Point Blank: Bonus Interview with Connor Sheets
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Today, we bring you a special bonus episode as part of our ongoing series, Point Blank, about the 2017 spree shooting in Rancho Tehama, California. This episode is a half-hour conversation between me and Connor Sheets, an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, who we teamed up with to co-produce the series. You'll hear us speak about his original article that inspired our series, titled, It Was California's Forgotten Mass Shooting, But For Victims, The Hell Never Ends.

Connor and I also discuss how he initially got the story, the unique value of telling stories through podcasting versus print journalism, and our own thoughts about the process of conducting interviews, putting the podcast series together, and what we took away. So here it is, me, Witt Misseldein, in conversation with Connor Sheets.

First, I just wanted to get a little background about you, your role at the Los Angeles Times, how you got there, how long you've been in journalism. Just give us a bit of background. Yeah, so I'm fairly new at the Los Angeles Times. I moved out here about a year and a half ago from Alabama, where I worked as an investigative reporter for almost seven years. In my time here at the LA Times, I'm working as an investigative and enterprise reporter, which kind of means I do a wide range of stories on a wide range of topics. I don't have a specific beat.

I'm currently in the middle of a series of stories with a reporting partner, Kerry Blakinger, about pharmacies in Mexico selling pharmaceuticals that are tainted with fentanyl and passing them off as legitimate pills. So it's really all over the place. I've written about everything from pickleball to cartels to guns, as we're going to be talking about today. Tell me a bit about then the Rancho Tehama story. Tell me about how you found the story, what inspired you to write about it, and how you came across it.

I've been in journalism for a long time, 15 years or more. And in that time, I've covered shootings everywhere I've been. There's just been a constant drumbeat of mass shootings and local shootings, just a part of being a journalist in America. So last year, the Buffalo shooting took place and they flew me out to Buffalo. I spent several days there. I kind of focused on the background of the shooter, growing up in like over 90% white area and the racial animus that he developed.

And, you know, the first day I was there, I went to the grocery store where it took place, the Tops supermarket in Buffalo. And like, I think it was one day after it happened, I flew out immediately. And, you know, it was very moving seeing all these people coming together. And obviously, there was this horrible tragedy, but there was sort of this community gathering aspect and people were coming from around the country to help. And, you know, when I got back from that trip,

I was thinking, what happens with shootings that don't reach the level of infamy or news coverage that a story like Buffalo does? We're based in California. We were hoping to find one that was in California. We wanted one where there was a number of people killed, where it really left a community devastated, but that even people in California kind of forgot.

And in looking into that, I found this shooting in Rancho Tehama Reserve, which was in 2017. And, you know, six people ended up dead. It took place over two days. There was a shooter going through the community shooting at random people. He tried to do a school shooting, actually ended up shooting a child who didn't die. You know, it had a lot of the hallmarks of some of the worst mass shootings that you hear about in the U.S., but he was stopped before he did quite as much damage as, you know, something like Uvalde.

But, you know, the way I look at it is if you're a person whose loved one was shot and killed in a shooting or if you were shot during a shooting, how many people were shot along with you? You know, you're still having the same impacts on your life. And a small town like Rancho Tehama, you know, six people being shot. I mean, that can tear a town apart for years. And so, you know, I wanted to do was really try to figure out, you know, what happened in Rancho Tehama and what is it like there today for the people who were impacted by that shooting. So tell us a bit about then what the process was like.

You know, Rancho Tejama Reserve, just to give a little bit of background, is a very small town about two hours or so north of Sacramento, out sort of in almost like a wild west type of area. You get off the highway and have to drive about maybe 30-40 minutes just to get to the town.

There's beautiful mountains all around, snow-capped mountains. And it's a pretty stark environment, but it's got that kind of natural thing going for it. And before I went, I tried to get in touch with as many people as I could. The sheriff's office really wasn't interested in talking. I tried to talk to different people who have been quoted in articles about it. But basically, I went up there cold.

which I do a lot with stories. You know, that's what I did with Buffalo. So you just kind of show up in a place and do your best to figure out what's going on and get a story and find out what's happening. So roll into town, you know, it's maybe a couple stop signs in the whole town. So, you know, I show up. What I ended up doing was posting up at the gas station, stand outside and just start talking to people. So, you know, people drive up and I'm just asking them, you know, were you impacted by the shooting? Were you here when it happened? A lot of people were not interested in talking, but a lot of other people did want to talk and some of them sort of

said, you know, I don't really know much about it, but you should talk to XYZ person. And pretty quickly, it became clear that one of the people I needed to talk to was Jesse Sanders, who ended up being the focus of one of our episodes. And he really was integral that day in preventing...

