 2. Next to him are borough secretary Kaitlyn Tinari (center) and council president Thomas Gordon (right). Williams said Schuylkill Haven’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement is going well, but declined to elaborate.Will Bunch
Most of what citizens and the media in Schuylkill County know about the 287(g) programs comes from borough or township council meetings in which a police chief tells elected officials about all the sweeteners that cash-flush ICE added to the program when Congress and Trump enacted the so-called Big Beautiful Bill in 2025.
Police departments or county sheriffs who join the most common 287(g) Task Force model get $100,000 for vehicles or other equipment and $7,500 for each officer who undergoes 40 hours of mostly online training, as well as additional dollars for their time on immigration matters — all contingent on making actual arrests. In August, Schuylkill Haven officials said they’re expecting a federal check for $152,000 — money the borough wants to spend on buying the currently leased police headquarters.
The cash incentives have sparked a kind of deportation arms race across Pennsylvania, which has gone from just a few 287(g) programs at the start of the year to more than 130, with new ones coming online every day. Most of the council debates tread lightly on the question of liability for an officer who makes a bad arrest — a problem ICE is belatedly looking to fix with a proposal to insure each officer up to $500,000 — or the elevated risk that a traffic stop could lead to violence.
Fighting in the Schuylkill
That’s already happened. On May 20, a Schuylkill Haven cop stopped a car on Route61 after he claimed the driver had illegally dark-tinted windows. ICE agents who were in the borough and arrived at the stop ran the license of 34-year-old Yensy Rafael Santana Alvarez of New York City and determined he had an immigration removal order.
According to the Skook News, a court affidavit said the man handed over his car keys and stepped out of his car — then ran for it. Alvarez led the law officers on a wild foot chase across the Schuylkill and back, getting tased once, and allegedly pulling one officer underwater as another suffered minor injuries. He was eventually arrested, and felony charges were filed but then dropped.
Some local critics also questioned whether minimally trained cops making immigration arrests is a good idea in a county where some departments have a history of police abuses. “In northern Schuylkill County, over the last 10 years, we’ve had horrendous police … acting very unprofessional in different departments,” John Hampton, a lawyer who has worked with Mahanoy Township, told me.
A heated and emotional debate over the federal 287(g) immigration enforcement program dominated Monday night’s Pottsville Council meeting.
After initially failing in a 3-2 vote, the resolution was reopened moments later and ultimately passed following a council member changing… pic.twitter.com/kSW1QXhgqS
In 2022, two then-police officers in the borough of Minersville were indicted on still-pending federal police brutality charges for allegedly severely beating a man during a traffic stop and falsifying police reports to cover it up. That didn’t prevent ICE from signing a 287(g) agreement with Minersville police in May.
That same month, local activists pleaded with the Pottsville City Council during a meeting that lasted more than five hours not to join the 287(g) program, arguing that immigration arrests would make tourists and new businesses not want to come there. They thought they’d won in a 3-2 vote, only to have GOP council member Scott Price change his position and demand a revote that flipped the outcome, saying that, in the end, “I have to side with our police officers.”
One of the few pro-287(g) advocates who spoke at that May hearing was Mahanoy Township’s Long, who said his department had been “the leader in the county” by making 10 immigration arrests, mainly at what he called a truck-safety inspection point. “ICE does not come in and tell you what to do,” Long insisted. “We tell them what to do.”
He was joined by one of his officers, Anthony Maldonado, who cited his own heritage as a Puerto Rican to insist there is no racial profiling. “I have family members who are light-skinned, dark-skinned, everywhere in between, so I would take it very personally if we conducted ourself unprofessionally to that effect,” he said.
‘Because you look like a Mexican’
The room in Pottsville did not hear from Moe Montalvo, a gutter contractor from nearby Tamaqua who, in mid-April, passed through the checkpoint on Burma Road operated by cops from Mahanoy Township and assisted by adjacent Ryan Township officers. He said he was part of a two-truck convoy, and the first one with two white occupants was waved through, while his was stopped to allow the officers to ask Montalvo, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who is half Puerto Rican and half Egyptian, for his ID and grill him about his identity.
Montalvo posted that day on Facebook that when he told an officer he was born in Montgomery County, the cop replied: “Are you sure? Because you look like a Mexican.” Montalvo also quoted the officer: “Why are you worried? The only thing you should be worried about is when I take my Taser out, because I’m going to aim right for your nose piercing.” I confirmed the incident with Montalvo, who told me that “it seems like there was no doubt that racial profiling was involved here.”
Weeks later, the Mahanoy Township Police Department went dark, at least temporarily, after Long, Maldonado, and its other officer all quit in a disagreement with supervisors. One of the supervisors, Republican Tony Merchlinsky, confirmed to me the entire force had resigned after a dispute with supervisors over its refusal to wear body cameras. He said it was triggered by a civilian complaint over an arrest that did not involve immigration, although he added that “it may have involved racial profiling.”
Maldonado took to Facebook to give his side of the story, saying that a different supervisor had told the township officers they were making too many arrests, and that, as quoted by Maldonado, he preferred “a [B]arney Fife department and have his police drive around and wave at people instead of making arrests.” Merchlinsky confirmed that Mahanoy Township — which recently hired a new, albeit part-time, police chief — has yet to see one dime from the feds of the more than $100,000 that was promised.
The checkpoint drama and police tensions in Mahanoy Township demonstrate some of the many problems when beat cops are drafted to join Trump’s mass deportation crusade. Are police really making their towns safer when one part of the community is taking long traffic detours and covering up their windows in terror of any contact with cops? Is the economic gloom over Pennsylvania’s fading coal country really going to be lifted by clamping down on immigrants who’d been flocking there to pour concrete and rehab old buildings?
Does a region whose very DNA is handed down by the immigrants who once came here to shovel anthracite now want to be known in the 21st century as a “show me your papers” police state?
Few of these questions are being asked as one former coal burg after another races to embrace a Trumpian bargain with the 287(g) program. The latest is Mahanoy Township’s next-door neighbor, Ryan Township, which in June voted conditionally to join the ICE mass deportation program, citing as the biggest incentive its need to replace its run-down Ford Explorer, one of the oldest police cars in Schuylkill County.
Who could have imagined, as we sat glued to the screen watching ash-covered victims frantically flee the falling World Trade Center towers, that the type of terrorism threatening us 25 years later would turn 9/11 on its head.
On that terrible day, Americans stood united against the assault, political rhetoric cast aside in the horrific moment. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, later to become a MAGA mouthpiece, became “America’s mayor” as he projected a message of calm resolve in news conferences held amid the ruins.
