Granville report voted iPost’s top story of 2025

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Readers have voted Geoff Kelly’s story on the hit-and-run accidents of Erie County narcotics chief D.J. Granville the top story of 2025.

Kelly was the first reporter to break the story, which published March 11. The story not only detailed the accidents, in which Granville struck seven parked vehicles on the city’s West Side, but the failure of Buffalo police to conduct a roadside sobriety test and the apparent cover-up of the accidents by Erie County Sheriff John Garcia.

Kelly wrote:

Granville’s spree began not long before midnight on April 11 of last year, as he headed east on Jersey Street from Niagara in his county-owned pickup.

The first 911 call came at 11:38 p.m. from a caller who gave a Porter Avenue address, reporting a hit-and-run on Prospect Avenue near Jersey Street, just a block off Niagara.

A half dozen other calls followed over the next eight minutes, reporting a white pickup truck plowing into cars. One reported that a “truck came down and struck several [vehicles],” another that “his parked car was hit.”

Granville, in August, pled guilty to one criminal misdemeanor count of reckless driving and one count of leaving the scene of an accident that caused property damage, a violation. Garcia subsequently restored Granville to his job.

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Eighty-five of the 194 readers who cast votes selected the Granville story as the year’s best. 

Other top vote getters included a story by I’Jaz Ja’ciel on a drop-off in fines issued by Buffalo’s new Housing Court judge and the detention of migrant families in makeshift cells along local border crossings for up to two weeks at a time, as reported by J. Dale Shoemaker. 

His report, one of some 25 stories he produced last year on the aggressive enforcement actions of ICE and other federal immigration authorities, was the most-read story on Investigative Post’s website in 2025, generating more than a quarter-million page views.

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Kelly, Investigative Post’s associate editor and political reporter, also won the top story of 2024, a piece on a family squabble involving the estate of WBEN radio host Tom Bauerle. That dispute is ongoing. 

Kelly’s reporting on a City of Buffalo fire department clerk getting paid nearly $600,000 over seven years while under suspension won the top honors in 2023.

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