Breakout Jail Reporter Kelly Davis Hailed as San Diego's 2023 Journalist of the Year (2024)

Almost no reporter would touch the story. But Kelly Davis did.

Former San Diego CityBeat colleague Dave Maass recalls how Davis — with her “inexhaustible compassion” — covered the plight of homeless sex offenders in 2010 at a time when child molester John Gardner’s rape and killing of local teens Chelsea King and Amber Dubois was stirring outrage.

“What was less obvious to the public was that this also applied to people one might consider CityBeat’s political enemies,” Maass said. “Whenever we were about to brutalize a politician with our snark, it was often Kelly who would try to see things from their perspective and remind us they were human beings.”

Despite the late alt-weekly’s fights with former councilman and radio talker Carl DeMaio, Maass said he always had the sense that DeMaio occupied a special place in Davis’ heart as “a person on his own journey of self-discovery.”

Davis — who next week will accept the honor of San Diego Journalist of the Year — never abandoned her sources either.

Even after a story was done, “she’d follow their lives, for better or worse,” said Maass, now director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “One of the hardest things for her must’ve been watching a veteran, whose struggles with PTSD and the criminal justice system she covered, descend down the rabbit hole of white supremacy, and as a journalist, there was little she could do about it.”

When the San Diego professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists named Davis its award-winner for 2023, it noted a policy being broken.

“San Diego SPJ has a tradition of not selecting its own board members as Journalist of the Year,” the group said. “However, as the impact of Davis’ reporting continues to grow, the other board members agreed that we could no longer ignore the significance of her journalism to the San Diego community.”

Said SPJ board president Lisa Halverstadt, who might otherwise have won Journalist of the Year for her 2017 coverage of the deadly Hepatitis A outbreak among the homeless:

“Kelly’s years-long investigation of deaths and conditions in local jails directly inspired — and likely will continue to inspire — significant change. Kelly’s fellow board members decided it was time to recognize her game-changing work and its undeniable impact.”

Davis didn’t take part in the Journalist of the Year vote. She says she was at home in the Fletcher Hills area of El Cajon when she learned about her mid-May selection.

“I’ve always felt that board members should not be eligible for Journalist of the Year — and that’s generally been our (unwritten) policy,” she told Times of San Diego. “But this year, the board voted otherwise. … I was very honored and humbled by their decision.”

The first person she told was her husband, Brian Espinosa.

Kelly Lynn Davis began covering jail deaths a decade ago after a tip from Jeff McDonald of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Then in 2019, as a freelancer collaborating with McDonald, the U-T published a three-part series “Dying Behind Bars” after a six-month investigation of local jails’ unusually high death toll and officials’ inaction.

Local and state audits validated their reporting — spurring lawmakers to seek reforms and better jail conditions.

The series also prompted citizen groups to focus attention on the jail system and push for reforms. In 2022, Assemblywoman Akilah Weber introduced the Saving Lives in Custody Act, but it was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. State Sen. Toni Atkins reintroduced the bill to improve jail oversight and mental health care in jails, citing Davis’ work.

Davis Fought Own Battles

And all this despite Davis’ own private struggles.

In late 2016, the year after she left CityBeat, Davis was diagnosed with metastatic Stage 4 breast cancer.

“I was very fortunate to be enrolled almost immediately in a clinical trial,” she said. “I’m not in remission. Rather, they call it ‘No evidence of active disease.’ I still have some small lesions on various bones, but they appear to be frozen in place. I had a CT scan recently and everything looked stable. Or in radiology terms ‘unremarkable.’ I am very unremarkable.”

Her former CityBeat colleague Maass noted a legal ordeal amid her medical one.

“I can’t recall being as angry as anything in my life as when San Diego County tried to force Kelly to hand over all our research into jail deaths,” he said via email, citing the Chassidy NeSmith case. Her husband, Kristopher, died by suicide in the Vista jail and Chassidy’s attorneys argued that jailers ignored warning signs that Kris was planning to hang himself.

