Elizabeth Donald
Reporter/Editor/Photographer
Journalist for more than 20 years in daily news on multiple beats, now freelance. Serves on SPJ Ethics Commission, president of St. Louis SPJ, freelance editor and photographer.
PROJECTS
bnd.com
There are signs your teens may think about suicide. Here’s how you can get them help.
Sometimes Emily Halasey feels as if she’s in zero gravity with objects flying at her, but she can’t move.
“You just know if you move or if you dodge, there’s another rock that’s just going to hurl at you,” the 18-year-old from Collinsville said, describing her anxiety. Depression is like that, too, except those objects are pushing her down — at least that’s how it feels to Emily.
At least 37 teenagers have died by suicide in the metro-east since 2006, including Emily’s childhood friend — an average of three suicides each year, according to local coroners.
bnd.com
Racist message found on blackboard at SIUE
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville was struck once again with racist graffiti Thursday, this time referring to black people as non-citizens on a classroom blackboard.
The message was left on a blackboard in SIUE’s Peck Hall and was discovered Thursday. It quoted in part an 1857 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.
The message read, “No person of African descent shall be citizen of the U.S. ... nor were they ever intended to be. Dred Scott Decision — Google I...
donaldmedia.com
Annapolis
There are hundreds of columns and editorials out in the world condemning the slaughter of five journalists at a newsroom just like mine, less than two weeks after it happened. The columns appeared within hours, tweets and posts and laments. There’s a reason. Words are our lifeblood and our solace. We may be working out our collective sadness and fury in words for some time to come.
I honestly feel this is the closest we journalists will come to understanding how police officers feel when they...
bnd.com
'A 1940s news aggregator': Family donates World War II news scrapbooks to SIUE library
Headlines from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day will soon be part of the library collection at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, after a family donated scrapbooks from World War II newspapers to the museum — the news as the first rough draft of history.
Dorris William Wilton, of Alton, was a manufacturing executive with McDonnell’s aircraft division while his son, Dorris Wilbur Wilton, served with the U.S. Army in north Africa, Sicily and Italy during World War II. While his son served overse...
bnd.com
A quiet groundbreaker: Edwardsville's first black school board member dies at 82
When Rudy Wilson entered a metro-east high school to check up on some of his student teachers, it was made very clear that he wasn’t wanted there.
It was the 1970s, and Wilson was an education professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. But after his unfriendly reception at a high school when he was trying to mentor his student teachers...
donaldmedia.com
双耳开放
I did most of the talking, which is a bad form for a reporter.
Earlier this week, I was asked to join a colleague at a meeting hosted by the World Affairs Council in St. Louis. Every couple of years the WAC brings in a group of journalists from other countries and asks the St. Louis Society of Professional Journalists to sit down with them and talk about the similarities and differences between their work and ours.
Two years ago it was Russian journalists, and this year it was Chinese journal...
bnd.com
Vegas shooter used these to make his guns nearly full-auto. Should they be legal in Illinois?
The gun debates raging in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting include focus on a little-known modifier used by the shooter: a “bump stock” that lets a semi-automatic rifle fire hundreds of bullets in seconds...
stlspj.org
St. Louis SPJ condemns arrest of journalist Mike Faulk
The St. Louis Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists condemns the arrest of reporter Mike Faulk by St. Louis police during the weekend’s protests and demonstrations.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has reported that one of their own, reporter Mike Faulk, was caught in a controversial police tactic known as “kettling” on Sunday night. Faulk was on duty covering the protests and the ensuing police action when police apparently blocked all four sides of the intersection...
bnd.com
Belleville hospice patient had one last wish. A horse at Fairmount made it come true.
John Brown rolled his wheelchair up to Dreymore’s horse stall and unwrapped a mint. He fed it to the horse he called his "wife," as he visited her one last time.
Brown, 60, is a lifelong horseman, working as a trainer and a groom — and in any other capacity he could find around horses — since he was a child. For decades he worked at Fairmount Racetrack in Collinsville, caring for and training racehorses, including Dreymore.
Now he is a patient at Unity Hospice in Belleville, with lung cancer ...
bnd.com
Here’s why teen driver deaths are dropping in Illinois
Teen driving deaths have dropped by half in Illinois since the state passed the new graduated licensing laws, while fewer teenagers are getting their licenses early.
In 2007, there were 155 teen driving deaths between the ages of 16 and 19. In 2008, the state passed the graduated driver licensing system, which eases teens into driving with phases of gaining driving experience with a parent or guardian, limiting distractions such as cell phones, and letting teens earn their way from one phase ...
bnd.com
Police investigate Wanda Cemetery after woman says husband's plot was resold | Belleville News-Democrat
South Roxana authorities are investigating possible fraud at Wanda Cemetery amid allegations that the cemetery has double-sold plots.
At least one person has filed a complaint about lots she had purchased being resold without her permission, according to South Roxana Police Chief Bob Coles. The woman, who was not named by police, discovered the lots she had paid for had been resold when her husband passed away.
bnd.com
Want your towed car back? Be prepared to pay $500 - just for the receipt
Earlier this year, Edwardsville attorney Brian Polinske filed individual lawsuits against six metro-east cities alleging that they are requiring unreasonable fees from people whose cars are towed after an arrest.
bnd.com
Students fight hate on campus with "Door Project" of tolerance
“Not on my campus.”
“We have more similarities than differences.”
“While we may come from different places and speak in different tongues, our hearts beat as one.”
These were some of the messages written on a door propped up in the quad Wednesday at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, as students responded to incidents of racism in the past week. A note with racial slurs was left on a student’s on-campus apartment door, and a Confederate flag was painted on the boulder in the middle of...
bnd.com
Man charged with spray-painting swastikas has been targeting churches, police say
Court records for the man accused of painting swastikas on graves show a long history of crime, threats and time in and out of mental institutions — as well as accusations that he has been painting swastikas on churches since the beginning of April.
Timothy V. McLean, 34, of Glen Carbon, has been charged with multiple felonies alleging that he spray-painted more than 200 graves with swastikas at Sunset Hill Cemetery in Glen Carbon over Memorial Day weekend...
bnd.com
Perception that St. Louis is dangerous hurts this restaurant. So does fake news.
For 104 years, Crown Candy Kitchen has served overstuffed BLTs and thick shakes in north St. Louis, proud of its neighborhood.
But a recent satire piece on a Facebook page underscored something more than the usual jokes about the diner’s famously long lines, pounds of bacon stuffed into bread, and the chocolates lining its century-old counter: the perception of its neighborhood, and with it north St. Louis, as unsafe.
A Facebook page dedicated to mocking the city of Edwardsville posted a sati...