It's Friday, October 17, 2025 and in this morning's issue we're covering: Altercation involving UNCG police continue drawing strong reactions, For seven years N.C. activists in the Wilmington area overcame political and scientific hurdles to convince the EPA to enact PFAS regulations in drinking water. Now they’re confronting the current presidential administration that's intent on quashing their success, As concerns mounted, a local nonprofit continued to receive city money, partially at Richmond council’s insistence, Cops on Ketamine? Largely Unregulated Mental Health Treatment Faces Hurdles, Mississippi prison chief reopens homicide cases following news investigation.

Media outlets and others featured: Carolina Public Press, Inside Climate News and The Assembly and WHQR, The Richmonder, KFF Health News, Mississippi Today.

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‘Ashamed to be a Spartan.’ Strong reactions to UNC-Greensboro police altercation.

by Kate Denning, Carolina Public Press
October 13, 2025

A physical altercation between three UNC-Greensboro Police officers and a man and woman during a Monday traffic stop is drawing criticism from UNCG students and civil rights groups. Video footage of the incident shows officers grabbing and cursing at a man during the arrest and kneeling on top of the woman.

A report of the incident obtained by Carolina Public Press names the man as Quenten Thomas, 24, of Greensboro, and the woman as Alisia Rea, 22, of Charlotte. 

Thomas and Rea are both Black. The officers who initially approached Thomas for his vehicle being stopped in a turn lane are Latino, and a third officer who arrived during Thomas’ arrest is white. The UNCG chapter of the NAACP released a statement on the altercation criticizing UNCG Police who they say “brutalized two Black Greensboro residents.”

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UNCG released a statement acknowledging at least one of the individuals arrested is a student at the university. “The University is aware of a campus incident involving a student and law enforcement that has raised concerns in our community,” UNCG said in a statement posted on social media Thursday.

“While we cannot comment on ongoing legal matters, our priority is the safety and well-being of our students. Support is available through the Division of Student Affairs for those with questions or concerns.”

In the video, a female officer who is listed in the incident report as Officer Rebecca Galicia, a police trainee, says Thomas was initially pulled over for being stopped in a turn lane, though records show he was ultimately arrested for a revoked driver’s license and “resist, delay or obstruction” in addition to stopping on a highway.

Rea, who filmed several minutes of the altercation and arrests, was arrested for assault on a public official and issued a trespass warning according to the incident report, despite officers saying in the video she was being arrested for interfering with their investigation.

Rea, who identified Thomas as her boyfriend, told CPP on Monday, Oct. 13, that they do not "have a statement to make at this time."

How UNCG incident happened

The start of the video posted to social media shows a male officer, who can be identified by his nametag as UNCG Police Officer Cristian Ortiz but is not named in the incident report, attempting to grab Thomas out of the driver’s seat of his vehicle. Thomas told Ortiz to let go of him so he could step out of the car. 

Ortiz let go of Thomas, and Thomas repeatedly asked the officers to back up from the driver’s side so he could step out. Ortiz shouted at Ortiz, telling him to, “Get out of the f—ing car right now, man!” 

“Can you back up?” Thomas said in the video. “I do not feel safe getting out of the car with you guys hovering over me right now.”

A third officer, whose nametag is blurry in the video and is not listed in the incident report but has been identified as UNCG Police Sgt. Braxton Hiatt in social media posts, then arrived on the scene and said Thomas was under arrest. Hiatt is seen removing his stun-gun device and pointing it at Thomas through the open car door, moments after arriving.

Ortiz pulled Thomas out of the driver’s seat and began restraining him. As Thomas had his hands behind his back against the side of the vehicle, Hiatt told Thomas he was about to be “tased.” Thomas expressed he did not know what he was doing to be tased for or why he was being arrested.

The video continues to show Thomas being put in the police car. Rea, the woman filming the interaction, asked officers whether they read Thomas his rights. Hiatt responded, “You watch too much TV. Mind your business.”

“Miranda rights apply only before officers begin a custodial interrogation,” a UNCG spokesperson later told CPP. “Without both ‘custody’ and ‘interrogation’ Miranda warnings are not applicable. Custody means a situation where a reasonable person would not feel free to leave. Interrogation refers to direct questioning.”

Ortiz then told Rea he needed her name because she was interfering with the officers’ investigation. Rea did not give her name and asked for Ortiz’ badge number. She moved off the street onto the sidewalk, where Ortiz followed her to continue asking for her name. 

After Rea asked for Ortiz’s badge number multiple times, he responded officers do not have them. The UNCG spokesperson confirmed to CPP that UNCG Police do not have badge numbers. After Rea not providing her name, Ortiz said, “You’re going to jail, too.” As Rea began walking away, officers followed her and told her to stop. All three officers can be seen attempting to restrain her. 

Rea fell to the ground after struggling to break their grasp and is seen on her stomach on the sidewalk as officers proceeded with the arrest. Additional footage filmed by a bystander shows all three officers on top of Rea. She asked the officers several times to remove their hands from her neck.

Ortiz, Galicia, Hiatt and Rea did not respond to requests for comment before publication. Thomas could not be reached at this time.

Criticisms circulate 

The NAACP’s UNCG chapter released a statement on social media regarding the arrests saying Thomas and Rea are enduring severe emotional distress and psychological trauma from the events.

“UNCG PD are supposed to protect and serve students, now, to the Black community on campus they are their biggest danger,” the statement read. 

“The UNCG NAACP is working with the victims of this harrowing incident to ensure all the correct steps are being taken. The UNCG NAACP stand firmly against police brutality and any actions that comprise the safety and dignity of students on or near our campus.”

A post on a subreddit dedicated to Greensboro regarding UNCG’s statement sparked conversation, with some showing support for Thomas and Rea and others criticizing Thomas for not getting out of the car sooner.

“In what world are we supposed to feel that amount of force for a tense but simple interaction is warranted?” one post read. 

“UNCG students are infuriated. I feel for that girl and hope she gets a lawyer (because) there was no reason for the officers to react like that.”

On UNCG’s official Instagram, many criticized the university for turning off the ability to comment on the post. One alum commented on a separate post that educators are taught to deescalate tense situations rather than escalate, and law enforcement are often taught the same.

“I didn’t see one example of that in the video,” they wrote. “I saw profane-laced yelling, and three officers laying on a young woman who can’t be over 120 pounds. Tonight, I’m ashamed to be a Spartan.”

The UNCG spokesperson responded to further questions from CPP that the university cannot comment on specifics, such as whether the officers are or will be suspended from their positions, because the matter involves ongoing legal proceedings, however the university is reviewing the situation.

“The Division of Student Affairs is in communication with the student involved in the incident. Student Affairs is available to provide counseling, guidance and resources to any student as needed,” the spokesperson said. 

“As is our standard practice with any arrest, the University is reviewing the incident, including available reports and video, to ensure clarity and transparency and to assess any violations of policies, procedures or state law.”  

The UNCG Police website says its officers have the full range of authorities granted to municipal law enforcement, and they receive the same level of training as municipal and county law enforcement officers. An agreement with the City of Greensboro allows UNCG to have jurisdiction throughout the city in addition to campus.

Editor's note: This article originally published on Oct. 10, 2025, but is a developing story that is being updated as more information becomes available.

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A Short-Lived Win in a Never-Ending Fight Over Forever Chemicals

For seven years N.C. activists overcame political and scientific hurdles to convince the EPA to enact PFAS regulations in drinking water. Now they’re confronting a Trump administration intent on quashing their success.

By Lisa Sorg

October 12, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Forever War, Part 1: This story is published in partnership with The Assembly and with WHQR, a nonprofit radio station and NPR affiliate in Wilmington. It is the first in a series of stories about the PFAS crisis in North Carolina. 

Listen to an audio version of this story below.

OAK ISLAND, N.C.—Emily Donovan stood before 100 people in the pews at Ocean View United Methodist Church in a small seaside town in Brunswick County, North Carolina. It was May, the start of beach season. She had invited a scientist to speak about the astronomical levels of PFAS—nicknamed “forever chemicals”—that had been detected in sea foam four miles away.

But before she began her presentation, Donovan, a co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, had to deliver some bad news. That morning, Lee Zeldin, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator appointed by President Donald Trump, had announced his intention to rescind drinking water regulations for several types of PFAS compounds. 

