Joe Mahr

His name is Joe Mahr, an Ohio-native who was part of a team that won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner for investigating reporting.

He and two others wrote “a series on atrocities committed by Tiger Force, a U.S. Army platoon during the Vietnam War.”

That’s just the most prestigious of his awards for investigative reporting, about which you can read here.

The subject of one was “allegations that the police in Toledo refused to arrest or investigate abusive priests.”

He “has also written a series of stories looking at abuse and neglect in the mental health system,” Wikipedia says. The abuse revealed rapes that had not been investigated by police (which sounds a lot like what happened to those raped in the Illinois prison system while I was looking at that problem in the 1990’S).

“There’s something really intoxicating about digging up information and chasing a story,” Mahr told a reporter for a profile in the Ohio University Honors Tutorial Program.

The profile he says he has a self- described “passion to expose wrongdoing.”

Last year he delivered a talk entitled, “Watchdog Journalism in the 21st Century,” at Iowa State University

In his Chicago Tribune biography, he writes,

“My job is to ferret out wrongdoing in the suburbs, from corruption to questionable policies. I welcome all tips. The best way to reach me is by email: jmahr@tribune.com

He says one of his efforts looked at “a nationwide failure to not only hunt fugitives, but breakdowns that let them walk away from police without arrest.”

Mahr wrote for the Chicago Tribune stories about drivers being arrested for driving over 100 miles per hour receiving probation.

He also wrote the story which tagged the Village of Bull Valley for issuing the most tickets per policeman in the Chicago metropolitan area.

Mahr also won an award from Lee Newspapers for stories on the “repeated tragedies caused by drunken drivers.”

When he was hired by the Tribune, former colleague Kristen Hinman wrote the Chicago newspaper’s office memo said Mahr had been hired to “sniff out corruption and other shenanigans in the metro suburbs.”