Levi Pulkkinen

SPJ Region 10 honors — Runner-up for short feature, open division In 2016, I led our staff in a broad look at mental illness in Washington state. The constellation of stories we turned on the topic formed our first large project since the Seattle P-I presses stopped in 2009, and the first heavy lift for some of my colleagues. As part of the project, I used a pair of deaths at a rural Washington state jail to illustrate the total lack of mental health care standards for county jails. I also wrote a vignette on Chad Crooks, a Seattle man whose suicide illustrates just how far we have left to go.

Koula Sylla came by his U.S. citizenship the hard way – he waited. Having received asylum four years after his arrival in 1994, Sylla applied for citizenship in 2006. It came seven years later. Because Sylla didn’t tell a Brooklyn immigration judge that he had twice used other names in asylum applications, he was on track to lose his U.S. citizenship. While immigration authorities don’t share the number of citizenship revocations they process, I was able to use the federal court information system to hunt them down. I found that they’re on the rise.

SPJ Region 10 honors — First Place for health reporting, large newsroom division Kai didn’t have long to live when I met her at her mother’s apartment. She spent the last months of her life at home, though, in part because of the work we did together. She and dozens of other ventilator-dependent children faced institutionalization in nursing homes or hospitals because Medicaid reimbursement rates were too low to attract nurses. Her fight raised those rates, and got those children home.

A month after Seattle leaders applauded themselves for landing a small blow against big business in the form of an “Amazon tax”, on Tuesday they hurriedly abandoned it to avoid what they called “a prolonged, expensive political fight”.

Tommy Le, the 20-year-old son of Vietnamese refugees, was hours away from graduating from high school when he was shot by a deputy sheriff on June 14, 2017. The young man’s family was heartbroken by his death, and Washington State’s large Vietnamese-American community shared a piece of their pain. But Le’s family says their hurt was amplified by an allegation made by King County Sheriff’s Office officials hours after Le was killed. Officials with the sheriff’s office, which provides police services to many Seattle suburbs, released a statement indicating Le charged deputies with a knife. Nine days passed before the claim was corrected.

Kevin Campbell’s LinkedIn page reads like an inside joke. Maybe it was a mildly funny double entendre, before the overdose. “Substance Abuse Counselor.” That’s how Campbell described himself on the sunny, want ads and Amazon side of the internet. On the “dark Web,” he was “PTandRnR,” a drug dealer on the Silk Road black market.

“It was all lies.” That’s how “K” described her life with Marysa Comer, weeks that saw her degraded and sexually abused for the benefit of a pimping fraud, David Delay. Comer was K’s path to Delay. At 19, Comer seduced and exploited the Seattle-area high schooler in the hope that Delay would make her a star. Three years later, Comer has nothing to show for all she took from K and the others. The money went to the man who broke them. She will spend a third year in federal prison. If she is proud of what she did, she hides it well.