The rollbacks included GenX, one of dozens that have contaminated the region’s drinking water and have been linked to disorders of the liver, kidneys and the immune system, as well as low birth weight and cancer.

Donovan felt devastated and enraged.

“Churches in Brunswick County baptize their babies in PFAS-contaminated tap water,” Donovan told the crowd. “We fought so hard. And now our hard work is getting rolled back.”

In 2013, scientists first discovered several types of PFAS in the Lower Cape Fear River, the drinking water source for several utilities in the region. The insidious chemicals were eluding traditional water treatment systems and flowing through the taps of hundreds of thousands of people.

The scientists traced many of the compounds to Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant, 80 miles upstream. State and federal documents show that for 40 years Chemours and its predecessor, DuPont had been quietly tainting the drinking water of a half-million North Carolinians with high levels of toxic PFAS.

It took several years for that information to reach the public, but once it did, Donovan and her fellow environmental activists, as well as public interest lawyers, state legislators and local residents, started urging the EPA and the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality  to regulate the compounds.

Many went to Congress and to court. Clean Cape Fear pleaded its case to  the United Nations special rapporteurs on human rights, who concluded last year that PFAS contamination coming from the Chemours facility constituted “a business-related human rights abuse.” 

Meanwhile, the scope of the contamination expanded throughout the state. Scientists found the compounds in fresh vegetables and fish, eggs and beer. Pine needles, honey and house dust. Landfills, compost and sewage sludge. 

Blood of horses. Blood of dogs. Their own blood.

Finally, the environmental advocates prevailed. In 2024, Michael Regan, North Carolina’s former top environmental regulator who’d become President Joe Biden’s EPA administrator, announced his agency would regulate five types of PFAS, including GenX, in drinking water. 

The celebration was brief. 

Now, here was Trump back in the White House, and Zeldin, with support from the chemical industry, was dismantling those hard-won protections. 

And now, here were North Carolinians, prepared to battle anew for the health of their communities. To stop Chemours from dumping GenX in landfills. To force the company to pay for drinking water it had defiled. To halt the expansion of the Fayetteville Works plant.

“This is a motivator, not a deflator,” Donovan said, a few weeks after Zeldin’s announcement. “We’re going to continue to fight this, now, more than ever.”

2013-2016: A Movement Is Born

The Cape Fear River begins 200 miles upstream from Wilmington, at the confluence of the Haw and the Deep rivers. 

On its journey to the Atlantic Ocean, the Cape Fear rambles through forests of loblolly pine and courses under plains of concrete. About halfway to the sea, where the river grazes Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant, the company was sending PFAS into the waterway. 

Had it not been for Detlef Knappe and several scientists, including Mark Strynar and Andy Lindstrom of the EPA, Chemours could still be doing so. 

Knappe is a distinguished professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State University in Raleigh. He grew up in southern Germany in the small town of Freudenstadt, which translates to “City of Joy.” 

Now a lean, ruddy man in his 50s, Knappe has retained shards of his German accent, but its edges have been softened, like rocks weathered by water. He is quiet and modest, and never boasts that he was among the scientists whose findings launched an environmental movement.

In 2013, Knappe and the EPA scientists were curious about a new chemical that DuPont had been manufacturing at Fayetteville Works. It was a replacement for PFOA, another “forever chemical” used in stain-resistant carpet, waterproof apparel and nonstick cookware, which the company agreed to phase out by 2015 due to its health risks. 

Coincidentally, the EPA scientists soon stumbled across a pamphlet from DuPont that named the mystery chemical: GenX.

Knappe had preserved water samples from the Cape Fear River for a different project. When the scientists analyzed the samples for GenX, they found average levels in Wilmington at 600 parts per trillion, with spikes reaching 4,500 ppt.

“We all felt that was really high,” Knappe said. “But how do you communicate that information? There’s this mystery chemical, GenX, and we weren’t aware of much information about its toxicity.”

The scientists were right: The levels were as much as 450 times what later became the drinking water standard. Their analysis found GenX was passing through the treatment system at the Sweeney Water Treatment Plant in Wilmington. Residents were drinking, bathing and playing in contaminated water. 

As the scientists worked on a paper that contained their new findings, the EPA lowered the health advisory for PFOA and another forever chemical, PFOS, to 70 ppt. While the advisory didn’t apply to GenX, the scientists were concerned about the potential health effects of the new compound, given its high levels in the drinking water. 

We have to publish that paper now, Knappe thought.

When the paper came out in November 2016, he shared the findings with state regulators and utilities, but without toxicity data, no one knew what to make of it.

Then a freelance reporter for the Star-News of Wilmington, Vaughn Hagerty, happened upon the scientific paper online. On June 6, 2017, he broke the story of the scientists’ findings about GenX in the city’s drinking water. 

People protested in the streets. Residents mobilized on Facebook.

“What was surprising and gratifying was the impact that article made,” Knappe said. “And how, maybe for a moment, politics stopped.”

2017-2018: Clean Cape Fear 

Donovan is in her 40s, with chin-length, dark brown hair and glasses. At 5 foot 10, she is swan-like and often towers over a crowd. She worked in corporate marketing for a decade, then moved to Leland, in Brunswick County, from Charlotte with her husband in 2009. At the time, she was pregnant with twins, a boy and girl. 

She became a stay-at-home mom and for seven years taught Bible study at Little Chapel on the Boardwalk in Wrightsville Beach. After noticing some children were praying for the health of their loved ones, Donovan said she heard God call her to become an environmental advocate.

In June, she and several concerned residents, including Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette, social activist and retired obstetrician Dr. Jessica Cannon, and former Wilmington Mayor Harper Peterson, gathered at Peterson’s wooden dining room table to discuss how to handle the crisis.

The demonstrations had been powerful, but diffuse. The activists decided they had to channel the public’s anxiety into a coherent movement. They called the group Clean Cape Fear.

In Raleigh, Michael Regan had been the head of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality for just six months. He was homegrown, having been raised in Goldsboro, about an hour southeast of the capital. He graduated from the historically Black N.C. A&T University in Greensboro before heading to Washington, D.C., for an advanced degree in public administration.

Water pollution and obscure contaminants weren’t Regan’s specialty. He had worked in air quality and clean energy programs at the EPA and later at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Now as head of DEQ, Regan was facing the type of daunting challenge that can define a leader’s legacy.

2017-2018: Stymied at the Legislature

Republican State Rep. Ted Davis Jr., is 75, a trim man with wire-rimmed glasses. A former state and federal prosecutor, he grew up in New Hanover County and drank  water from the Cape Fear River for most of his life.

Like most people, Davis knew nothing about PFAS. But as an advisory member of the Joint Environmental Review Commission, he hoped his colleagues would support funding for local governments to address pollutants, monitor the river’s quality and hold hearings on the PFAS contamination. 

Yet after a contentious Environmental Review Commission meeting in 2017, the Senate declined to hold another hearing.

Undeterred, Davis approached Republican Tim Moore, then the House speaker, and asked to form a special committee. “I said, ‘Tim, I don’t give a damn whether the Senate is going to support it or not,’” Davis recalled. “‘This is too important.’” 

Davis, the senior chairman of the resulting House Select Committee on North Carolina River Quality, presided over seven lengthy meetings with toxicologists, state regulators, scientists and other experts.

Still, several legislators fell in line with the industry’s talking points. State Rep. William Brisson, a former Democrat from Bladen County who had switched parties, downplayed the compounds’ toxicity. “It’s not like the mice fell over dead when they were injected with GenX,” he said at the committee hearing. 

Those hearings prompted Davis to introduce the Water Safety Act. But only one of the bill’s provisions became law: A $450,000 allocation to the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority to test the finished drinking water and to install a temporary advanced treatment system was eventually folded into the state budget.

“We all drink the water and we breathe the air, and some of us just don’t seem to care about cleaning it up.”— State Rep. Deb Butler

On the Democratic side, state Rep. Deb Butler, an attorney who represents New Hanover County, was having even less luck than Davis in advancing PFAS legislation. Some of her bills called for an outright ban on PFAS, including their use in firefighting foam and consumer packaging. Most of the measures died in committee; some never got a hearing.

