When 19-year-old Taylor Kennedy woke up to find his friend dead, he called the police.

Just the day before, he had gone with Shannon Gaddis, 17, to buy heroin in St. Louis, police said.

Though officials determined that Taylor was sleeping when Shannon snorted heroin, Taylor was charged with drug-induced homicide for buying the heroin that led to her death.

If convicted, the Troy, Ill., teen faces up to 30 years in state prison.

The Illinois state and federal prosecutors in the Metro-East area, adjacent to St. Louis, announced they would investigate overdoses more thoroughly.

And they would go after ...

After I learned the banks that had been bailed out by taxpayers had become the main purchasers of tax liens in Arizona, I knew I was onto a potentially big story.

I began interviewing several tax lien buyers and found that this was a common practice not only in Tucson and throughout Arizona, but all over the country. My goal was to use what was happening here as a window into the larger story.

From the beginning, I thought the key to the story was the fact that the bailed-out banks were using money to buy up tax liens rather ...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported an illegal immigrant who was a witness in a homicide case, an attorney told me. "Prosecutors are going to drop the charges."

Sure enough, the case crumbled and the U.S. citizen who had been charged with murder was set free. ICE agents had deported the witness after he was arrested on unrelated charges and booked into the county jail, court documents showed.

Local and federal authorities responded by pointing fingers at each other and insisting this was an isolated incident. The problem, a breakdown in communication, had been addressed, they promised ...

Somewhere in the tilting tower of boxes that passes for my personal archive are the files from my first attempt at data journalism—an investigative piece about the Minneapolis Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. You’ll find no CDs with database files in there. No printed spreadsheets either; just a small stack of hand-drawn grids with case counts, closure stats, and other vitals. I don’t even know if I had Microsoft Excel installed on my work computer at the time. It never occurred to me that there might be a better way to store and process the information ...

Utah is considered one of the healthiest states in the country. We enjoy some of the lowest rates of smoking, binge drinking, preventable hospitalizations and cancer deaths.

But the state's relative good health masks the reality that Utah has some of the worst disparities when you look at health outcomes and access to healthcare by where people live, their income and their race and ethnicity.

The Salt Lake Tribune launched the series Healthy for Whom in January to explore why some neighborhoods are ghettos of poor health. The latest installment was about how certain neighborhoods have higher rates of ...

Houston’s massage parlors are as ubiquitous as the city’s trademark sprawl. And they’re mostly unregulated.

The Chronicle discovered hundreds of unlicensed parlors in the nation’s fourth largest city by digging through state and local databases and commercial websites.

We started with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which had a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of 100 of licensed operations on the agency’s website.

But a simple search on the Yellow Pages website returned more than 400 business listings for Houston.

So who’s watching the other 300?

To answer that, I sent out Texas Public ...

Badger Guns and Ammo in suburban Milwaukee rose to national prominence in the 1990s when reports showed it had sold more crime guns than any other dealer in the nation.

In 2007, I learned from sources that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had found serious problems at the store, known then as Badger Outdoors. Such records on gun stores are shrouded in secrecy by law but I discovered the ATF was considering revoking the license – a rare move taken against only the worst gun dealers.

However, a few months later ATF’s plan evaporated. The ...

The overdose death of a 15-year-old suburban girl was front-page news in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Maddie Kiefer had been dumped, dead or nearly dead, in the front yard of a friend’s home on a chilly Sunday morning.

The shock expressed by the community, including the more than 1,000 mourners at Kiefer’s funeral, made us want to know what led to her death. But we also had a larger question: Just how common was it for people to overdose and die not from heroin or cocaine, but from prescription drugs?

Two tiny pills, each a different prescription ...