Each Friday, Inquirer photo editors pick the best Philly sports images from the last seven days. This week, there’s nowhere better to start than in Clearwater, Fla., where the Phillies kicked off their spring training this week. The Sixers also returned from their West Coast trip for a matchup with the Knicks before this weekend’s NBA All-Star Game, where Tyrese Maxey will make his first start. And as always, there’s plenty of Big 5 hoops action with March Madness just over a month away.
An ICE agent firing a gun near Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s former congressional district has brought new resonance to the agency in the race to replace her.
Analilia Mejia, who campaigned on abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, won a close and crowded Democratic primary to replace Sherrill in Congress in a victory for the progressive movement that coincides with a national debate over President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda. Even some Republican officials have been speaking out against ICE’s tactics.
Mejia will compete with Joe Hathaway, the former Randolph mayor who ran unopposed in the Republican primary, in an April special election. While Hathaway is far from supporting Mejia’s call for an end to ICE, he has also voiced support for making changes to the agency.
The encounter that has brought their views into focus happened Tuesday in Morris County. The incident, in which an ICE agent fired a gun in Roxbury, is under investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. The attorney general’s office said no one was injured.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said the officer shot at an undocumented immigrant’s tires in self-defense during a targeted effort to detain him.
“This is a public safety issue,” Mejia said in an interview. “Abolishing ICE, to me, is the only reasonable step forward, because it is clear that ICE’s and DHS’s recruitment practices are clearly failing the American people. Their oversight and training is clearly failing the American people, and they have zero accountability.”
In Roxbury, a township of about 20,000 people, roughly 40 miles from New York City, local residents recently protested a proposed ICE facility, which Democratic politicians and the all-Republican town council alike oppose.
The township, which contains mostly Republican and unaffiliated voters, falls right outside of Sherrill’s former district, which includes other parts of the same county and has become fairly reliably blue.
Mejia said Tuesday’s confrontation raises concerns about guns going off in residential neighborhoods or near schools, and that it shows the “recklessness” of the Department of Homeland Security. She said she’s been in conversation with local Democratic officials who question DHS’s account of the incident.
Hathaway disagrees with Mejia’s views on ICE, but he also stopped short of defending DHS when asked about Tuesday’s incident. He said in an interview that he needs more information to comment.
“I think it’s generally not a good thing when politicians try to stick our nose in and stoke the flames and politicize these kinds of things before we know the facts,” he said. “I certainly don’t want to do that in this case.”
The GOP candidate is critical of the state’s Immigrant Trust Directive — the sanctuary policy that limits local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE, but he also said he supports improved training, de-escalation tactics, and technology for ICE agents. He said American citizens who peacefully protest should be kept safe, though ICE agents also need to be able to detain undocumented immigrants effectively.
A New York Times and Siena University poll published in late January found that a “sizable majority” of voters believe ICE “has gone too far,” while roughly half support Trump’s deportations and handling of the southern border.
DHS said the undocumented person driving the car in Roxbury had a criminal history of drug trafficking charges, drug possession, and driving under the influence, and that a judge issued an order of removal for him in 2021. The federal agency said he “rammed into a law enforcement vehicle and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run an officer over” while trying to “evade arrest.”
“Following his training, the officer defensively used his firearm and shot out the tires of the vehicle to stop the threat,” an unnamed DHS spokesperson said. “Thankfully, no one was injured.” The driver was arrested and taken into ICE custody, DHS said.
The attorney general’s office requested that any witnesses share video footage of the incident. The request came right before Sherrill’s administration launched an online portal for New Jerseyans to submit videos of ICE, which she initially announced on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Video footage shared by bystanders contradicted the Trump administration’s account of two recent deadly shootings by federal agents in Minnesota.
Mejia argued during her campaign that ICE cannot be reformed and should be replaced with something else, such as a more efficient system of processing asylum or citizenship applications.
“I’m not calling for open borders,” she said Wednesday. “I’m not calling for the eradication of a system. I’m actually calling for the cease and desist of the violence of the occupation of American cities, of the overreach from this administration, and the erosion of constitutional protections.”
She said she believes Congress, in the short term, should stop funding ICE, reallocate funds for the agency that came as Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed funding for social services, stop surveilling and collecting data from Americans, and end qualified immunity for agents.
Senate Democrats blocked a funding bill for DHS Thursday amid unsuccessful negotiations with the White House to make changes to immigration enforcement operations following the shootings in Minneapolis.
