Reese Dunklin Email & Phone Number

Texas, United States

Texas, United States

Dallas, Texas

Member of the global investigations team, doing long-term and quick-turn investigations on a range of subjects. My most recent investigation, built on more than 7,000 records requests and the creation of an exclusive database, showed how more than 1,000 people had died when police used force that was supposed to stop, but not kill, them. Our "Lethal Restraint" series, which is still ongoing, has already spurred efforts within policing to create new safety guidelines for uses of force. In 2020, I broke news on how the federal pandemic relief program (Paycheck Protection Program) doled out millions to publicly traded companies and religious organizations that had access to other capital. In 2019, I was part of a team that examined the U.S. Catholic Church's latest reckoning with clergy sex abuse, winning a Gerald A. Renner Award for Excellence in Enterprise Religion Reporting from the Religion News Association. In 2018, a colleague and I published an investigation about the lack of justice and protections for children sexually assaulted on U.S. military bases. "Hidden Victims" led members of Congress to demand answers from the Defense and Justice departments, call for investigations that subsequently backed our findings and pass reforms to give victims more protections. President Trump signed those reforms into law just five months after we published. The Society of Professional Journalists recognized our work with the public service Sigma Delta Chi Award in online journalism. "Hidden Victims" was inspired by a multi-part series in 2017 about students who sexually assault in America's public schools. Our reporting found numerous mishandled cases and cover-ups, lax oversight by state education agencies, and untimely investigations by the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights. SPJ also recognized that series, "Schoolhouse Sex Assault," with a Sigma Delta Chi Award.

During my 16 years there, I helped produce nearly a dozen long-term series or rolling investigations on a breadth of subjects. Among them: Catholic Church sex abuse cover-ups, conflicts of interest at Dallas City Hall, lax patient care and billing fraud at Dallas' prestigious medical center, failures in U.S. chemical safety, and murderers who got probation. That portfolio has won more than two dozen national and regional investigative reporting awards, including a prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists. I won the Livingston for stories in 2004 about a fugitive priest I located working in ministry near children, a discovery that spurred authorities to deport then arrest and convict him. (The Web sites for many of these projects are in the "accomplishments" section of my profile.) In addition, I also wrote for our team's DMN Investigates blog, ran its social media platforms on Twitter (@DMNInvestigates) and Facebook (DMN Investigates, which nearly doubled in followers in 2013), and used data analysis tools like Access and Excel for reporting. My career at The Morning News began in 1999 as a metro reporter covering a fast-growing suburb, where my reporting on conflicts of interest led to my first investigative stories.

General assignments reporter based in Belleville, Ill., bureau. In addition, I worked on a two-month project that found St. Louis metro sex-offender registries were riddled with errors -- up to 50 percent inaccurate in some cases -- and police were too understaffed to maintain them. I was also a summer 1998 intern on metro desk's crime and courts team, covering a small-plane crash, a triple homicide and a cop's murder-suicide of his estranged family.