"Profiting from Missing Children"

Recipient of the STAR investigative REPORT of the year award in The Charles E. Green Awards (2023)

Kiah Collier, Jeremy Schwartz, Lexi Churchill
Texas tribune

Judge’s Comments:

When politically connected former professional football player Kenny Hansmire told reporters to go ask law enforcement if his company's child identification kits helped find missing children, they did just that, reaching out to more than a dozen of the state’s biggest agencies. None could recall any instances when they were useful.

In a compellingly told story, the reporters systematically laid out the case against Hansmire and the multimillion-dollar business of “crime control theater.” The Tribune carefully and devastatingly unwrapped the politically motivated direction of millions of dollars in public and foundation money to Hansmire’s company in spite of questions about the effectiveness of their product, the exaggerated claims of the problem, and the availability of cheap or free alternatives from other sources.

They meticulously documented the long string of legal and financial difficulties of Hansmire’s other companies with courthouse record digging and Freedom of Information requests. Their stories produced a bulletproof case that persuaded the legislature to pull funding for the kits they had previously earmarked. All in all, an awesome piece of investigative reporting that has made a clear difference.

Ford Fessenden

Judge’s Bio:

Ford Fessenden is a former investigative reporter and data specialist at The New York Times. His work has included the 2000 Florida ballot review that showed Al Gore got more votes than President George Bush, a detailed account of the last minutes of hundreds of people at the tip of Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, and many groundbreaking visualizations for the Times award-winning graphics department. He started his career at The Daily Texan at the University of Texas-Austin and currently lives in New Braunfels and Phoenicia, New York.

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