Hard to believe, but it was just a week ago when the Baltimore Banner published Everyone has seen Baltimore’s missing boy. So why can’t authorities find him?, a deep and vivid investigative story that includes U.S. Marshalls tromping through a neighborhood in search of a little boy and a city agency that mistakenly closes the case instead of prioritizing it.
Readers like me spent half their time exasperated at all the agencies that couldn’t locate him and the other half wondering how discredited city systems must be for the boy and the Baltimoreans who hid him to think that they actually might be helping him out.
In this new interview, two of the three reporters involved in the story — Jessica Calefati and Lee Sanderlin — talk about how they made such a complicated and deeply frustrating story into something clear and compelling to read.
“I had done some reporting in this neighborhood for a number of years,” says Sanderlin about how his understanding of the story evolved when he started learning that Tristan was receiving intermittent help from well-intended adults. “A different picture started to be painted.”
“One important interview we got sort of late in the process was with a woman named Heather Thomas,” says Calefati about key elements of the reporting. “She was able to share with us was some of his humanity — that he had a black cat named Shadow and he was interested in video games.”
Watch or read the transcript above or on YouTube. Listen to it on Spotify or Apple.
Jessica Gallagher is the third reporter whose byline appears next to the story.
Previously from The Grade
Eviction, housing affordability, & rethinking education news (Bianca Toness interview)
An interview with the AP team responsible for Pulitzer-recognized education coverage