Hathaway said he is “willing, absolutely, to come to the table to reform” how ICE operates, but that he also wants to see changes to sanctuary policies.
Sherrill’s administration has not provided more information about the Roxbury incident, citing an ongoing investigation.
“We recognize that matters of this nature raise concerns within our communities… it is my duty to protect the safety of residents of this state and uphold the Constitution. I will do everything in my power to fulfill this responsibility,” Acting Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said.
On Wednesday, Sherrill signed an executive order prohibiting ICE from operating on state-owned private property unless there’s a judicial warrant and launched a “know your rights” guide for residents interacting with immigration agents.
Mejia, who grew up in Elizabeth and lives in Glen Ridge in Essex County, said that as an Afro-Latina, she feels less safe during Trump’s immigration crackdown and that she takes precautions like carrying her passport or being careful where she speaks Spanish.
“It happening close to home is, of course, troubling, but this is an escalation that we have been seeing for years,” said Mejia.
Low-income Pennsylvania families and adults in their late 50s and early 60s have been dropping out of Affordable Care Act health plans at the greatest rates after a key financial incentive expired at the end of last year, causing insurance costs to double on average across the state.
Some 98,000 people who bought health plans last year from Pennsylvania’s Obamacare marketplace, Pennie, have opted out of coverage for 2026, as of Wednesday. That means one in five previously enrolled Pennsylvania residents have dropped their coverage.
The number is expected to continue growing, as people begin getting premium bills they cannot afford, Pennie administrators said. They have already seen a significant increase since the end of open enrollment on Jan. 31, at which time 85,000 people had not renewed coverage.
The agency has estimated that up to 150,000 people may ultimately drop coverage if Congress did not renew a tax credit program that ensures no one pays more than 8.5% of their income on an ACA health plan. The tax credits, which were adopted in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, had been renewed annually until now.
“If the tax credits had stayed in place, we probably would have seen another record enrollment, further reducing the uninsured rate,” said Devon Trolley, Pennie’s executive director.
The tax credits were a defining issue in last year’s longest-ever federal government shutdown. In that budget stalemate, Democrats wanted to permanently expand the enhanced subsidies, and Republicans refused.
New Jersey has not yet released the final results for its ACA open enrollment period, which also ended Jan. 31.
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The first look at the impact of the higher insurance costs comes from Pennie data at the end of open enrollment. As of Feb. 1, a total of 486,000 people had signed up for coverage in 2026, down from 496,661 the same time last year.
Some 79,500 newcomers to the marketplace partially offset the people who dropped coverage.
In the Philadelphia region, more than 27,000 people who were enrolled in Pennie last year dropped coverage for 2026. Philadelphia and Montgomery Counties saw the biggest impact, with enrollment dropping 18% in each.
Pennie leaders said people dropping plans are not enrolling in another type of insurance.
That’s notable because those who joined Pennie for 2026 were coming from another form of insurance, such as an employer-based health plan. The people leaving Pennie were expected to become uninsured, Trolley said.
Now that open enrollment is over, most people who find their plan is too expensive and drop it will not have an opportunity to select new coverage until the fall.
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Pennie administrators said they heard from many lower-income families and individuals that the cost increases for 2026 were too much of a strain for already tight budgets.
Breaking down the terminations by income, the greatest drop was seen among people with incomes 150-200% of the federal poverty rate. That’s an annual income of between $23,475 and $31,300 for an individual. For a family of four, the equivalent income range would be $48,225 to $64,300.
A total of 13,562 Pennsylvanians in this income bracket declined to renew their Pennie plans for 2026 as of Feb. 1, according to the most recent available data from Pennie.
“The math just isn’t working for people in those households,” said Trolley.
People in this income bracket still qualified for some financial assistance. The ACA includes tax credits for anyone with income below 400% of the poverty rate, and these tax credits did not expire.
Higher earners who would now have to pay in full, without the help of tax credits, account for another large segment dropping coverage.
This included 11,837 people who earn more than 400% of the federal poverty rate. In the past years, the enhanced tax credit helped families in higher income brackets afford marketplace insurance.
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Just under 20,000 adults between the ages 55 and 64 canceled their Pennie plans for 2026, accounting for nearly one-quarter of dropouts as of Feb. 1.
About two-thirds of individuals in this age group earn enough that they would have had to pay the full price of their health plan, without any tax credits. They already pay more than younger adults for the same plan, under rules that allow insurers to charge more to cover older adults, who are likely to have more medical expenses.