“One of the things I’ve learned in the last eight years is that things that shouldn’t be politicized are, and the environment is one of them,” Butler said earlier this summer. “We all drink the water and we breathe the air, and some of us just don’t seem to care about cleaning it up.”

2018: A Prayer Circle and Cancer 

Brian Long, then the plant manager at Fayetteville Works, paced the floor before more than 100 people at Faith Tabernacle Christian Center. He wore an orange Chemours pin on the lapel of his sport jacket.

It was a cloudy evening in June 2018. The company was hosting a public event in St. Pauls, a small town two hours from Wilmington, to assuage the community’s fears about GenX.

“There’s been a lot reported on this compound,” Long told the frustrated, angry crowd. “We have decades of evidence and studies that suggest this compound—at the levels we see in our environment—do not cause health risks.” 

EPA and academic scientists soon found that even at low levels, GenX was associated with harm to the thyroid, liver and kidneys.

Rates of thyroid cancer declined in New Hanover and Brunswick counties, according to National Cancer Institute data from 2017 to 2021, the most recent figures available. However, those two counties still rank second and fifth, respectively, for thyroid cancer rates in North Carolina, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.

Kidney cancer rates rose in Brunswick and Pender counties during that time, according to federal data. Pender County leads North Carolina in rates of testicular cancer, also associated with GenX exposure.

Local residents had begun reporting their experiences with cancer and other health problems. Some risk factors, such as age and genetics, make it difficult to establish causation between their illnesses and exposure to PFAS. Yet thyroid, testicular, brain and other cancers have been linked to the compounds.

Several advocates’ families were touched by disorders they felt might have been linked to          PFAS exposure. Donovan’s husband, David, had been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor that caused him to go blind until a surgeon removed it.

Dana Sargent, then with Cape Fear River Watch, was worried about her older brother, Grant Raymond, diagnosed nine months before with a malignant brain tumor. He had been exposed to high levels of PFAS while a U.S. Marine and throughout his career as a Chicago firefighter. Doctors had given him less than five years to live. He was only 45. 

Sargent, now 51, is from the Chicago area and arrived in North Carolina by way of California and Washington, D.C. She is short and petite, with long, flowing brown hair. She specializes in research, but her other quality is bluntness.

She attended the meeting, which began with a prayer circle that included Chemours. “It was asinine and repulsive to hold a meeting in rural North Carolina, in a church—to help shut people up,” she said. “They knew what they were doing.”

One man in the second row told Long that because of contamination in his neighborhood, he couldn’t sell his house. 

“I understand you’re frustrated,” Long said, three times.

The man became angry, and as law enforcement led him out of the church, he told Long, “You have defiled the house of God.”

2018-2019: Chemours Cuts a Deal 

Here’s Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper, on how to snag an alligator to test its blood for PFAS: 

Get a treble hook, the kind used to catch a marlin. 

Cast the rod over the alligator, which should be lying in the water. Reel in the line until the hook reaches the alligator, then jerk it with all your strength.

Steer the tired alligator to the bank. 

Then, everyone jumps on the alligator (multiple humans, if possible).

Finally, tape the alligator’s mouth shut. Stick a 20-gauge needle at the base of its skull to draw 15 milliliters of blood.

Burdette helped NC State University and EPA scientists apprehend alligators in the Cape Fear River and several nearby lakes to test their blood for PFAS. Alligators spend their long lives in water often polluted with chemicals; they can serve as models for detecting human health problems caused by contamination.

The scientists sampled the blood of 75 alligators and found 14 different PFAS at concentrations similar to levels found in the blood of Wilmington residents. High levels of PFOS  would later be found in several species of freshwater fish, prompting the state health department to advise people to eat no more than seven servings a year. Pregnant women should eat none.

It had been more than a year since the contamination had become public, and Burdette was fed up with what he viewed as DEQ’s inertia and Chemours’ negligence. He pestered the attorneys at the Southern Environmental Law Center: We’ve got to do something.

Geoff Gisler, then a senior attorney at SELC, began to strategize, but it soon became apparent to him what needed to happen. 

“We sued,” Burdette said.

SELC alleged DEQ was failing to uphold the North Carolina Constitution, a section of which obligates the agency to protect the environment and human health from the effects of pollution. The law center also filed suit against Chemours, alleging it had violated the federal Clean Water Act by discharging PFAS, including GenX, into the Cape Fear River.

By the fall of 2018, DEQ and Chemours were trying to make a deal.

“In some ways it was a very sterile process,” Burdette recalled. “But it was also very tense. I felt like we didn’t need to do a whole lot of negotiating because we were right. They had poisoned the drinking water supply, and the state had let them do it. I didn’t want to compromise, and I think we did as little of that as we possibly could.” 

By February 2019, the parties had crafted a consent order. Among the many provisions in the 46-page document was a requirement for the company to sample private wells for a dozen types of PFAS and to provide clean water to households whose wells were contaminated above certain thresholds. 

No longer could Chemours discharge wastewater into the river as part of its manufacturing processes. No longer could the company expel hundreds of tons of GenX from its smokestacks; it had to reduce the emissions by 99.9 percent. 

DEQ, too, had specific duties to hold Chemours accountable, including levying a record $13 million civil penalty.

“I think it’s been a tremendous success,” Gisler said in a recent interview. “It was never the final word and would never fix all the problems, but it’s a big step in the right direction. It’s our view that the polluter has to pay, and that hasn’t been happening, because the state and the EPA had not been enforcing it.”

In retrospect, Sargent, the former head of Cape Fear River Watch, wishes the consent order had been tougher. But when the document was finalized, few, if anyone, could foresee the scientific advances in detection methods.

“We didn’t know then that there were 350 types of PFAS coming out of Chemours,” Sargent said. “There’s still people falling through the cracks.”

Some of those people lived in Brunswick County, where private drinking water wells and river water entering the Northwest treatment plant were contaminated. That plant served homes, businesses and schools, including the one Donovan’s young children attended. 

“It sickens me to think I may have hurt my children by letting them drink that tap water,” Donovan testified before the U.S. House Oversight Subcommittee in 2019. She urged its members to pass a law banning the manufacture of the compounds. “I will forever wonder if one day that will cause them medical harm.”

At the hearing, she named her friends—Sarah, Tom, Kara—all young, all with rare or recurrent cancers.

“I am begging you to engage your humanity, to find the moral courage,” Donovan said. Her voice cracked. “To protect the most valuable economic resource—human life. Because it’s already too late for some of us.”

Some of Donovan’s friends have since died. “They left kids who are questioning their faith, wondering why God hates them so much that they gave their parents cancer and didn’t save them,” Donovan said. “The people who fought so hard to get answers of what caused their cancer died not knowing.”

Sargent’s brother, Grant, was among them. In December 2019, two years and three months after his diagnosis, his brain tumor killed him.

2021-2022: Quest for Accountability

One spring day, Donovan spotted odd-looking sea foam near the Ocean Crest Pier in Oak Island, a popular spot for saltwater fishing. She learned that the best time to find the foam is after a storm or on extremely windy days, when the water is agitated. She scanned live beach video feeds and local social media chats, where people posted photos of the foam blooms.

Her sightings, as it turned out, were not isolated to the coast. State officials had seen similar foam at 15 other spots, including in Falls Lake near Raleigh and a stream in the southern foothills of the Appalachian mountains. 

Eventually Donovan collected samples from 13 sites in the Cape Fear River and along the coast, including near airports and military installations, which often use firefighting foam that contains the compounds. NC State scientists began an analysis, a process that took more than a year.

In Raleigh, Davis, the Republican representative from New Hanover County who had successfully negotiated for GenX funding, was still trying to pass legislation to hold Chemours accountable. He sponsored a new bill, “PFAS Pollution and Polluter Liability,” that would require that polluters who discharged PFAS into a public water system pay for treatment costs to remove the compounds. 

“I’m going to fight for my constituency,” Davis said at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. “If the gentleman from Chemours really wants to show they care, why don’t they pay to make the water safe from the contamination they put in that river?” 

The legislation was referred to the Agriculture and Environment Committee, but, like several PFAS-related bills before it, never received a hearing.

In the same legislative session, Butler, the New Hanover County attorney now in her second term as a representative, sponsored House Bill 444. It was more aggressive than Davis’ bill and extended liability to dischargers of the compounds, not only the manufacturers.

