Audra D.S. Burch

But most of the class was centered on the latest president to face possible removal from office: Donald Trump, who is on social media just as much as some of Chris Dier’s students.

At Chalmette High, located in a conservative Louisiana parish, the students in Dier’s class recently confronted the merits of the case against Trump, who stands accused of pressuring Ukraine to investigate his chief Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Dier saw the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry against Trump as an opportunity: a real-time lesson in civics and political science for his students.

So, for two 90-minute class periods, Dier’s seniors pretended to be members of Congress, but without the bluster and sniping — dutifully obeying the signs on the walls about how to respectfully agree to disagree.

“We have never studied anything that was unfolding live,” said Grace Bartholomae, one of the students. “This is history.”

To help his students understand the details of the inquiry, Dier assembled a bit of a crash-course lesson plan, including an excerpt from the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s 30-minute phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, along with a reconstructed transcript of the conversation.

The idea was to try to answer the same questions voters are asking themselves about potential impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Is Trump being unfairly cast as corrupt? Has he brazenly weaponized his office for personal gain? Did he seek the aid of a foreign power to interfere in the next election? What are high crimes and misdemeanors anyway?

And is the rarest of constitutional consequences, impeachment by the House and then possible conviction and removal from office by the Senate, worth the trouble a year before the next election — the first in which the students in Dier’s class, most of whom are 17 years old, will be eligible to vote?

Chalmette High is in St. Bernard Parish just southeast of New Orleans, along the Mississippi River. Surrounded by water and built largely upon fishing and oil refineries, the parish lost more than half of its population after Hurricane Katrina destroyed nearly every home. The rebuilding brought more diversity, and today, of the 1,972 students at Chalmette High, about 52% are students of color.

Trump handily carried the parish in 2016 with about 65% of the vote, but the students in Dier’s class did not always share their parents’ conservative views.

Dier, 31, teaches in the same classroom where his mother, also a world history teacher, taught five years before. He had planned to tackle impeachment later in the semester, but when the Democrats began an inquiry last month, he moved those lessons up on the calendar to follow a study of the Vietnam War.

He said the point was not just to study this particular impeachment inquiry, but to push his students to engage as informed citizens at a time when many Americans do not understand basic civics.

Only 39% of adults can name all three branches of government (a jump from 32% last year) and 25% can name only one branch, according to a recent survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. This year, congressmen in Florida and Georgia introduced a $30 million bipartisan bill to improve the quality of civics education in elementary, middle and high schools across the country.

Another challenge for teachers, Dier said, is the fear of being accused of bringing too much politics into the classroom. His has shelves stuffed with books on political science and history, and posters of Ben Franklin, Helen Keller and Malcolm X.

“I think social studies teachers are hesitant to teach controversial topics, past and present, due to hyperpolarization or pushback from parents,” he said. “Almost all of my students will be voting in the next election; they deserve teachers who do not shy away from current events because of our partisan climate.”

If anything, Dier added, “our partisan climate means students need to be challenged more to learn how to navigate it.”

He figured the best way to explore impeachment in a neutral way was sticking to the Constitution and the established facts of Trump’s actions. That meant having the students, in a condensed version of the impeachment process, study how the Founding Fathers framed impeachment and the step-by-step procedures in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Dier divided the class into four groups and instructed them to read the material they had been given, including the call transcript and the whistleblower complaint.

The students huddled in separate corners of the room reading aloud. Before long, “bribery,” “treason,” “quid pro quo” and other impeachment watchwords floated above the din of the discussions.

The students did not share the same opinion on the matter. To some, the phone call was a clear violation; others struggled with the degree of wrongness. A handful of students — a number that would grow by the end of the lesson — fully supported Trump.

“Abuse of power is subjective,” insisted Hunter Wheaton, who questioned whether the country was ready for the ugliness of impeachment, which would require majority support in the House.

Even though she felt impeachment and removal from office was unlikely, Jenna Riess said that the inquiry would reveal what the president had done wrong, and that voters would “use that in the next election and vote for a better candidate.”

After the discussion, Dier polled the 21 students. This time there were three groups: those who supported impeachment (12), those who did not (four) and those who remained undecided (five).

The undecideds sat quietly in the center of the classroom, and the two opposing groups prepared their strongest arguments.

Chance Beck, speaking for those who supported impeachment, said Trump’s action set a bad precedent. “It’s not morally or politically correct for a president to be able to use national power or national aid that we give to Ukraine for a personal favor,” he said. “I believe he should be impeached and convicted and removed to make the case that this will not be tolerated.”

