Gun deaths in Wisconsin are hard to track. How our team approached this first-of-its-kind effort.
John DiedrichIf you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text “HOPELINE” to the National Crisis Text Line at 741741.
Gun deaths have risen in Wisconsin, but if you want to know exactly how suicides, homicides or accidents happened in your county – or a neighboring county – it is hard to find out.
Like other states, Wisconsin releases detailed information on deaths only in its largest counties – but it typically takes years for it to be made available. For smaller counties, such data is never released.
To close that gap, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel set out to understand the complete picture of gun deaths in Wisconsin.
Through the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, reporters obtained and analyzed data extracted from records provided by every county in the state but one – a first-of-its-kind effort and analysis.
The reporting team initially sought comprehensive, detailed data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which collects information about violent deaths under the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Violent Death Reporting System.
The Journal Sentinel sought the information to explore the full picture of how people in Wisconsin – from the largest counties to the smallest – experience gun deaths, a number that reached a record 841 deaths statewide in 2022, according to data that is still preliminary.
State officials said the raw violent death data cannot be released by them under the open records law.
Academic researchers get this data by agreeing not to use it to identify the deceased. The Journal Sentinel sought it in the same way, a request that was reviewed by Marquette’s Institutional Review Board, which oversees research to ensure people are not harmed. Such boards are a federal requirement.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services Data Governance Board denied the Journal Sentinel's request for the data, in part saying that there was no way to ensure the news organization would comply with the agreement.
For the general public, the department provides only an online summary of death data – and it is years behind. Last year, when the Journal Sentinel project began, the most recent publicly available data was for 2018 (the state updated the data through 2020 earlier this year, but numbers remain nearly three years out of date).
Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, criticized the state for failing to provide the records to the Journal Sentinel. He noted journalists in Wisconsin are typically allowed to review sealed juvenile court records if they agree not to use the names in their news reports.
“Then you have another part of government saying, ‘We don't care what you promise. We're not going to let you have it because we don't trust you.’ I do find that troubling,” he said. “They are making it really difficult for you to get information that is unquestionably in the public interest.”
To be clear, the data itself does not include names, rather just facts about each death, such as date, age, race, gender, type of firearm use and manner of death.
Having been denied data from the state, the reporting team turned to the counties.
Using the state’s open records law, investigative reporter and O’Brien Fellow John Diedrich and his student assistants, Alex Rivera Grant and Ben Schultz, began requesting the death records from each of the 72 counties in August 2022.
The team asked for 20 years of data or for as long as the county kept the records electronically.
After work that lasted nearly a year, the team had obtained and analyzed records from all but one of the state’s 72 counties – the sole holdout was Trempealeau County, south of Eau Claire.
'I'm not doing it'
Trempealeau County Coroner Bonnie Kindschy, an elected official, refused to even locate the death records, which is required by state law.
“I am not digging through those records for you,” Kindschy said in an interview with Diedrich in June. “I’m not doing it. I have told you that a dozen times. I don’t understand why you can’t understand that. This is ridiculous. Goodbye.”
Kindschy then hung up on Diedrich.
The team emailed Kindschy five times, starting in September 2022. Diedrich called Kindschy three times and he traveled to Whitehall, the county seat of Trempealeau County, in July trying to get the records from the courthouse.
Diedrich and the attorneys working on behalf of the Journal Sentinel also called and emailed Trempealeau County Corporation Counsel Rick Niemeier at least six times.
Lueders said Kindschy is required, under the state's records law, to provide a written response to the request. She must either provide the records or give a legally defensible reason, in writing, for not providing them, he said.
"‘I am not digging through those records for you’ is not a legally defensible reason,” he said. “Kindschy's refusal, alone among the state's 72 coroner or medical examiner offices, to provide these records is a violation of the law, and one that reflects very badly on her as an elected official.”
Besides her position as coroner in Trempealeau, Kindschy is the appointed medical examiner in adjacent Jackson County. Jackson County did provide the death records. It appears Kindschy was not involved in the decision to release Jackson County’s data.
In an interview at his office in Whitehall, Paul Syverson, the elected county clerk in Trempealeau County, said he didn’t like that Trempealeau was the only one refusing to provide records. But he said was unable to do anything because Kindschy, as an elected official, controls the records.