The bill had more than 20 co-sponsors, including a Republican, Frank Iler of Brunswick County. It never received a committee hearing. 

2024: At the EPA, Regan Delivers

Michael Regan had overseen North Carolina’s PFAS crisis as DEQ secretary, but a hostile legislature and an indolent EPA under the first Trump administration hamstrung much of his effort to change policy. In 2021, Biden empowered him to take steps to protect the nation’s drinking water in his new role as EPA administrator.

Yet three years had passed since Regan had joined the EPA and environmental advocates had become impatient with what they viewed as the agency’s sluggish progress on regulating PFAS.

Then, on a warm morning in April, Regan returned to North Carolina, to Fayetteville, the Cape Fear River flowing behind him. 

He had arrived to announce the first legally enforceable maximum concentration levels for PFOA and PFOS at 4 parts per trillion and for GenX, PFNA and PFHxS at 10 parts per trillion. Several of the compounds were also regulated as a mixture.

Although the standards applied to only five of the 15,000 types of PFAS, they were something. 

“This is the most significant action on PFAS the EPA has ever taken,” Regan said. “The result is a comprehensive and life-changing rule, one that will improve the health and vitality of so many communities across our country.” 

Donovan credited the progress to the EPA’s openness to meeting with environmental advocates. 

“We had conversations and incredible access to the EPA. We were given the same level of stakeholder value as the industries, maybe even more,” Donovan said. “The Regan we saw at the EPA was much more muscular than at DEQ.”

Not everyone applauded the regulations. Some conservative members of North Carolina’s Environmental Management Commission, which approves or disapproves rules proposed by DEQ, blanched at Regan’s announcement. 

Michael Ellison, who was appointed to the commission by Senate President Pro Temp Phil Berger, has a history of downplaying concerns about the compounds. At a meeting that summer, Ellison asked, rhetorically, “For decades we’ve been making and discharging this stuff. How many people have died from PFAS poisoning?” 

Sargent was sitting in the room. Her eyes watered. She thought of her brother and the cruelty of Ellison’s remark.

“He had no empathy,” she recalled. “He thought this was a joke.“

The American Water Works Association, a national trade group of public utilities, opposed the standards for financial reasons. The Biden administration had earmarked $1 billion to help utilities in small or disadvantaged communities cover the costs of advanced treatment to remove the compounds, yet that was a fraction of the estimated $30 billion needed for all of the nation’s affected water systems.

In North Carolina, more than 1,900 public water systems would be required to comply with the new rules by 2029. If the maximum contaminant levels had been in effect on the day of Regan’s announcement, the drinking water of at least 300 systems would exceed them. 

Two months later, the trade group sued the EPA, arguing the agency hadn’t followed the legally required procedures when it made the rules.

Regan felt assured the standards could withstand a legal challenge. What he wasn’t accounting for was that in seven months Donald Trump would win a second term and that Regan’s successor would begin to brazenly repeal the standards.

May 2025: The Persistent Republican

It was after 7 p.m. on May 7, and the North Carolina House of Representatives had been debating bills for five hours. Davis, wearing a gray suit with a white pocket square and a red tie, rose from Seat No. 9 in the House chamber. 

“We’ve had a long day and we’re all tired,” Davis said. “But I hope you’ll give serious consideration to what I have to say.”

Davis was a primary sponsor of a bill titled “PFAS Pollution and Polluter Liability,” modeled after his previous legislation. It was just two pages. Although it didn’t mention Chemours by name, the language was so specific, it could mean no one else. 

If a PFAS manufacturer contaminated a public utility’s drinking water above federally permissible levels, it would have to pay for the installation, maintenance and operation of a treatment system to reduce concentrations in finished drinking water to comply with those limits. 

“You can make all the PFAS you want,” Davis told his colleagues, “but you can’t release it into the environment.”

A last-minute amendment—key to garnering enough votes for the bill to pass—narrowed the list of eligible public water systems to those that incurred costs of more than $50 million. Those were the systems in New Hanover, Brunswick and Cumberland counties, which, without the bill, would pass the costs on to ratepayers.

“These costs should be the responsibility of the polluter,” Davis said. “It’s only fair.”

Unlike Davis’ previous PFAS legislation, this bill crossed party lines to include many Republicans. It had more than 40 co-sponsors, including some of the most progressive Democrats in the House.

The members began to vote. On the digital screens mounted in the House chamber, names of those voting yes lit up in green. After 26 seconds, nearly the entire screen was green. The bill passed 104-3.

Davis was ecstatic. It had taken five years for him to carry a Polluter Pays bill this far.

“I was tickled to death,” Davis said later. “That guy from Chemours,” seated in the gallery, “I could see he had a sick look.”

With the House in the win column, Davis now had to convince the Senate to support his legislation.

May 2025: Sea Foam and an Industry Unrestrained

A few hours before Donovan’s sea foam presentation at Ocean View United Methodist Church, Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA administrator, dropped the hammer. He would rescind Regan’s maximum concentration levels for GenX and three other PFAS compounds. 

The EPA announcement was even more troubling in light of the results of the long-awaited study on the PFAS-laden sea foam.

Jeffrey Enders, a research assistant professor at NC State University, detected 42 types of PFAS, including some manufactured only by Chemours. One type that Chemours used as a replacement for a phased-out compound, PFO5DoA, was detected at 20,000 parts per trillion. In a different study, scientists had previously found PFO5DoA in 99 percent of the 344 Wilmington residents who provided blood samples.

Levels of PFOS, which has not been produced in the U.S. since 2002, were found in the foam as high as 8 million ppt—the highest concentration ever reported in published scientific journals.

After Enders’ presentation, people told their personal stories.

“I live in Brunswick County and have been exposed my entire life,” one woman said, including while she was pregnant. Her drinking water well had a total PFAS level of 300 ppt.

“Now my kids are having issues,” she said, as she began to cry. “This hits hard.”

June 2025: The Senate Takes Up the Bill

Three weeks later, Davis’ bill was up for discussion in the Senate Environment Committee. 

A few Republican members had warmed to regulating Chemours. “We need to run this bill,” said state Sen. Tom McInnis, a Republican whose district includes Cumberland County, another heavily contaminated area. “The folks at Chemours are notorious for not doing what’s right.”

Some Democrats thought the bill didn’t go far enough, although they agreed to support it. “You’re trying to hold the most culpable company responsible,” said Sen. Julie Mayfield of Buncombe County. “I just want people to understand this might not solve the problem.”

“I wish we could get rid of it all, but that would be herculean,” Davis said. “This is a baby step, but it might put a little bit of fear in anyone who might make PFAS.”

The tension in the room tightened. A parade of industry lobbyists began speaking to the committee, including from Chemours.

Jeff Fritz of Chemours said state regulators knew in the early 2000s that DuPont, which later spun part of its business off as Chemours, was making PFAS, including GenX. That is true. However, state records show that while regulators knew about the manufacturing, the companies failed to disclose in their discharge permits that they were sending PFAS into the Cape Fear River.

Fritz also claimed that Chemours voluntarily decided to stop discharging all PFAS. But he omitted the fact that the company did so only under scrutiny by state regulators. And that Chemours failed to stop all discharges until a second state inspection discovered GenX was still entering the river from the plant. 

The bill didn’t advance. It’s eligible to be heard again next year. 

September 2025: Zeldin Targets GenX for Rollback

In September, EPA Administrator Zeldin made good on his promise. The agency filed a motion in the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to vacate Regan’s maximum contamination levels for GenX and the three other PFAS compounds, siding with the American Water Works Association, a trade group that had opposed them. 

“This is a flat-out victory for Chemours,” Donovan said. “They’re playing their game, and the Trump EPA is 100 percent caving to industry pressure.” 

The argument hinges on what Zeldin alleges is an administrative misstep: When the EPA enacted the rule under Regan, it allegedly did so out of sequence.

The Safe Drinking Water Act requires the EPA to first publish a notice of intent to regulate a contaminant and seek public comment on whether it should, in fact, be regulated. 

Only then can the agency propose a national primary drinking water standard and goal for the contaminant. That step requires another public comment period.

