The Story on WUNC

As the details about three rescued women in Cleveland, Ohio unfolds, we offer a story from contributor Scott Carrier. He lived in Salt Lake City when 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted and then lived basically in plain sight for months. He says that we can be blind to what is right in front of us.

Alan Smith spent 14 years teaching philosophy and literature to violent criminals in a prison in England until he realized he was changing, slowly "becoming more of the prison than I wanted to be," and had to walk away.

Bangladesh’s garment factory collapse at Rana Plaza has put pressure on U.S. companies to respond.

Charles Kernaghan has been working for years to push companies and governments to prioritize the rights of workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

On this edition of The Story, he talks with host Dick Gordon about the string of recent tragedies and the complex web of forces that make change so difficult.

Late this March, Daniela Pelaez, 19, traveled from her college in New Hampshire to Washington D.C. to sit down with senators and representatives and remind them of something she’s become known for: she’s in the country illegally, there are millions like her, and they want to ask for help.

Host Dick Gordon calls Issa Touma in the city of Aleppo, where he has reached him several times over the past year. He says sometimes the electricity is cut for days and there are bombings and firefights. In these times, the sounds of Aleppo intensify and he is hearing families fight and begin to fray.

This is a video from a workshop organized by Le Pont, the only cultural organization still operating in Aleppo:
 

Last Friday, Carlos Warner called one of his 11 clients in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and offered to help negotiate the end of a hunger strike that detainees are holding. But the client, Fayiz al Kandari, declined his offer, and asked why the U.S. Army will not talk directly to them.

From 1976 to 1986, a violent criminal terrorized communities across California. He became known as the Golden State Killer, and was linked to at least 50 rapes and 10 murders. For years, his whereabouts were hazy.

Then, the writer Michelle McNamara started the blog True Crime Diary, where she and a community of fellow obsessives started piecing together clues that had long been passed over by authorities.

Most of us don’t expect to be sent to jail for failure to pay our parking tickets. But in several counties across Ohio, courts are jailing men and women who cannot afford to pay their fines.

Dick Gordon, host of The Story, speaks with Jack Dawley, who’s been to jail three times for failure to pay. He says he’s never seen a judge or been given any opportunity to explain to a judge that he simply cannot afford to pay.

Charlie Haughey returned home from Vietnam with almost 2,000 photo negatives of his fellow soldiers.  He put them in a box and left them there for 45 years, untouched, until a friend encouraged him to digitize them.

In this edition of The Story, Charlie says seeing them brings back the war, and "things I did not take pictures of. And there are some that are, to me, just the scariest pictures in the world."

Two years ago, when members of an elite Navy SEAL team stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and took out the leader of al-Qaeda, they ended one of the biggest manhunts in American history.

But for a small group of analysts at the CIA, bin Laden's capture was the culmination of a two-decade search that began long before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.