‘Punching up’ for accountability: A Q&A with alums Matthew Mitchell and Susie Neilson

An investigation developed at UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program in collaboration with the San Francisco Chronicle by alums Matthew Mitchell (’25) and Susie Neilson (’19) is shedding light on serious failures by San Francisco’s HomeRise, one of the largest non-profits serving formerly unhoused people in the city. The first piece published in March — “At a ‘model’ S.F. complex for the formerly homeless, a man lay dead for days unnoticed” — is about Wilton “Eric” McCain and related failures in supportive housing at the Jazzie Collins Apartments. Alum Daniel Hennessy (’25) also contributed to the story. The second story, which just came out — “His redemption story inspired San Francisco. Inside housing for the homeless, women say his abuse went unchecked” — sheds light on systemic failures that gave way to one man’s alleged abuse. Mitchell, a recent J-School alum who continues to report this series for the San Francisco Chronicle and Neilson, an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle who recently won a Pulitzer Prize, give us some behind-the-reporting insights.

How did this story first come about?

Matthew Mitchell: I was in [the first-year] “Intro to Investigative Reporting” and was working with Garrett Therolf on a pitch to get into the Blockbuster class during my second year of grad school with David Barstow. I knew I wanted to write a story about San Francisco because I grew up in the city and have a lot of pride for where I’m from. Housing has always been something that I’ve paid close attention to because as I’ve gotten older, people I grew up with have been displaced. They can’t really afford to live in the city anymore.

I spent time on online message boards anonymously asking people what issues they felt weren’t being covered. I ended up connecting with a tenant of this building in the Tenderloin operated by the nonprofit HomeRise. I interviewed her for quite some time and what she told me was really upsetting — that this nonprofit organization that receives tens of millions of dollars in public funding struggled to provide basic services.

Did your IRP teachers think you had a story?

Matt: This was in my second week of working with Garrett, and he encouraged me to run with it. I didn’t have a ton of experience reporting, so we just started pulling public records and looking at what else had been written about HomeRise and the larger permanent supportive housing environment. It went from there, and that was the next two years of my life.

Garrett was immediately like, ‘Yeah, follow this. This seems like there’s something there.’ And even when I wanted to move off of it … he was like, ‘No, you should keep pulling on this string and that string.’ I think at that time he could see further down the road than I could.

How did the Chronicle come on board?

Matt: I was introduced to Susie, and we sat down and wrote a 20-page reporting memo in the first two weeks of knowing each other. That allowed me to at least see all the work I had done and for the Chronicle to be like, ‘All right, well, there’s clearly a lot here.’ They ultimately decided that a rolling investigation made sense.

You’re both Berkeley J-School alums. Was that helpful?

Matt: I think just having some common ground and knowing that you’ve shared a bit of overlap in experience was really helpful. Susie was familiar enough with the IRP to know our process, and so seemed to ask all the right questions. She did such a great job of inhaling thousands of pages of public records and at one point, I had 100 pages of memos that Daniel [Daniel Hennessy, former reporting partner] and I had written for Garrett…

Oh my — that’s a lot.

Matt: She read through the entire thing and would send me really embarrassing paragraphs in which I’m questioning my life choices.

Susie Neilson: It’s only been a few years since I was in the same position as a student, just trying to feel my way in the dark through my first big investigative projects. And so it feels really meaningful to be in a position where I can give some of those learnings back. I think that one thing that the IRP and Berkeley Journalism does really well is understand that the students often come in with a lot of skills or experiences and can teach each other [those things], and that’s how this partnership with Matt has felt. He came in with all of the domain expertise, the subject matter knowledge, the sourcing. He really came in with the story. And what I’ve been able to do in this partnership is help him learn how to go about structuring an investigation, how to plan out a series, what steps you have to do each week, and how to do that specifically for a place like the Chronicle, which is more of a deadline-oriented newsroom than the IRP.

With so much data and public records, how do you find the story?

Susie: Matt came to us with this huge universe of reporting. The Chronicle took on the project because we knew that there was a ton there, but we weren’t sure exactly what those stories would look like. And when Ryan [Gabrielson] assigned me to the project, that was one of the primary roles that he saw me taking….How do we zoom out and find these threads that will become stories?

Was it hard to collaborate on such a big story?

Susie: Matt and I are pretty much talking to each other all day, most days that we’re working. I feel like [on big projects like these] you kind of mind meld and become one brain.

How did you find the story about Sal, the allegedly abusive case manager at HomeRise?

Susie: At one point, Matt had this very troubling conversation with a former employee, who said there was a case manager who’d been accused of sexual misconduct multiple times by residents and other staff. And I was like, ‘We should maybe try to do a story about that.’ Thanks to Matt’s strong sourcing work with former employees, he was able to get these documents [showing] that HomeRise had done an investigation into this person.

Matt: It’s a testament to just talking to as many people as you can, and if they’re all kind of saying the same thing, trust that instinct and listen to them. I think we also did a really good job of corroborating a lot of what we had been hearing with public records. That’s definitely a skill that was sharpened during my time at the IRP.

