In 2024, Sarah Stillman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer for The New Yorker, began looking into a tip she’d received about the starvation-related death of a 65-year-old Arizona woman, Mary Faith Casey. While incarcerated in a county jail for nearly four months and suffering from severe, untreated mental illness, Casey’s weight had plummeted from around 145 pounds to 90.
To report the story, Stillman — who founded and directs the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, which supports intensive public-interest journalism and trains young journalists — spent hundreds of hours examining what happened to Casey and others at the Pima County Jail. That investigation led her to uncover a much broader pattern in county jails that appeared to extend nationwide — an alarming number of people were starving to death or dying of dehydration, allegedly due to inadequate mental health care.
Sarah Stillman
While she reported on the issue for The New Yorker, Stillman collaborated with the lab to bring the story to a broader, more hyper-local set of audiences. She enlisted the help of Eliza Fawcett ’19, a reporter and fellow at the Yale lab, who scoured local news reports, court cases, and medical examiner records around the country to investigate the scope of dehydration and starvation deaths of mentally ill people in local jails.
By the time Stillman’s lengthy piece about the case was published in The New Yorker, Stillman — with help from Fawcett, and Matt Nadel, the lab’s program manager — had identified more than 50 such cases across the country. (Stillman credited both Fawcett and Nadel in her story.)
Stillman, Fawcett, and Nadel also created a lab website, “Starved for Care,” to tell the stories of more than two dozen individuals who died of causes tied to dehydration, starvation, or neglect in jails in 17 states, each illustrated with a portrait of the individual by artist Janelle Retka.
“What was so moving about that project and speaks to how the lab is trying to reframe some of this work, is that while we delved into these really upsetting cases, we wanted to present them in a way that humanized these people,” said Fawcett.
The lab has since facilitated additional related reporting in local, non-profit newsrooms. For example, the lab partnered with the Arkansas Advocate on a forthcoming, four-part series by lab fellow Abbey Kim ’25 about jail deaths in that state, and with Arizona Luminaria on an investigation of “competency restoration” programs for the mentally ill.
This kind of journalistic symbiosis — a deeply investigated national story that supports and spins off many localized iterations, thereby helping to drive accountability — is precisely what the three-year-old lab aims to do more of as it grows, said Stillman, a professor in the practice in the Department of English in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“So many stories have potential impacts that go far beyond telling a big national story,” she said. “Frequently, policy change needs to happen at a local level. I am continuing to do my own reporting on deep-dive investigative stories that have national implications, but I also mentor former and current students through the lab to write their own related investigative pieces that they publish with local newsrooms.”
Providing a pathway
Just as critically, the lab, which is supported by Yale’s English department and Yale Law School, along with generous grant funding, offers promising journalists the opportunity to pursue investigative features that many local newsrooms don’t have the resources to support. Local newsrooms, in return, benefit from the efforts of student reporters and post-graduate fellows, as well as from the lab’s resources.
“It’s such a hard landscape for people who want to do that work — there are so few jobs and pathways for that,” Stillman said. “One of my visions for the lab was to be able to support younger journalists right after they graduate.”
The lab currently has two full-time reporting fellows — Fawcett, from Brooklyn, and Kim, from Maryland — and also coordinates “with an array of current and former Yale students who are working on stories that either plug into our collaborative projects or are freestanding investigations that are really important and that we want to help drive into the world,” said Nadel, a journalist and documentarian whose recent lab-supported film “Cashing Out,” published by The New Yorker, was shortlisted for an Oscar and nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Take, for example, a major piece of investigative reporting by lab fellow Hannah Krenn ’25 published last month in the San Francisco Chronicle, which grew out of a story she wrote for Stillman’s class. Krenn obtained leaked videos that appeared to show prison guards pepper-spraying incarcerated women, allegedly in retaliation for filing complaints about sexual misconduct against the guards.