Trinity Frey, representing those against impeachment, argued that it was not clear the phone call was inappropriate and that it was unrealistic to expect enough of the real-life Republican senators to support Trump’s removal.

Though what he did might be considered morally wrong, she said, it was simply not severe enough for him to be taken out of office.

After hearing from both sides, the undecideds had to make their move.

“Centrism is canceled,” cracked Bartholomae, in the lightest moment of the exercise.

One by one, each of the five students joined one of the two groups, greeted by cheers.

Three of the five joined the anti-impeachment group. They said the stakes were too high and the evidence was too thin. “Show me where this says it’s illegal,” said Jihad Thabata, who questioned whether the call amounted to misconduct.

In a closing statement about whether Trump should stay in office, Alexis Resendez coolly argued that members of Congress should respect the choice made by voters in the 2016 election.

Ayla Hoey rebutted that the transcript may seem subtle, but Trump “knew the power he had over other countries. Even if it seems like Ukraine is not being pushed, he knew what he asked for was going to get done.”

In that final round, a two-thirds majority voted in favor of removing Trump.

This article originally appeared in

'Centrism Is Canceled': High Schoolers Debate the Impeachment Inquiry

CHALMETTE, La. — It was impeachment day in Mr. Dier’s world history class at Chalmette High School. Andrew Johnson, the first impeached president, was on the lesson plan. So was Richard M. Nixon, who avoided facing such a fate by resigning. Bill Clinton, who also was impeached but never convicted, was also part of the discussion.

They went to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank in Washington, to learn about income inequality. They went to Birmingham, Alabama, where they sang hymns and talked about the civil rights movement. In Salt Lake City, they met a gun lobbyist who discussed the sanctity of the Second Amendment.

Each stop was designed to reveal something about the country and how the students, all between ages 14 and 18, form their opinions on the great social and political issues of our time.

Etgar 36 is a summer camp meets road trip, and campers are exposed to opposing arguments about hotly debated issues at a time when many Americans are not used to talking to people with whom they disagree. The arts and crafts, sports and roaring bonfires of traditional sleepaway summer camps have been replaced by cultural journeys and exercises in critical thinking and civic engagement.

For Billy Planer, the camp’s founder, arming young people with information and ideas is the best way to prepare them for the emerging challenges of the world. Perhaps more quickly than ever before, teenagers are pressured to take a side and have an opinion amid an unending sea of status updates on social media.

“Success for us is finding humanity in discussions with people who have opposing views,” Planer, 52, said. “We want our kids to ask questions” and “gut-check their own positions,” he said.

On a bus that resembled the rolling digs of a rock band, the campers crisscrossed the country for several summer weeks to hear about women’s reproductive rights and gun control, the West Bank and marijuana legalization.

This year, Etgar included stops in 26 cities. The teenagers, carrying cellphones, pillows, backpacks and the occasional stuffed animal, first loaded onto the bus in Atlanta. In addition to nights in hotels, they slept on the bus during long drives, like the stretches from Boulder, Colorado, to Salt Lake City or Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The campers entertained themselves with silly inside jokes and played on Snapchat. Between attending presentations on abortion and race, they celebrated birthdays, gossiped about school and munched on Twizzlers. Before their trip to the Heritage Foundation, they visited United for a Fair Economy, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Boston.

“My world is essentially liberal so I wanted to do this camp so I could see the other side,” said Jesse Eick, 15, who is from Manhattan and wants to work on political campaigns or become a journalist. “In my normal life, I might not ever interact with people who think differently. That is not a productive perspective — you have to understand the whole picture.”

Jim Pfaff, chief of staff of the Colorado House Republicans, has been speaking to the young people of Etgar for 13 years. Pfaff opposes gay marriage and said he knew that many of the campers disagreed with his views. But that was not the point.

“A free exchange of ideas is crucial for a free society. One of the things that makes our country great is that people with disparate viewpoints could be friends,” said Pfaff, who hosted this year’s conversation in a Colorado Springs park. “That is rapidly changing. From a political perspective, we are seeing people shut down ideas because they don’t agree.”

In Birmingham, the campers gathered at a park near 16th Street Baptist Church, where four girls were killed by white supremacists in a 1963 bombing. Bishop Calvin Woods Sr. spoke about the importance of music during the civil rights movement, and it was not long before “We Shall Overcome” and “This Little Light of Mine” filled the air.

Rachel Rubins, 17, of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, wrote a journal entry about that afternoon that was shared on the camp’s website. “Mr. Woods showed us how to use love and singing to express our emotions in the fight for justice,” she wrote.

“It was definitely the most powerful moment in my life,” she added.