Nearly the entire world joined the United States in opposition to al-Qaeda, a multinational terrorist organization that murdered 3,000 men and women of many different nationalities in the twin towers attack. President George W. Bush, in perhaps his finest hour, reassured a shocked nation and built a multinational coalition to fight al-Qaeda.
Our NATO allies immediately volunteered for a war in which many of their brave soldiers died — including Canadians and Danes, whose armies President Donald Trump so frequently now insults.
That sense of unity, which impelled Americans to comfort strangers and inspired solidarity from allies and adversaries alike, has long since dissipated in the wake of forever wars and populist discontent. A divisive, America First president seems to delight in fomenting hatred between people of differing beliefs and ethnicities – and treating long-time allies like enemies.
What the Trump administration is doing is opening the door to a new breed of lone wolf terrorists, inspired by the internet. Such radicalized individual acts have primarily been carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers over the past years, according to detailed studies, although the low level of violent left-wing incidents has risen in 2025, in reaction to Trump policies.
But the president and his team have worked hard to dismantle the very agencies and have fired the FBI agents and U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors that handle terrorism cases. Elite counterterrorism and counterintelligence units have been gutted by hundreds of firings and resignations. At the U.S. Department of Homeland Security alone, more than 1,300 counterterrorism specialists have been axed or reassigned to work on border enforcement and deportations, or to search for nonexistent voter fraud.
What’s so stunning is that, just before the start of the current endless Iran war, with the White House still claiming Tehran is the leading sponsor of international terrorism, FBI Director Kash Patel specifically sacked about a dozen members of an elite Washington-based unit specializing in stemming threats from Iran within our country. Why? Because the agents had been involved in investigating Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after he ended his first term.
When asked in March by the New York Times whether Americans needed to worry about possible terrorist reprisals by Iran inside the U.S., Trump retorted: “I guess. Some people will die.”
Trump’s blindness is worse than the noncooperation between the FBI and the CIA in 2001 that led them to ignore clues to the monthslong presence of the 9/11 terrorists on U.S. soil. This is the willful blindness of our government to potential terror attacks by an Iranian regime that has every reason to strike in the near term.
Add to that the president’s constant incitement of his followers against so-called leftist networks, declaring “antifa” to be a dangerous terror organization. Only problem: There is no such organization; antifa is a catch-all term for loose groups across the country who declare themselves to be anti-fascist.
Compare that to the white supremacist massacre of 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh during Trump’s first term, or the deadly truck attack by an Islamist on New Year’s Day 2025 in New Orleans. Yet Trump consistently, and determinedly defying statistics, declares domestic terrorism to be the work of the so-called left.
Such incitement is a cover story for attacking political criticism from any front, and inspires potential right-wing terrorist attacks against Trump’s political opponents. Never forget that it was right-wing terrorists who called for the murder of Vice President Mike Pence when they attacked the U.S. Capitol, who murdered two Minnesota lawmakers, and who nearly killed Paul Pelosi, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
Meantime, the president dispatches federal agents who could be thwarting real terrorism to instead threaten election officials and potentially midterm voters. Ditto for menacing noncriminal immigrants with violence and sometimes death.
As for state-run terrorism, Trump’s self-declared friend, Vladimir Putin, has embarked on a campaign against NATO allies, including dropping drones near airports such as the one in Leipzig, Germany, recently.
“We are the daily target of hybrid warfare,” said the German interior minister last month. The International Institute for Strategic Studies this summer tallied 144 drone incidents across 13 countries in less than two years, with Russia as the main culprit. And that doesn’t include the assassinations Moscow has conducted against former dissidents living in England and Germany and many arson and sabotage attacks across Europe.
And while you may think you have read much about the deliberate Russian destruction of civilian markets, malls, schools, universities, and cathedrals in Ukraine, you are probably unaware of the worst.
Just one example: In the city of Kherson, just across the river from Russian positions, Russian drone pilots play a game they call “human safari” and brag about it on their Telegram channels. It means getting a hapless vegetable seller in their sights, chasing him as he tries desperately to escape, and then finally killing him.
This is not warfare. It is deliberate terror, Nazi-style, to try to demoralize Ukrainians into surrendering their sovereignty.
And so, as we remember 9/11, as we repudiate the terrorist attackers, and recall the human error by U.S. officials that led to the deaths of 3,000 innocent souls, we should give serious thought to the Trump administration’s choices and rhetoric that open the door to more terrorist assaults.
Trump has refused to attend the 9/11 ceremonies in New York City, reportedly because he wouldn’t be allowed to make a speech. Instead, he will bloviate at the Pentagon alongside his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, who is contributing to the president’s security blindness that exposes Americans to potential harm.
Shame on them for endangering the country by refusing to learn the lessons of that terrible day.
For anyone who noticed I was gone, I’m back. It was a weird two weeks of flex time — half vacation, including jaunts to a couple of Jersey Shore points (see below) and an OG family reunion in the Hudson Valley, and half working on my biggest investigative reporting project in several years. It’s coming very soon. Stay tuned.
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, anti-Islamic hate is getting worse
Amina Barhumi (center), the advocacy and policy lead of the Muslim Civic Coalition, prays with members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations outside the Will County Courthouse in Joliet, Ill., where a jury found defendant Joseph Czuba guilty of murder and hate crime charges in February 2025.Nam Y. Huh
The footprints of the World Trade Center’s twin towers are now a memorial attached to a well-attended museum. Osama bin Laden is dead, and the last U.S. combat troops finally left Afghanistan five years ago. But there is one thing that spiked immediately after the attack and never really went away.
In fact, anti-Islamic hate is a bigger force in our politics than it ever was. Republicans, desperate to cling to power in an election when all the cards — including another “dumb war” in the Middle East and sky-high gas prices — are stacked against them, are frantically waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 and the Islamophobia it inspired.
You can see it in Lower Manhattan, where the man who was New York City’s mayor in 2001, Rudy Giuliani, is now saying that the idea of the current mayor — Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim American to hold the post, who was only 9 years old on the morning of the attack — attending the 9/11 memorial ceremony “offends me.” His comments were part of a bigger racist diatribe that somehow tied Mamdani to a Muslim plot aimed at “taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe.”
You can see it in Michigan, where a wave of anti-Muslim hate has surged after an Islamic doctor and public health expert, Abdul El-Sayed, won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. This includes events like “the Christian Crusader March” organized by the Donald Trump-pardoned Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionist Jack Lang, which flooded the city council of majority-Muslim Dearborn with anti-Islam placards and even a Nazi flag.
And you can read all about it when a sitting congressman like Tennessee’s Andy Ogles has no problem taking to the cesspool of Elon Musk-owned X last March to write that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” The fact that the fanatically pro-Trump Ogles lost his GOP primary a couple of months later could have been a warning to his fellow Republicans to dial it back, but few seem to have gotten the memo as Sept. 11, 2026, arrives.