Zeldin alleges Regan’s EPA proposed and finalized a regulatory determination—as well as the regulation itself—“simultaneously and in tandem.” Without a second comment period, Zeldin argued, the agency “denied the public and the regulated community the opportunity to adequately comment on and participate in the rulemaking process.”

The EPA proposed the PFAS drinking water standards in March 2023 and provided a 60-day comment period. More than 120,000 comments were submitted, including by those now challenging the rule, according to the SELC, which also provided comments. 
The agency then published a detailed 4,570-page response to those comments.

Zeldin’s EPA intends to issue a draft rule rescinding the regulations for public comment this fall; a final rule on the maximum contamination levels (MCLs) is expected next spring.

A Chemours spokesperson said the company supports the EPA’s decision. “Chemours wholly supports setting reasonable and scientifically justified MCLs,” the spokesperson said, “but getting the science right is absolutely critical, and the evidence clearly demonstrates that the previous determination for GenX is flawed.” 

The EPA retained two independent scientific panels to review its findings. Over 135 pages, the 12 reviewers largely agreed with the conclusions, with minor suggestions; the agency incorporated many of them.

Chemours is cherry-picking the facts, trying to “confuse the narrative,” Donovan said.

The company cited six scientific studies conducted from 2018 to 2023 that concluded GenX’s toxic effects on rodent livers could not be extrapolated to humans because of a genetic difference in how a protein behaves between the two species.

However, four of those studies included a conflict of interest statement from the scientists, many of whom work for private consulting firms, indicating the research had been done on behalf of Chemours.

EPA scientists challenged those Chemours-backed findings. They cited examples of how the protein in question is relevant to both species; in humans, medicines are developed to target that very protein.

More than 40 concerned parties have either petitioned to intervene in the case or to file briefs in support of keeping the standards: Prominent scientists, like Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; attorneys general from 17 states, including Jeff Jackson of North Carolina; and environmental groups, including Cape Fear River Watch and Clean Cape Fear. 

It’s uncertain whether the rescission will survive a court challenge. Under the federal backsliding rule, the EPA can’t legally repeal the standards, said Jean Zhuang, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. The Safe Drinking Water Act stipulates that changes to the standards can only be more protective, not less.

“What Zeldin has announced is clearly in violation of the law, in addition to harming over 100 million Americans and their drinking water,” Zhuang said. “These industries, like Chemours, are fighting these drinking water standards because then the pressure is off them to control these chemicals.”

Regardless of what happens at the federal level, a DEQ spokesperson said the agency will continue to enforce the consent order. It is also gathering data from public water systems to help them meet the drinking water standards for PFOA and PFOS by the new deadline of 2031. 

Accounting for private wells and public drinking water systems, DEQ estimates 3.5 million North Carolinians are exposed to levels of PFAS above federal standards.

The same day that Zeldin filed the motion in federal court about the GenX standards, DEQ announced it was requiring Chemours to offer private well testing to an additional 14,000 residents in New Hanover, Brunswick, Columbus and Pender counties. 

This brings the total to more than 200,000 homes in 10 counties that are eligible for PFAS testing. Of those, state records show more than 22,000 have been sampled and nearly 7,500 have qualified for alternate water supplies as stipulated in the consent order.

Previous testing has found PFAS 400 feet deep, nearly to bedrock, and in wells as far as 28 miles from Fayetteville Works. 

DEQ says it has not yet found the contamination’s edge.

Next in the series: Local governments and residents sue Chemours. Meanwhile, PFAS and GenX are found in the landfills, sent there by the company.

As concerns mounted, a local nonprofit continued to receive city money, partially at Council’s insistence

Victoria A. Ifatusin

October 13, 2025 | 4:00AM EDT

In a February 2023 meeting, Michael Bailey told City Council that Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School students, families and leaders were “begging” for his help. 

Already volunteering in the school, he said a student had died by suicide, and he was ready to get to work. He handed councilors green, yellow and red folders.

“There’s enough testimonies in there; there’s enough exercises; there’s enough discipline and organization and research to tell you: I’ve done my work,” said Bailey, a former football coach and athletic director at Virginia Union University. “I’m ready to do the work. I want the work done. I’m your coach; I’m on your team. You have recruited me. Please allow me to do my work.”

Councilors approved $50,000 for his nonprofit, which operates at the school as UBU100, a few months later. The total payout would grow to more than half a million dollars over the next two years. 

That funding was largely given outside of the city’s standard process for awarding money to nonprofits, which involves application reviews and a scoring system designed to determine whether a group appears organized enough to use public funds effectively.

Just one month after Bailey’s visit to City Hall, a city official emailed colleagues cautioning them that the organization’s funding application “scored very low.” Others warned against giving money to what they said was a vaguely defined organization that didn’t provide enough paperwork detailing how it would use it.

But the group had a champion in Councilwoman Ellen Robertson (6th District), who made amendments to city budgets for the organization to receive funding, even as she was aware of internal concerns about the organization’s lack of documentation.

The unusual treatment city officials gave UBU highlights the concerns some city officials have about a nonprofit funding system that lacks clear rules and allows elected politicians to influence which groups get taxpayer dollars.

The city has proposed overhauling its nonprofit funding process with a procedure that allows outside experts to decide who gets the money. However, UBU received funding by direct decree of Council, circumventing the process entirely.

As the group began receiving city funding, it was filing bare-bones tax forms with the IRS meant for tiny nonprofits with less than $50,000 in annual revenue. Since 2023, UBU has received $550,000 from the city alone, with $517,320 distributed in the 2024 calendar year.

As officials raised internal concerns about the group’s lack of paperwork, Robertson intervened and urged the city to send the money anyway, according to emails and memos The Richmonder obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests beginning in May.

When asked why the organization was able to step out of the application process, she said it is common for councilors to make amendments to budgets for organizations and services they support. 

As payments to Bailey’s group were delayed, Robertson privately emailed Lincoln Saunders, then the city’s chief administrative officer.

“It’s time to stop denying poor African American children a fair opportunity in life,” she wrote. “I will bring this back to Council for action, if needed.”

The nonprofit’s leaders – Michael Bailey and his wife, Queen Bailey – told The Richmonder they provided requested documentation each time the city asked and were told what they submitted was insufficient.

They painted a picture of a group formed out of a desire to help inner-city kids, but instead got caught in a tangle of bureaucracy and paperwork issues that stifled their ability to serve. 

The emails show repeated internal warnings from city administrators and indications that the group was not following contract requirements. City officials also questioned the accuracy of the organization’s filings with the IRS.

Organization leaders said their tax preparer submitted a proper 990 tax form for 2024 to the IRS in August, but the IRS website still only shows that Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation submitted tax forms saying it made less than $50,000. 

The tax preparer told The Richmonder that the correct form was submitted and that the IRS’ website is incorrect. A spokesperson for the IRS said its website is up to date.

An inner-city impact

UBU’s parent organization, Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation, works solely out of MLK Middle School, a school in Richmond’s East End where about 90% of the students are economically disadvantaged, according to the latest Virginia Department of Education data.

Michael Bailey said he coached and taught in Richmond Public Schools before serving as football coach at VUU. He told City Council he wanted to take what he learned from his coaching experiences and bring it to the school.

The Baileys told The Richmonder they provide life skills like self care, anger and time management, and early career development through their UBU100 and My Life Coach Academy programs at no cost to students. 

Leaders also teach students how to play golf and take field trips to college basketball tournaments and other events. 

“How would you know about the CIAA, the NCAA or ACC tournament if you're from the 6th District? You're never going to see it,” Michael Bailey said. 

What's in a name?

The group is identified by several names. Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation is the only name registered with the IRS, and is the name listed on contracts between the organization and the city. But the school community knows the program as UBU100. The program is also referred to as My Life Coach Academy. Both are registered with the State Corporation Commission as LLCs. 

When asked how many students the organization has in its program, Michael Bailey said they document 100 students “for legality purposes and data,” but they have more in the program than that number. 

“You should have data. And that's why I chose the number 100. It's easier to provide information on 100 than it is for 76,” he said. 

Queen Bailey said the program is impacting three-quarters of the school, which has an enrollment of about 500.

The program reported reducing negative behaviors by 51% amongst incoming 6th graders, above its stated goal of 40%, during the 2022-23 school year. However, when The Richmonder recalculated the percentage with the same data, it came out to 24%. 