The roots of Etgar are from Planer’s experiences in the mid-1980s, when he spent summers at traditional Jewish sleepaway camps in western Massachusetts. In high school, he traveled to Israel with a camp, and the concept of learning through experience and travel stuck.

Planer was working as a youth director at a synagogue in Atlanta before he started Etgar in 2003. About 475 teenagers have participated in the summer camp, which is open to all faiths, although most who participate are Jewish. The name, he said, means “challenge” in Hebrew.

This year’s campers came from states including Tennessee, Oklahoma, New York, Georgia and Illinois. Most were able to afford the $5,000 or $7,000 fee for the three- and five-week camps; those who could not were aided by private donations or a reduced fee. Many of the campers said they were liberal, and a few said they were libertarians or socialists.

As part of their experience, the campers are encouraged to confront issues rather than people. They are taught to defend their ground while leaving room for different ways of thinking.

After hearing from representatives at J Street, a pro-Israel lobbying group, Max Orston, 15, said he changed his mind about the possibility of a two-state solution.

“Our conversations prompted me to do more research and I ended up leaning toward one-state,” Max explained.

Max’s father, Todd Orston, said he partly chose Etgar to give his son the opportunity to learn about issues from different perspectives before coming to his own conclusions.

“I wanted my son’s eyes to be open and for him to be exposed to real-world issues that people face on a daily basis so he can grow intellectually,” said Orston, a family lawyer in Sandy Spring, Georgia, who attended traditional Jewish camps through high school.

In Maryland, the campers gathered in a suburban hotel room to hear the story of Daryl Davis, a blues musician who befriended members of the Ku Klux Klan, including Scott Shepherd, a former Grand Dragon. Davis described attending Klan rallies and forming friendships with KKK members, some of whom have turned their robes over to him and denounced white supremacy.

The next morning, Jesse, the teenager from Manhattan, stared out a bus window, still thinking about Davis’ talk and the power of forgiveness. “It was eye-opening to think someone in this terrible group can be turned around,” she said.

On the ride to the nation’s capital toward the end of this year’s journey, Matt Levine, a 15-year-old from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, pored over a newspaper article about debt and the middle class.

He was reading to prepare for a discussion at the Heritage Foundation. There had been other presentations on the tour and Matt said he regretted not following up with a question or two. This time would be different, he said.

At the end of the presentation, he raised his hand and asked about the shrinking middle class. The moment was a personal breakthrough.

“I found my voice!” Matt said as he headed back to the bus.

For Planer, the purpose of the camp is not about moving someone along the political spectrum, but about teaching young people to listen to arguments and to be better prepared to defend their own.

“Maybe they change their minds,” he said. “Maybe they don’t.”

A Youth Camp Where No Issue Is Off Limits

(Summer in America)

He places the flowers one by one around the white wooden cross for Margie Reckard, his wife. This is his solemn ritual, born of grief and unmooring: tending Margie’s garden.

“She loved any kind of flowers. I could walk down the street and find flowers that had been run over a thousand times, and she would think it looked like a million dollars,” Basco said Friday morning.

Hour later, the La Paz Faith Memorial and Spiritual Center in El Paso would be spilling over with bouquets, as hundreds of strangers came to pay their respects to Reckard at her visitation and prayer service.

Basco had invited the public to the service this week, worried that he would have to bury his partner of 22 years alone. Reckard has children, but he has no direct relatives. When Perches Funeral Homes, which was handling Reckard’s arrangements, learned of Basco’s intentions, it extended an open invitation to the service on its Facebook page.

The response was unimaginable. The funeral home received about 10,000 messages and tributes, and more than 900 floral arrangements.

They sat along the front of the chapel, below the stained-glass windows, on every table in the foyer, in the fellowship hall and on the staircase. They were sent from across America. New Hampshire. Oregon. Kentucky.

Some came from Dayton, Ohio, the site of a mass shooting less than a day after the attack in El Paso.

And crowds filled the center to capacity. Hundreds stood in a line snaking around the church and on the blocks beyond.

“This is amazing,” Basco said as he walked down the center aisle, surveying the unfamiliar faces.

“You took a stranger off the street,” he added, and showed him love.

Victor and Mary Perales, of El Paso, said they had come to support Basco because they knew something about sudden loss: Their oldest son died unexpectedly two years ago. Victor Perales wrote a letter to give to Basco offering his condolences but also offering friendship.

“We know how hard it was for us, and we were surrounded by family. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to go through this alone,” said Victor Perales, 72, a retired truck driver. “I said we are going to this funeral to give him a hug and let him know we can be his family.”

