Get to know the founding staff at the Association of Gun Violence Reporters
Sammy Caiola
Co-Director
Sammy Caiola is a Philadelphia-based journalist covering police accountability, sexual violence and mental health/substance use for Kensington Voice. She most recently served as the first gun violence prevention reporter for WHYY News. She is passionate about bringing trauma-informed journalism and community engagement into newsrooms.
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
Chapter Leader
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.
Kaitlin Washburn
Chapter Leader
Kaitlin Washburn is AHCJ’s health beat leader for firearm violence and trauma and an independent journalist based in Chicago, primarily working for the Chicago Sun-Times. She was a gun violence reporter for two years in Missouri for The Kansas City Star as a Report for America corps member. Previously, Washburn was an agriculture reporter covering the omnipresent industry in California’s Central Valley for The Sun-Gazette, also as a part of RFA.