AUSTIN (KXAN) – The mysterious death of a 14-year-old girl. A deadly crash into an Austin hospital. The arrest of a Central Texas tutor. A small-town medical emergency.
These were the stories at the center of our team’s most impactful investigations in 2024. These investigations resulted in new city ordinances, revised autopsies, and lawmakers filing bills sparked by KXAN’s reporting set to be considered when the 89th legislative session begins in January.
Here’s a list of KXAN investigations making an impact:
KXAN’s “A Fatal Fall” investigation found police failed to collect key evidence and did not follow up on potential leads in the case of 14-year-old Treyshur Carter, who was found unresponsive on the side of an Austin road in February 2024 and later died from catastrophic injuries.
The Travis County medical examiner reviewed KXAN’s findings, including body camera video and expert opinions, and within days amended Treyshur’s autopsy to reflect a motor vehicle was most likely involved. The Austin Police Department also re-reviewed the case following KXAN's questions.
KXAN’s “Preventing Disaster” investigation followed a fatal car crash into an Austin emergency room in February 2024. Our team took a broader look at safety concerns with that crash and hundreds of others nationwide – including whether medical sites had security bollards at their entrances. Experts say those could stop crashes from happening.
Texas State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, filed Senate Bill 660 requiring most hospitals in the state to install safety bollards after our investigation revealed these types of accidents are not uncommon. The Austin City Council also passed a new ordinance requiring crash-rated safety bollards at new hospitals, urgent care clinics, and stand-alone ERs.
Texas State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, and a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers filed Senate Bill 571 to expand access to state misconduct records. The move is in response to a KXAN investigation that uncovered a former juvenile corrections officer got a tutoring job inside a Central Texas high school after a state agency investigated him for sexual misconduct.
SB 571 would give contractors, whose employees work on school campuses, access to a state search engine with misconduct data from the Texas Education Agency, Juvenile Justice Department, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Family Protective Services. The search engine, which was greenlit by lawmakers in 2023, is still not complete.
“There’s been issues where contractors that have a really negative background, maybe even pedophilia, or whatever else, have been able to get access to school. We are trying to put an absolute halt to that,” Bettencourt said. “The reporting that you had [makes] it even more clear that we have to plug that gap.”
State Senator Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, expanded and refiled a bill, Senate Bill 378, prohibiting unlicensed cosmetologists and barbers from doing injections, including Botox, unless they are licensed in medicine, certified, or have medical supervision.
The legislation was filed after a KXAN report found a lack of oversight and safety gaps for cosmetic medical services.
Three Texas lawmakers say they are looking for ways to better collect data on truancy cases, following a KXAN investigation that discovered no state agency has tracked outcomes for tens of thousands of students referred to court for missing too much class in the past decade.
Democratic state senators Judith Zaffirini of Laredo and Royce West of Dallas, along with Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat out of Round Rock, told KXAN there is a need for better data on truancy.
“Truancy remains a critical challenge in Texas, largely because inconsistent tracking precludes identifying root causes, intervening early, and providing families the support they need,” Zaffirini said. “I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Texas Senate to identify better and more effective methods for uniform truancy tracking.”
As Texas’ population grows, critics point to the need for more medical examiners in death investigations, instead of the state relying so heavily on its current process in most counties, where an elected justice of the peace also has the power to determine cause and manner of death with scant training, often without autopsies or forensic expertise.
During our reporting, Texas lawmakers resumed efforts to modernize that antiquated system, as a nearly-forgotten mystery resurfaced with a fresh review of a young girl’s strangulation case.
7. The City of Austin stopped using an Onion Creek neighborhood as temporary staging site for waste
For years, the City of Austin used an Onion Creek neighborhood as a dump site for trash – piling garbage swept across the city into a cul-de-sac, yards from people’s homes. KXAN’s “Dirty Decisions” investigation discovered the department in charge didn’t follow its policies.
After KXAN began asking questions, Resource Recovery stopped dumping in the neighborhood and cleaned the site. The department also stopped using a similar site behind a strip mall in north Austin on Great Northern Boulevard. Resource Recovery said it would revisit its procedures for selecting and using “temporary staging sites” for waste.
“They have assured us that it is no longer happening in this area, and we expect to hold them to it,” Austin City Council member Vanessa Fuentes said.