To be clear, I don’t believe Islamophobia is the only permanent scar from the day the United States was attacked by four planes and their 19 hijackers who were followers of bin Laden’s Islamist brand of extremism. It’s been five years — although it feels like yesterday — since the 20th anniversary of the attacks, when I wrote that the fear and loathing of the 9/11 aftermath hadn’t evaporated but instead metastasized.
I could write that exact same column today … so I won’t. The role the attack played in pointing America toward fascism hasn’t changed, but it is striking after five more years that while many overt symptoms of a 9/11 hangover have subsided over the years, the virus of Islamophobia has only grown more persistent.
Prejudice toward Muslims existed, of course, yet it exploded after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the fourth jetliner that crashed in Shanksville, Pa., in ways both large and small.
Large: On Sept. 15, 2001, a Dallas-area neo-Nazi killed a Pakistani immigrant working in a convenience store — the same day a Sikh native of India was also murdered at a Mesa, Ariz., gas station by a man who believed the victim was Muslim. Smaller but not insignificant: Islamic schoolchildren from coast to coast were bullied and slurred by classmates who called them “terrorists” or just “Osama.”
At the highest levels of the U.S. government, there was schizophrenia. Many recall that the president, George W. Bush, visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., to insist that U.S. Muslims “love America as much as I do,” had no connection to the foreign extremists, and that “Islam is peace.”
Less well-remembered is the federal operation that targeted thousands of Muslims and South Asians — especially men under the age of 45 — in the weeks immediately after the attacks. They were detained, interrogated, fingerprinted, or subjected to deportation proceedings.
In a new piece, the “war on terror” historian Spencer Ackerman chronicled how agents went through a Brooklyn neighborhood known as Little Pakistan, dropping cards under doors with instructions such as: “This is the FBI. This is the INS. This is the NYPD. We need to talk. I have questions. Call me. ASAP.” It’s believed that thousands found the post 9/11-climate so hostile that they left Little Pakistan … and the United States.
Islamophobia has managed to both persist and change over the last quarter century. Certainly one can’t imagine Trump going to a mosque and acknowledging that Islam is a peaceful religion; the man who entered national politics by calling for — and partially enacting — a “Muslim ban” just last month labeled Democratic candidates in the midterms as “jihadists.” Today, the fish stinks from the head, and those middle-school punks who called their classmates “terrorists” are all grown up and running for office in November.
To some extent, it’s one step up and one step back for American Muslims. The stunning success of Mamdani, who’s more popular than ever after eight months in City Hall, and the rise of El-Sayed and other mostly progressive young Muslim American politicians is a next chapter of immigrant success that seems to have rattled the ancient U.S. hierarchies around race and religion.
But mostly it feels like Republicans — seeing that the crowd doesn’t want to hear the new stuff like the Iran war or data centers — have reverted to playing the hits, like railing against “men in women’s sports” in a desperate bid to get an unearned encore.
That’s pathetic yet predictable, but one thing I find appalling is that a news media that ought to know better keeps going along with this malarkey. That includes grilling every Democrat who appears on TV about what they think about a Turkish American Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker, even as most voters have never heard of Piker while some subjects of these inquisitions have never met him.
Last week, CBS News — purchased by a pro-Trump billionaire who put the over-her-head conservative opinion writer Bari Weiss in charge — ran one of the most irresponsible pieces of journalism I’ve ever read, implying there was something sinister about El-Sayed’s anodyne early 2020 social media comments that America should take the coronavirus seriously because it had killed (at that time) as many people as died on 9/11. One CBS staffer told the website Status that the dubious hit piece on El-Sayed was “shameful,” adding, “The racism is overt.”
The staffer was being kind.
Someday — hopefully in my lifetime — there’ll be a U.S. president who won’t only call Islam a religion of peace, but will also stop dropping bombs on Muslim countries. Until then, demagogues are going to demagogue, but the media needs to be calling out the racists, not empowering them. If we keep giving in to our worst instincts, then — as folks used to say 25 years ago — the terrorists will have won.
Yo, do this!
One reason my two-week hiatus passed so quickly was that I immersed myself (and thus finished too quickly, perhaps) in this month’s riveting audiobook, Housewives of the Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery by the Atlantic writer Kaitlyn Tiffany. The book tells the story of how the majority of Americans came to doubt the Warren Commission’s official story of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 murder in Dallas through the persistence of very average citizens — including the three middle- or nearing-middle-age women of the 1960s at the center of Tiffany’s compelling narrative. This is not “another Kennedy assassination book,” but rather a robust and much-needed tale about regular folks successfully challenging their government to do better that resonates in the Trump era.
I did somehow find time to make the short drive (90 minutes from Center City Philadelphia) to Long Branch, N.J., for a Bruce Springsteen pilgrimage centered on a visit to the new and impressive Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. It was just our luck that our tickets were for the day afterthe Jersey rock icon stunned fans with a surprise visit there (and also popped on stage that night at Asbury Park’s Stone Pony). But the collection of artifacts — amplified by a film and listening booths, and illuminating not only Springsteen’s 60-year career, but the artists from soul, country, and early rock ‘n’ roll who inspired a legend — is well worth the trip. Augment the day, as we did, with a trip to Asbury Park’s revived boardwalk and a drive-by of Bruce’s childhood homes in nearby Freehold. Bonus: Springsteen’s remarkable “Land of Hope and Dreams” show that wrapped up his 2026 tour at Philadelphia’s Xfinity Mobile Center in May was recorded for a full-length film that begins streaming Wednesday!
Ask me anything
Question: Given the current outbreak of measles in Pennsylvania and the start of the school year, how long will it be until the first case of polio is diagnosed? — @mcsween66.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: Hopefully a long time, or never, although polio has not been completely eradicated and there was a case earlier this year in Rockland County, N.Y. (here’s a good explainer of how that happened and what it means). Experts are right to be worried if low U.S. vaccination rates persist. But right now I’m more worried about something else that your question hints at: a stunning lack of information about the measles outbreak in Lancaster County, which seems to have caused two deaths, and which I know much more about from reading an article in the Atlantic than from our public health officials. At the core of this seems to be the politics of a Democratic governor in Josh Shapiro and a Trump-y GOP, including the elected county coroner in Lancaster County as well as in Washington. Public health is way too important to get tangled up in political spin.