“That group is where we were seeing the most significant price jumps — a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars,” Trolley said.
Another 15,356 adults between the ages 26 and 34 — many new to buying health insurance on their own — also dropped out. The ACA allows young adults to be covered under a parent’s health plan until age 26.
Graphics editor John Duchneskie contributed to this article.
Confronted with the possible closure of their beloved school, the Motivation High community came prepared to fight back.
As community members entered their Southwest Philadelphia school’s auditorium Wednesday night, students waving signs and carrying blue-and-yellow pompoms handed out leaflets: on one side were Motivation’s stats — building condition, graduation rate, attendance, suspensions.
On the other were stats for Bartram High, the school they would be assigned to attend if their school closes in 2027, as proposed under the Philadelphia School District facilities plan. The data for Motivation, a magnet, are stronger across the board, sometimes starkly so — Bartram is a neighborhood school with no admissions criteria, and its attendance and graduation rates are lower, and its suspensions higher.
Motivation has only 150 students enrolled this year. The school system cited low enrollment as one reason for the closure. But district officials have been clear: The recommendation was also driven by a desire to reinvigorate struggling neighborhood high schools.
“Why are we put in with Bartram to make Bartram look good, when we stand out on our own?” one Motivation student asked district staff pointedly.
The opposition from the Motivation community lays bare an issue at the crux of the school system’s plan: To reach its stated goal of advancing all students, the district says it must displace some. Often, that has pitted communities against one another.
Residents in a restless crowd at Motivation on Wednesday, including one of the state’s most powerful politicians, Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia), said they were not having it.
“It’s like you want us to water flowers that just weren’t growing from the beginning,” one parent told officials. “You want to uproot kids who have found their place. You can count my child right out of that plan. She ain’t going to Bartram.”
Motivation began as a Bartram program, housed in a separate building, for academically talented students. But in 2004, Motivation became its own school, eventually moving to the former Turner Middle School building at 59th and Baltimore.
Motivation thrived as the only criteria-based high school in Southwest Philadelphia. But like a number of smaller magnets, it was hit hard by 2021 changes to the district’s special admissions policy.
The district that year moved to a centralized lottery system, taking away from principals any discretion over who got admitted to the schools. It said it did so for equity reasons and to solve for demographic mismatches at some schools — though Motivation’s student body had been representative of its neighborhood and the city as a whole.
In the past, schools like Motivation filled most of their ninth-grade classes with students who met the district-set criteria, and also admitted students who were close but came with a strong recommendation from another school, or had compelling personal circumstances that explained why they missed meeting the magnet standards.
Those extra admissions ended with the district policy change, and Motivation’s enrollment plummeted. It was never a huge school, by design — topping out at 400 students prior to the pandemic.
It doesn’t seem fair, said Nehemiah Bumpers, a Motivation 10th grader.
“Why are you guys moving us for having low enrollment scores?” Bumpers said. “It’s the lottery system that drastically changed our enrollment.”
McClinton, who attended the Wednesday meeting, was similarly frustrated.
“When you talk about the enrollment being diminished, it’s because you changed the playbook for principal Teli,” McClinton said of veteran Motivation principal Rennu Teli-Johnson, whom the House speaker praised.
“She knows every one of these kids,” said McClinton, whose House district includes both Motivation and Bartram.
The school board has yet to vote on the proposal to close Motivation and 19 other schools. But the possible closure has roiled the student body.
This week, most Motivation students walked out of school, staging a protest over the district’s plan.
Zanaya Johnson-Green, an 11th grader, said students were beside themselves, even those who will graduate before the school is planned to be folded into Bartram in the fall of 2027.
“Motivation has given me so many opportunities, and I don’t want to see it go,” Johnson-Green said. “No one wants the school to close. This is having a bad effect on all of us.”
The district has, in recent years, invested millions in sprucing up the Motivation building, which if the school does close would become district “swing space” — a place where schools can move to accommodate building repairs or other overflow needs.
“Why spend all that money just to push us into Bartram and use this school as a swing space?” Bumpers asked.
But much of the energy at the meeting was spent talking about the safety at Bartram — with parents and students pressing the district on how they could guarantee staff and student welfare, and district officials saying they would use a planning year and community wisdom to address concerns.
“Disaster!” someone in the audience shouted when Associate Superintendent Tomás Hanna talked about his hope that those with worries would step up to the plate to help plan for a Bartram transition.
A Motivation student shook her head.