The moment Alicia Solomon Click heard about Basco, she knew she was taking a road trip. The professional singer drove six hours from Sante Fe, New Mexico, and had stood for two hours in the visitation line. “I am here to tell Mr. Basco for every crazy nut there are thousands of us that love him,” said Solomon Click, 61.

For part of the service, a mariachi band played as Basco and Reckard’s relatives greeted and hugged guests. Basco met some of his wife’s relatives for the first time. When a performer began singing “Amor Eterno,” or Love Eternal, much of the church sang along.

“This was an assault on all of us,” Fred Valle, 44, said of the shooting. “You don’t have to know him to feel for him.”

Bishop Harrison Johnson, a Perches funeral director, delivered the eulogy. Before he began, he looked out into the standing-room-only sanctuary and turned to Basco. “Look at all the friends you have now,” Johnson said, to thunderous applause.

He preached from Matthew 14:22. Faith will get you through anything, he assured the crowd, even something as evil as the Walmart massacre. He talked about a united El Paso that was not defined or divided by color — a direct answer to a racist attack.

“Whatever you do, do not stop walking through the storm,” Johnson said. “Don’t stop because you will walk out of the storm.”

Basco and Reckard met more than two decades ago at a bar in Nebraska. He was immediately smitten.

“I took one look at her eyes, and it was over with,” Basco said before the service Friday, tears welling.

They settled in El Paso about nine years ago, although their hobby was visiting places by train. Reckard, who was a grocery store cashier in Nebraska, had several health issues, including Parkinson’s disease. Basco worked at a rodeo at one point but now runs a car wash business. He was outside fixing his truck when Reckard left for Walmart that Saturday morning.

“She was a lady,” he said, “and she was the love of my life.”

Basco said that when he wants to feel closest to his wife, he heads to the makeshift memorial and talks to her. Sometimes he returns at night and sleeps next to the cross, hardly visible among the piles of flowers and mementos.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/us/el-paso-funeral-basco.html" id="aff76232-e610-3e5e-a8f6-29a400c3bf85">The New York Times</a>.

Strangers Pull Together to Support a Widower of the El Paso Shooting

EL PASO, Texas — Just about every morning for the past two weeks, Antonio Basco has risen before dawn to buy as many floral bouquets as he can fit in his car and carried them to a makeshift memorial for the victims of the mass shooting in El Paso.

He takes the flowers to a makeshift memorial with 22 white wooden crosses, one for each of the victims of the mass shooting at a nearby Walmart on Aug. 3. The cross for Margie Reckard, his wife, is on the end, steps away from the Walmart sign.

After unwrapping the bouquets, he carefully clips the stem of each flower, hundreds of them in all, and places them one by one on his wife’s display. Then he pours water and sprinkles floral food to keep them alive as long as he can.

This is Basco’s solemn ritual, born of grief and unmooring: tending Margie’s garden.

“She loved any kind of flowers. I could walk down the street and find flowers that had been run over a thousand times and she would think it looked like a million dollars,” he said on Friday morning, in little more than a whisper. “I keep doing this because I want to keep her memory alive.”

Every day, the memorial draws mourners who leave flowers, candles and stuffed animals, or read the notes and cards to each victim — the routines of nearly every community after a mass shooting. The memorial, stretching along a barrier at the edge of the Walmart property, is both a place of overwhelming sorrow and healing.

Basco said that when he wants to feel closest to his wife, he sometimes returns to the memorial at night and sleeps next to the cross, hardly visible among the piles of flowers and mementos. Other times, he leans in and talks to Margie. Visitors quietly back away, giving him privacy so he can garden in peace.

When he is done, strangers line up to give Basco a tearful hug, sometimes take a photo and express their condolences.

Some may know him as the man who invited everybody to his wife’s visitation and prayer service on Friday evening, worried that he would have to bury his partner of 22 years alone. Reckard has children, but he has no direct relatives.

When Perches Funeral Homes, which was already handling Reckard’s arrangements, learned of Basco’s intentions, it extended an open invitation to the service on its Facebook page.

The response was unimaginable. The funeral home received about 10,000 messages and tributes, and more than 900 floral arrangements from strangers as far away as New Zealand, Australia and Japan.

On Friday evening, hundreds of people of all races filled the La Paz Faith Memorial and Spiritual Center for the service, with a line of hundreds more stretching outside for blocks. The funeral home staff had been forced to relocate the event there after the overwhelming public response.

Victor and Mary Perales, of El Paso, said they had come to support Basco because they knew something about sudden loss: Their oldest son died unexpectedly two years ago. Victor Perales wrote a letter to give to Basco offering his condolences, but also offering friendship.

“We know how hard it was for us and we were surrounded by family. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to go through this alone,” said Victor Perales, 72, a retired truck driver. “I said we are going to this funeral to give him a hug and let him know we can be his family.”

