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Audrey Hill

Student investigative journalist studying at American University

Intern at the Investigative Reporting Workshop

IRW •

Waiting for water

When Ward Walker moved to the seaside village of Stebbins, Alaska, in 1995, he was told there would be running water within the next five years. The 63-year-old, who recently retired as vice mayor of the village of roughly 650, now says he’ll be happy if it happens before he dies.

Stebbins became Walker’s home after he married Thecla Matthias, an Alaska Native whose family’s roots in the region trace back generations. Since then, he’s been a teacher, a priest and a carpenter serving the downtro
IRW •

Fauci hopes to inspire the next generation

Dr. Anthony Fauci said it was during his childhood in Brooklyn that he first encountered the spirit of community care that would guide his more than five decades of government service. His father, a pharmacist, was seen as the area’s family doctor.

“Right from the time that I was born,” Fauci said in a recent interview with IRW, “there was this feeling in the household that it’s important to take care of other people.”

That spirit of community was later cultivated by his education —his Jesuit
AWOL •

Policy doesn’t equal policing in drug arrests

Although the DC Council unanimously voted to decriminalize all drug paraphernalia in 2020, data from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) shows that officers continued to arrest people for the offense into the following year, highlighting what some experts see as a gap between the district’s increasingly progressive drug laws and their enforcement.

Many parts of the country, the district in particular, have begun to shift toward a less punitive approach to addressing the opioid epidemic. Th
Washington Post •

Uneasy voters in D.C., Maryland and Virginia cast Election Day ballots

“I hate to sound selfish. But at the end of the night, when I go to bed and I check the bank account one last time to make sure we’re okay for the next week or two, that’s when the final decision comes into play,” he said. “It’s not so much what’s going to be the abortion laws in a year or two, or immigration or the Border Patrol. It’s going to be more, ‘Do I have enough money?’”
AWOL •

The Lost City

The following is an abridged version of this semester’s episode of Ripped From the Wall, AWOL’s investigative news podcast. To listen to the full version of the story, including additional interviews and narration, you can listen to the audio file below, find it on Spotify, or download it wherever you find podcasts.

This semester, Ripped from the Wall dove into the story of Reno, the lost city that Fort Reno Park and Alice Deal Middle School in Tenleytown were built on in the mid 1900s. The sto