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Steven Rascón (he/they) is a production assistant for Reveal. He is pursuing a master's degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with a Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy Fellowship. His focus is investigative reporting and audio documentary. He has written for online, magazines and radio. His reporting on underreported fentanyl overdoses in Los Angeles' LGBTQ community aired on KCRW and KQED. Rascón is passionate about telling diverse stories for radio through community engagement. He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater arts and creative writing.
The final episode of Mississippi Goddam shares new revelations that cast doubt on the official story that Billey Joe Johnson accidentally killed himself.
There have long been concerns about the quality of investigations into the suspicious deaths of young Black men in the state, especially when police are involved.
Amazon knows a lot about you. Customers trust that their data and purchases are kept secret and secure, but internal documents show the tech giant’s inability to safeguard its own data.
Billey Joe Johnson was a Black boy dating a White girl. That made the story behind his death even more complicated.
When a detective with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation finds out what Reveal has uncovered, he begins to wonder whether the case should be reopened.
In December 2008, the autopsy of Billey Joe Johnson Jr. helped the grand jury conclude that his death was an accident. But an independent review of the autopsy came to a different conclusion.
On the morning of Billey Joe Johnson’s death, crime scene tape separates the Johnsons from their son’s body. Their shaky faith in the criminal justice system buckles as authorities fail to follow up on inconsistencies in the official story.
Billey Joe Johnson Jr. was a high school football star headed for the big time. Then, early one morning in 2008, the Black teenager died during a traffic stop with a White deputy. His family’s been searching for answers ever since.
By law, domestic abusers are banned from owning guns. But too often, those laws aren’t enforced, and the consequences can be deadly.
The future of warfare is being shaped by computer algorithms that are assuming ever-greater control over battlefield technology. Will this give machines the power to decide who to kill?