“Why do we have to reap what you sow when you stopped paying attention to neighborhood schools all those years? Why do we have to suffer the consequences, lose opportunities?” the student said.
Monica Allison, a Cobbs Creek neighbor and ward leader, made it clear that though she was fighting against the Bartram closure, wounds inflicted from prior school closures, dating back to John P. Turner Middle School and George Wharton Pepper Middle School, were also on people’s minds.
“You closed John P. Turner and you didn’t ask us,” Allison said. “Now we’re back with another closure. It’s ridiculous. You keep talking about elevating Bartram at the expense of other kids. The neighbors are really tired of this.”
John Young, a Motivation teacher for the last decade, said his students were living their civics lesson by protesting the district’s plan. The district is in a tough spot, he said — coping with the fallout of charter schools that took students from traditional public schools, dealing with its own decision to create greater high school choice.
But, Young said, “this decision is going to continue that trend of pushing our students to homeschool, pushing our students to charter schools. This decision is not going to solve the problem, it is going to hollow us out.”
A visibly upset McClinton spoke last on Wednesday night. The district must invest in both schools, she said — not just one.
The district officials she addressed all had good jobs, McClinton emphasized. They could afford to send their children to whatever kind of school they felt was best for them. Southwest Philadelphia parents might not be wealthy, but they deserve to make choices, too, the speaker said.
“It’s not fair that you’re pitting Black children in Bartram against Black children in Motivation,” McClinton said. “Not one of your children go to Motivation or Bartram. I don’t get millions of dollars in Harrisburg for you to waste it away to make this a swing space.”
Sitting onstage in an echoey historic synagogue, next to a U.S. senator and a cardboard cutout of his newly released memoir, Gov. Josh Shapiro reflected on the Pennsylvanians who give him hope.
As he had in other stops on his book tour up and down the East Coast, Shapiro often referred to his book’s title, Where We Keep The Light, and the ways he finds hope in the “extraordinary impact” of Pennsylvanians. Among them, he said, were those who were sexually abused by Catholic priests in crimes covered up by the church until they were illuminated by the victims’ unrelenting quest for justice.
In his book, Shapiro details his work as Pennsylvania attorney general to compile and release a bombshell grand jury report that in 2018 revealed thousands of cases of abuse by priests across the state.
“I find hope in the people I met who were abused over years and years and years,” Shapiro told U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) last month at an event at Sixth and I, a synagogue in Washington, “who still had the courage to show up in a grand jury room to testify and to challenge me to do something to make sure we righted a wrong and brought justice to them.”
The nearly 900-page report was lauded as the most comprehensive review of clergy abuse across a single state and prompted new laws clarifying penalties for failure to report abuse and allowing survivors more time to pursue criminal or civil cases against their abusers.
But a key step in delivering justice to those survivors — establishing a two-year window for the filing of lawsuits over decades-old abuse that falls outside the statute of limitations under existing law — remains unfinished.
The proposal has become one of the most fraught issues in Harrisburg. After a devastating clerical error by Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration killed a proposed constitutional amendment in 2021, lawmakers have been unable to come together on a new path forward. Republicans who control the state Senate have tied the proposal to policies Democrats will not support. All the while, the Catholic Church and the insurance industry have lobbied hard against it.
Nearly a dozen interviews with survivors, their family members, and advocates reveal a deep frustration with the inaction in Harrisburg. Even as Shapiro renews calls for the Senate to act, survivors are divided over whether he has done enough to use his power as governor to advocate for them.
A key pledge in Shapiro’s bid for reelection — and his pitch to a national audience — is that he can “get stuff done” by working across the aisle. But some abuse survivors in Pennsylvania say the unfinished business in getting justice for them brings that record into question.
“He got to where he’s at on the back of victims and survivors, and now he’s forgotten,” said Mike McIlmail, the father of a clergy abuse victim, Sean McIlmail, who died of an overdose shortly before he was supposed to testify in a criminal case against his alleged abuser.
Shapiro, his spokesperson Will Simons said, has fought for survivors “publicly and in legislative negotiations” since 2018. He has promised to sign any bill that reaches his desk establishing the window.
With a reelection campaign underway and his eyes on flipping the state Senate, the governor renewed that fight earlier this month. He used his budget address to blame Senate Republicans for the inaction thus far.
“Stop cowering to the special interests, like insurance companies and lobbyists for the Catholic Church,” he said, his voice thundering in the House chamber. “Stop tying justice for abused kids to your pet political projects. And start listening to victims.”