What you’re saying about …
My question from late August about transgender politics in the November election drew a spirited response from readers, most of whom agree with me that Democrats should openly embrace transgender rights and not either run away or equivocate on the issue. The most passionate response came from Zoë Sparks, a transgender woman, who wrote it would be best for Dems if they “stood up boldly, made it an issue of civil rights, pointed out that history, statistics, science, and medicine are all on our side and MAGA has only fake history, fake statistics, pseudoscience, and quack medicine in their favor …” But Arlene Stach argued that it’s commonsense politics to support keeping transgender athletes who were born with male biology out of women’s sports. She wrote, “If the Democrats think this will win for them, they are mistaken!”
📮 This week’s question: The passage of Labor Day means it will be Election Day in what will feel like the blink of an eye. Democrats seem all but certain to gain at least the handful of seats needed to retake the House, but the Senate is up for grabs. Do you think Dems will win at least 51 Senate seats, and why? What are the key races? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “a Democratic Senate” in the subject line.
Backstory on the mysterious masked men of Dover
Police officers form a line to block protesters near Eastney Beach, in Portsmouth, England, on Sunday.PA
The myth that nothing ever happens on Labor Day weekend was punctured repeatedly in 2026, including the gruesome Miami crash of a cargo jetliner that killed five people on the ground and an armed man lunging at Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton at a campaign event. But the weekend’s most puzzling and arguably most alarming news was barely covered on American television: the sudden appearance in two British port cities — Dover and Portsmouth — of hundreds of black-clad, right-wing male protesters, their heads covered in balaclavas, there to cause chaos and protest the arrival of migrant boats.
The mysterious men — eventually tied to a self-proclaimed Christian group called the Patriot Platform, led by a former associate of the anti-Islamic, far-right political activist Tommy Robinson — attempted to block lifeboats carrying migrants from landing, and also tried to blockade their buses once on shore, while snarling local traffic as Dover’s famed white cliffs loomed in the background. The protests were a dramatic public illustration of the rising tide of right-wing reaction — much of it xenophobic rage over refugees — that has increasingly roiled politics in the United Kingdom, posing a threat to the milquetoast, inept Labour government.
But, in the spirit of the U.K.’s most famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, the real mystery along the British seacoast was the dog that did not bark. Although police did eventually restore order in the two port cities, the authorities were painfully slow to respond to such a large-scale civil disturbance, and few or no arrests were made. That’s in stark contrast to the frequent images over the last year of grandmothers and other peaceful, placard-carrying protesters getting dragged away by British bobbies when protesting for a free Palestine.
The reaction from the government of new Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham was equally languid. A Burnham spokesperson, pressed by a reporter for a political response, would only call the shocking protests “an operational matter for the police to set out their response to the protests on the ground. So I will leave them to respond to that.” Winston Churchill, who (despite his many flaws) famously promised to fight fascists “on the beaches,” must have been spinning in his grave.
Speaking of Nazis, the protests and the sudden police embrace of pacifism coincided with a regional victory in a battered former industrial corner of eastern Germany for the extreme right AfD (Alternative for Germany) Party, the unholy heirs to Adolf Hitler’s legacy. This weekend’s echoes of Western Europe’s failed appeasement of the Nazis in the late 1930s are almost as troubling as the thuggish extremism itself. The coddling needs to end, or else we are condemned to repeat the absolute worst of our past.
What I wrote on this date in 2016
The protests in South Dakota, led by its Indigenous people, against the Dakota Access oil pipeline that erupted in the late summer of 2016 were a peak moment of 2010s political activism, and a lost cause (the pipeline opened the following year, after Donald Trump became president) that was totally worth fighting for. On this date 10 years ago, I was crusading — also unsuccessfully — for the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS) to drop its roughly $192 million investment in the pipeline owner. I wrote, “Pennsylvania doesn’t have a great track record of environmental leadership — but there’s no reason why that history can’t be altered.”
I’ve mentioned it before in this space, but no one has done more to keep the tradition of the great American sports columnist alive than The Inquirer’s Mike Sielski. Last week he published a remarkable — and remarkably timely — deep dive into the case of a then-19-year-old from Pennsylvania Amish country whose addiction to online sports gambling and social isolation led him to make a bomb threat against the U.S. Open tennis tournament. The case was hardly an isolated incident, but the hallmark of an alarming trend: the growing number of threats not just against major sporting events but individual athletes, as more and more people — especially vulnerable young men like the one Sielski chronicles here — get addicted to the ubiquitous, heavily advertised betting sites. The piece is a reminder that great storytelling doesn’t need to be a dying art — but also that in-depth journalism requires time and your support. You provide that — and get some great reads in return — when you subscribe to The Inquirer.
By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.
It’s also true that American feminism has too often minimized the unique needs of Black women.
And while I don’t pretend to comprehend the various intricacies of Black womanhood, I do understand that among the duties of Black manhood, one of them looms larger than most.
We must stand up for our women.
In recent months, it’s become increasingly clear that some of our most prominent men have spent far too much time doing anything but that. In fact, national figures like ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith have been rightly castigated for their inordinate criticism of Black women, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and journalist Joy-Ann Reid.
But the call to protect and defend Black women is not just about Smith and his cutting criticism of national figures. It is also about the Black men I have watched cast boulders at the first female mayor of Philadelphia.
Solomon Jones interviews Vice President Kamala Harris during his radio show on WURD in February 2024. Harris has been a target of Stephen A. Smith’s barbs.Lawrence Jackson
As a matter of full disclosure, I have known Cherelle L. Parker for more than 20 years. As neighbors, we’ve watched each other’s children grow up. And while I don’t agree with her on every policy or political priority, I respect her because she has always been the same steady person, the same tenacious fighter, the same Black woman I met so many years ago.
On this point, I will not waver, whether the Black woman in question is Michelle Obama, or Parker, or Miss Dot from 25th and Oxford.
This does not mean there will never be disagreements between us. It does not mean arguments will never happen.
In truth, disagreement is a normal and healthy aspect of any functioning relationship. It is when those disagreements spin into hateful diatribes and rhetorical violence that we lose ourselves in the chaos.
This is not the time for abject pettiness, for a crabs-in-the-barrel mentality, or for fomenting discord under the guise of holding leaders accountable.
After watching 300,000 Black women lose their jobs in just a few months after the Trump administration’s cuts in the federal workforce, we have to know that sisters are under attack, and we must act accordingly.
That means standing beside them as they lead in communities.
It means standing in front of them when they are under attack.
It means standing behind them when they need someone to push them forward.
Black men understand, in ways others simply don’t, that Black women are stronger than they look, more vulnerable than they seem, and more beautiful than they know.
When they present all that to the world, the totality of their power can be intimidating — especially for those who harbor insecurities of their own.
But as the husbands, brothers, and sons of these strong women, we cannot afford to see them as competitors.
We must see them as partners, because in these uncertain times, when racism removes its hood and stands boldly in America’s streets, Black men and women can ill afford to turn on one another.
