Cal Poly freshman Kristin Smart was reported missing on May 26, 1996, after walking home from an off-campus party with Paul Flores, also a freshman at the time. She was legally declared dead in 2002, though her body has never been found. On Oct. 18, 2022, Paul Flores was found guilty for the first-degree murder of Kristin Smart, now facing 25 years to life in prison. His father, Ruben Flores was found not guilty.
In addition to co-producing and editing, I interviewed Chris Lambert, who was credited with reviving the case with his podcast, "Your Own Backyard."
I have covered housing and homelessness in San Luis Obispo County in many of my reporting classes. For my Web Audio and Video class, I created a short documentary for my final that was just one piece of many reporting projects I’ve done. I had built trust with both unhoused community members and county staff who allowed me to capture their experiences with one of the county’s newest plans to address homelessness: a Safe Parking site.
I made this visualization as part of a group final project in my data journalism class in Spring 2022. With three other students, I created a data-driven story on a webpage (view here), exploring school shootings in the US and gun laws. I cleaned and analyzed more than 2,000 rows of data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security to review school shooting incidents since 1970, clarifying our parameters for what constitutes a school shooting, as some incidents in the database would not be included.
As a Dow Jones News Fund data intern at Bay City News, I wrote an article and visualized data from a scientific study showing how rising groundwater levels would cause contaminants from more than 5,000 toxic sites to spread into neighborhoods, hurting both infrastructure and health. This map is one of the graphics I made for this story.