Bishop Harrison Johnson, a Perches funeral director, was to deliver the eulogy. “My message is faith gets us through anything. What do we do when loved ones die like this, violently? This is the time when people question God’s existence,” said Johnson, who leads an El Paso church. “My answer is we turn to Christ.”

Johnson said one of the hardest things for him about the funeral was not managing the overwhelming public response or choosing the right words to celebrate someone he had never known, but telling Basco he should have a closed-casket service.

“I took one look at her eyes and it was over with,” Basco said, tears welling.

They settled in El Paso about nine years ago, although their hobby was visiting places by train. Reckard, who was a grocery store cashier in Nebraska, had several health issues, including Parkinson’s disease. Basco worked at a rodeo at one point but now runs a carwash business. He was outside fixing his truck when Reckard left for Walmart that Saturday morning.

An El Paso Widower Mourns in Solitude, Amid a Throng of Kind Strangers

EL PASO, Texas — Just about every morning for the past two weeks, Antonio Basco has risen before dawn, eaten a breakfast burrito and driven to two stores in El Paso to buy as many floral bouquets as he can fit in his sport utility vehicle.

The response was unimaginable. The funeral home has received about 10,000 messages and tributes, and more than 900 floral arrangements ordered from strangers as far away as New Zealand, Australia and Japan.

About 1,000 people promised to join Basco at the service, forcing the funeral home staff to relocate it to La Paz Faith Memorial and Spiritual Center, in a historic El Paso neighborhood. People from California, Wisconsin and New York were expected to attend.

On Friday evening, Victor and Mary Perales, of El Paso, said they had came to the funeral to support Basco because they knew something about sudden loss: Their oldest son died unexpectedly two years ago. Victor Perales wrote a letter to give to Basco offering his condolences, but also offering friendship.

Bishop Harrison Johnson, a Perches funeral director, will deliver the eulogy. “My message is faith gets us through anything. What do we do when loved ones die like this, violently? This is the time when people question God’s existence,” said Johnson, who leads an El Paso church. “My answer is we turn to Christ.”

El Paso Widower Is Embraced by Strangers but Mourns in Solitude

Old homicide logs are stacked on another table. Inside the pages, among the details is the story of the Atlanta child killings, one of the most vexing cases in the city’s history.

Forty years ago, Atlanta was terrorized by a serial killer who snatched and killed two dozen children, aged 7 to 17. They vanished with spine-chilling regularity, only to have their bodies discovered weeks or months later. In rivers. Under a bridge. Behind dumpsters.

The menacing drumbeat of child abductions, mostly of young African American boys, shook a city that was emerging at the time as a progressive black mecca. Gripped by fear, anxiety and helplessness, parents refused to let their children play outside. Some took their children out of school. Psychics arrived to help. The city imposed a curfew.

In 1982, Wayne Williams was convicted of killing two adults. Police suspected that he was also responsible for most of the child killings, as well as the killings of four young adults. Even though prosecutors introduced evidence to potentially link him to some of the other killings, Williams, who is serving two life sentences, was never tried or convicted of killing any of the children — no one was.

But after Williams was sent to prison, 22 of the unsolved child killing cases were closed, raising an enduring question: Who killed Atlanta’s children?

Some parents argue that the city, eager to quiet the blistering headlines, yielded to political pressure and closed the books after Williams’ trial as a matter of convenience. The abrupt, unsatisfying end led to questions, doubts, anger and rumors. Through it all, the parents, gutted and grief stricken, have been searching for answers.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was an elementary school student when the killing spree began and she vividly remembers the relentless warnings against going outside alone. Last month, she ordered the cold cases reopened and the evidence retested using the most recent DNA technology. Bottoms said she hopes the new investigation will “help bring some peace to the families who for so long have felt like they were forgotten.”

Wayne Williams is now 60 years old. He sits in a state prison about three hours south of Atlanta and has steadfastly denied that he is a killer. But Erika Shields, Atlanta’s police chief, said the new investigation is not about him.

“This is about being able to look these families in the eye,” she said, “and say we did everything we could possibly do to bring closure to your case.”

‘My God. My God.’

In the summer of 1979, the remains of two teenage boys were found in the woods in southwest Atlanta. They had been missing for several days. One reportedly vanished from a skating rink. The other while returning from a movie.

“Nobody had any idea of what this was going to morph into that Saturday afternoon, that these were the first two victims of a serial killer who would murder over a span of two years,” said Danny Agan, a retired Atlanta homicide detective who investigated three of the cases on the list.