Another recent example is a story written by Etai Smotrich-Barr, who completed his undergraduate degree in American Studies in December. While a student in Stillman’s sought-after feature-writing workshop, “Writing About Justice and Injustice,” Smotrich-Barr reported a story from Michigan, his home state, about a family whose son died in an Oakland County jail.
“When I finished the reporting for the class, Sarah and the lab helped me refine the writing and pitch it to a Michigan newspaper,” he said. “I’m currently working to get it published, and the lab has been supporting me through that, financially and editorially.”
In Stillman’s course, Smotrich-Barr shifted his understanding of journalism.
“Not only are you documenting what is happening,” he said, but “you can make an argument of what needs to be different.”
Digging into data
Stillman, who received B.A. and M.A. degrees at Yale, has garnered some of journalism’s highest honors for her work. In 2012, she won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan on labor abuses and human trafficking on United States military bases. In 2022, her reporting on how migrant workers face exploitation and abuse in their efforts to rebuild communities after extreme weather events received a George Polk Award.
And in 2024, her New Yorker article, “Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. The article, which also highlighted data reporting from the Investigative Reporting Lab, revealed how what is known as the “felony murder” doctrine — which allows anyone who participates in committing certain felonies that result in a death to be charged with murder, regardless of intention or degree of involvement — has led to the lengthy incarceration of thousands of Americans.
The subject at the heart of that story, a young man named Sadik Baxter, had been sentenced to life without parole in Florida. In 2012, he was arrested while stealing from unlocked cars with a friend. The friend fled the scene in a car, lost control of his vehicle in a police chase, and killed two bicyclists. While Baxter was already in police custody and nowhere near that accident, he was nonetheless charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
Stillman enlisted the lab’s help in generating a robust public dataset on felony-murder convictions nationwide. The team’s work, collected on the lab’s “Felony Murder Reporting Project” website, has since been cited in key filings challenging the use of felony murder in state supreme courts in Washington and Michigan, as well as in federal appeals court filings in Baxter’s case and many others.
But most gratifying for Stillman is the impact the reporting had for Baxter: a prosecutor in Florida decided to revisit his case. Previously serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, Baxter was resentenced and will now be released in four years.
‘A kick starter’
Recognizing that news is consumed very differently these days, the lab is experimenting with creative ways of presenting its work and reaching various audiences. In addition to its website, the lab shares its work on Instagram, TikTok, and a new Substack called “The Digest,” written by Kim, the lab fellow.
Beyond social media, they are trying new ways of packaging their investigative reporting. For example, they’re collaborating with Retka, the illustrator, to create a series of printed, pocket-sized zines, each telling the story of one individual who died of starvation or dehydration in a local jail. Each zine is co-published with a local newsroom and highlights relevant local policy fights. The lab enlists local organizations to help distribute each zine in community centers, nonprofit service groups, bookstores, and libraries in the region where each story takes place.
“We try to think carefully about where folks might be who knew the subjects of these zines and might like to see them remembered, or might have been through similar experiences, whether that involves experiencing homelessness, criminalization because of mental health issues, or just having been in the county jail in general,” Nadel said. “How can we find them either to gather more tips or, at the very least, give them the knowledge that there is an active community and national conversation about this issue?”
Stillman is also thinking about ways to expand the lab’s scope by reaching out to students outside of the usual journalistic circles. “Part of the benefit of being in a university context is the cross-pollination between fields,” Stillman said, “and we’re really excited to find ways to take advantage of that.”
The lab essentially acts as “a kick starter into the world of journalism,” Kim said, and has given her the chance to do work she thought she would have to wait years to do.
“I’m at a point in my life where I’m trying to understand how to think about the world, how to be a responsible reporter,” Kim said. “Sarah is a great role model, and she is uniquely gifted at connecting people with other people, and with new ways of thinking. She has allowed me to do journalism in a way that I wasn’t confident I was going to be able to do. It’s been invaluable.”