the shooting from being worse than it was. And he kind of was able to tell me more about the situation for people who were impacted by the shooting on that day, what it's like now, and sort of also helped me understand who else I might want to talk to. So, you know, that was the initial reporting process, just kind of word of mouth, connecting with other people, and then kind of systematically trying to work through some of these news stories, piecing that all together into a coherent look at a community that was ravaged by a shooting and really was never able to fully recover.

in large part because they never really got the resources that a lot of larger communities get when something just slightly bigger happens. Right. Do you want to talk about it too, being overshadowed a bit by the Las Vegas shooting, right? So this shooting happened in, I think, November 2017. A few weeks before that, the Vegas shooting, the highest death count in the history of mass shootings in the United States, hundreds of people killed and shot and also trampled and all that. Obviously, we're all familiar with that shooting. So that happens. But also a lot of people forget the 5th

most deadly mass shooting in American history is the Sutherland Springs, Texas shooting, which was a shooting at a church in Texas. And that actually happened shortly, maybe a couple weeks or days after the Rancho Tejima shooting. So it was sandwiched between two massive death toll shootings.

So it kind of just got lost in the narrative, you know, which is extremely disturbing that a man going on a rampage and shooting people up across the town and injuring more than a dozen people, killing five, killing himself, almost doing a full on school shooting, that that can fall by the wayside news wise so quickly. But that's basically what happened there. So.

Basically, it's a look at the fact that a lot of the people who were either themselves shot and still dealing with injuries to this day, or who had loved ones that were killed or injured, how a lot of them never got really any money as far as 100%.

hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills. They're still in debt. A lot of them didn't get any kind of mental health treatment or if they did, it was very short-lived or expensive. And then perhaps the most, you know, stark representation of the difference between this shooting and some of these other shootings is the GoFundMe and crowdsourcing aspect. You know,

you know, GoFundMes for shootings like the Parkland shooting, the Uvalde shooting, things like that. People are getting millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, you've got people like Jesse Sanders who was shot while...

literally physically stopping a school shooting. You've got people like Troy McFadden, who we have as one of the episodes. He still is dressing his wounds every day. These people got either nothing from GoFundMe. I think both of them got nothing. And then some of the other people, you know, a couple thousand dollars, a few thousand dollars. I think the most that I found of anyone was about $50,000. And, you know, if you're a person who's impacted by a mass shooting,

which shooting that was and how well known it was really doesn't impact your life. So that was really what I wanted to focus on. Yeah, great. So, you know, on that note, I was interested to hear from you about your interest in my story. And, you know, what inspired you to do this project?

Normally, this show is just one episode, one story. It's one storyteller, one traumatic event, one life-changing thing that happens to someone. And I'd always had the idea to do several stories around a single event. How does a single event ripple effect not only in one person's life, but across many different people who also have many different entry points into it, both from their own backgrounds...

what they experienced in it and then what they take away from it and how that ripple effect lasts as you said you know years and years later sometimes the rest of their life and so we had done this in 2021 it was the 20th anniversary of 9 11 and we decided to do four stories around 9 11. um

And that was an amazing series, just a total eye-opener for me. And to listen to these people 20 years on talking about something was just so powerful. But that was such a large-scale event. It was something that all of us experienced to some extent. And so for this series, we were looking for something that was a little more intimate and something that was focused on a small town or a small group of people that were impacted by it.

But not only were they connected to it, but they were interconnected to each other. So in a small community like Rancho Tehama, you have these people all kind of knowing each other, have a relationship to each other. So the impact is really dense. And we were looking for that kind of a story.

And when we came across yours, you know, the title alone just spoke to us. And when we started reading how you were writing about it, it's exactly what we want to focus on the show is these first person accounts and how these ripple effects do happen years later.

What struck me so much in doing this kind of series, especially around an issue like gun violence, is you hear about it from every single angle, seemingly except for the actual people who lived in it. These are often the last stories we hear outside of whether or not we should have different laws or what the police said about it or the true crime aspect. A lot of times people focus on the shooters themselves, why they did it, and that becomes the focus. So you were just speaking to all the elements that we wanted to.

And then as well, you had access to these people. So it was a great way for us to really have a foot in the door. I told my editor of all the stories to take a podcast series approach to of all the stories I've done so far at the LA Times, this is the one that fits the best. People really had something to say. And there was something there that hadn't been done, which is, you know, this is almost exactly five years after. And what did it mean for all these people today?