School principal Inett Dabney has been a public booster of the group. She attributed UBU100’s presence to a school-wide drop in chronic absenteeism, from 39% to 20%, as well as improvements in discipline infractions and Standard of Learning scores.

“Their positive impact is undeniable,” she wrote.

Emails also showed school teachers and counselors describing the group as a “godsend” that allowed students to “excel by executing their academic and personal goals.” Danielle Greene-Bell, Richmond Public Schools’ chief engagement officer, visited the program and said students enjoy it.

The students echo that sentiment. The program helps them deal with negativity and they feel at ease when asking the program’s six employees for advice, one said. If students do a good job, they receive awards, including lunch-time trips to fast food chains. 

“You just feel comfortable here,” another student told The Richmonder. 

But emails showed city officials were skeptical.

Over the course of two years, they repeatedly pointed out inconsistencies within documents, or lack thereof, provided by Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation, most notably the organization’s budget. 

An unusually large budget request

One public official, who asked not to be named to protect internal budget discussions, said it is not typical to see $250,000 increases to the city budget when “we don’t have enough money to go around for our needs.”

“Because we have such constrained revenue, it is really, really hard every year for any department to secure additional funds, and $250,000 is a lot of money inside city government,” the official said. “That amount of funding would be considered game-changing for those departments and what they’re able to do for kids.”

The official noted other youth development organizations like Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Richmond and Communities in Schools Richmond, which respectively received $244,084 and $500,000 to do work at three middle schools – including MLK Middle School – and 20 elementary schools. Smaller organizations, similar to Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation, received about $10,000 to $30,000 in the most recent budget cycle.

Torey Edmonds, the community outreach coordinator for VCU’s Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development, worked closely with UBU100 and other grassroots organizations as a city consultant.

“They're getting a lot more money than other organizations,” she said, referring to Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation. “If they’re doing the work, then we should support them. Do they have to prove they’re doing the work? Hell yeah. This is taxpayer dollars.”

Edmonds said smaller nonprofits are doing the work and proving it, like the RVA League for Safer Streets, a basketball league for men aged 17 to 28 from high-crime areas. The organization joined the city this summer in a press conference emphasizing the need to reduce gun violence in the city. Its funding was reduced to $40,000 from an initial $50,000 during this year’s budget process. 

ReWork Richmond, which helps build careers for lower-income residents in the East End, hasn’t received city funding despite applying for it twice, Edmonds said. She is on the group’s board of directors.

In addition to receiving more than half a million dollars in city funding since 2023, Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation was also approved to receive nearly $430,000 from the state beginning in 2023. The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services awarded the group two grants, one starting in July 2023 for $25,000 and the other for $154,000 over a two-year period starting July 2024. Sen. Lamont Bagby, D-Richmond, also made a budget amendment after its approval for fiscal year 2025 that allows the group to receive $250,000 through the state DOE. 

‘I desperately need your help with getting payments to this group’

During the February 2023 City Council meeting, Robertson warned that the free services Bailey was providing at MLK Middle School as a volunteer would not continue without funding and requested an amendment to provide funding to the organization. 

Councilwoman Cynthia Newbille (7th District) said she also confirmed in a brief conversation with Bailey and his wife before the meeting that “the program is stellar.” The Baileys then submitted an application for non-departmental funding.

In an email one month later, the group “presented an enormous budget request without providing evidence of other funding sources or effective budget justification,” wrote Eva Colen, manager of the Office of Children and Families and then senior policy adviser to former Mayor Levar Stoney. “It was also unclear what exactly they did and what their goals were.”

Le’Charn Benton, the city’s principal management analyst, and City Deputy Attorney Bonnie Ashley also shared concerns about the group, including the organization’s lack of compliance with their grant contract with the city, as well as a lack of documentation indicating progress and goals had been met, according to a June 2024 email. 

“In conclusion, it was advised that we do not release any additional funding without an audit,” Benton wrote to Traci DeShazor, former deputy chief administrative officer for human services. 

City Council approved $250,000 to the organization five months later. 

A major component of the group’s ability to continuously receive money was Robertson’s advocacy. Communications showed Robertson demanded city funds for Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation despite her awareness of the organization’s insufficient documentation. 

In a February 2024 email, Queen Bailey forwarded Colen’s email to Robertson, requesting documentation from the foundation. Robertson forwarded that email to Sabrina Joy-Hogg, the city’s former deputy chief administrative officer. 

“I desperately need your help with getting payments to this group,” Robertson wrote in an email. 

Joy-Hogg responded a day later.

“I just heard about this,” Joy-Hogg said. “Apparently, they have not submitted the required documentation to get paid. We cannot release the funds without the documentation. But let me get more information.”

Robertson also requested meetings with Saunders.

“Please say the paper work is done and [their] guy will get a check before Christmas!” she wrote in one email.

“I am totally embarrassed and insulted by the lack of our ability to employ a process which meets reasonable expectations and responsibilities," she wrote in another.

This May, Robertson worked with Queen Bailey to ensure the organization was registered with the State Corporation Commission, as city officials told Robertson that the Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation was listed as inactive, so the city couldn’t allot $250,000 for the organization in the budget.

The high-ranking public official said it is not uncommon for council members to approach top city officials directly about funding an organization.

“But there’s only been one or two times that a councilmember has advocated for that organization to get funding past the guidance that we’ve provided them,” they said. “And this is one of those times.”

Robertson told The Richmonder in a phone interview she requested funding for the organization because the previous administration promised it.

Michael Bailey oftentimes expressed his frustration with the city’s process and request for documentation. When the city declined to release funding to his organization, he persisted in contacting other officials outside the process.

In an October 2024 email to former Mayor Levar Stoney, Michael Bailey said RPS and city staff, namely Colen and DeShazor, “slandered,” “discriminated” and “intentionally harmed” him and his business. 

In other emails to officials, he called the city’s vetting process “a nightmare” and “the most exhausting and emotionally stressful part of serving this low-income community and school.” 

The Baileys praised Robertson for her support and said she works with the organization because she cares about the families in the 6th District.

Questions about tax forms

City and RPS officials also questioned the validity of the organization’s tax forms.

Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation submitted Form 990-N each year since 2015, excluding 2018, telling the IRS the nonprofit brought in less than $50,000 annually. Above that threshold, the more rigorous Form 990 is required.

Matthew Stanley, the RPS director of advocacy and outreach, asked the nonprofit in September 2024 for an accurate IRS 990 form for 2023, as well as a budget containing current and expected income sources in order to do work at the school.

Michael Bailey responded: “If you don’t mind me asking, what does the financial health of our organization have to do with an agreement to service the youth of this at-risk community, especially when we have not requested nor received any funding from RPS?”

While the money provided to the group came from the city, RPS sets the terms by which they can engage with students at the school.

Greene-Bell, who was new to the job at the time and overseeing RPS’s partnership process, stepped in and told the Baileys that the organization would not receive the agreement without the appropriate tax forms. Queen Bailey eventually offered the explanation that the city hadn’t given the organization $50,000 in a year until 2024.

“This upcoming tax year we will not file the 990-N,” she wrote to officials, referring to tax year 2024. IRS records still show the group filed the 990-N for that cycle.

RPS ultimately allowed the group to continue working at the school.

Greene-Bell said RPS didn’t know the organization’s financial status because it doesn’t pay for its services. But she stressed the need for the accurate tax forms because the division wants to ensure that a group has enough money to run the entire school year.

“I don't want it to be a case where you come in, our children are looking for you, they enjoy spending time and are learning, and then your organization runs out of money and has to leave mid-year,” she said. “That's not student-centered, that's not protecting their children.”

The organization has submitted the new 990 form for 2024 to RPS, along with other application materials, which The Richmonder received through FOIA from the school division.

The forms stated that the group’s “students planned and executed several major school events, including Ellen Robertson Day” during the 2024-2025 school year.

Robertson was copied on a chunk of the correspondence. She told The Richmonder that she met with the group in 2022 and created budget amendments for the group to receive funding due to the work it was doing, but otherwise doesn’t know a lot about the organization and hasn’t seen its documentation. 

“In no way am I suggesting that the city do business with someone that they feel have not met whatever obligations that they need to meet,” she said. “I do encourage the city to make sure that we are working with people to get what we need from them so that we can do service with them, but I am not saying you've got to do business with these companies.”