We must instead turn toward one another, and face the slings and arrows of this world together.
Welcome to Shackamaxon, a weekly politics column focused on what’s happening at City Hall and in Harrisburg. It is named for the place where the Lenape chiefs would meet to conduct the people’s business, which is now known as Penn Treaty Park.
This week’s edition covers sinkholes, the embrace of “slopulism,” the ongoing struggle over the future of the Cecil B. Moore Library branch, and the loss of a venerable museum.
Signage marks a hole in the road on the 1600 block of South Lawrence Street on Tuesday. Neighbors have been complaining about the street’s integrity for more than a decade.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
Sinkhole street
How long does it take for a 311 request to be resolved? For residents of the 1600 block of South Lawrence Street, it has been 13 years — and counting. In the meantime, city officials have repeatedly ignored their emails and offered excuses.
It all began with a 2013 complaint about road instability. According to residents, their block once hosted a factory, which means that when their homes were built and their street was initially paved, it had to be filled in. Their concern is that, over time, this fill may have eroded, leading to the repeated formation of sinkholes and putting their buried utility pipes at risk.
Given that one of the neighbors who contacted me, Tim Dunn, is a civil engineer, I would say this is a credible worry.
While the city paid to fix three water laterals after the main broke, the neighbors believe three or four additional laterals were damaged and should have been covered, too. They also report that the laterals the city replaced experienced issues almost immediately. The block is scheduled to be repaved next year, and if underlying problems remain, the effort could be futile.
You would think that would lead officials at the city’s Streets and Water Departments to investigate. But until this week, that wasn’t the case.
The neighbors have compiled a timeline, complete with notes and evidence, of their efforts to get the departments to take their concerns seriously. Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents the street, confirmed their account. Even he had trouble getting emails answered about this situation.
Out of 36 requests from Squilla or residents for help or information, 19 went unanswered. Adding insult to injury, the neighbors told me the city has repeatedly deployed no parking signs, only to not send anyone to do any work. This was perceived as an intimidation tactic.
When I reached out to the city to get their side of the story, they said they are now on top of the situation. On Tuesday, after my initial outreach, they finally sent a sewer operations team to investigate exactly what is happening underground.
Changes in how we get around and how we shop have had an impact on our streets. When these homes were built back in the 1920s, cars were rare in Philadelphia. The most popular model, Ford’s famous Model T, weighed up to 1,500 pounds. People increasingly use SUVs and heavy-duty trucks as their daily rides, putting strain on roads created without them in mind. The total weight rating for a loaded Amazon delivery van can be almost 10,000 pounds. This is part of why Mayor Cherelle L. Parker proposed a “pothole tax” on deliveries.
More money, however, would not fix what went wrong on South Lawrence Street. If existing communication and coordination issues aren’t resolved, residents will understandably see the pothole tax as yet another cash grab from City Hall.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks during a news conference at the state Capitol, Aug. 18.Marc Levy
Shapiro’s slopulism
One of the most frustrating parts of post-pandemic politics is the rise of “slopulism.” Short-form videos make it easy to build support for ideas that pander to our biases but are either not factual or impractical. From inciting claims about voter fraud to the idea that we can “just make transit free,” no one wants to read the boring evidence when there’s a cool, colorful video that tells them what they want to hear.
Gov. Josh Shapiro, a dedicated performer in the TikTok and Reels sphere, has embraced slopulism before. During his 2022 gubernatorial campaign, he promised to pursue “gas tax rebates,” an idea that would have depleted the state’s reserves and disproportionately sent cash to wealthier households. Mercifully, it doesn’t seem to have come up since he won.
While Shapiro’s critics will often say that the Ambitious Abingtonian watches the polls like a hawk, he’s mostly avoided relapsing into slopulism as governor. At least, until recently.
First came his about-face on data centers. Now he’s indicated support for a ban on automatic license plate readers known as Flock cameras.
There are real concerns about their misuse. Many feel uncomfortable with a private company like Flock Safety playing such a big role in law enforcement, and there have been troubling instances of police officers using the devices to stalk ex-romantic partners. Guardrails must be established.
At the same time, automatic license plate readers and other cameras have become an essential law enforcement tool. They can help identify stolen cars, track shooters after an incident, find hit-and-run drivers, and ensure detectives get the right perpetrator. While a spokesperson made clear that the governor’s statements were not meant as an endorsement for any particular piece of legislation currently before the General Assembly, Shapiro must ensure whatever restrictions are placed on the technology don’t curtail the important gains in reducing violence and solving crimes.
People in the community come out for a meeting and cookout to discuss the funding and renovations for Cecil B. Moore Library on Aug. 29.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
Limited library
One politician who can’t be accused of following the polls is Jeffery “Jay” Young, City Council’s quarrelsome contrarian. After years of conversation, Young has agreed to allow renovations at the Cecil B. Moore Library in North Philadelphia to move forward. There’s just one big problem: His plan is only a fraction of what neighbors had asked for.
Instead of adding a teen space, a private study room, new computers, and other physical improvements for which proponents had raised $8 million, the library will get a bare-bones approach. Young prefers building a new library and has so far been unwilling to reconsider that vision.
Residents, for their part, are passionate and organized about saving their original plan. Sadly, councilmanic prerogative, the tradition that keeps Council members from second-guessing each other’s decisions, gives neighbors next to no recourse to stop Young.
The Dinosaur Hall at the Academy of Natural Sciences’ museum.Peter Dobrin
Use it or lose it
Since 1828, the Academy of Natural Sciences’ museum has offered visitors a glimpse into the planet’s living past. Like many Philadelphians, I have gawked at the massive, reconstructed Tyrannosaurus rex many times. The museum, however, has announced it may go the way of the dinosaurs.
This set off a firestorm of criticism of both the Academy and Drexel, its partner. How could they do this to us? Why don’t we have more time? Did anyone ask for help?
Almost in response, longtime civic leader and former Mayor Ed Rendell lieutenant David L. Cohen revealed that he had been trying to save the Academy for some time — and was close to a deal to keep the Academy in the city, even if the museum closes.
While his efforts are welcome, this closure and the financial struggles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art are a reminder that a critical part of keeping these illustrious institutions around is showing up.
After all, declining ticket sales and attendance are a running thread in this post-pandemic world. As much as the ornate stone buildings these collections reside in suggest permanence, they can and do close when support is not offered. I’ll include myself in saying that all of us need to appreciate and utilize the tremendous legacy past Philadelphians have left behind before it is gone.
Unsurprisingly, the United States of America found a lot of ways to celebrate its own birthday this year. Modesty never was one of our strong suits.
Events held to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence included concerts, reenactments, and Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the White House lawn that future historians will have to grapple with someday.