What was the day-to-day, on-the-ground reporting like on this story?

Matt: I learned pretty early on in doing gumshoe reporting and spending time with a population like the formerly homeless that they can tell when you’re being insincere. I just tried to meet them where they were at and listen to them and not come in as an extractive reporter. Just listen to their stories. I felt like that was the right way to go about things.

In reporting about Sal, you went against a dominant and positive narrative about a person who got out of prison and made good — a narrative other journalists followed without really probing. Was going against the grain of that narrative difficult for you?

Matt: It was just so overwhelming, the scale of these allegations, that I didn’t really flinch when we discovered that Sal had been profiled by The Guardian. I think the records we had obtained just strengthened that resolve.

Susie: I think that [on the investigative team] there’s a lot of desire to do what we call ‘punching up.’ We’re always trying to think about the bigger, powerful systems that cause harm. Ultimately what I kept thinking about is that individual people can create harm in these organizations. People do bad things. But our story is not fundamentally about Sal. It’s about the fact that he worked for this organization that, when faced with these allegations repeatedly over many years, did nothing about them. [It] was about HomeRise and the broader system of impunity that allowed him to operate unchecked and harm these women that represent the most vulnerable members of San Francisco’s society.

It’s an intense story to follow, and I’m wondering how you managed to navigate the secondary trauma reporters can experience.

Matt: For some reason, I’m drawn to dark subject matter, and I’m not really sure if I do a great job compartmentalizing, leaving work at work. I don’t know if you really can do that — or at least I can’t. But I found that developing a strong social network of people outside of the journalism world who fill conversations with laughter helps me get out of the reporter mindset. And then I’m a big runner so…but yeah, it’s not easy. While I was at the IRP, there were weeks when all Daniel and I would do was read through autopsies. I thought I was fine, but the people around me could sense that I was a bit beaten down.

Susie: I think having community is so important, and I would add that it can be really hard to do these stories when you’re working alone. So it’s one reason actually, beyond just the volume of reporting, that having a person to go on the journey with you both intellectually and emotionally can be really helpful. Sometimes I’ll be like, to my reporting partners, including Matt: ‘Hey, maybe you should take a break from this. It’s been a long couple of days.’ Or we’ve just had a crazy interview, and we can debrief and digest things together. I would also say for me personally…the last couple of years globally have been really brutal and horrible in so many ways, there’s just so much bad news happening, and I think having a project to focus on that has a lot of difficult subject matter, maybe you have a bit of agency… It helps me personally channel a lot of the feelings I have about the broader state of the world into something that feels more actionable.

Was there anybody along the way, in the course of your reporting, who was a surprising source or who gave you some hope or incentive to keep going?

Matt: The person that comes to mind to me is a character in the Sal story, Mary Beth, who is just the most lovely person. We’ve made a habit of visiting her in her apartment at Jazzie Collins almost weekly. Despite all of the terrible things happening in that building and that have happened to her, she always is full of life and brimming with hope. Having conversations with her makes me want to work harder.

What are the benefits of having the J-School’s IRP teachers and mentors support a story like this?

Matt: I think the amount of time and patience that the IRP provides students is really invaluable, especially for folks who don’t have a ton of experience reporting. It’s a very safe space to kind of mess up or spend a couple days chasing something that dead ends.

Did you guys have a lot of synergy in the writing part of it or did you have different styles that you had to reconcile?

Matt: I think that’s where Susie’s experience definitely shined. She’s able to write in this very authoritative voice and knows the skeleton of an investigative story before she sits down to get it on the page. Co-writing something is one of the hardest things to do — especially when you don’t know someone very well. But I think Susie and I are so good at communicating, it worked out pretty well. Susie, I don’t know, how would you respond to that?

Susie: As long as you have two people who are trying to work in service of the story and also have good taste when it comes to writing, I think that it tends to work really well. One thing I discovered pretty early about Matt is that he’s very well-read and a great writer and has a good eye for when a sentence isn’t working. I would call myself a sketch artist. I write quickly. I get the outline down, and I make sure that it’s broadly working. I think of Matt more as a painter. He’s more precise.

How has it been to work with a venerable outlet like the San Francisco Chronicle?

Matt: As someone who has never worked in a large newsroom like the Chronicle’s, having the support and efficiency that affords really gave this project its wings. A major part of that came from our editor, Ryan Gabrielson, who shepherded us along and showed this particular story the attention it needed.

Your series has already begun to have an impact: Prasad was recently fired from his latest job as a case manager. The city also cited your reporting on HomeRise extensively in a Civil Grand Jury report published last week, and HomeRise’s CEO Janéa Jackson stepped down in May. Are you hoping for more impact from these stories or are you just more interested in laying out the facts?

Matt: Our job is to lay out the facts for people, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be doing this work if I didn’t think that there would be some type of impact from our reporting. I would hope that there’s more oversight and more accountability.

–Andrea Lampros