“They could have just as easily gone after me, since I also had possession of a copy of the materials, and in some cases the original copies,” he said.

But by that time — 2017-2018 — Maass worked for a nonprofit with some of the best First Amendment lawyers in the country, “while Kelly was a freelancer going through cancer treatments. It was government cowardice at its most craven.”

So how did Kelly Davis — with no major media perch in San Diego County — come to be one of its fiercest and most consequential reporters?

Born in Long Beach, she grew up in Huntington Beach and Irvine. Her stay-at-home mother, Judy, had a small interior decorating business (“She was very creative and could make anything — from pancakes to prom dresses — beautifully”). Her now-retired dad, Jay, co-founded a company called Tri-Anim that sold respiratory medical equipment.

In 1996, Judy died of metastatic breast cancer. Twenty years later, Davis wrote movingly about Betsy, her only sibling, who suffered from ALS and chose to end her life.

Betsy held a farewell party several weeks before she passed. She gave guests a single rule: “Do not cry in front of me.”

English Literature Buff

Davis says her dream college was attending the University of San Francisco.

“I spent two weeks there, but got very sick with the worst case of tonsilitis my doctor had ever seen,” she says. “I ended up returning home.”

But Chapman University in Orange “accepted me on the spot, and I got into their Honors Program as well. It was a great liberal arts education with most classes no larger than a dozen students.” She earned a bachelor’s in English language and literature.

She later earned a master’s in English lit at Boston College, attending that school “because Boston is the San Francisco of the East Coast. And they had a great program in 19th century British poetry.”

Davis says she loved the school and people, but soured on academia — “and that’s when I realized I wanted to give journalism a try.”

With her husband, Brian, she moved to Ventura from Boston to attend UC Santa Barbara.

“I was enrolled for one year in a Ph.D. program in “Language, Literacy and Learning,” she says, but didn’t work on any campus papers — “too shy, too cynical.”

After 10 months as a UCSB graduate teaching assistant, Davis became a staff writer in 2001 at the Ventura County Reporter, an alternative weekly, where she began covering homelessness for editor David Rolland.

“In those early days, with no previous reporting experience, she wrote some incredibly impactful in-depth feature stories,” Rolland says. “The most memorable was an investigative piece about a young Black man with mental illness who was shot and killed by police officers while cowering in a closet with a knife. That story sort of set the tone for where Kelly’s writing career would go from there.”

When the Reporter’s owner decided to expand into the San Diego market, Rolland was asked to move here and start CityBeat.

“I’d known Kelly only for about a year, but I insisted that they let me bring her with me,” he said. “She was that valuable. She continued to be my journalism partner for the next 13 years and, along with her husband Brian, remains my closest friend.”

For Davis, the 2002 move was just fine: “I was eager to get out of Ventura. Nice place to visit, but I didn’t love living there.”

She threw herself into work in San Diego.

“In an age where younger reporters are very concerned about a work-life balance, for all the time I’ve known Kelly, the boundary between her journalism career and her personal life has been either thin or non-existent,” Maass said. “From the first day I arrived in San Diego, she put me up in her house and to this day it’s not uncommon for us to text each other late at night and weekends about scoops.”

Despite groundbreaking work with Maass on jail deaths, he says: “The saddest thing of all is that so much of our work is now lost, due to the greed and foolish decisions of the short-sighted media company that bought CityBeat and failed to see the value in maintaining its archives.”

Little-Known Lawsuit

In fact, Davis in 2017 filed a wage-cheating suit against CityBeat publisher Southland. Four months later, her lawyer asked that the case be dismissed. She wouldn’t discuss any settlement, saying only “I felt the outcome was fair.”

Maass called Davis a versatile reporter.

“On top of the investigations, she is also a gifted co*cktail reviewer and a passionate advocate for local culture, be it bands, restaurants or art galleries,” he said, and called her “an extremely humble person.”

He likened her to Hollis Henry, a female musician-turned-journalist in William Gibson’s science fiction novel “Spook Country.” Reading it, Maass “couldn’t help but think of Kelly. Ask her about her music side-career!” (Keep reading.)