Pennsylvania’s extensive investigation, which Shapiro inherited when he became attorney general in 2017, chronicled more than 1,000 cases of abuse by more than 300 priests across the state dating back to the 1940s.
For most of the cases in the report, the statute of limitations had passed, leaving no legal recourse for survivors.
The report proposed that lawmakers create a two-year window to allow the filing of civil suits over cases that happened years, if not decades, ago. Despite Shapiro’s advocacy since releasing the grand jury report, the proposal has been trapped in a stalemate for years.
Pennsylvania trails more than 30 other states that have approved similar legislation.
“It’s maddening to have people say, ‘We’re committed to this, this is going to happen, we’re committed to it,’ from both sides of the political spectrum and nothing ever gets done,” said Jay Sefton, who says he was abused by a priest in Havertown as a middle schooler in the 1980s. “It does start to feel like these are lives being used as its own sort of theater.”
Speaking to journalists in Washington days before he targeted Republicans in his budget address, Shapiro tied the window’s prospects to Democrats’ ability to win the state Senate for the first time in more than three decades.
“I’m confident with a Democratic Senate that will be one of the first bills they put on my desk,” Shapiro said.
In an interview, Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) noted that the GOP-controlled Senate had approved a constitutional amendment to establish the window several times before, although it ultimately failed to ever reach the voters.
She declined to say whether the state Senate would take up the amendment up this year but said creating the window through legislation, as Shapiro requested, would be unconstitutional.
She accused the governor of using survivors to score political points as he tries to raise his profile for his reelection this year and rumored 2028 presidential ambitions.
“He has decided that he’s going to be moral instead of follow the law. Look at his record in his own office,” Ward said, arguing Shapiro has a track record of fighting for some survivors but not others. She pointed to his office’s handling of sexual harassment allegations brought against a former top staffer and close ally. Documents showed that complaints about the staffer were made months before his abrupt resignation.
For some clergy abuse survivors, the blame lands squarely on Ward and her Republican allies as they insist on a constitutional amendment, which requires two votes by both the House and Senate along with a ballot measure.
“It’s the Republicans that are blocking it, and I think they’re blocking it because of the church,” said Julianne Bortz, a survivor who testified before the grand jury and whose experience was featured in the report.
Despite Shapiro’s recent statements, there is a sense among some survivors that lawmakers, and Shapiro, have forgotten about them.
Former state House Speaker Mark Rozzi, a Berks County Democrat and clergy abuse survivor, said Shapiro “betrayed” survivors and should be playing “hardball” with the Senate to ensure that the bill makes it to his desk.
“Talk is cheap. Unless you come to the table and cut a deal, nothing else gets done,” Rozzi said.
Advocates have spent years pushing lawmakers in Harrisburg and have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of movement.
“We, being the victims, have always held our end of the bargain. Always. We’ve always shown up when we’ve asked to, we’ve testified when we were asked to, we interviewed, we discussed the worst moments of our lives when asked,” said Shaun Dougherty, who said he was abused by an Altoona-Johnstown priest.
Now, he said, it’s the governor’s turn to get the work done.
Former State Rep. Bill Wachob, a Democrat who worked in politics after leaving elected office in the 1980s, is convinced the governor could make it happen through negotiations if he wanted.
“He and his team have made a calculated political decision that they have gotten as much mileage out of this issue as they’re going to get and they’re not doing anything more,” Wachob said.
In Shapiro’s memoir, however, he wrote he expected that going up against the Catholic Church in pursuing the 2018 report “was likely the end of the road for me politically.”
“I’d made my peace with being a one term Attorney General, if it meant that I could put my head on the pillow at night knowing I did my job and made good for these victims,” he wrote.
Since Shapiro became governor in 2023, his efforts to fight for survivors have been waylaid by an increasingly tense relationship with the GOP-controlled Senate, as evidenced by last year’s nearly five-month bitter budget impasse.
“I have no doubt that the governor has been doing what he can,” said Marci Hamilton, the founder of Child USA, which advocates for child sex abuse victims. She blamed the challenges in reaching a deal on Harrisburg’s partisan dynamics.
Recent criticism of Shapiro has driven division within the survivor community in recent weeks, said Mary McHale, a survivor who was featured in a 2022 Shapiro campaign ad.
“He cares. But he also has a state to run. This can’t be the No. 1 issue,” she said.
Diana Vojtasek, who said she was abused by the same Allentown priest as McHale, said she worries frustration is being misdirected at Shapiro instead of Republicans.
