Life, death, and community journalism
How the JSK Fellowship brought me back to the “story cycle,” and a story that urgently needs telling
Raul Barreto was 32-years-old when he died on March 11, 2020, inside Los Angeles County’s notorious Men’s Central Jail, located northeast of downtown LA.
Barreto was a bright man who’d come from a difficult background. His mother struggled to stay employed, and frequently moved the family as a consequence. His father vanished into California’s prison system early in Raul’s life. An older brother who tried to protect his baby brother with lessons in the art of being tough, disappeared into his own lifetime prison sentence before he turned 21.
In Raul’s teenage years, his attempts at toughness brought him four trips to LA County Probation’s youth lock-ups. Yet, on the fourth trip, he acquired a mentor who recognized his knowledge-craving spirit and his intelligence. In the years after his release, Raul found a series of good jobs, then began doing justice advocacy work, where he became something of a star.
Fast forward five years to early 2020 when, despite his glowing future, and an abundance of friends and supporters, Raul began struggling with mental illness that displayed itself as paranoia. He tried to control his worsening symptoms with self medication.
“He was hallucinating. He thought there were worms under his skin,” his sister told me, “or that people were after him. That they were trying to hurt him.”
On the night that led to his trip to Men’s Central Jail in a state of distress, Raul ran out of his apartment and up several flights of stairs to the fifth floor roof of the apartment building, where he deliberately or accidentally broke a window.
Worried for Raul’s safety, the apartment manager, who knew him, called the police, assuming the members of the Los Angeles Police Department who arrived would take him to a hospital.
Instead the cops took him to jail.
If Raul’s arrest for two misdemeanors had occurred one week later, he likely would not have been arrested at all, due to the county’s COVID-related mandate to reduce LA’s massive jail population by instituting a “cite and release” policy for anyone who had engaged in minor lawbreaking. Like Raul.
But, Raul was arrested, and when he arrived at MCJ, as the dungeon-like jail facility is called, he was likely still hallucinating and otherwise emotionally erratic.
Nevertheless, the jail personnel put him in a four-person cell with three other men, where he was later found dead.
The pre-report summary by the LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner described his cause of death as “neck compression” — in other words, strangulation — along with “blunt head trauma.”
The “manner” of death was listed as homicide.
Murder and reporting
I’m the founder and editor of WitnessLA, a nonprofit online news site known for our reporting on how justice systems affect the health and wellbeing of LA County communities.
I met Raul seven years ago when we published a story about him, after he and four other young people worked on a research-driven policy brief aimed at reforming the county’s broken youth justice system.
After the story was finished, I continued to be impressed by Raul’s intelligence and insight. So, when we were offered an op-ed that he co-wrote with another justice advocate, we published it right away.
It was early on the morning of March 13, 2020, that I began getting frantic text messages about Raul Barretto as the terrible facts made their way around the various communities his life had touched. Although I knew him far less well than many, I too felt shattered by the news. But, as reporters do, I put my emotions away and began investigating what had occurred.
Less than a week later, however, COVID arrived with hurricane force, including inside the county’s jail system and California’s prisons. After that, there seemed no pause in the stream of other urgent justice-related news stories that required my attention, and I allowed myself to be swept away from finishing my work on Raul’s story.
Expert voices
In September 2021, however, my reporting life was again transformed when, in addition to my editorship, I was selected to be one of ten 2022 John S. Knight Community Impact Fellows at Stanford University.
This rigorous and inspiring nine-month virtual fellowship supports, guides, and creatively mentors journalists chosen from around the U.S. as they work to develop innovative “news solutions” to provide better reporting for the nation’s Native American, Black, Latino, Asian and other communities of color.
The primary goal of my own JSK Fellowship is to bring the members of the LA County communities most impacted by the issues of justice and injustice we cover into the reporting process. In so doing, we aim to amplify the voices of these neighborhood experts who know the failings of our justice systems better than anyone.
A companion goal of my fellowship is to employ, when possible, the kind of narrative strategy that allows community members to see themselves in the story, and also allows those engaged in governance to more fully experience the high human cost of bad justice policies.
The challenge was to know where and how to begin this new initiative.
The JSK Fellowship encourages its fellows to take chances, nudging us to swing out beyond conventional journalistic thinking.
And so it was that, in the course of one of the weekly exchanges with my nine other talented fellows, I realized it was time to return to the story of Raul Barreto, the circumstances that led to his death, the people he affected during his lifetime, plus the troubling justice issues his story points beyond itself to illuminate.
A week or two later, a discussion with another JSK Fellow jump-started the idea of making use of a narrative form called the story cycle, in order to probe the multiple layers of the story of Raul Barretto.
Community storytelling
The story cycle, for those unfamiliar, is a narrative strategy that has been used by certain novelists from Sherwood Anderson with his 1919 book, Winesburg, Ohio, to Tim O’brien in The Things They Carried, Jennifer Egan with A Visit From the Goon Squad — along with newer novelists like Tommy Orange in his gorgeous and devastating 2018 novel, There, There.
Yet the form is employed only very occasionally in nonfiction or journalism.
The novelist Louise Erdrich has notably used the story cycle in a number of her prize-winning novels, beginning with her first novel, Love Medicine, in which she tells interrelated stories from the point of view of different characters, with some told in the first person, others in third.
In brief, the basic idea behind this multi-narrator approach is the assumption that, while facts may be known, it is impossible for any one person to possess a full view of the truth of an event, and its meaning.
Once when an interviewer asked Erdrich, who is Ojibwe, what she intended with Love Medicine’s structure, she said that it was designed along the lines of a traditional Ojibwe motif in storytelling, in which pieces of a story were told night after night at gatherings, each story recounted from the point of view of perhaps a dozen individuals.
Community storytelling, you might call it.
Before I launched WitnessLA, I was for years a freelance reporter, and on a few occasions, I experimented with modified versions of the story cycle by placing first person monologues of those I interviewed in between rigorously reported narrative sections.
This time, we intend to go farther with the idea, particularly when it comes to the technology of reporting.
In this new exploration of the form we plan also to employ audio and video pieces of the narrative puzzle, using audio strategies similar to some of those described by 2020 JSK Fellow Krista Almanzan in her 2020 Medium essay on the topic.
The story cycle structure is, of course, only one of a number of journalistic approaches I‘m working to use in order to weave the expertise of community storytellers into the reporting process during my JSK Fellowship.
But perhaps it is the right approach for telling certain deeply reported stories that also call out for multiple voices — such as the life and death of Raul Barreto.