Jail-death series collaborator McDonald of the U-T — himself a former SPJ Journalist of the Year — says one day he and Davis were chatting about the rising death rate in county jails.

“She’d called to compliment me on a story I’d done about a deceased inmate and I told her I was very frustrated because no matter how thorough we reported a death, no one seemed to care,” he wrote in an email nominating Davis for the 2023 award. “That’s when we had the idea to do a bigger series examining years’ worth of data. I was so grateful to the U-T managers for agreeing to our collaboration.”

He says Davis continued to distinguish herself, maintaining relationships with family members of those who died, activists working to change public policy and the community of lawyers who represent victims.

“She also keeps in close touch with experts studying correctional health, reading their reports and attending conferences aimed at spreading their findings,” he said. “She wins the trust of families, lawyers, experts and jail staff because her firm command of the subject matter is as clear and visible as her sincerity and passion.”

McDonald concluded: “Kelly has made San Diego County a better place by almost single-handedly forcing the issue of jail deaths and other negligent practices in local jails to the forefront of the public agenda. We are so much better as a community for her efforts, and she continues to make me proud to be her collaborator, and friend.”

Added Rolland, now a spokesman for San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria: “She has always led with her heart, and she protected her subjects, who were often very vulnerable people, like they were family. I know they always felt safe in Kelly’s hands.”

This interview was conducted via email.

Times of San Diego: What prompted you and Dave to begin looking at jail deaths?

Kelly Davis: Rewind to late 2012. Jeff McDonald (my current collaborator on jail deaths reporting, but back then a friend) had heard about the death of one of his sources, Russell Hartsaw — a very colorful downtown denizen with a fascinating personal history — in George Bailey Detention Facility.

He’d heard that Russell was beaten to death. He wasn’t able to jump on the story at the time, and asked if I wanted to look into it. So I put in a request for Russell’s autopsy report and it raised a lot of questions: Why was this frail, elderly gay man who was showing signs of mental illness / dementia removed from protective custody and placed into general population, where he fell prey to more violent incarcerated people?

I thought it was going to be a story just about Russell, but Dave Maass, my colleague at CityBeat at the time, suggested we look at all deaths going back six years. Then, I can’t remember how, we decided to compare deaths in San Diego jails with deaths in other large counties. That’s when we realized San Diego County had the highest jail mortality rate.

Then we looked at specific issues — suicide, deaths tied to drug/alcohol withdrawal (there were many), deaths tied to use of force by deputies. It ended up being a five-part series with the final story looking at what happened to Russell.

How do you feel about still covering this beat 10 years later?

As I tell people, it’s sadly the story that keeps giving. I’ve felt, and still feel, an obligation to cover each lawsuit, settlement, report. So many families of people who’ve died have been so gracious in sharing their loved ones’ stories and I feel those stories need to be told.

There were times over the years when months would pass with no deaths and I’d think, “OK, the Sheriff’s Department has made some changes. This issue’s done and I can move onto something else.” But then something awful would happen, or there would be a string of deaths over a short period of time.

Questionable deaths are still happening — and last year we saw the most deaths of any other year. I wish I knew why. Even with natural deaths, where it seems like it was that person’s time to go, I often see red flags that raise questions about whether they received proper medical attention.

There are just always so many questions, especially with deaths of people experiencing mental illness. But as you well know, California’s public records laws protect law enforcement at the expense of transparency. Unless those laws change, we’ll never truly be able to hold people accountable. I’m appalled by how little information we’re able to get compared to other states.

What were the most substantive policy or legislative reforms sparked by your jail reporting? Or bills coming up?

When Dave and I first started writing about jail deaths, the suicide prevention policy was limited to something like “All reports of suicidal behavior shall be considered serious.” Now the policy is five pages long.

There’s been a state audit that found San Diego jails indeed have the highest mortality rate among large jail systems — something the Sheriff’s Department long tried to dispute — and a study commissioned by the county’s Law Enforcement Review Board that found the same.