So how do you think it's different? So then, you know, once you started engaging with the podcast element and we started down this path, tell me what it's different for you telling a story through audio and through podcasting than it is journalistically from a print media perspective. Yeah. So you just tacked on from a print media perspective on the end there. But I do think a lot of people look at what I do on a day to day in the newspaper as journalism and podcasting as not journalism.

And I think somehow documentary video format, there's TV journalists that do very important work and there's documentaries that break ground, but podcasts are still this sort of misunderstood.

But there's this whole world of amazing storytelling, investigative reporting coming out in podcasts to the level that even the Pulitzers actually added a whole category for audio reporting basically to allow for the amazing stuff that's going on in the world of podcasts. So on that level, I think that we're doing the same thing just using different tools.

Something we talk about a lot in journalism, like, you know, instead of us expounding about something, how do we bring those people's voice, the people, the subjects of the story, the people impacted, how do we bring their voices forward and how do we tell their story? And so your format, I mean, that's a unique opportunity to really go all in on the like, this is just their story, essentially, in a way.

And so, you know, that was a whole different approach. But I mean, honestly, almost never can you use more than a few quotes from one person in a story, maybe a few sentences maximum, even in a profile of a person, like maybe a couple paragraphs. And this is, I think some of our interviews went as long as like four or five hours. And, you know, now we're looking at how do we actually get to the root of this story from these individual people's perspective. It's just a whole different approach. And it's one that was really amazing to be able to go down the road of.

Is there anything that stood out to you as you were sitting in on the interviews that was like struck you as different about how I approach the subjects or how I get a story than how you're getting a story? Yeah, I mean, I think that you get to know people in this like historical sense that is not typically relevant to what I'm doing necessarily, but it kind of inspires me to maybe ask those questions.

in case something comes up. Because I think what happens is you get sort of a sense of people's background in your podcast and in this series. You know, you kind of get to the root of who a person is in this way that is pretty rare, really, in any format. And, you know, it sometimes seems like, well, why are we asking all these questions? You know, when I first started doing it, it's like, well, do we really need to know, like, their brother's name and, you know, the street they grew up on? But then when it gets cut together in the end into an episode, like, all that stuff really kind of does have resonance.

Also, just the way that you focus sort of on the psychological or sociological aspects that contributed to these people's lives. I think that aspect is something that maybe I don't pay enough attention to in certain situations. And so, you know, it's just it's interesting seeing someone doing a different form of what I consider journalism. That's just something I've never really done in this way. And just seeing how it you know, how differently you can tell people's stories.

I'd also be interested in your take on this question of print journalism versus podcasting. What do you think podcasting can do that print journalism can't and vice versa? The thing that stands out most...

For me, and it's one of the reasons really I started the show, is in print journalism, and this isn't for every journalist out there, but it has an angle, right? You're looking for an angle to anchor the story that you can tell everything around. And I come from academia originally, and there you're after a thesis. There's a thesis, and all the data points you get are to support or contradict that thesis. But in this, I...

allow people and podcasting in general, I think is a format that allows the story to sort of speak for itself. And it's really one of the original missions of the show is I want myself to get out of the way and I want the listener to get out of the way. I want people to be able to put their perspectives aside and allow the story itself to shine.

In a sense, it's interesting you were talking about the psychological aspect. It's kind of like a journalism of the psyche, right? It's a type of journalism, but it's really a deep dive into how someone sees a situation where the truth with a capital T is much less important than the personal truth that they not only bring into it, but that they take out of it. And that truth might change and morph over time. And you get to see this complex

sort of mosaic and nonlinear way in which that truth evolves, both for the person, and then I want that to evolve for the listener as well. And I think that happened to me really throughout this series. Each new person we interviewed, they had a different perspective on this exact incident. And each of them not only evolved in their own story, but as we listened to them through and through, the story evolved for me. What happened? Why it happened?

how my view of the shooter, my view of the people involved, my view of the community. Again, instead of building an angle or building a thesis, I'm often interested in helping people question or tear down what they think about a particular thing. There are a lot of assumptions that we bring about guns and about rural people and about working class people and about how people experience this kind of thing. And

You know, I hope in this series, it can really open people's eyes to give it a far more complex portrait of both the issue of guns and how we handle these situations psychologically, politically, sociologically. But again, without speaking to it directly or telling people how to think about it, but just kind of opening up the can of worms and allowing people to take away what they take away. And for me, podcasting is such a unique form to be able to do that.