“I just don’t see the value in attacking the one who has vowed publicly that he will sign this legislation for us as soon as it’s across his desk,” she said.
Advocates are hopeful that the national bipartisan effort to force President Donald Trump’s administration to release FBI files related to serial abuser and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein may spur new motivation to protect abuse victims in the state.
“What the Epstein transparency act showed us is we are finally at a point where the protection of sexual abuse victims is nonpartisan,” Hamilton said. “I fully expect to see that that understanding for victims will happen in Harrisburg.”
Rep. Nathan Davidson, a Dauphin County Democrat who introduced the House legislation to create the window, has scheduled hearings in April to bring renewed attention to the issue.
Sefton, who said he was abused as a middle schooler in Havertown in the 1980s, will perform a one-man show about his experience in a theater just steps from the state Capitol the week of the hearings.
He is done hoping lawmakers will establish the window but said it would make the state safer if they did.
“Nobody is going to give anyone their childhood back. It can’t happen,” Sefton said.
“There’s always going to be a part of me that’s filled with some rage about people blocking the energy here. If that were to go through, it’s a piece of energy that gets finally freed up.”
Tracey Gordon couldn’t extract enough campaign cash from her office staff to fund her bid for a second term as Philadelphia’s register of wills.
But two years after she left office, taxpayers are still paying for Gordon’s alleged misconduct.
On Tuesday, the city agreed to pay $250,000 to a former clerk who, like several other register of wills employees, said he was fired after he refused to contribute to Gordon’s campaign.
Nicholas Barone alleged in a 2023 federal lawsuit that Gordon, through an intermediary, had first requested a $150 contribution in late 2021.
When Barone told his supervisor he could not afford to contribute, Gordon asked for $75, according to the lawsuit. Barone balked again.
Then, in January 2022, Barone received a termination letter, effective immediately. The letter came four days after a performance review found he was exceeding expectations, according to his suit.
“She pressured everyone to make a donation and sort of made it known, if you’re not donating, you’re not going to be employed,” said Barone’s lawyer, James Goslee.
In addition to the Barone settlement, the city has paid $400,000 to settle four other federal lawsuits brought by former Gordon staffers. They alleged that Gordon, who was elected in 2019, had essentially turned the register of wills office into an arm of her unsuccessful reelection campaign.
Patrick Parkinson, a former administrative deputy in the office, claimed in his lawsuit that Gordon “continually and relentlessly badgered” him for campaign money, then fired him in 2022 when he refused. His suit was settled in 2024 for $120,000.
Barone’s case was unusual in that it was the only one that got as far as a trial, which began Monday. Several former employees testified about how Gordon had politicized the office. Gordon testified last.
The city then agreed to settle before the jury began deliberating. Goslee said her testimony was a “disaster” for the defense.
“She just wasn’t a good witness, I’ll put it to you that way,” Goslee said. “She should not be in politics or be allowed anywhere near public office.”
Reached by phone Thursday, Gordon initially declined to comment. She called back five minutes later.
“In connection with the allegations brought against me, I maintain I did nothing wrong,” Gordon said. “Any decision to settle the case was a decision made by the City of Philadelphia.”
A spokesperson for the city’s law department declined to comment.
The register of wills office is a somewhat obscure row office in City Hall that employees approximately 100 people with an annual budget of about $5.2 million. It issues marriage licenses, processes inheritance-related records, and does other nonpolitical work.
But it also has a reputation as a Democratic patronage operation going back at least to the 1980s, with jobs being doled out to people with political connections.
Goslee said he was hoping that Barone’s case might lead to some “structural change.”
“This is a very important public interest case,” he said. “That system of entrenched, compelled patronage really needs to come to an end.”
That does not appear to be happening yet.
Gordon was defeated in the 2023 Democratic primary by John Sabatina Sr., an estate attorney and Northeast Philadelphia ward leader. He took office in January 2024.
The city has since paid out $256,000 in settlements to nine former register of wills employees who filed lawsuits alleging that Sabatina fired them to make way for his own patronage hires. Five cases are still pending.
Legal discovery in those cases has produced an internal list that the incoming Sabatina administration appears to have used to determined who would be fired.
“It was a hit list,” lawyer Timothy Creech, who is representing most of those ex-employees, said in September, comparing Sabatina to a “Tammany Hall”-style party boss, a reference to the former New York City political machine.
“It wasn’t to save money,” Creech said. “It was specifically to hire their own people.”