As far as legislation, last year, Asm. Dr. Akilah Weber introduced AB 2343, known as the “Saving Lives in Custody Act.” It was unfortunately vetoed, but she reintroduced it this year with the same language. Also this year, state Sen. Toni Atkins introduced SB 519, which gives local officials the ability to take over failing jails, expands jail oversight and requires the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department to release internal reviews of deaths.

Besides the U-T and The New York Times, who else are you writing for these days?

The Union-Tribune keeps me pretty busy. I’m working on a few stories for Voice of San Diego. I really like local reporting. I’ve also contributed to The Guardian, The Appeal, Bolts, The Imprint and The Crime Report, among a handful of others, and so I’m always thinking about stories I might pitch those folks.

Re: NYT — all I’ve done so far is some courthouse research that was used in a story. I’m on their stringer list, so maybe I’ll have an actual byline one of these days. Who knows?

What’s the status of the Chassidy NeSmith case? Are you still fighting having to testify or share your work?

The case was settled a couple of years ago … and thanks to the hard work of Sheppard Mullin attorney Matthew Halgren, who represented me pro bono, the subpoena the county issued to me to try to get all my notes, interviews, research, etc., was quashed.

Outside the jail stories, what’s your best work — especially stuff people don’t know about?

Oh gosh. I was pretty happy with this piece I wrote for The Appeal last year about a man who was endlessly cycling through San Diego’s criminal legal system. Also for The Appeal, I spent six months covering COVID-19 in jails and prisons throughout the U.S.

Locally, I’ve been following the Commission on Police Practices for Voice of San Diego (here are a few stories) and, for the Union-Tribune, a proposal to create alternatives to incarceration. I also co-authored a piece for The Imprint that followed up on their excellent reporting about the state of California’sbotched returnof troubled youth who’d been sent to out-of-state treatment facilities.

What subjects would you love to tackle when time allows?

I’d like to delve more into the juvenile justice system, alternatives to incarceration, the challenges faced by folks who are just getting out of a long-term jail stay or prison. I’m generally interested in incarceration — its culture, consequences, legacy.

What’s your stand on Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher’s AB5, which is still up in the air?

The law has had no impact on me since Lorena’s amendment that got rid of the 35-story cap.

What fun fact can you tell about yourself that nobody knows?

I met my husband, Brian Espinosa, in a band in college. He was the drummer and I played guitar. I was dating the lead guitarist/singer at the time. Brian and I still play in a band with longtime friends called The Luxembourg Signal.

Would you like to work at a major investigative outlet someday — like The New York Times, Washington Post or ProPublica? How do you see your career evolving?

Honestly, I don’t think I have the chops to work at any of those places — and nor would I want to move to D.C. or New York. I’d love to work at a shop that specializes in criminal justice reporting, though. I love outlets like The Appeal, Bolts and The Marshall Project.

How many state Public Record Act requests do you have outstanding now? Can you name any of the agencies you’ve queried?

I actually don’t have any. Is that bad? I mostly hit up the Sheriff’s Department and have become quite familiar with their gingham-esque (or perhaps it’s more of a minimalist plaid?) redactions pattern.

Does San Diego have enough media outlets, and watchdog reporters, to uncover other jail scandals?

I don’t think San Diego needs more journalists covering jails. Jeff McDonald and I have it covered and Dorian Hargrove at Channel 8 and Adam Racusin at Channel 10 have done excellent work. I think San Diego needs more reporters in general and especially more watchdog reporters. But we’re fortunate to have nonprofits like Voice of San Diego and inewsource.

Anything else about you or your work readers should know?

I’d like to give a shout-out to some editors and fellow journalists who’ve helped me become better at my job (Dave Rolland, Dave Maass, Jeff McDonald, Ricky Young, Jeff Light, Sara Libby, Andy Keatts, Sam Schulz and Tarcy Connors). I’d also like to urge people to support local media. Get a digital subscription to the U-T, sign up to be a member of Voice of San Diego, KPBS or inewsource.

I don’t think people realize what a world without journalism would look like, but we’re slowly drifting in that direction.