A white woman confronted my kids and their friends at the park today because they were building a fort with dead sticks in the woods.

An officer showed up. An armed agent of the government.

Because my kids were playing.

I am so angry.
This is what the officer found when she arrived.

Imagine seeing this scene and thinking, “I should call 9-1-1.”

🤬🤬🤬
I wasn’t there. My wife said the woman was upset because she believed my kids and their friends were knocking down “live trees.”

Oh ok.

Look none of these kids were knocking down living trees. My oldest is 9. His friend is 12.

Maybe it was my 2-year-old she was worried about?
My wife told her to mind her business & leave our kids alone. The woman said they were being “destructive” and left.

The officer arrived 30 minutes later

She was reasonable, thank god, and a little annoyed that she’d been dispatched. “Part of the job,” she said.
I’m sorry, but in no decent society should it be “part of the job,” for armed officers to police kids for playing with sticks.
My kids are mixed but white passing. Their friends have darker skin. But they’re luckier then most.

It’s maddening knowing this happens to Black kids all the time. For just ... being.

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More from @Mike_Hixenbaugh

10 Jul
1. Y’all. It’s been a while since I’ve teamed up with @charlesornstein, & honestly, I‘d forgotten how tired you feel after a few days of churning with that guy...

We linked up last week to tell the story of what’s happening in Houston’s hospitals. Here’s what we found:
2. First we examined internal staff messages sent to hospital workers, which showed that some hospitals were already straining to keep up with COVID-19 hospitalizations a week ago. One public hospital had run out of a key drug. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/i… @NBCNews @propublica
3. Then we pulled public autopsy data and examined EMS response records to show that — as COVID cases surged — a growing number Houston area residents were dying suddenly at home. Another indicator that things are spiraling here. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/c… @NBCNews @propublica
Read 8 tweets
28 Jun
Whelp, there it is. The Texas Medical Center has deleted its helpful charts showing base and surge ICU capacity. No longer part of the daily updates. Comes 3 days after Gov. Abbott ordered hospitals in Houston to stop doing elective surgeries to preserve ICU beds.
After Abbott issues his order on elective procedures, which could cut deeply into hospitals’ revenue, TMC leaders held a news conference. They hadn’t meant to alarm people when they warned about running out of ICU beds. houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…
After that, some Houston hospitals started sending notes to staff, like this one, which was passed to me. Now there was still plenty of ICU surge capacity, so despite the governor’s order, the hospitals were going to keep performing those elective procedures.
Read 8 tweets
2 Jun
God I love Houston. An urban trail riding club, Nonstop Riders, has just rolled up to the downtown protest. Here’s Marcus Johnson of Houston’s Fifth award, fist raised in the air. “We’re here representing for all our black brothers and sisters.”
Cheers rose up from the crowd as these dudes rolled up. Clip-clip-clip-clop.
Read 4 tweets
1 Feb
After our reporting this week, @childrenswi officials have been bombarded with angry letters. Here’s one to a hospital board member:

“I am horrified, as I know you must be, to know that this criminal complaint is based on falsehoods and deliberate ‘stretching’ of the truth.”
In case you missed the original story, you can find it here: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/e…
About an hour after we published the story, hospital leaders sent an email to staff pledging to investigate and inviting them to come forward with concerns: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/w…
Read 5 tweets
5 Dec 19
1/ In October we wrote the story of a mother who lost her daughter after being accused of harming her with medical treatments. There were serious problems with the evidence presented in her case. Now we're reporting on another just like it from Washington: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/h…
2/ Here was the original story on Ajshay James: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/d…
3/ Megan Carter reached out to us after reading it. “After we went through this, I wanted to just crawl away and never talk about it again,” she told me. “But then I was like, this is just going to keep happening.”

Her case is shocking, and so similar to Ajsjay's.
Read 18 tweets
23 Nov 19
1. Been thinking more about the op-ed, which seems to dismiss our investigative series as “anecdotes,” which “often do not convey the full story." It seems like a good opportunity to highlight some of what @keribla and I reported 👇
2. In this story, a pair of grandparents were wrongly sentenced to 25 years in prison based largely on the dubious testimony of a pediatrician who “did not base his opinions on the particular facts” of the case, a court found. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/p…
3. In this case, child abuse specialists repeatedly misstated the evidence against a mom who they accused of medical child abuse. Two years later, she remains separated from her daughter. One doctor said reunification is never in the child’s best interest. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/d…
Read 14 tweets

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