ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
There's a new crop of Pulitzer Prize winners, journalism's highest honor. Among them are Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari of the Connecticut Mirror. They and two reporters from fellow nonprofit newsroom ProPublica teamed up to investigate predatory towing practices and the state laws that fostered them. Ginny and Dave, congratulations, and thank you for joining us.
GINNY MONK: Thank you for having us.
DAVE ALTIMARI: Thank you.
NADWORNY: So you launched your series with the words, gone in 15 days. Walk us through some of the issues in Connecticut.
ALTIMARI: So we got a tip that towers were getting permission to sell people's cars after 15 days, which honestly didn't sound real.
MONK: Yeah. Around the same time, I was working with a tenants' union in Hamden, Connecticut, and folks were telling me just over and over that their cars were getting towed and sold for minor parking violations. Someone was parked crooked - still within the lines, but parked crooked - and someone hadn't cleared snow off their windshield. There were all kinds of reasons, many of them very minor. And our series really focused on people whose cars were towed from their own homes.
ALTIMARI: Theoretically, under the law, what was supposed to happen is they were supposed to notify the person whose car has been towed that their vehicle had been towed and give them the option to collect some of the money from the sale. And if they didn't, then after a year, they were supposed to turn the money over to the state. And none of that was happening.
NADWORNY: So the cars would be towed and then sold, and the towing company would make a profit. And then what did that mean for the people left without cars?
MONK: The loss of transportation had huge effects that echoed through people's lives. So people lost jobs, lost their housing, missed medical appointments, struggled to get their children to school - really big consequences for, again, things like parking incorrectly.
NADWORNY: How did the state and state agencies like the DMV factor into all of this?
ALTIMARI: The DMV was supposed to - or did - have to give them permission to sell the vehicle. They were theoretically supposed to be the gatekeeper. They weren't - they were basically rubber-stamping the forms. What we did find is that in a lot of cases, they were selling the cars privately or, frankly, giving them to friends or family members. That's how they were getting around it and how they were able to sell some pretty nice cars.
NADWORNY: Did you just say that in some cases, the people who worked at the towing company were just giving them to their friends or family?
ALTIMARI: In some cases, yes, or using them themselves.
NADWORNY: You worked with reporters at ProPublica.
MONK: Yes. We worked with several really talented people - particularly two data reporters, Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne. The data was hugely complicated, and I don't think we could've told these stories without their work.
NADWORNY: Is there a moment that stood out to you, maybe something a source said or just this aha moment in the course of your investigation?
MONK: We did a really big audience-engagement effort, and the response was really huge. We interviewed more than a hundred people who had been towed. So I think seeing how much people wanted to talk about this issue and felt like they hadn't been heard before was sort of a collective aha moment.
NADWORNY: So this investigation did the thing that accountability journalism strives to do. It helped make change. What resulted from your work?
MONK: So in 2025 - I think it was about 24 hours after our first story published - lawmakers started promising that they were going to do something about this, and they did. In 2025, they overhauled the state's towing statutes. And then they came back in 2026. And actually, the day the Pulitzers were announced, the House of Representatives gave final passage to another bill that said the time before the sale is going to be 30 days at the minimum, and you have to base it on the age of the vehicle.
NADWORNY: Does this feel like enough to you guys?
ALTIMARI: It's a good start.
NADWORNY: That's Pulitzer winners Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari of the Connecticut Mirror. Thanks so much for speaking with us, and, again, big kudos. Congratulations.
MONK: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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