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This series investigated an unsolved police shooting of two students in 1972 at Southern University, an historically Black university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Two young men, Denver Smith and Leonard Brown, were shot dead outside a Southern administration building during a protest — a lethal end to weeks of demonstrations by students fueled by disparate funding between Southern and the majority white flagship and poor learning and housing conditions.

This investigation revealed, for the first time, how the FBI narrowed the list of sheriff’s deputies who may have fired the deadly shot but failed to identify a culprit. We named the three main suspects and unveiled new facts about the victims and the stories of their families, who have grieved for 50 years without answers.

2022 IRE Award Winner, Student Work > Large