On that note, you know, which stories really stood out to you? I mean, you know, there's quite a lot of emotion in some of these interviews and you're watching people almost work through some of this in real time. You know, what stood out to you the most and what was the most poignant? Something I think really stood out to me is, for example, in Jesse's story, you know, Jesse Sanders was the person that you had highlighted in your story. And then when we interviewed him, something that struck me was just the many lives he had lived before this even happened.

You know, he got a girl pregnant when he was 11 years old. He ended up going to jail and it was in solitary confinement for months. He comes out and has a drug addiction. And, you know, then he's involved in a mass shooting. And there are just so many lives that he lived before he becomes this very unlikely hero of the story. And...

I don't know. To me, what was interesting is if you took any particular slice of his life, he would look like an upstanding citizen to a delinquent kid, to a jailbird, to a villain, to a criminal, to a loving father. And if you just took any of those slices, you would see him completely differently. And now he has this kind of moniker of hero. And now he has this other moniker of someone who's living with PTSD who is still really struggling to put his life together. Yeah.

And I think often we think of these types of heroes as someone who saves the day and then they're lauded and then they go on to have this shining moment. And the toll that they take to become that hero is not often visible. And I think in Jesse's case, the amount of trauma he was bringing just to the incident itself, the amount of trauma he experienced...

Their heroism does almost nothing to sort of change his life in a more positive direction. If anything, it's something that leaves him more devastated than he was before, even though he potentially saved the lives of dozens of schoolchildren that day. So that really stood out to me. I think the other story is Sheridan's, the sister of the shooter. I'm

I'm sure it's been told before, but I've never come across that kind of in-depth story about someone who's so intimate with someone who's committed one of these acts. And just being able to detail and go through the impact of what it's like to be on that side of the story. It's not just the victim, but it's someone who's sort of in the perpetrator's story, but themselves sort of a victim of that story.

And being able to both see the compassion as well as have all the anger towards him as a perpetrator, but also understand him as a little child and having seen him grow up and see how this entire situation developed from the beginning. I don't know. I'm still, as soon as you asked this question, I thought like, I really don't even know what to make of her story still, even after the interviews we did and after speaking with her for three hours and editing this for 10 hours. And there's something so incomprehensible about it.

about the mental illness that kind of lies at the center of this whole incident and why that happened. And especially in a family that had all the resources to try to get him help and they still couldn't.

And the law intervening and taking away his guns and that still didn't do anything. I don't know. There's something that has left me just entirely perplexed. And yeah, there is like a hauntedness to that. Just the kind of intractable situation that she found herself in. And I think that we find ourselves in after we listen to the series.

I wanted to ask you too, which moments for you or which elements for you really stuck out? Yeah. So for me, Sheridan's story also was extremely impactful. And what's interesting to me is you think about Columbine and you think of an image of these teenagers wearing black trench coats and that's

permanently in your brain that's who did columbine you know what i mean or you think of the one in aurora the guy with the orange hair or whatever like that's like who he is forever and that's the person who did this shooting and it's just a person you know we just say he's mentally ill he had access to guns this is what caused him to do the shooting and whatever and but you go back and you you know this this story begins with he's a child and he was a precocious kid and he loved skateboarding and all this stuff and then you start seeing okay then he started having some injuries and what have this contributed to what and how does that all come together

A kid who played guitar obsessively and then had problems with his hands or something and was not able to play as well and got frustrated. And then sound was impacting him in all these ways that wouldn't – because maybe because the injuries, maybe not. And who really knows? But why does that person of all the people that have had a head injury, why does that person – what other things were at play? Like you kind of get the whole picture of this person's life. They're not just like this caricature of evil.

They obviously clearly committed a horribly evil act, a terrible act. It's not about sympathizing with them or excusing anything, but it's just about understanding that there's more to these people. It's just a very interesting contribution to the conversation about this. The other one that really stood out to me is Troy McFadden. Troy never spoke to the media that much after this happened. He's a very quiet, strong, quiet guy. He worked on

construction in a very, you know, he was very proud of being a hard worker. He's one of these guys, you know, these really kind of salt of the earth type of people that you don't really hear talking to the media in this way much, especially about something that can be as politically fraught as a mass shooting or something. But his life was destroyed that day. He was physically shot and is still suffering pain from that injury five years later.

His wife was killed. And, you know, basically it just tore him in half. And how does a person like that whose whole life is based on being strong and how does a person like that rebuild his life? And seeing it from his perspective, the person you don't generally hear from, it's just really interesting to engage with and talk to. So I just thought that one really stuck with me too.