Several of the 30 office employees on the list are described by their connections to Gordon, including “Tracey niece,” “Tracey’s friend, 7th Ward committee person,” “Last Tracey hire.” The suggested action for most of those employees was immediate termination.
“We have enough immediate terminations to allow us several hires in the next two weeks,” reads a note at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
Another note appears to indicate that some firings were planned before Sabatina had replacements: “We don’t have people lined up for all of these jobs and we need to make sure we use up all of the funds set aside in the budget for salary.”
Sabatina has declined to comment on those cases.
Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the Committee of Seventy good-government group, said it is not acceptable for the city to spend more than $900,000 to settle lawsuits stemming from politics in the register of wills office.
“We can all think of a thousand better things we could do with these funds,” Cristella said. “The patronage mill better start printing money to keep up with these payouts because taxpayers in this city can no longer foot this bill. When is enough for Council and the mayor to meaningfully reform the row offices?”
Last year, the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, Philadelphia’s fiscal watchdog, passed a resolution to recommend that City Council and Mayor Cherelle L. Parker abolish the register of wills office, along with the sheriff’s office, another row office with a long history of problems.
Neither Parker nor Council has shown any interest in taking action.
Gordon, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2024, now works in the sheriff’s office as a services representative, according to city payroll records.
“Row offices are set up to create jobs for the politically connected, not serve the people of our city,” Cristella said. “It doesn’t matter who is in the office, the taxpayers are always on the hook for their abuse of power.”
Staff writer Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.
Family Practice & Counseling Services Network won a $3.4 million federal health center grant that will allow the nonprofit to continue providing medical and mental healthcare in Southwest Philadelphia and other low-income Philadelphia neighborhoods, officials confirmed this week.
The clinic had been part of Resources for Human Development, a Philadelphia human services agency that a fast-growing Reading nonprofit called Inperium Inc. acquired in late 2024. As a federally qualified health clinic since 1992, the clinic had received an annual federal grant, higher Medicaid rates, and other benefits.
Federal rules prohibited the clinic from continuing to retain that status and those benefits under a parent company. That meant Family Practice & Counseling Network had two options: close or spin out into a new entity that would reapply to be a federally qualified clinic.
With financial and operational help from the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Family Practice & Counseling formed a new legal entity last July and reapplied for the grant. Last week, the organization’s CEO Emily Nichols learned that the federal agency that oversees federal health centers awarded it the grant.
The Women’s Community Revitalization Project is planning a 34-unit apartment building, flanked by two triplexes, on city-owned land in Kensington.
All of the units will be available to those below 60% of area median income, or almost $72,000 for a family of four.
The apartment building at Cumberland and Reese Streets is designed at an angle slashing across the lot, using only a portion of the city-owned land.
“Having a solid wall of building directly across [from rowhouses], we just felt wasn’t really contextual to the neighborhood,” said Lorissa Luciani, who has been the executive director of Women’s Community Revitalization Project (WCRP) for the last nine months. “Then there’s height limitations so we couldn’t go any higher.”
The project is funded through federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), which the nonprofit group obtained in 2025. The land will be obtained for a nominal cost from the city.
WCRP has been meeting with local community groups since 2024. Luciani said organizations such as Xiente, APM, and the 19th Ward RCO have been supportive of this project.
The development, designed by Philadelphia-based CICADA Architecture & Planning, will cost over $26 million and is slated for completion 18 months after the group settles on the land. It will include 10 parking spaces.
On Tuesday, the Philadelphia Land Bank’s board voted to approve the sale of the property to WCRP. The plan also has the backing of Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, which is essential because she will need to introduce legislation to move the property out of the Land Bank.
“It’s an amazing project,” Lozada said. “We are in need of partners like the Women’s Community Revitalization Project who understand the need for not just affordable housing, but deeply affordable housing.”
Without Lozada’s support, the project would be impossible. Final passage of the legislation could come as soon as later this month.
Luciani said WCRP would close on the project in the fall.
This will be Luciani’s first ground-up development with the organization. She joined the nonprofit in 2025 after WCRP’s longstanding executive director and founder Nora Lichtash retired from her leadership role with the group after 35 years. She still works for the group as a consultant.
WCRP was founded in 1986 to serve Fishtown, Kensington, and other neighborhoods in North Philadelphia east of Broad Street. Since then, it has developed projects in other corners of the city, such as Germantown and Point Breeze.
