Juan Gabriel Torres’ ex-girlfriend and their children left balloons and a cupcake near a cross on the Lohman Avenue bridge for his birthday last year. The NMPolitics.net/Las Cruces Sun-News/KRWG series told Torres’ story.
The USA Today Network announced this week that an in-depth series on behavioral health in Southern New Mexico spearheaded by NMPolitics.net has won two national awards.
The “compelling examination of how New Mexico’s inadequate mental health system has failed its residents and burdened its communities” won awards in an annual Division III competition among the 44 smaller newspapers in the USA Today Network.
Writers Carlos Andres López and Diana Alba Soular and photojournalist Robin Zielinski, all on staff with the Las Cruces Sun-News, collaborated with Heath Haussamen of NMPolitics.net to produce a four-story, two-video package on behavioral health, which published in late November. KRWG’s Anthony Moreno also contributed to the series.
“Carlos Andres Lopez and Diana Alba Soular distilled a complex issue into a series of insightful articles that make it impossible for the reader to ignore,” the judges said. “From the heartbreaking death of Juan Gabriel Torres to the hard data about New Mexico’s suicide rate, the reporters exposed the state’s broken mental heath system from multiple angles and in many voices.”
“Their reporting shows the unfortunate consequences of an ill-conceived funding freeze and the pressing need to bring more and better services to the region,” the judges said. “The fact they collaborated with other media outlets to report this story is a bonus.”
NMPolitics.net’s editor and publisher Heath Haussamen sought funding for the project from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and served as the project’s coordinator and editor.
The work was previously recognized by the USA Today Network with awards in the fourth quarter of 2017. The new awards were for work done by newspapers in the USA Today Network throughout 2017.
Read the series here.