Then there was the stuff: the products, promotions, and items people and companies created to commemorate, or to capitalize off of, the Semiquincentennial. Since receiving the first news release for 250th merchandise on Jan. 5, I’ve been collecting the more unusual items I’ve come across that were created in the name of this nation’s birthday.
As summer comes to a close, I’d like share my anthropological findings with you.
Bobbleheads of state
The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee, Wis., has made a bobblehead for almost every pop culture figure and event over the last couple years. There’s a few of Pope Leo, two of Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino (“Old Sitch” and “New Sitch”), and one of Jimothy, the raccoon from Seattle who’s believed to have short spine syndrome and went viral earlier this year.
But the most improbable bobble — one seemingly even more difficult to create than a raccoon who appears to have no neck — is one without a head at all.
An image from the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum of its Declaration of Independence bobble created for the nation’s 250th anniversary.Courtesy of the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum
The Declaration of Independence bobble is among a series of 16 bobbleheads made for the nation’s 250th. It consists of a facsimile of the document that bounces back and forth on a small, brown pedestal with a magnifying glass on it.
The company confidently states that this is “the first bobble of Declaration of Independence,” and I’m pretty sure I don’t need to fact check that. Because when others ask: “Why in the world?” the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum asks: Why not? And make it bounce!
Nothing says “Happy 250th birthday, America” like a bobblehead Phanatic riding a bald eagle.Stephanie Farr / Staff
The Phillies and FOCO also got into the commemorative bobblehead game by creating one of the Phanatic in an Uncle Sam hat confidently riding a bald eagle like it was his hot dog cannon ATV. The eagle (who alas, is not Swoop) stands upon a podium wrapped with a banner that reads: “We the Phillies 250.” Sadly, it’s only available at the New Era Phillies Team Store at Citizens Bank Park and sadly, that store is no longer carrying the Liberty Bell Phillies cap I went in for when I spotted this.
Ghee whiz!
You butter believe the Pennsylvania Farm Show churned out one of the most epic nods to our nation’s 250th back in January when it unveiled a sculpture of three Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence — made out of 1,000 pounds of Land O’ Lakes butter.
The sculptors, Jim Victor and Marie Pelton of Conshohocken, also added glasses of milk into the Founding Fathers’ hands in order to buttermilk the dairy theme. Also depicted in the sculpture are the Liberty Bell and Betsy Ross.
The 2026 Pennsylvania Farm Show Butter Sculpture depicts three of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence. Also included in the sculpture are Betsy Ross, at left, and the Liberty Bell, at right. Provided
Just to clarify, when the Farm Show was over, the butter was spread out to Reinford Farms in Juniata County, where it was turned into renewable energy in a methane digester, according to a news release.
One margarinely interesting fact: This isn’t the first time Benjamin Franklin has appeared in a Farm Show butter sculpture. In 1991, he was the subject of the event’s first butter sculpture, and in 2007, he was sculpted again with the Liberty Bell, according to PennLive.
Beavers and beers
Shirts for sale at the Buc-ee’s in Mount Crawford, Va., read “I love America and Bucee’s too.”Stephanie Farr / Staff
Among the more head scratching T-shirts about the nation’s 250th I saw was one I spotted during my first trip to a Buc-ee’s, in Mount Crawford, Va., this May. The convenience store is a temple to merchandising and consumerism so it was no surprise its 250th T-shirt, which featured its beaver mascot in an Uncle Sam hat, read: “I love America and Buc-ee’s too.” Because nothing says I love my country like equating your affection for it with a convenience store.
One of the 250th shirts for sale at the Independence Visitor Center this summer.Stephanie Farr / Staff
The other baffling T-shirts I saw were closer to home. This summer the Independence Visitor Center gift store had shirts that read: “Beers and 250 Years 1776 America” and “Land of the free America 250 years and beers.”
A shirt for sale this summer at the Independence Visitor Center seemed to equate the number of years this country has existed with how many beers it’s birthed. Or drank. It’s pretty hazy on details.Stephanie Farr / Staff
I’m not sure who their target audience was, ale I know is they finally managed to create a shirt that makes those “Ben Drankin’” ones seem classy. If the Visitor Center wanted to wordplay on beer, they missed a huge opportunity by not making “Pursuit of hoppiness” shirts.
Booze cues
Speaking of alcohol, that industry really stirred things up by creating a host of intoxicating beverages to cheers 250 years with.
When it comes to names, it’s hard to top the Semiquin-tini, a canned lemonade-and-vodka cocktail by Union Forge that comes in at 10% ABV.
The Semiqin-tini by Union Forge is one of numerous boozy beverages created to commemorate the birth of our country.Stephanie Farr / Staff
Out in Pittsburgh, Wigle Whiskey teamed up with the Senator John Heinz History Center to resurrect one of George Washington’s favorite spirits, Cherry Bounce. The cordial, which Washington packed canteens of on long journeys, is made of tart cherries, spice, and brandy. It clocks in at 35% ABV, so don’t go trying to cross the Delaware after consuming it.
Wigle Whiskey’s Cherry Bounce pictured at the Senator John Heinz History Center.Courtesy of Wigle Whiskey
At Giant, I spotted “We the People” carbonated wine by Mano’s Wine of Kansas City, Mo. It was hard not to see it because it came in garish metallic rockets-red-glare bottles that I’m sure somebody shot fireworks out of once they finished it.
We the People carbonated wine by Mano’s Wine of Kansas City, Mo.Stephanie Farr / Staff
Next to those bottles on the supermarket shelf was something that actually made me gasp out loud: “Tears of Gettysburg” white wine. How did someone bottle the tears of Civil War soldiers? Why did they turn it into wine? And why market it for the anniversary of the Revolutionary War?
I had so many questions.
Tears of Gettysburg wine from Adams County Winery.Stephanie Farr / Staff
As it turns out, this sweet white wine (why are the tears sweet!?!) from Adams County Winery wasn’t made for the 250th, it was made for the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1988 and has been around ever since.
Hallmark moment
I know you may not believe me, but I totally called that signing of the Declaration of Independence butter sculpture at the Farm Show. As someone who waits every year for the butter sculpture reveal, it seemed like the most obvious and absurd choice.
What I did not expect, what none of us could have ever expected to be created to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary, was a Hallmark movie set in Philadelphia.
A promotional image for “To Philly With Love,” a new Hallmark Channel movie set in Philadelphia starring Stephen Huszar and Rebecca Dalton.Courtesy of Hallmark Media
To Philly With Love, a two-hour history-mystery-romance movie, was clearly trying to be National Treasure meets The Notebook. But that goal was doomed from the start because a hallmark of Hallmark movies is the complete lack of suspense or interesting plot. Captivating dialogue is also out.
