Sexual violence is a particularly difficult topic for investigative reporters to cover. The questions are manifold: How can you verify a story that often has few witnesses, no clear paper trail and contradictory accounts of what happened? What records could establish that an incident was handled improperly by law enforcement or other officials?
For any investigation, we want to establish that the issue at hand impacts more than a single person or family, that it represents a larger failure that has implications for communities or the state as a whole.
From the beginning, this story appeared to check all the boxes. The girl at the center, whose middle name is Larissa, said she told Hobbs school officials as well as police she had been raped on campus. A video of the alleged assault had circulated throughout the school district. There were witnesses, and the school and police had records.
There are systems in place that are supposed to protect students in situations like these. If those systems failed here, those failures would have implications not just for Hobbs Municipal Schools, but for students across the state.
We interviewed nearly a dozen experts in school-based sexual violence, psychology and law enforcement. Their assessments were clear: Both police and school officials should have taken Larissa’s report seriously, quickly launched in-depth investigations, and taken steps to protect her from retaliation and educational harm.
Larissa’s account was the focal point of our reporting. She had contemporaneously relayed the details of the alleged assault to her mother, as well as to other professionals who work with students.
Writing Larissa’s story would require extensive reporting. That reporting spanned four months, and included:
- Over a dozen interviews with Larissa and her mother, sometimes together and sometimes separate, to establish a detailed timeline and a clear accounting of her life before, during and after the incident at school. We went back multiple times to ask the same questions to ensure details remained the same.
- Interviews people with direct knowledge who were able to corroborate those accounts in detail, but who could not be named in the story because of child privacy laws.
- Phone records, text messages and records from the police and the school district that further corroborated the details and timeline we had established through interviews.
We then needed to establish the scope of the problem. Was Hobbs an outlier, or was this a problem that was more widespread? We submitted 14 records requests to police, the emergency dispatch authority and the New Mexico Public Education Department.
Those records showed us that schools in Hobbs had called police nearly 50 times over the past three school years to report rape, sexual assault or students sharing digital images of other students without consent. Some of those calls were for incidents that occurred off campus and didn’t involve the schools, according to police records; others were for incidents that occurred on campus.
We also analyzed the most recent data from the New Mexico Department of Health’s Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey, which asks students whether they have experienced sexual violence. Those records showed an elevated rate of sexual assault occurring among students in Lea County.
We then scoured court records to find cases that had been brought against the school district for incidents similar to Larissa’s. Five such lawsuits have been filed over the past three school years. We went on to interview attorneys, as well as parents and children, who were involved in those cases.
To find out how Hobbs stacked up against the rest of the state — and how New Mexico compared to the rest of the country — we gathered publicly available data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which shows raw numbers of crimes recorded by local law enforcement throughout the country.
Using Newshound, an AI-powered analytical program for journalists developed by researcher and journalist Marc Drumwright, we broke those numbers down by law enforcement agency and offense type. We then analyzed the data to find how often rape and sexual assault were reported by every New Mexico law enforcement agency. We also ran an analysis to see how often each agency made arrests for those crimes.
That analysis showed rape and sexual assault were reported to police in Hobbs at a rate more than 2.5 times higher than the national average — the third-highest prevalence of those crimes in New Mexico. Ninety-six percent of rapes and sexual assaults in Hobbs went unsolved, according to the analysis. (In this respect, Hobbs was not unusual; many law enforcement agencies in New Mexico have similarly low clearance rates for sex crimes).
This data, along with the documents and information we obtained through public records requests, interviews, and on-the-ground reporting, painted a clear picture: Larissa’s alleged assault was not an outlier, and the systems in place to protect her had failed.
