LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The WDRB Investigates team tackled a wide range of topics in Louisville and southern Indiana in 2024, everything from warning of the dangers of a popular drug to analyzing changes in a new school busing schedule to tracking the pipeline of illegal drugs from Mexico and California to Kentucky.
Here are the top 10 WDRB Investigates stories read on WDRB.com in 2024:
Louisville patients warn about dangers of weight loss drugs and life-changing side effects
A Louisville woman claims a popular weight loss drug she was prescribed for Type 2 diabetes almost killed her.
Doctors prescribed Ozempic to treat Jacqueline Barber's Type 2 diabetes back in 2021, but she said it gave her a lot of complications and she couldn't eat. Barber said the only thing she could keep down without throwing up was peanuts, peanut butter crackers and peanut butter cookies.
While Barber's diabetic levels got under control, her doctors finally told her to stop taking the Ozempic after two years in 2023 because of the complications she was having.
"My stomach was paralyzed," she said. "I couldn't tolerate anything."
Barber had developed gastroparesis, but she's not the only one who has taken weight loss medication and developed complications.
Dr. John Oldham, a bariatric surgeon with Baptist Health, said doctors are often seeing patients in the ER for complications to the weight loss medications.
"When I just left the hospital to come over today, (I) was counseled on patient that came to the emergency room this morning who took her second dose of Mounjaro medication. Just three hours later, she was having abdominal pain, bloating," he said. "Her CT scan is actually showing a gastric outlet obstruction, where her stomach is very dilated full of food, not wanting to pass."
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Mexican drug cartel tied to Bullitt County drug bust that put nearly 40 people behind bars
Nearly 40 people, many from Louisville, were recently arrested after police seized 252 pounds of meth and 12 kilos of cocaine at a Bullitt County gas station.
The bust, touted as the infiltration of a "major drug organization," was the latest result of a federal investigation into a pipeline of illegal drugs making their way from Mexico across the border and up to Kentucky and Indiana.
The DEA said drugs purchased in California are priced low, but once they make their way to Louisville, they are marked up much higher. The reason for that, partially, is the risk involved in transporting the drugs, risk that is passed on to the buyer:
Erek Davodowich, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Louisville Field Office, said the Louisville-area bust earlier this year will make a difference in how the cartel operates.
"The cartel is still operating in Mexico, but what it does is take out their network here operating amongst our two states in addition to the organization that was out there in southern Los Angeles," he said.
Davodowich said there's no specific area of Louisville that's more prevalent than another, but affiliates of the cartels are in the area regularly, overseeing transactions.
"We're out there every single day doing the best job we can do," he said.
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Nearly 30 gangs in Louisville commit 30% of the city's violent crime, FBI says
Louisville's gang culture has been an unspoken reality for years, a taboo subject that few publicly recognized but many knew wreaked havoc on underserved youth. Lately, a surge in violent crime in recent years — several with more than 150 homicides, per police data — has brought the gang conversation front and center for city leaders and federal law enforcement.
Louisville Metro Police leadership speaks openly about their fight to keep kids out of gangs. Community activists, the ones on the streets trying desperately to keep teenagers on the right path, join a growing chorus hoping for change.
And the FBI, whose Louisville field office spends valuable resources fighting the scourge of gun thefts, drug trade and more in Louisville, said the gang violence is "all around us."
"We estimate that approximately 30% of our significant violent crime is attributable to violent gangs," said Supervisory Special Agent Joseph Hamski, who works on FBI Louisville's Gangs and Violent Crime Squad. "We estimate that approximately 25-30 gangs exist and operate in the Louisville area."
The FBI has been investigating several well-known gangs in the area, including the Victory Park Crips, O-Block and EST, which stands for Everybody Shine Together. In October 2021, 10 members of EST — ranging from 20 to 33 years old — were indicted on various drug charges, including conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute meth, fentanyl, cocaine and heroin. LMPD and the FBI touted the arrests as a big step toward "trying to dismantle a pretty entrenched criminal organization" which is fueled by drug money.
