FREELANCE INVESTIGATIVE DATA JOURNALIST
DATA ANALYSIS
More than 100 Colorado nursing homes that experienced COVID-19 outbreaks were fined for poor infection control and other pandemic-related failures — but those very same facilities also pocketed financial bonuses tied to infection rates.
I spent months merging and analyzing three datasets with SQL, creating maps in ArcGIS, collecting inspection reports and interviewing whistleblowers/family members.
The story won a 2022 regional Emmy and prompted a Congressional inquiry.
Colorado’s “red flag” law gives police officers and average citizens alike the power to seek the removal of guns from people they believe are dangerous – but I found the chances that will actually happen depend largely on who’s asking. Red flag applications are approved 95% of the time if police step in. If Coloradans filed on their own, the approval rate dipped to 32%
I spent months working in R, SQL and Excel to do this novel data analysis. I found someone that fought to get a red flag order placed on their brother and convinced them to go on-camera. They were the focus of this story.
There were calls to expand the law after our story and the Club Q shooting. The law expanded to include other professions like teachers, district attorneys and social workers.
Minority neighborhoods make up more than half of all acreage in Denver, but they account for less than a third of the city's tree canopy. And -- new trees were more likely to go into white neighborhoods.
In R and SQL, I compared Denver's 2020 tree canopy data with race and ethnicity data from the 2014-2018 American Community Survey, compiled into the same neighborhoods by the City and County of Denver.
This quick-turn investigation was published by 9News in July 2022.
The Colorado constitution is supposed to outlaw forced prison labor. I reported on a lawsuit where prisoners alleged they are required to work, and punished if they do not.
I found at least 727 instances where the Colorado Department of Corrections documented that an offender failed to report to work, or do the assigned work.
I used R and SQL to clean and analyze this data. My findings were published by 9News in June 2023.
I pursued records for months from state health departments across the country that demonstrated the rise in spending on the opioid treatment drug Vivitrol. In Colorado alone, taxpayers spent 6,500% more on the drug from 2013 to 2018.
The story was published in May 2019 and won a national 2020 Edward R. Murrow Award.
After hearing numerous complaints and viewer questions about the escalator, elevator and moving walkway outages at Denver's airport, I used SQL to run the numbers.
Outages have increased across all three types. have all increased year over year since 2015. In 2019 alone, the airport averaged more than 34 outages a day among all three mechanisms -- that includes an average of about 18 escalators, 11 moving walkways and five elevators per day. This investigation aired in Februrary 2020. In addition to the broadcast portion, I created multiple info-graphics to visualize the data on the 9News website.