“My predecessor has a substantial amount of experience and relationships with many of these organizations” in Kensington, Luciani said.
“I’m trying to work to have my own relationships with them,” Luciani said. “They’re a really organized, sophisticated community that really understands their needs, and they’ll fight for it as hard as they need to.”
Luciani previously worked in New Jersey local and state government and planning for decades and has a deep familiarity with subsidized housing policy.
“I grew up in public housing in North Jersey,” Luciani said. “So it’s been a personal and professional lens that I utilize to try and continue the good work that helped my family in the hopes of helping others.”
In December, Katrina Williams watched as the man who killed her brother was sentenced to decades in prison and felt, she said, as if a two-year nightmare was coming to an end.
But weeks later, another shooting took the life of her only son.
Williams’ brother, Lashyd Merritt, 21, was one of five people killed in a mass shooting in Kingsessing in July 2023, when Kimbrady Carriker walked through the Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood with an AR-15 rifle and fired at random passersby.
Then, in January, her 19-year-old son, Russell, was killed by a man who, like the Kingsessing shooter, committed a spree of crimes, police say.
“I’ll never understand it,” said Williams, 43. “There’s no reason for it.”
For Williams, the trauma of Merritt’s violent death never fully dissipated, she said, and the fatal shooting of her son only compounds her pain.
It’s a cycle of violence that is not unfamiliar in the city.
For others with relatives killed in the Kingsessing attack, the traumatic impact of gun violence did not end on that July day. Nyshyia Thomas lost her 15-year-old son, DaJuan Brown, to the gunfire and, while she was still mourning, her 21-year-old son, Daquan Brown, was arrested last year in connection with another mass shooting in Grays Ferry.
Asked about the evening of Jan. 28, when she and her husband, Russell Williams Sr., learned of their son’s death, Williams said two things came to mind:
“Déjà vu,” she said, and “hell.”
Around 10 p.m. near 64th Street and Lindbergh Boulevard, police said, 19-year-old Zaamir Harris stepped off a SEPTA bus and stole a bike from the vehicle.
He rode up to Russell Williams, who was walking home from night school, where the teen was studying to become a commercial truck driver. Harris then pulled a gun and fired at Williams multiple times, striking him in the throat, police said.
Williams collapsed near 66th Street and Dicks Avenue, just three blocks from home. After the shooting, Harris ditched the bike and stole an e-scooter before fleeing, according to police.
Police tracked Harris to a Wawa at 84th Street and Bartram Avenue, where he was arrested. He was charged with murder and gun crimes. Investigators recovered three fired cartridge casings from the scene, as well as a 9mm handgun, according to police.
A spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department declined to say whether investigators have determined a motive for the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation.
Katrina Williams said her son did not know Harris, and a police detective told her the shooting was random.
After he was shot, Russell Williams was rushed to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he died from his injuries. It was the same hospital where Williams’ brother, Merritt, was taken after being shot in Kingsessing, she said.
Russell Williams had recently graduated from Philadelphia Electrical and Technology Charter School and dreamed of an entrepreneurial career in stock trading.
Like her son, Williams said, Merritt was a hard worker who wanted to better his life. He worked for the IRS, had a girlfriend, and wanted to travel the world, she said.
“We lost two great people,” Williams said. “Two of them.”
That police made an arrest in the slaying of their son has brought little solace, Williams and her husband said as they sat in their Southwest Philadelphia living room on a recent February day. Family photos filled the space, and a portrait of Russell, smiling and wearing a tuxedo, hung on the wall.
As the case against her son’s accused killer proceeds, Williams said, she will be in court every step of the way, just as she was when Carriker pleaded guilty in the death of her brother.
In December, as Carriker faced sentencing, Williams said, she could not bring herself to address the judge and ask for a long prison sentence, as relatives of other victims did. She was so overcome with anger, she said, that she feared she might physically attack her brother’s killer.
But she was in the room when Common Pleas Court Judge Glenn B. Bronson sentenced him to 37½ to 75 years in prison. In Williams’ view, Carriker should have received a life sentence for each person he killed, she said, even if no punishment could make up for the loss of Merritt.
Now, Williams is preparing to head back to court as she once again seeks justice.
Since her son’s death, Williams said, she has taken comfort in the kindness of friends and family. She was touched, she said, to see a “block full of people” gather to honor his life and release balloons in his memory. But the ache of her loss remains.
“It’s like pain on top of pain — it’s just always gonna be hard,“ Williams said. ”I just gotta deal with it the best way I can.”