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New RiverLink operator struggling to achieve customer service goals
Worried that she wasn't being charged correctly for crossing the Ohio River toll bridges, Susan Cochran, of New Albany, Indiana, said she tried to get help from RiverLink's customer service center.
But those attempts failed, she recalled, forcing her to file a complaint in January with the local Better Business Bureau.
"I tried a couple of days to call them, and nobody answered," Cochran said in a recent interview. "I got put on hold. And, you know, you can only wait on hold for so long without giving up."
Kentucky and Indiana officials agreed last month to spend $3.3 million in toll revenue to improve RiverLink operations, acknowledging long call wait times and other concerns during the transition to a new provider, Texas-based Electronic Transaction Consultants. The company, known as ETC, took over the day-to-day toll collection and billing work last September.
But, in the months that followed, ETC increasingly fell behind on its performance targets for the toll system, according to documents obtained in public records requests. The reports, internal memos, spreadsheets and other notes provide the first publicly available look at how RiverLink has fared under its new operator.
WDRB News analyzed records that detail how effectively the ETC-led team managed their two RiverLink responsibilities: the "back office" work processing toll transactions, including ensuring that the correct vehicles are charged; and handling customer service.
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Bullitt County Public Schools spent $100,000 on its own garbage truck to cut costs. Things didn't go as planned.
Just outside the maintenance facility at Bullitt County Public Schools sits a white garbage truck. Superintendent Jesse Bacon said district leadership thought they could save $100,000 over three years by purchasing their own truck, instead of contracting with Rumpke, to serve its 26 buildings.
"For a district our size, it sort of made sense, the possibility of doing that because of the scope of the sanitations services that we would need," Bacon said, adding that the cost factored in diesel fuel, dump fees, a driver's compensation package and more.
But the project hasn't gone as planned.
"We quickly found out why school districts don't get into the sanitation business when they don't have to," Bacon said in an interview earlier this month. "It was way more complex than we anticipated."
In fact, the project ended up costing BCPS tens of thousands of dollars.
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Did Louisville's crackdown lead to explosive growth of short-term rentals in Jeffersonville?
Historic homes line Riverside Drive in Jeffersonville along the banks of the Ohio River. It's a picturesque piece of Jeffersonville, but, lately, residents there are noticing a change.
Paul Torp said five properties within a two-block walk of his home on the historic street are now listed as short-term rentals on websites like Airbnb and Vrbo.
"Unfortunately, what we're seeing is that the developers are buying them, converting them into short-term rentals, and it really is changing the fabric of the neighborhood," Torp said. "Some of them apparently can house up to 20-30 people."
Torp is one of many Jeffersonville residents who have expressed concerns with an explosion of short-term rentals in the southern Indiana city. Right now, the city of Jeffersonville doesn't regulate short-term rentals, which came as a surprise to Alicia Lopez, who lives in Las Vegas and listed her Jeffersonville property on Airbnb and rents it to traveling nurses..
Since there isn't any regulation, it makes the number of short-term rentals in the city difficult to track. The city's director of planning and zoning said, according to data from a monitoring service, there are about 250 short-term rental units in Jeffersonville. Approximately 100 units popped up in the last year alone, an increase of nearly 70%.
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JCPS bus delays much worse under new start times, data shows
When Jefferson County Public Schools upended school schedules last year, Superintendent Marty Pollio said there would be a clear payoff for the inconveniences families and teachers would endure: Fewer students would miss time in the classroom because of bus delays.
"These nine start times completely solve our issues around transportation. I can't say that clearly enough," Pollio said when presenting the plan in February 2023. "This ensures that every student is picked up. This plan actually ensures a shorter time on the bus for our students."
Yet, after the district moved from only two start times to nine staggered throughout the morning and redrew its bus routes, the delays did not improve. In fact, they got much worse.
JCPS students lost nearly 4 million minutes of instructional time because of bus delays in the October-December period of 2023, nearly four times the instructional time lost during the same period in 2022, according to a WDRB News analysis of data obtained in a public records request.
