EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s how we prepared our series rooted in the story of Melinda Lou Kayser
Last summer, reporter Abbey McDonald received a desperate email from a Salem woman.
She described how her mother, Melinda Lou Kayser, was wasting away on a sidewalk in southeast Salem. Kayser was severely mentally ill, unable to care for herself and often aggressive toward those trying to help.
“Please help,” the subject read.
THE SERIES:
Part 1: Melinda Lou Kayser died on a cold Salem sidewalk months after county investigators determined she could care for herself. Her life included years of turmoil as her mental illness worsened.
Part 2: In an effort to protect civil rights, Oregon has created a mental health system that generally requires someone to commit a crime to get help. That leaves Salem Hospital’s psychiatric ward a revolving door that stitches people up or stabilizes them without much hope of long-term fixes.
Part 3: After years of inaction, lawmakers are taking up reforms to make it easier to civilly commit people for treatment. But space needed for such care lags behind what’s needed.
Abbey met with Jessica Finnegan two days later.
Her story, and her mother’s was published this week in “Sentenced to the Sidewalk,” a three-part series exploring how flaws in Oregon’s civil commitment and mental health systems leave vulnerable people to die on the streets under the guise of protecting their rights.
The series was a significant undertaking for Salem Reporter, which operates with a team of just five reporters.
But Melinda’s suffering and story demanded attention.
Over months, Abbey researched both Melinda’s life and the state laws and systems that are supposed to help people with no other resources.
She did so while continuing to cover local homeless services, her primary beat, as well as chipping in on Salem Reporter’s coverage of a presidential election, city budget cuts and more.
The work was slow. As Abbey was working to learn about civil commitment, Jessica texted her in the fall with an update. Her mother had died on the street from what was later determined to be hypothermia. Her death came after she was rejected for commitment.
That spurred Abbey to continue her reporting, honing in on how Melinda’s life got to such a tragic conclusion.
“Melinda’s death was incredibly public. Hundreds of people saw her condition in passing on sidewalks over the years, and dozens were acutely aware of her behavior. When someone is suffering in such a visible way over months, that’s indication of a deep systemic issue and learned helplessness among the community as a result,” Abbey said in a note to me.
Her reporting over months was meticulous. She got court records from Roseburg documenting Melinda’s early life, and met with her sister to speak about her childhood. She interviewed experts and those who deal with the issue every day, from judges to doctors.
Few news organizations tackle such reporting anymore. The rest of our team – reporters Ardeshir Tabrizian, Joe Siess, Madeleine Moore and Alan Cohen – took on a bigger load themselves to free up time for Abbey to pursue this challenging journalism.
Abbey worked with Editor Les Zaitz to convince a Marion County judge to unseal records from Jessica’s failed attempt to have her mother committed for mental health treatment — a crucial set of documents that are typically shielded from public view.
And she spent hours fact-checking every detail of the story, assembling a spreadsheet with hundreds of lines that cross-referenced every fact in the series to an interview, document or report.
Abbey was motivated by a deep concern for people whose lives and struggles often slip through the cracks.
“Melinda’s story reflects on all of us, in Salem, in Oregon and beyond. My reporting also found there’s frighteningly thin public resources to prevent it from happening to anyone who finds themselves, through years of escalating crisis, unable to perform the basic tasks needed to live,” she wrote.
The response from our readers has been overwhelming. We’ve received dozens of comments and emails with messages of support, grief and shock. Many expressed gratitude for Abbey’s careful storytelling, which illuminated complex issues through a deeply personal account.
Several people, ranging from Mayor Julie Hoy to local outreach workers, told us following publication that they knew Melinda or saw her on the sidewalk and tried to offer her food or help, often more than once.
We’re grateful to Jessica to place her trust in us and for her willingness to share such a personal story with a wide audience.
And thank you to you, our readers and subscribers. Your support pays for this in-depth reporting and lets us undertake major projects to illuminate important Salem issues.
If you’re so moved, please share this series with a friend and encourage them to sign up for our free newsletter. And if you’re not yet a subscriber and would like to become one, you can sign up here. With more subscribers, we can do more of this important journalism for the community.
Contact Managing Editor Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers education, economic development and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade and is a past president of Oregon's Society of Professional Journalists chapter. Outside of work, you can often find her gardening or with her nose buried in a book.