As to why Robertson went outside the traditional funding process, she said members of the previous administration told her the organization would be included in the budget for this fiscal year, but she didn’t feel comfortable with that and she submitted the budget amendment to be sure. 

Edmonds, who worked closely with the group, said she wasn’t aware how much money the organization received until she was called into a meeting with Robertson, Saunders and DeShazor. She said Robertson was adamant about the organization receiving funds despite city officials’ reference to the organization’s failure to meet contract requirements. 

“She was going hard for them. And the documentation that was being asked for, I didn’t think was unreasonable,” she said. 

She added: “Anybody would have to answer, ‘Why are we giving them this kind of money and they don’t have proper 990s?”

After initial budget promise, city reopens funding application

Mayor Danny Avula’s initial budget did not include funding for the group, but during a work session for the approved fiscal year 2026 budget, City Council agreed to earmark $250,000 for the group at Robertson’s insistence.

When the budget was published, the $250,000 was only given to “life skills programming” at the school, not Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation, or any of its other names. 

The decision came after reporting by The Richmonder on nonprofit funding in May.

“City administration plans to issue a notice of funding availability for life skills programming,” a city spokesperson said in July, adding the city was working through requirements for grantees. “This notice will include requirements similar to other Fiscal Year 2026 non-departmental grants such as demonstration of fiscal management and fulfillment of previous reporting requirements, and have other contractual obligations.”

The Baileys, however, said the city already committed money for 2025-26, and that money belongs to them.

“We’re supposed to get that,” Michael Bailey said. 

The city published the notification in August, requesting applications from organizations that could deliver life skills programming to students at MLK Middle. At least five organizations applied, including Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

The $250,000 was recently awarded to the Boys & Girls Club.

An ordinance is required to proceed with the grant contract with Boys & Girls Club. One will be introduced to City Council in coming months.

Nonprofit grants by the city have come under scrutiny in the past year.

A recent report by the city auditor's office found that the city gave nearly $1.5 million to nonprofits that didn’t meet the city’s application criteria, while denying funding to nonprofits that did. Amy Popovich, current deputy chief administrative officer for human services, said the city is committed to developing an equitable and transparent process for funding local nonprofits. 

In a May 2023 email to Saunders, Robertson said grassroots organizations like Rings Vs Rent Scholarship Foundation “usually don’t understand the complexities of government grants. They are usually people moved by heartfelt lives and pain to right the historic racial wrongs done largely by the government and people of force.” 

The city official disagreed.

“That kinda goes away when you become a six-figure organization,” the official said. “An organization that … is named in the state budget and who has a council member actively advocating against staff recommendations is not a grassroots organization anymore.”

Contact Reporter Victoria A. Ifatusin at vifatusin@richmonder.org. This article has been updated to clarify that RPS did not give the group any money, only permission to operate on school property.

As concerns mounted, a local nonprofit continued to receive city money, partially at Council’s insistence

The unusual treatment city officials gave UBU highlights the concerns some city officials have about a nonprofit funding system that lacks clear rules and allows elected politicians to influence which groups get taxpayer dollars.

The RichmonderVictoria A. Ifatusin

Cops on Ketamine? Largely Unregulated Mental Health Treatment Faces Hurdles

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — A few months ago, Waynesville Police Sgt. Paige Shell was about to give up hope of getting better. The daily drip of violence, death, and misery from almost 20 years in law enforcement had left a mark. Her sleep was poor, depression was a stubborn companion, and thoughts of suicide had taken root.

Shell, who works in a rural community about 30 miles west of Asheville, tried talk therapy, but it didn’t work. When her counselor suggested ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, she was skeptical.

“I didn’t know what to expect. I’m a cop. It’s a trust thing,” she said with a thin smile.

Combining psychotherapy with low-dose ketamine, a hallucinogenic drug long used as an anesthetic, is a relatively new approach to treating severe depression and post-traumatic stress, especially in populations with high trauma rates such as firefighters, police officers, and military members. Yet evidence of the efficacy and safety of ketamine for treatment of mental health conditions is still evolving, and the market remains widely unregulated.

“First responders experience a disproportionately high burden of trauma and are often left without a lot of treatment options,” said Signi Goldman, a psychiatrist and co-owner of Concierge Medicine and Psychiatry in Asheville, who began including ketamine in psychotherapy sessions in 2017.

Law enforcement officers in the U.S., on average, are exposed to 189 traumatic events over their careers, a small study suggests, compared with two to three in an average adult’s lifetime. Research shows that rates of depression and burnout are significantly higher among police officers than in the civilian population. And in recent years, more officers have died by suicide than been killed in the line of duty, according to the first-responder advocacy group First H.E.L.P.

Ketamine is a dissociative drug, meaning it causes people to feel detached from their body, physical environment, thoughts, or emotions.

The Food and Drug Administration approved it as an anesthetic in 1970. It became a popular party drug in the 1990s, and in 1999, ketamine was added to the list of Schedule III nonnarcotic substances under the Controlled Substances Act.

The death of “Friends” actor Matthew Perry in 2023, which was attributed to ketamine use, further tainted the drug’s reputation.

But starting with a 1990 animal study and followed by a landmark human trial, research has shown that low doses of ketamine can also rapidly reduce symptoms of depression. In 2019, the FDA approved esketamine — derived from ketamine and administered as a nasal spray — for treatment-resistant depression.

All other forms of ketamine remain FDA-approved only for anesthesia. If used to treat psychiatric disorders, it must be prescribed off-label.

“This is a situation where the clinical practice is probably ahead of the evidence to support it,” said John Krystal, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and a pioneer of ketamine research.

Krystal has studied the effect of ketamine on veterans and active-duty military members — a population comparable to first responders in their exposure to trauma. While research shows strong evidence of ketamine’s antidepressant effects, he said further studies are needed on its potential role in PTSD treatment.

The regulatory environment for ketamine also remains a concern, Krystal said. State oversight varies, and federal regulations don’t outline dosing, administration methods, safety protocols, or training for providers.

In this regulatory patchwork, more than 1,000 ketamine clinics have sprung up across the country. At-home ketamine treatments have flooded the market, prompting the FDA to issue a warning.

Side effects of ketamine can range from nausea and blood pressure spikes to suppressed breathing. The drug can also cause adverse psychological effects.

“Being on a psychedelic puts people in an extremely vulnerable state,” Goldman said. People can get retraumatized as they relive disturbing memories. That’s why it’s critical that a mental health provider guide a person through a ketamine session, she said.

With proper precautions — and when other treatments have failed — Rick Baker thinks ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is a good fit for first responders. Baker is CEO and founder of Responder Support Services, which provides mental health treatment exclusively to police officers, firefighters, and other first responders in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

As a population, first responders are more resistant than civilians to traditional therapy, said Baker, who is a licensed clinical mental health counselor. Ketamine provides a potential shortcut into the trauma memory and works “like an accelerant to psychotherapy,” he said. “It strips away people’s armor.”

When used for mental health treatment, a dose of ketamine — typically half a milligram per kilogram of body weight, less than for anesthesia — creates a mildly altered state of consciousness, Goldman said. It makes people look at their own traumatic memories at a distance “and tolerate them differently,” she said.

The ketamine sessions in her practice are usually two hours long, and clients are under the drug for about 45 minutes. The drug is administered as an IV drip, an intramuscular injection, under-the-tongue lozenges, or a compounded nasal spray. The drug is short-acting, meaning its dissociative effects largely wear off within about an hour.

But most insurers won’t pick up the cost of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, which can be more than $1,000 per session for the IV drip.

“That’s certainly prohibitive for first responders,” Goldman said.

The Department of Veterans Affairs covers some forms of ketamine treatment, including ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, for eligible veterans on a case-by-case basis.

In Shell’s case, a donation made to Responder Support Services covered what her insurance wouldn’t when she decided this spring to try ketamine-assisted psychotherapy with Baker, her counselor.

Revisiting the most gruesome calls in her nearly two decades as a police officer was not something Shell wanted to do. But Hurricane Helene, which caused catastrophic flooding in western North Carolina last year, pushed the 41-year-old “over the edge,” she said.

“Some of the sessions were rough,” said Shell, who is also a member of her agency’s SWAT team. “Things came up that I didn’t want to think about, that I’d buried during my entire career.”

