Innovative Narrative Probes Teenager's Death

In 2002, Mylo Harvey, an upstanding, 19-year-old leader in the Tulalip Indian Reservation, took hallucinogenic mushrooms, wandered down Casino Road and ended up dead after struggling with the police. This is how a groundbreaking, 11-chapter series by 2003 Ochberg Fellow Scott North begins, but, as its title suggests, "A Truth Beyond" does much more. It is, as North says in the accompanying video, “a story about a story,” and the first-person narrative interweaves Mylo’s case with North's own experience of reporting cops and violence in his more than twenty years at The Herald in Everett, Washington. The story does for the reader what it did for North: “It made me think hard about the role of a newspaper reporter in these times of change and the things that bond and divide those of us who now live in Snohomish County.”

The final chapters will be published on Sunday, August 17th. You can also subscribe to an audio podcast of the story.