Over the next 22 months, 22 more children — including two girls — were kidnapped and strangled, shot, stabbed or bludgeoned, along with four young adults. One boy, Darron Glass, last seen in September 1980 when he was 10, is still missing.

“Every day, every night, it seemed like they were finding bodies. The city was turned upside down. There was this big dark cloud over us,” said Sheila Baltazar, 61, whose stepson, Patrick Baltazar, 12, was killed in 1981. “And we were just trying to hold on to our babies.”

Police scrambled to find any connection among the bodies that were being discovered almost routinely. At the height of the killing, more than 100 agents were assigned to the investigation as part of a law enforcement task force.

Nineteen children were already missing or killed by the time that Curtis Walker, a seventh-grader, walked into his home one afternoon in the winter of 1981. His mother, Catherine Leach, was cooking when she turned to Curtis and forbade him from going outside. “Stay inside,” she said. “They’re snatching children.”

Curtis, 13, left anyway, headed to make extra money by carrying groceries for seniors. He never returned home. For two weeks, Leach, now 70, waited for news about Curtis, the second oldest of her four boys, the one who had promised to score big in Hollywood, maybe as an illustrator because he drew animals so well.

Then came a call from a neighbor: Turn on the news.

“My God. My God,” Leach cried, reliving that moment 38 years ago. “I looked at him being pulled out the water on television. I just knew that was him.”

Though her son’s killing was one of 10 considered a “pattern case” that authorities directly connected to Williams, Leach does not believe he is the killer. She is not alone. Several parents or relatives have said they believe the Ku Klux Klan was responsible.

“We want to know who killed our children,” Leach said, adding that it felt like her son and the other children had been forgotten. “That’s the answer we didn’t get.”

It was a stakeout in May 1981, near the Chattahoochee River, that led the police to Williams. Investigators eventually linked hairs and carpet fibers on the bodies of some of the victims to those in his house and car, they said.

Agan, who worked on the police force for 29 years, retiring as a homicide commander, said he understands the temptation to believe that Williams is innocent, particularly among African Americans, in part because of a historic distrust of police.

But for him, he said, the facts are clear. It was Williams whom the police spotted crossing a bridge in his car after an officer heard a splash, he said. Days later, a body was discovered in the river not far from where another had already been found.

“A lot of folks want to hinge his guilt on the carpet fiber alone. There was other evidence, more fibers and dog hairs brought into court, along with witness testimony. And there is the inescapable fact that Wayne Williams was on that bridge, and two bodies washed up days later,” Agan said. “Wayne Williams is a serial killer, a predator, and he did the bulk of these murders.”

In 2010, DNA testing was performed on human hairs found on the body of Patrick Baltazar, the 16th victim. The results did not exclude Williams as the source of the hairs and the investigation did not produce any new results.

A Pair of Gold Trunks and $2

Anthony Terrell, 48, has spent the last four decades replaying the day his big brother Earl went missing after leaving a community pool. He still searches his mind for the slightest detail that might lead to answers.

Terrell tearfully shared his story on a rainy Saturday at the Ellenwood, Georgia, cemetery where his brother is buried in the Garden of Faith.

On a July afternoon in 1980, Terrell’s relatives invited the boys to go swimming, but he stayed behind to care for his two younger brothers. He gave Earl his gold trunks and $2 to enter the pool.

A short time later, Earl, 10, got into trouble at the pool and was asked to leave. Everyone assumed he went home, but by the time night fell, the family was racing through the neighborhood, searching for him.

Months later, Earl’s skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded area. Terrell helped his mother identify his brother by the gold trunks.

“I just keep thinking, what if I had went swimming instead,” he said.

Terrell described his brother as his protector.

“He taught me how to do everything. We walked to school together. He wanted to be a firefighter and every time he saw a fire truck he would run outside,” he said.

“He was a fighter, which is why I don’t understand how anyone could have snatched him.”

‘We Opened It Up.’

Bottoms, who was elected mayor in 2017, was 9 years old when the killings started. She remembers her grandmother and aunt begging her mother to send her to Chicago. And she remembers waiting at the school bus stop one morning when a car slowly cruised by — and suddenly book bags were flying and scattered on the street.

“It was chaos, and we all just took off running, and kids were crying and everybody was hysterical,” she recalled. “It was like there was a boogeyman out there and he was snatching black children.”

The memory stayed with Bottoms. So when she recently learned about the case of two Alabama teenagers whose killer was arrested 20 years after the crime through the use of DNA, she instantly thought of the Atlanta child murders.

Last month, she announced that investigators would take a fresh look and the city would begin exploring plans for a memorial to the children. For years, a group of parents, led by Leach, had asked the city to find a permanent way to remember the children.

