Articles for Geoff Kelly

Dec 4

2025

Lack of medical care led to prison deaths

Jason “Poppy” Phillips’ family protest outside Greene Correctional Facility where Phillips died in December 2023. Video by by Angus Mordant for The Marshall Project. Ashley Dolcy heard panic in her husband’s voice. On most evenings, they would talk after she returned home from her job as an assistant principal at a school in the Bronx. Jason “Poppy” Phillips would call on a prison-issued tablet from his cell at Greene Correctional Facility near Albany. On Dec. 14, 2023, he told her that, since lunch, he’d increasingly had trouble breathing and swallowing. Alarmed that Phillips was struggling to breathe while locked[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Nov 26

2025

City to pay $3.3 million to settle Molly’s Pub lawsuits

Defense attorney Joel Daniels and Jeffrey Basil. Photo courtesy of WKBW 7 News. It’s been more than 11 years since Jeffrey Basil, bar manager of the now-defunct Molly’s Pub on Main Street, pushed William Sager down a flight of stairs, then enlisted off-duty Buffalo police officers working security for the bar to try to cover up what he’d done. Sager, 28, suffered a traumatic brain injury and died on July 31, 2014, after two-and-a-half months in a coma. Basil was sentenced to 18 years in prison for manslaughter in 2015. The following year, Robert Eloff, one of the off-duty cops,[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Nov 21

2025

Lawyer puts up $800k to deny party boss a Senate seat

Attorney Peter Reese, a relentless pot-stirrer in Western New York politics for decades, is hell-bent on preventing Erie County Democratic Chair Jeremy Zellner from becoming a state senator. On Tuesday Reese filed paperwork with the state elections board to create an independent expenditure committee dedicated to derailing Zellner’s efforts to succeed Sean Ryan, Buffalo’s mayor-elect, in representing the 61st State Senate District. He’s seeding the committee’s bank account with $800,000 of his own money. “I figured a million would be too gaudy,” Reese told Investigative Post. The committee is called ATAT, short for “Ainsi toujours aux tyrans,” Reese said. That’s[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Nov 20

2025

Niagara Falls mayor admits ‘ignoring’ media requests for info

Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino. In his latest update from inside Niagara Falls City Hall, Mayor Robert Restaino once again donned his newspaper publisher’s cap to tell the Niagara Gazette what stories it should be printing and to tell residents his administration is not refusing the local news outlet’s requests for public information but is rather just ignoring them. Restaino, a former city court judge removed from the bench for misconduct, justified this flouting of state Freedom of Information law by citing his frustration with the newspaper’s choice of stories. In a message published on his office’s YouTube channel, Restaino accused[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Nov 19

2025

Across the state, discipline for police misconduct varies widely

The Yates County Sheriff’s Office. Photo by Lauren Petracca for the New York Times. A teenage girl came forward in May 2023 with a horrifying complaint: Her adoptive father had been raping her since 2021, she told police officers in an interview at her school. After some of the assaults, according to a police report, he would give her soda, candy or blueberry iced tea. The abuse started when she was 13. The teen was removed from the home, and the case was assigned to Megan Morehouse, an investigator in the Yates County Sheriff’s Office who had met the girl[...]

Posted 2 months ago

Nov 7

2025

The consequences of Trump’s immigration crackdown

From left: Jennifer Connor, Brittany Triggs, Pam Kefi and Ba Zan Lin. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel. Ba Zan Lin spent his first 18 years living under authoritarian regimes in his native Burma before coming to Buffalo in 2006 seeking political asylum. He says he and others in the region’s immigrant community recognize the Trump administration’s heavy-handed tactics in pursuit of detainment and deportation of non-citizens it characterizes as “illegal.” The raids, the street grabs, family members disappearing into a byzantine network of federal detention centers — “the masked men waiting for them at night” — all these feel traumatizing and[...]

Posted 3 months ago

Nov 5

2025

Ryan wins, Democrats sweep Cheektowaga

Erie County Democrats had plenty to celebrate Tuesday night. It was no surprise that the party’s nominee for Buffalo mayor, Sean Ryan prevailed, beating two opponents with more than 70 percent of the vote. Nor was it a surprise that incumbent Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick won reelection, beating Republican and Conservative nominee Christine Czarnik by nearly 18 percentage points. The real wins for Democrats were outside the city. Tonight: Our event on ICE and immigration in WNY In Cheektowaga, the party’s candidates swept every race, winning back the majority on the town council by unseating two Republican and Conservative[...]

Posted 3 months ago

Oct 30

2025

Buffalo to raid “Rainy Day” fund

The bad news keeps coming for the City of Buffalo’s finances. Comptroller Barbara Miller-Williams informed the Common Council this week that the city would need to dip into its Emergency Stabilization Fund — a.k.a. the Rainy Day Fund — in order to balance the books for the fiscal year that ended June 30. According to the city’s finance commissioner, the shortfall is due to costly settlements to police misconduct lawsuits that hit the city in May. Lawmakers were told the city will need to use at least $2 million from the fund and perhaps as much as $10 million, according[...]

Posted 3 months ago