Bus delays led to an average of 77,015 minutes of instructional time lost per school day across the district in the three-month period, up from 22,416 minutes the year before.
In an interview, Pollio did not dispute WDRB's findings but said delays would be far worse today had JCPS not adopted the staggered school times and redesigned bus routes.
To read more, click here.
Kentucky's unemployment system still plagued by delays, frustration as state prepares for overhaul
Kentucky was overwhelmed by record waves of unemployment claims during the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses were locked down to contain the virus's spread. Tens of thousands of Kentuckians found themselves in limbo for months as they waited for their jobless claims to be processed, delays that became a nagging political problem for Gov. Andy Beshear.
The Democratic governor accepted responsibility for the state's response but noted that budget and staffing cuts hobbled the unemployment insurance system before he took office in late 2019, just months before the global pandemic hit.
Kentucky still uses the same decades-old system in 2024, but the state agreed in May to a six-year, $55.5 million contract with Deloitte Consulting to replace the antiquated technology.
"This new system will help us better meet the needs of Kentuckians by improving accessibility and claims processing times, as well as safeguarding against potential unemployment insurance fraud," Beshear said in a news release earlier this year.
Around the time the contract was signed, Kentucky's unemployment rate for was 4.5%, compared to the national average of 3.7%. Louisville's unemployment rate was 4%.
The new system under Deloitte is being hailed as the savior of an antiquated process, and the state said it will implement safeguards to protect against what the current system has become. But the unemployment backlog continues, and delays remain a daily reality.
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Bardstown woman scammed out of money by fake adoption agency she found on Facebook
All Bernadette Maha Abdullah wanted was a baby. Already a parent to several older children, Abdullah grew up with an adopted brother and always wanted to follow in her parents' footsteps. So after having her first miscarriage in July 2021, she decided she was willing to pay thousands of dollars to adopt.
"When I lost the baby, I got back into social media to find support for miscarriages and things," said Abdullah, who lives in Bardstown. "I found this really nice group. The women were so good, and I clicked on it one day, and there was a link for adoption, So I clicked on that and joined that group as well."
Abdullah and her husband wanted to adopt from India to match her his nationality.
"I told my husband 'There's a guy on there. He runs an adoption agency, so let's contact him,'" she said.
Abdullah was given pictures of babies that were supposedly in an Indian orphanage who needed homes.
She said he claimed to work for the main adoption agency in India and helped people with their paperwork. From there, she agreed to pay $10,000 to adopt a baby girl and boy. The babies were said to be born on the same day, and Abdullah would think of them as twins.
"He had contacted me and seemed legitimate, you know," said Abdullah's older sister, Marissa Browns. "He was sincere about the babies. He said these babies need homes."
But something still didn't seem right for Abdullah.
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Advocates push for change after 'lack of respect' at long-abandoned Louisville cemeteries
The dead at Eastern Cemetery aren't forgotten, but many are neglected.
Headstones sink into the rolling hills. Bags of dog feces hang above a fading 19th century marker. A downed tree limb covers at least five graves. Grass grows tall around much of the graveyard.
Eastern has been abandoned for decades now, one of three cemeteries once owned by the Louisville Crematory and Cemeteries Co. before its owners were indicted on criminal charges and the company dissolved into bankruptcy by the early 1990s.
Without an owner, it's up to volunteers to maintain the grounds and cover the cost of the work. For 23 years, a succession of Jefferson County judges has overseen myriad requests, from approving family members' petitions for new monuments to signing off on grass cutting schedules and reviewing how money from a trust fund is spent.
But, in recent years, the system with responsibility over Eastern, Schardein and Greenwood cemeteries has failed the families whose loved ones are buried there, a WDRB News investigation has found.
To read more, click here.
More stories about memorable moments in 2024
- Olympic glory, street-legal UFO and mystery chicken top WDRB Be Positive stories of 2024
- 2nd Street Bridge rescue, Scottie Scheffler arrest, Givaudan plant explosion top WDRB News stories of 2024
- Restaurants, bars in Louisville that closed in 2024
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