“I feel bad we are the last one. That is what bothers me,” Syverson said.
‘Conscientious public servants'
The Journal Sentinel team was assisted by two attorneys, Tom Curley, associate general counsel for Gannett Corp., the Journal Sentinel’s parent company, and Tom Kamenick, president and founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Project, which advocates for open records and government in the state.
Curley sent letters to counties that had not acknowledged the team’s requests, while Kamenick engaged counties that had answered but refused to release the records.
From his knowledge of public records efforts in Wisconsin, Kamenick said he did not know of a similar effort to collect health data from every county. Lueders agreed.
“I think it is remarkable that you got 71 of 72 counties to provide the information. Good for them,” he said. “They're doing what they're supposed to do and what the state should have done.”
In Wisconsin, death investigations – and record-keeping on them – are handled on the local level.
While the topic is a vital one for understanding patterns around everything from fatal accidental shootings to suicides, the detail varied widely among the counties, the Journal Sentinel found.
Some counties have elected coroners, who are not required to have medical training. Others have appointed medical examiners, some of whom who are medically trained. The largest counties, such as Milwaukee and Dane, have forensic pathologists.
The state’s bigger counties keep records electronically. Some, such as Milwaukee and Waukesha counties, quickly provided data. Others, such as Dane County, resisted at first before supplying the records once they were contacted by the Journal Sentinel attorneys.
Officials from several small counties initially denied requests or took weeks or months to reply, noting low pay, short-staffing or little or no equipment to do their job.
Some coroners and medical examiners said they and their staff were forced to work on their own personal computers because the county where they worked didn’t provide them one.
Kamenick and Curley did not need to file lawsuits to obtain the data, but Kamenick said the positive response from so many counties could be helpful for future requests.
Because some counties had detailed spreadsheets while others had just paper records, the reporting team spent dozens of hours standardizing the data so it could be analyzed and presented online.
Kevin Crowe, a former USA Today investigative data reporter, started on the project. Later, the effort was joined by Journal Sentinel data reporter Daphne Chen and newsroom developer Andrew Hahn.
In addition, Diedrich interviewed more than 100 people for the project, including dozens of gun owners, researchers, gun store owners, families affected by gun deaths, public officials and others.
Kamenick, who operates the public interest law firm in Wisconsin, said he was encouraged to see most coroners and medical examiners contacted for this project provided records.
One example: Rusk County in northwestern Wisconsin – one of the smallest counties in the state, with about 14,000 residents – provided seven years of records in a spreadsheet.
Medical Examiner Annette Grotzinger apologized for a four-week delay, saying much of her department had recently quit so she had to do the records work herself.
Like several other officials, Grotzinger said fulfilling the request allowed her to see her own numbers differently. For instance, she said she was surprised how many homicides there were in the county since 2015 – five of the 20 gun deaths.
Dave Patton, who was appointed Wood County coroner in 2021, said his deputies have been doing reports on their personal computers which he could not regularly access. Wood County, in central Wisconsin, has nearly 75,000 residents.
As a former paramedic, Patton said he was concerned about the security of the health data on personal computers. Following the Journal Sentinel’s request, he said new computers are coming.
“Our county board didn’t know,” Patton said. “They are now getting computers so their work will be protected.”
Project credits
Contributing reporter: Natalie Eilbert, Alex Rivera Grant, Ben Schultz
Data analysis, graphics: Andrew Hahn, Daphne Chen, Kevin Crowe, Eva Wen
Photos, video: Mike De Sisti, Bill Schulz
Story editing: Greg Borowski
Photo editing: Sherman Williams, Berford Gammon
Copy editing: Ray Hollnagel, Pete Sullivan
Design: Kyle Slagle
Social media: Ridah Syed
About this project
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter John Diedrich examined the full extent of gun deaths in Wisconsin during a nine-month O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University.
The project reveals the full picture of gun deaths in the state and tells the stories of people affected by gun deaths and those trying to find solutions.
Diedrich was assisted in the project by Marquette student researchers Alex Rivera Grant and Ben Schultz.
Marquette University and administrators of the program played no role in the reporting, editing or presentation of this project.