A hotline was established and within days 50 tips came in; 16 were sent to investigators. Shields said the new investigation began with three questions: Where is all the evidence? How many cases would be reviewed? And from over what time period?

Investigators established a 15-year window ending in 1985, in which the team would review crimes that might be linked to the Atlanta child killings but were not identified as such at the time.

During that time period, 157 children were killed, including the 24 children already considered part of the case. Many others were victims of domestic violence. The remaining cases will be reviewed and more could be added to the new investigation.

Atlanta police, with assistance from other agencies, will review the cases to determine the condition of the evidence, whether it can be tested or retested and run through DNA databases. Early on, the team determined that some of the cases were not thoroughly investigated and the 22 cases closed after Williams’ trial should have remained active.

“I am not judging the officers. I am saying with Wayne Williams being convicted, it allowed all these boxes to be sealed, even if there was nothing in them that tied the victim to Wayne Williams,” Shields said. “I think the investigators were under such political pressure that they were not allowed to do their jobs to the extent they could.”

Shields said she expects to learn something new about the 40-year-old case, but she is unsure how compelling those details will be.

“We will see different patterns, but I don’t know that it will lead to an arrest,” she said. “We are going make some headway, but I am not sure how much.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/us/atlanta-child-murders.html" id="a6cec75b-b72f-303f-a918-6c554cee8d5a">The New York Times</a>.

ATLANTA — On the fifth floor of the Atlanta Police Department headquarters, more than a dozen investigative files of dead children are neatly spread across three tables. A handwritten list, scribbled in red ink, provides the names of some of the children who were killed. The years of each killing — 1979, 1980 and 1981 — are taped on three walls, along with grainy photos of the children, almost all of them smiling.

Who Killed Atlanta's Children?

The three victims reported these horrific assaults to the police as hate crimes, all built on America’s race, religion and sexual identity fault lines. Except the police say the incidents never happened.

Smollett’s dramatic tale of a hate-fueled assault by Trump supporters last month was pure fiction, according to the Chicago police, a calculated stunt to generate publicity and a higher salary for his role on the show “Empire.” On Thursday, the actor was arrested on a felony charge of having filed a false police report.

Despite the headlines that have dominated the news cycle since, fake hate crime reports are uncommon.

Hoaxes are not tracked formally, but the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said that of an estimated 21,000 hate crime cases between 2016 and 2018, fewer than 50 reports were found to be false. The center believes that less than 1 percent of all reported hate crimes are false.

But such false reports can play an outsize role in undermining the credibility of real bias victims and anti-hate efforts. In the aftermath of Smollett’s arrest, one lawmaker has even promised to draft a bill increasing the penalty for filing false hate crime reports.

“Devastating is how I would describe this Smollett story, especially during this legislative season when some states are trying to pass hate crime reform bills,” said Brian Levin, a national hate crime expert and the California center’s director. “This has the potential to eclipse the real facts about hate crimes.”

In the six weeks after Donald Trump’s election, hate crime reports spiked to their highest number in more than a decade, according to the center. Levin, whose research draws from news media reports, counted nine false hate crime claims in this period, most detailing pro-Trump signs and symbolism.

Among those cases was the one in 2016 reported by Yasmin Seweid, 18, the young woman on the New York City subway who told police that she was the victim of an anti-Islamic assault. She said the attackers yelled “Donald Trump.” But within weeks, Seweid admitted that she had made up the story, reportedly to cover for a night of drinking with friends. She was charged with filing a false report, a misdemeanor in New York state.

As with the Smollett case, the sensational elements of the story — a young Muslim woman cornered, harassed and followed — became fodder for the news media.

“These kinds of rare cases do damage, especially in the current hostile political environment,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “They are seized upon and used to try to discredit legitimate anti-Muslim incidents or used to say there is no such thing as a hate crime.”

Hooper said his group received 2,000 to 3,000 bias reports annually before verification, and “less than a handful” were deemed false each year.

Cynthia Deitle spent more than 20 years as an FBI special agent in the civil rights unit, focused on hate crimes and police brutality. As the director of programs and operations at the Matthew Shepard Foundation, she said the most common motivation behind the false hate crime reports that she had investigated was the desire for attention and sympathy.

“They felt that being labeled a ‘hate crime victim’ would be a positive result,” Deitle said. “The cases I examined took place in a workplace environment and at residences, and sometimes the allegation was made to draw attention away from a real negative aspect of the complainant’s life, like poor performance at work or school, or a feeling that the complainant was not getting the attention she or he deserved.”

