Get to know the founding staff at the Association of Gun Violence Reporters
Sammy Caiola
Co-Director
Sammy Caiola is a gun violence reporter for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. She most recently served as an editor and reporter for Kensington Voice, and before that was the first gun violence prevention reporter for WHYY News. She is passionate about bringing trauma-informed journalism and community engagement into newsrooms. Her 2023 Podcast, “Stop and Frisk: Revisit or Resist” won a 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award in Large Market Radio. She has completed the Ochberg Fellowship at the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Abené Clayton
Co-Director
Abené Clayton is a reporter in the Guardian US newspaper’s California office and is currently the lead reporter on the “Guns & Lies in America” series, launched in 2019. Her work focuses on the impacts of and solutions to community violence. She started covering gun violence in her hometown of Richmond, California, and is now based in Los Angeles where she covers the evolving dynamic of gun violence through the people closest to the issue.
Jennifer Mascia
Newsletter producer
Jennifer Mascia is a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace, the only newsroom in America exclusively covering gun violence, which launched in 2015. She is also a contributor to CNN’s Guns in America team. She previously reported on gun violence for The New York Times. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and CUNY Hunter College. She is the author of a memoir, Never Tell Our Business to Strangers, which details her investigation into her late father’s criminal past.
Alain Stephens
Chapter Leader
Alain Stephens is an investigative journalist covering gun violence, extremism, and systemic injustice. A veteran and former police officer, his work draws on lived experience to expose the human cost of violence and institutional failure. His reporting has appeared in The Trace, NPR, USA Today, and Vice and has helped shape national conversations and inform congressional policy on gun violence and law enforcement accountability.
Paige Pfleger
Chapter Leader
Paige Pfleger covers criminal justice for WPLN News, the NPR station in Nashville, Tennessee. She has investigated gun violence and juvenile justice as a fellow with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, and her investigation into domestic violence and firearms dispossession won a regional Edward R. Murrow award and was a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and a Livingston Award. Her work has appeared nationally on NPR, The Washington Post, Marketplace, and PRI’s The World, and she has worked in the newsrooms of The Tennessean, Michigan Radio, WOSU, WHYY, Vox and NPR headquarters in DC.
Josiah Bates, Chapter Leader
Josiah is The Trace’s staff writer covering the Great Lakes region. He previously worked as an enterprise reporter at TheGrio and was a staff writer for TIME Magazine, and has written extensively about policing, gun violence, and other criminal justice topics across the country. His first book, In These Streets: Reporting from the Front Lines of Inner-City Gun Violence, was published in May 2024. He’s a graduate of Penn State University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Lakeidra Chavis Chapter Leader
Lakeidra Chavis is an investigative reporter with the Invisible Institute. She examines ways in which systemic injustices trickle down to everyday life, often through the lens of race and class. For more than a decade, Chavis has interrogated deeply nuanced issues within the public health and criminal legal systems. Her most recent reporting focused on police sexual misconduct in a troubled police youth program involving the Boy Scouts of America. Prior to that, she reported on the Chicago Police Department’s dragnet approach to gun enforcement and the stark rise in suicides among Black Chicagoans during the pandemic.