The badly mangled victim in a fatal car crash. A murder-suicide, in which a man cut his pregnant girlfriend’s throat then slit his own.

Under ketamine, the images came to life as still pictures, she said, like a surreal slideshow replaying some of her darkest memories. “Then I would sit there and cry like a baby.”

As of early October, Shell had undergone 12 ketamine sessions. They have not provided a sudden miraculous cure, she said. But her sleep has improved, and bad days are now bad moments. She also finds it easier to manage stress. “And I smile more than I used to,” she said.

She was hesitant to share her experience within her department because of the ongoing stigma associated with seeking help in the hard-charging police culture.

“I just didn’t want my people to think that I couldn’t handle the job,” she said. “I didn’t want them to feel that I’m posing a risk to them.”

The perception of ketamine plays a role as well, said Sherri Martin, national director of wellness services at the Fraternal Order of Police, an organization representing more than 377,000 sworn law enforcement officers. Many cops are used to ketamine as an illegal street drug, she said, or think of it as a counterculture psychedelic.

“So, when they are supposed to accept this as a treatment, that’s hard for them to grasp,” she said.

Few if any police departments provide clear guidance on ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. If it were medically prescribed, it would likely be viewed the same as taking an antidepressant, Martin said.

Shell ultimately shared her story with colleagues, most of whom were curious and supportive, and she now encourages other officers to speak up about their struggles. She believes seeking mental health treatment — in her case, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy — has made her a better and safer police officer.

“It’s hard to help other people when you can’t take care of yourself,” she said.

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Mississippi prison chief reopens homicide cases following news investigation

Nearly 50 prison deaths will be examined, following a joint investigation by multiple Mississippi newsrooms.

by Jerry Mitchell, Daja E. Henry, The Marshall Project and Mina Corpuz October 14, 2025

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The Mississippi Department of Corrections will review more than two dozen unprosecuted homicides inside its prisons, as well as deaths where causes were ruled as “undetermined,” following an investigation by several news sites, including Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project – Jackson.

“All the deaths that we’ve had since 2015, we’re going back to revisit,” Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain told the reporting team. “There is no statute of limitations, as you know, on homicide.”

Cain’s comments follow an investigation by a team of Mississippi reporters that revealed at least 43 people died by homicide inside Mississippi prisons since 2015. Total murder convictions in those cases? Eight, including two guilty pleas that came after the news stories were published.

The prison homicide investigation involved reporters and editors from The Marshall Project – Jackson, Mississippi Today, The Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link. 

A prisoner advocacy group said revisiting past homicides won’t address the key reasons for the deaths in the first place — chronic understaffing of security officers.

Revisiting past homicides is “sort of closing the door after the horse has left the barn,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “What the commissioner also needs to do is figure out why this is happening and what to do to stop it.” 

Deaths officially categorized as homicides this year appear to have reached their highest level since 2020, when a gang war pushed that year’s total to at least nine killings.

Forty-one-year-old Aaron Harrison became the sixth person killed in a state prison this year when he died on July 3. A medical examiner later ruled that Harrison, incarcerated at East Mississippi Correctional Facility, was killed by blunt force trauma.  

A nurse practitioner at the prison noticed bruising on Harrison while treating him for a possible drug overdose before he died, according to an incident report obtained by the news reporting team. Court records show that no one has been charged in Harrison’s death, but it is not unusual for homicide investigations to take up to a year.

State Rep. Becky Currie, who chairs the House Corrections Committee, asked a legislative committee last month — as the reporting team was about to publish its investigation — to look into all prison deaths for the past five years. 

The Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review analyzes state agency programs and operations and can issue recommendations.

Even with recent deaths, she’s found that little information is shared with the families, the public and lawmakers when an incarcerated person dies. 

“How can you say you’ll keep people safe if you don’t know what they’re dying of?” Currie asked.

Internal investigations

The corrections department has its own criminal investigations unit and can refer cases to county prosecutors for further action.

Cain said the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division is now examining each death that was not referred to a district attorney’s office. About 25 people work for CID, which has been rebuilt since he took over corrections in 2020, he said.

“We’ve brought a lot more professionalism,” Cain said.

Each prison has an investigator who can respond quickly, and more investigators work out of the central office than before, he said. “That way we can keep the integrity and know what’s going on.”

He compared the investigators’ work on these homicides to working on cold cases. “They’re looking for answers.”

“We’re going back to visit all that to be sure that we haven’t left any stone unturned,” Cain said. “Every crime that is committed in the prison, no matter how small,” will be referred to a county prosecutor. “If he wants to throw it in the trash and not prosecute, that’s up to him.”

In the past decade, prosecutors indicted people in 16 of the 43 homicides, with eight guilty pleas. One case was dropped because the accused person died by suicide before his day in court. Another was dropped in light of evidence that supported the accused person’s claim of self-defense. The remaining six indictments, handed up between 2022 and June 2025, are pending trial. 

The commissioner shared similar comments during a Sept. 24 legislative budget hearing, but lawmakers did not ask him follow-up questions about the investigations. Among those in attendance were House Speaker Jason White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann.

When reached by the reporting team, the offices of Hosemann and White, along with the state auditor’s office, declined to comment. 

The state Senate Corrections Committee chairman, Sen. Juan Barnett, did not respond to requests for comment about the team’s findings and Cain’s remarks. 

In addition to the 43 homicides, another 21 prisoner deaths since 2015 have been ruled “undetermined” by the state medical examiner’s office. That means medical examiners were not able to come to a conclusive answer about how a person died. An undetermined death could be a homicide, suicide, accidental, or a natural death. 

For example, Richard Weems’ 2022 death was ruled undetermined, but medical examiners noted his body showed signs of blunt force trauma. An incarcerated person told the Mississippi Free Press in 2023 that he saw Weems being beaten.

Asked if MDOC planned to review deaths marked as undetermined, Cain replied, “We’re going to look at all of them.”

Cain said prison security has been improved in recent years with more video cameras, six narcotic detection dogs, a drone detecting system and enhanced video on the prisons’ fences to stop drugs from being thrown over or dropped by drones. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the abundance of illegal drugs in MDOC facilities has led to extortion and violence, the department’s 2024 investigation found. 

Staffing shortages lead to violence, advocates say

One of the key problems the news investigation identified is the chronic understaffing that leaves incarcerated people vulnerable to violence. 

Fathi called the staffing levels in Mississippi prisons “a five-alarm emergency.” 

Corrections spokesperson Kate Head said in a statement that staffing “is central to safety and security.” The department continues to address the shortages and strengthen staff accountability, she told the news team.

Since Cain took the helm in 2020, the starting salary for a correctional officer increased by about $13,000, beginning at $40,392. Still, it is hard to hire and retain staff for such dangerous jobs. 

About 30% of the funded corrections officer positions were vacant, Deputy Commissioner Nathan Blevins told lawmakers at the budget hearing in September. 

“No prison can operate safely with that kind of staffing,” Fathi said, “It’s not safe for the incarcerated people, it’s not safe for the staff… it’s not safe for anybody.” 

Homicides in the prisons often happened when corrections officers were not watching.

For instance, Ronnie Graham was killed at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County in 2021, but his battered body was not discovered by a corrections officer for at least five hours. In another case, Jonathan Havard was strangled to death earlier this year at Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. However, his body was only discovered after an unidentified parent called to tell the prison officials that he had been killed, according to prison records.

Compounding the staffing problems is the growing prison population. Since December 2021, the number of state prisoners has increased from about 16,800 to 19,300, returning to pre-pandemic levels. Cain said the increase is largely due to high rates of recidivism. 

About 47% of people released in fiscal year 2021 returned to prison within three years, according to state corrections data. 

“If we do a better job of getting them employable, then that’s the whole key to recidivism and not coming back,” Cain said in the legislative hearing. “Recidivism is killing us.”

Cain’s promise of new investigations into unsolved homicides sparked hope for a mother who lost a son. 

Janice Wilkins, the mother of Denorris Howell, who was killed in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman in 2020, said she is grateful that her son’s case will be reviewed.

“It means a whole lot to me,” she said. “Once they review everything, they should move forward.”

Grant McLaughlin with the Clarion Ledger contributed to this report.

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