In Smollett’s telling of the Chicago attack, he was leaving a Subway restaurant in the Streeterville neighborhood when two masked men attacked him around 2 a.m. He said they called him homophobic and racial slurs and slung a rope around his neck. Even by hate crime standards, the story of an assault on a celebrity seemed shocking and garnered relentless attention.

But it wasn’t long before the story collapsed. Questions, inconsistencies and a lack of evidence chipped away at Smollett’s version of events. He steadfastly push backed at doubters, even appearing on “Good Morning America,” where he passionately proclaimed his innocence and questioned why anyone would make up a hate crime. “You do such a disservice when you lie about things like this,” Smollett told Robin Roberts.

According to some experts, the motivation behind filing false hate crime reports may be more than just getting attention.

“As a community we have to say this is unacceptable, because it’s wrong and dangerous and puts others at risk,” said Kelly Champion, a clinical and forensic psychologist specializing in trauma and anxiety. And, she added, Smollett “may have been under so much stress that we don’t know about that this seemed like an effective solution” to his problems.

By the end of the week, police had built their own narrative. They announced that Smollett had staged the assault, hiring two brothers for $3,500. They said he was also responsible for sending himself a threatening letter. Both acts were done to promote his career, they contend. The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

Smollett’s legal team has denied the claims made by police. “He wants nothing more than to clear his name,” said Jack Prior, one of his lawyers.

In the wake of the Smollett case, state Rep. Nick Zerwas, a Minnesota Republican, said he planned to introduce legislation this session increasing the penalty for falsely reporting a hate crime. The announcement was met with pushback from Democrats.

“I don’t think we need to create a chilling effect on people reporting hate crimes,” Minnesota state Rep. Ryan Winkler, the majority leader, told the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. If anything, he said, hate crimes were underreported.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/fake-hate-crimes.html" id="f226bbed-c3d7-3d28-a195-5c24b74fc40a">The New York Times</a>.

The Muslim college student was on the New York City subway when three men snatched her bag, reached for her hijab and called her a terrorist. A Houston sixth-grader was kidnapped and robbed by a band of young white supremacists, one with an “I hate black people” tattoo on his arm. And on one of the coldest nights of the year in Chicago, Jussie Smollett, a black and gay actor, was attacked by two men who shouted “MAGA Country” and slipped a noose around his neck.

Hate Crime Hoaxes Are Rare but Can Be 'Devastating'

Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr., 26, was a decorated African-American veteran. He had just been honorably discharged from the Army in 1946 and was headed home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. The fateful bus ride home was his last before his he lost his sight. Still in uniform, Woodard, was forcibly removed from the bus, brutally beaten and jailed by the white police chief in the town of Batesburg.

But in the small town where Woodard was beaten so severely that he lost his sight, the crime went unpunished and largely faded from memory. Almost three generations later, a black Army veteran in Georgia and a white federal judge in South Carolina separately stumbled upon Woodard’s story and vowed to honor his memory.

On Saturday afternoon, town and civic leaders and groups of veterans will walk the two blocks from the bus stop to the jail where Woodard was taken to honor his memory and acknowledge the cruelty that was done to him. Part of the trickle of small towns throughout the country confronting their violent, racist histories, the town of 5,000 — now called Batesburg-Leesville — will unveil a historic marker downtown as a permanent reminder of the racial injustice that happened there.

“Here is this hero that so many people have forgotten or didn’t know about,” said Don North, a former Army major from Carrollton, Georgia, who spent three years researching and raising money for the marker. “This is about remembering him, what he endured and the legacy he left behind.”

Woodard enlisted in the Army in 1942, serving as a longshoreman in the Pacific Theater of World War II. After he was discharged, he left from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia.

What happened on the bus is still unclear, but a dispute over a restroom break led the driver to call the police when they stopped in Batesburg, 35 miles southwest of Columbia.

Audra D.S. Burch

Articles written by the author

'Centrism Is Canceled': High Schoolers Debate the Impeachment Inquiry

A Youth Camp Where No Issue Is Off Limits

Strangers Pull Together to Support a Widower of the El Paso Shooting

An El Paso Widower Mourns in Solitude, Amid a Throng of Kind Strangers

El Paso Widower Is Embraced by Strangers but Mourns in Solitude

Who Killed Atlanta's Children?

Who Killed Atlanta's Children?

Hate Crime Hoaxes Are Rare but Can Be 'Devastating'

Why a Town Is Finally Honoring a Black Veteran Attacked by Its White Police Chief

Why a Town Is Finally Honoring a Black Veteran Attacked by Its White Police Chief

Commencement speaker's gift to graduates: He'll pay off their loans

Emmett Till's murder, and how America remembers its darkest moments