L. J. Breedlove

IT'S EVERY COP'S WORST NIGHTMARESeattle Police Detective Joe Dunbar knew he'd screwed up big time, maybe even fatally. He swallowed hard, followed by a deep breath to steady himself. He'd managed to dodge the gunfire coming from the dark and nearly derelict house on Queen Anne. But he was trapped, now. He had already called for dispatch for backup. Shouldn't they should be here by now?Something cold settled in his stomach.They weren't coming, he thought....

HE HAS A SON. Ryan Matthews is a player. He's also the Editor-in-Chief of Eyewitness News at Portland State University. But for all the women - and a few men - who have been in and out of his bed (and office, and the Green Room, and the newsroom couch), part of him has never gotten over the woman who left him three years ago. And then she came back. Teresa Valdez. She came back, gave him his 3-year-old son, and left again. ICE says she's undocumented...

He Doesn't Feel Like a Hero White supremacy groups have targeted the student-run Eyewitness News for their coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests. Protests become riots; death threats become real attempts. And the EWN staff doesn't know who they can trust to protect them - their own campus security seems suspect. Cage Washington knows something has to be done. But what will the solution cost him, his friends, his coworkers, even EWN itself?

A CALL TO ARMSSeattle Police Lieutenant Nick Rodriguez is worried about a growing number of domestic violence calls where the accused is a gun hoarder. Worried enough that he gives Mac Davis a call one morning at 2 a.m. to the house where a man just shot his wife and two children. Mac Davis, a local cop reporter and former Marine who might qualify as a gun hoarder himself, doesn't like 2 a.m. calls to crime scenes. He especially doesn't like it when...

NEWSROOM RULES: STAY SAFE. GET THE STORY. When the college basketball team traveled to Boise for a Thanksgiving tournament, the sports editor thought she did everything right: social distancing, testing before the trip, masks, no parties. But no one told her, or the team, or the alumni aboard the trip, the truth: a coach came down with COVID and had to be left behind on a ventilator in Boise. The COVID numbers are rising in Portland. At the university. And...

When You Can't Trust Your Own MemoriesRyan Matthews has a memory problem. Some memories just don't exist - nothing before age 10 really.Some memories conflict.If you asked him a year ago about his home life, he would have said his adoptive parents loved him, and he loved them, and they probably didn't deserve the wild teen he became.So what about the scars on his arm? Or his stomach? What about the images that haunt his nightmares?If you can't trust...

Is Blood Really Thicker than Water? Life is good. Mac Davis, a former Marine, is now a cop reporter for the Seattle Examiner. He's had stories nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has a reputation as a hard-nosed reporter, and a good man to have at your back when trouble comes knocking. And even Mac admits, around him, trouble usually does. He has a career, a girlfriend, even a house. He has friends. He belongs. But his past is knocking on the...

Football and the FlagIt's Texas in the 1980s.A young black high school quarterback says he won't play varsity football because they carry the confederate flag. Katy Williams, editor at the local newspaper, is stunned by the reaction of the town -- and her staff -- which ranges from indifference to the flag to outrage that anyone would challenge it at all. When five of the starting line follow Clay Peabody off the team, the situation turns explosive....

What would you do to keep a secret? Bob Anderson ­­- local banker, city council member, and now murder victim - had the goods on a bunch of people in Plains City, Texas. Everybody wants those files; no one can find them. Katy Williams was hired to make the Plains City Gazette into a modern newspaper. She's got enough on her plate with the newspaper, a Texan boyfriend, and Texas in general - she tells her friends back home these are her foreign correspondent...

The student-run Eyewitness News in downtown Portland has a lot of balls in the air: a series on homelessness, a new look at why downtown is so empty, an investigation into the man who tried to kill some of the staff, and a whole host of other stories. Plenty to keep them all busy, the news editor thought. And now what? A war in Ukraine? How was she supposed to cover that? Still reeling from the recent events, the staff gears up to try to do the story...