This movie, which was partially filmed in Philly, also included a cliché cheesesteak scene, a character with no Philly accent telling someone it’s pronounced “wooder,” and a completely tone-deaf scene filmed at the President’s House Site.
We hold these tooths
The Founding Fathers left “the pursuit of happiness” open to interpretation and woodn’t you know, someone found a way to pursue it with toothpicks.
Steven J. Backman of San Francisco has made toothpick art for five decades. This year, he created a sculpture of Independence Hall out of a single toothpick to mark the Semiquincentennial.
San Francisco artist Steven J. Backman has crafted a model of Independence Hall from a single toothpick in celebration of America’s 250th birthday this summer.Courtesy of Steven J. Backman
A few minor points: Backman used a Diamond toothpick and cut strands off it with a straight-edged razor. He then glued pieces into place without a magnifying glass, using only his naked eyes.
“I’m living in an American dream. … I’m doing something I love,” Backman told The Inquirer.
Let freedom ring
If you’ve got Semiquincentennial fever, the only prescription is more America 250-branded cowbells!
You know what this Semiquincentennial needs…more cowbells!Courtesy of America250
The Liberty Bell may get all the fame and glory, but these little guys — that come in red, white, or blue — are a fantastically annoying way to let people know you’ve arrived and you’re patriotic. Sure, you could play Stars and Stripes Forever on a kazoo, but it wouldn’t have the same ring to it.
Calling these souvenirs dumbbells would be udderly incorrect. They are keepsakes intended to be herd by future generations.
There’s a special place in hell for a cop who leaves a human being lying in the street, and they get run over by a car.
It doesn’t matter who the person is, or if they are under the influence of a substance. It doesn’t matter if they resist. They need to be escorted to safety. If needed, rescue workers or a behavioral health expert should be summoned. No one — and I mean no one — should be left lying in the street.
If the police officer who encountered the 48-year-old pedestrian who wound up lying in the bike lane in the 5500 block of Rising Sun Avenue in the wee hours of Aug. 27 had a shred of humanity left in his soul, that man would still be alive today.
Instead of being a hero and saving that man’s life, the officer talked to the victim as he lay on his back in the roadway, then got into his police cruiser and drove away. Minutes later, the man was fatally injured by a hit-and-run driver. Two unidentified people pulled the man out of the street and contacted authorities.
The same officer who had encountered the man earlier was the first to respond. Did he even try to make up for what happened? Not according to First Deputy Commissioner John Stanford, who said at a news conference on Friday that the officer didn’t administer first aid or file a police report. “That goes against everything that we stand for,” Stanford told reporters. “We talk about empathy. We talk about compassion as an organization, and none of those things were on display.”
The officer, whose name hasn’t been released, has since been placed on administrative leave and is still on the Philadelphia police force.
He shouldn’t be.
His job is to serve and protect. But he lacks the human decency and compassion it takes to do that.
What happened last week reminds me of a similar incident that took place four years ago, which I also wrote about. In that case, Elizabeth Negron had wandered into the middle of Germantown Avenue near Coulter Street around midnight one hot summer night in 2022.
It’s unclear what exactly was going on with her, but clearly something was off. She stood in the roadway and blocked the path of a SEPTA bus as vehicles veered around her in different directions. Soon, a police car arrived. Officers got out of their vehicle and interacted with her briefly before driving off, leaving Negron still in the roadway.
They left her in the street like an old discarded shoe. At one point, Negron can be seen lying on her back. A video, recorded by a nearby business, ends shortly thereafter, leaving viewers to imagine what happened next as a passing car ran her over and then fled the scene.
I’ve had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many incredible police officers over the years. Most are good people both on and off the job. But there are some who forget that the people they encounter out on the streets acting oddly are as human as anyone else. They matter, too.
Negron was loved by her two young daughters, a devoted sister, and others who still mourn and miss her. Her sister, Jackie Martinez, told me she had been scrolling on her phone when she learned someone else had suffered a similar fate. “I’m hanging in there and trying my best to not let it bother me,” she said.
Martinez said she would never just walk by someone in harm’s way. “You put them somewhere safe,” Martinez said. “If you walk away and they end up back in the middle of the street, at least you know that was on them.”
Jackie Martinez poses next to a tree planted in honor of her sister, Elizabeth Negron, who was killed on Germantown Avenue near Coulter Street by a hit-and-run driver in July 2022.Jenice Armstrong
David Fisher, a 29-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department and president of the National Black Police Association, agreed, saying, “You don’t leave somebody on the street needing care.”
It’s really that simple. It should be obvious. But apparently it isn’t.
There were so many jaw-dropping moments in U.S. District Court Judge Paul S. Diamond’s courtroom on Thursday that it is hard to know where to begin.
For starters, I had a stint covering courts in the mid-2000s, and have never seen a courtroom packed with so many lawyers — including lawyers representing lawyers — for a hearing in an exoneration case. An overflow room was needed to handle the rapt onlookers.
The hearing grew out of efforts by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office to overturn the conviction of Dennis Johnson, who was found guilty of second-degree murder in the 2007 shooting of a man at a North Philadelphia convenience store. While Johnson’s future was ostensibly on the line, it quickly became clear that so was Krasner’s.
By the end of the day, the future for both men looked bleak.
While Johnson was in court with his attorneys, the hearing focused on the machinations within Krasner’s office.
The office has already run into a heap of legal trouble over previous efforts to overturn other convictions or reduce sentences, mainly for those convicted ofmurder.
Federal courts have disbarred and suspended prosecutors in Krasner’s office for lying to the court. The state Supreme Court found more lies and, in an unprecedented move, appointed the state attorney general to review future efforts to undo prior convictions.
So essentially, Krasner’s office now has a court-appointed babysitter because it can no longer be trusted.
It was easy to see why after three prosecutors — who still work for Krasner — provided damning testimony about their own office’s sloppy handling of efforts to vacate Johnson’s conviction. They accused Krasner of conduct that bordered on paranoia and cover-up, and painted a picture of an office that seemed less focused on the pursuit of justice than on shielding itself.
Katherine Ernst, the chief of training in the law division, went first, followed by colleagues Steven Wildberger, an assistant district attorney in the appeals unit, and David Napiorski, the head of the law division.
David Napiorski, the head of the law division in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, testified that Krasner eschewed his official email account and “always prefers oral, in-person conversations.”Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
They came with receipts, providing meeting times, memos, and emails documenting conversations with Krasner about how to handle errors in court filings by the DA’s office related to an attempt to undo Johnson’s conviction.
Krasner did not respond to a request for comment, but in an earlier filing his office said the prosecutors were “ill informed.”
The three prosecutors provided alarming testimony detailing how Krasner avoided using his official office email and threatened them.
