California Nightmare
When caretakers preyed on the disabled, the state’s Office of Protective Services failed to live up to its name, reports Ryan Gabrielson of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch.
Ryan Gabrielson covers public safety for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting. He was a 2009-2010 investigative reporting fellow at UC Berkeley. His reporting on an in-house police force at California’s board-and-care institutions for the developmentally disabled exposed how officers routinely failed to do basic work on criminal cases, including suspicious deaths. Previously, he was a reporter at the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz. In 2009, he and Tribune colleague Paul Giblin won a Pulitzer Prize for stories that showed immigration enforcement by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office undermined investigations and emergency response. Ryan’s work has received numerous national and state honors, including a George Polk Award, an Online Journalism Award for investigative reporting, and a Sigma Delta Chi Award. A Phoenix native, he studied journalism at the University of Arizona and began his career at The Monitor in McAllen, Texas.