It actually made me think of the other two as you were speaking as well. The Ken's interview, the teacher who is there shielding the students in the classroom. I think both of them are people who would have prior to this kind of thing been unlikely candidates for therapy and for sort of softening their emotional life and for deep empathy for others. You know, not that they weren't empathetic people, but

They both, after this incident, you know, if there is any silver lining, they both became people who were more empathetic and they kind of have this more expansive understanding of mental health and other people and what people might be struggling with.

And that was really beautiful to see. And, you know, as I was thinking that through, you know, on the contrast of that Sissy's interview, the second one, who's the grandmother of Gage, the student at the school who was the intended target of the shooter, she's just devoted her life to him. And she has addressed some of her issues, but is unable to in a way because she's still caretaking for someone who you don't know what his recovery is going to be like. Gage is just becoming a teenager now. And

He not only lost his mom prior to the shooting, but then lost his father and grandmother in the incident itself. So he's an orphan, and he's only got her to really raise him. And the way she describes it, his mental health journey is long and very, very unpredictable. And that...

That really haunted me as well. You know, when you have this kind of madness that lies at the center of some of these incidents, it gets spread around. And even after the incident is over, it's left with these other people who now, like, do they become the next generation of people who spread that anger further and further, right? And all we can do is hope that Gage, you know, gets all the resources he needs, but you just never know what that trajectory is going to be. And...

There was something really haunting about that as well, and just seeing this kind of cycle and how it extends down the generations.

For me, another thing I wanted to say, I think when we got to Sheridan's interview, it's the one that you feel like you're going to get the most answers from. It's the one, like you said, where maybe now we can have a deeper understanding of how these things come about. And I think that's so true. There is a way in which by diving deep into these stories, you do get an understanding that you didn't have before. And at the same time, each new form of understanding opens 10 new questions for me.

I think it's worth us not just like honoring the way in which we gain an understanding from this, but the way in which we can honor the levels of ignorance that come out of it, the things we don't really understand about the human psyche, about human behavior, about guns, about how to manage any of this. And I think those questions in and of themselves are the insight that I've come away with almost more than I have any specific knowledge that I've taken away from it.

I don't know how to really put that, but there's just something to me about being sort of humbled by the unknowns that come out of these types of situations and how valuable that might be if we brought those unknowns into the larger conversation around this rather than just espousing a point of view. Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. At the same time, it's just very, it seems like a level of hopelessness of,

no matter how far we go down the road of looking at one shooting, it doesn't really do anything to solve the next one or to point us in the direction of a solution or a course of action. But at the same time, I think there's some catharsis or something for people that... One thing that was really interesting to me was just seeing people essentially go through some of the worst moments of their life for the first time in its level of depth. I think Troy and Jesse in particular, I don't know that either one of them had ever spoken to the degree they did a

about this and they're kind of working through it in real time. And I think, you know, there could be a benefit to that, whatever format it takes for people to sort of have a place to voice that, you know, have those conversations and talk to those things after these happen. Because like you said, I mean, the shooting ended, like I always call it the long tail of the shooting, like it just continues to have impacts on people's lives. And, you know, learning more about that, maybe we can find ways to help people who are impacted by these things, you know, to better address these things,

There's going to be more venture to Hamas, and I don't know what we can do to stop them from happening, but maybe in their wake we can have a more empathetic approach to the people who were impacted. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, when we talk about these events, we often talk about them as kind of these like senseless events or unthinkable events. And I'm like, I don't know if those words really apply anymore. You know, there've been so many shootings now that it's not unthinkable at all. I think it's very familiar to us at this point. There can be a hopelessness in the sense that like these will happen. They're going to happen. They happen all the time. And yet

in knowing that they will happen, this level of empathy we might be able to bring to these situations, right? Like, is there an empathy? Is there a form of compassion or way of being or way of understanding head injuries, for example, that would have led to a different outcome for Kevin? You know, is there a form of healing and psychological resources that could have been devoted after the shooting to help people heal a little better or direct more resources to them? So are there forms of recovery? Are there forms of healing we can bring to the situation after understanding the human story a little better?

Yeah. Well, Connor, you know, thank you so much. It's been just an absolute pleasure working with you on this series. It's really opened my eyes to so much and really given me a lot of ideas about future projects. And your contribution is just invaluable. And I just thank you so much for being part of it. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an incredible experience to work with you in this unique format and be able to tell these important stories in a way that hopefully resonates with people.

Today's episode featured a conversation between me and Connor Sheets, investigative journalist with the Los Angeles Times. Thank you all again for tuning in to the Point Blank series. We'll see you all next week when we resume with our regular episodes.

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