Activist Trudy Metzger talks about how purity, abuse and loneliness connect in the conservative Mennonite and Amish communities. For the Post-Gazette series Coverings.
Had her daughter died from overdose, or from the frigid December night? The question had obsessed Donna since Danielle’s death. Finally, she had the chance to ask the only person who might have answers, inviting him to coffee after confronting him on the street.
For the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette project Needle in the Family Tree: After Danielle’s Fall.
Instagram and Snapchat story for promoting “Life and Death on Santron Avenue.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette multimedia presentation “Life and Death on Santron Avenue” uses a long-form narrative story, still images and video to take readers into the lives and homes of those most deeply damaged by drug use. Opiates crush dreams and hope; only love and longing survive.
Santron Avenue is a 600-foot ribbon of cracked gray asphalt that follows a bowl-shaped landscape in a working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood called Carrick. Roll a marble down the street and it will eventually come to a stop at the 100 block, Santron’s lowest point. From here, it’s uphill, no matter which way you go. On this small section of road, the potent mix of heroin and fentanyl exerted such a powerful and destructive pull in 2017 that it warped the lives of all who spent time there.
Diane Dalton finally visits the empty house where the body of her daughter, Jenn, was found months before. As Jenn’s family is stuck looking for answers, the rest of the world, including those who were with Jenn in her final hours, carries on.
This is the closing video for Life and Death on Santron Avenue, a long form multimedia project on one block in Pittsburgh’s overdose capital of Carrick. In April, a high school student’s quick action in the middle house stopped dope from destroying her small family. In the height of summer, the house on the left became the endpoint of a reckless ride that nearly proved fatal. And on a drizzly August afternoon, dope ushered death onto the barren back porch of the house on the right, hurling one family into a chasm of pain. As fall approached, a sleepless and grieving father drove along Santron after midnight and posed questions no one would, or could, answer.
Danielle McClain’s family knows the battles of drug dependence, her son’s urn in her living room stands as a constant reminder. How do you better understand a son in addiction & protect the next generation? She explains how she sees it. Social media edit for the Post-Gazette project Keeley and the Vial.
Alcoa Corp. is leaving Suriname, after driving its economy for a century. Along the Upper Suriname River, an area almost the size of Allegheny County was flooded to provide water for the Afobaka Dam in order to power Alcoa subsidiary Suralco’s aluminum production complex. The construction of the reservoir and dam forced the relocation of 43 Saamaka villages and their some 6,000 residents– some of whom still wait for electrification of their villages over a half century later. Social media teaser for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: The Land Alcoa Dammed.
When I showed up to Clairton in 2013 to photograph a Friday with the legendary Clairton Bears football team, they were carrying the longest active winning streak in American high school football. With 66 consecutive wins in a row, the Bears had not lost since September 4, 2009. This is not really a piece about football, it’s the story of the heart of a city and a record of the power of the mythology created when brothers, cousins, uncles, fathers, grandfathers even, pass on a tradition as saturated with local legend and importance as the Bears.