“DA Krasner typically didn’t use that email,” Ernst said about his office email. “He wouldn’t check it. And so, if you wanted to email him, then you typically had to email his private address.”
Napiorski backed that view: “He always prefers oral, in-person conversations.”
In late June, after the three prosecutors drafted a memo to Krasner detailing the office’s conflict of interest in handling the Johnson matter, he responded with an email sent from the account of his chief of staff, Jennifer Lin, which began, “This response is not from Jen Lin, it is from Larry Krasner.”
At another point, Wildberger testified that when they presented Krasner a letter turning the Johnson case over to the state attorney general, he went “apoplectic.”
“He said something about having already told us not to bring him printed-out material, things in writing,” Wildberger said.
‘Paraguay’
The prosecutors pushed for the attorney general to take over, because their self-interest had become a focus rather than the merits of the case. In their view, they had conflicts, and so did Krasner.
But Krasner wanted to hire an outside lawyer to handle the matter, and repeatedly resisted efforts to turn the case over to the state Office of Attorney General, or OAG.
Ernst testified that Krasner “hated” everyone in the OAG. Wildberger said Krasner “referred to the Office of the Attorney General as Paraguay” and “the people that work there as Nazis.”
Adding to the drama was the fact that the attorney questioning Ernst and Wildberger was John Boscia, a senior deputy attorney general in the OAG.
To clarify, Boscia asked Wildberger, “So that the people from the OAG’s office were escaped Nazis who had gone to Paraguay?”
“That’s my understanding,” Wildberger responded.
All three prosecutors testified that throughout the internal discussions, Krasner remained adamant about retaining control of the case in order to “protect the office” — a phrase that came up more than two dozen times during the hearing.
At one point, Judge Diamond asked if Krasner’s reference to “protect the office” meant “protect himself?”
“I think that was probably part of it,” Napiorski said.
In another twist, Thomas Gaeta, the DA’s civil litigation supervisor, was involved in some of the internal discussion, yet he handled the brief and mild cross-examination of his colleagues on Thursday.
The roots of the DA’s conflict began after Johnson appealed the verdict, claiming his defense attorney was ineffective.
In 2022, then-Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Mason filed a document that agreed with the arguments made by Johnson’s attorneys at the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, and that his conviction should be overturned. According to the document Mason signed, the detective’s testimony in Johnson’s trial was improper and had “tipped the scales” toward a conviction.
But this spring, following an order from Diamond, Ernst and some of her colleagues reviewed the case. Ernst said she found multiple errors in Mason’s motion and confronted her.
Ernst and her colleagues urged Mason to fall on her sword for the office,take responsibility for the errors, and withdraw the motion. Napiorski said he told Mason he had done something similar in a different exoneration case that blew up.
Profiles in courage.
‘Reluctantly but loudly’
The main hero in what is shaping up to be an unraveling of Krasner’s mass exoneration scheme appears to be Mason.
Her dramatic testimony in Diamond’s courtroom last month provided a window into the lack of independent investigation by Krasner’s office into the wrongful conviction claims. (Mason also appears to have provided some backbone to the three prosecutors who testified on Thursday.)
Mason explained that she had only been on the job a few months in 2022, and had largely taken directions from her supervisor, Matthew Stiegler, who she said told her if Johnson’s claims were good enough for the Innocence Project, they were good enough for him.
In the meeting with the prosecutors, Ernst recounted that Mason said, “This is all Matthew Stiegler’s fault.”
Mason told her colleagues that Stiegler should have to sign the withdrawal motion, as well. Apparently, that was not an option. Instead of going along with the plan to take all the blame, Mason resigned on June 2.
In a two-page resignation letter addressed to Krasner, Mason wrote that she had limited experience with federal habeas law when she was hired. Yet, the first two cases Stiegler assigned to her “involved complicated cases where he determined that it was appropriate to concede habeas relief.”
Mason said she “trusted” Stiegler, but later learned about a mass exodus of prosecutors when he oversaw the federal litigation unit.
Mason said Stiegler had “worked closely with the Innocence Project and the Federal Defenders on the [Johnson] case, deeming it worthy of a concession with little independent investigation.”
Therein lies the problem when it comes to reviewing past convictions. Under Krasner, the prosecution and defense are largely on the same team.
Mason added that Stiegler reviewed several drafts of the concession she filed in the Johnson case, but did not sign his name to it. Mason ended by writing that she “reluctantly but loudly” resigned.
After Mason quit, all three prosecutors testified that Stiegler hatched a plan to manage the fallout. He suggested combing through Mason’s past cases for errors and claiming she was a rogue operator.
Ernst testified that Stiegler asked to meet and told her, “Mason purposely inserted the false facts into the response.” Ernst explained that Stiegler wanted to make it seem as if any mistakes in the case were “100% [Mason’s] fault and 0% his fault.”
Krasner was on board with Stiegler’s plan, according to Ernst, who recounted a conversation with the district attorney.
Krasner said Stiegler “gave me this really good idea,” Ernst testified. “I think that we should go through Ms. Mason’s cases, say that this was a pattern by her, and then file something with the court saying that.”
Why the deference to Stiegler is unclear. He has come and gone from Krasner’s office three times and remains a lightning rod. Stiegler now oversees the Conviction Integrity Unit, a departmental name fast becoming an oxymoron.
Stiegler sat in the front row of Judge Diamond’s courtroom on Thursday as the other prosecutors testified about his role and reputation with the office.
Wildberger testified that in the meeting with Mason and the other prosecutors, he told her, “You’ll find no Matt Stiegler apologists here.” He later explained that Stiegler “was not well liked” and had chased away many prosecutors.
The internal drama and legal troubles have roiled Krasner’s office. Ernst testified that many frontline prosecutors were “angry” at Krasner for what happened to Mason. Wildberger said he had “lost faith in the administration of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.”
Amid the discussions over whether to tell the court about the errors in the Johnson case came another bombshell.
Ernst testified that Napiorski warned her Krasner had threatened “to fire anyone who tells the judge about this.” She added that Wildberger clarified Krasner didn’t use the word fire, but said that “there would be consequences.”
Early on in the proceeding, Judge Diamond signaled his take on the emerging testimony.
“If what they say is true, potential wrongdoing abounds,” Diamond said. “There’s a question of whether perjury was committed, subornation of perjury was committed, criminal conspiracy was committed, and obstruction of justice was committed.”
The hearing is scheduled to continue on Tuesday. It is unclear what the judge will do next.
I left the courthouse thinking about the Watergate hearings and, in particular, a March 1973 meeting in which White House counsel John Dean warned RichardNixon about a “cancer” on the presidency.
Has something similar metastasized in Krasner’s office?
