I’m a criminal defense investigator. I’ve done this work for a long time and it has never gotten old. I have met incredibly creative, amusing and fierce people as I’ve investigated the circumstances and nuances of criminal behavior. I’ve learned both why someone takes a life and why it can always be prevented. The tools for prevention, however, are almost always unavailable to those who need them most.
I work in a community that is impoverished, neglected, and always struggling. Mostly I work for Black men in Richmond whose lives are governed by loss and anger. My job is to find anything that challenges the district attorney’s case against them. I also collect childhood stories, school records, neighborhood rumors, medical charts, anything that explains who these young men are so the lawyers, the jurors and the judge know whose fate they are working to decide. I help give the defendant a voice in a trial that is often not decided by a panel of his peers. Helping young men as they face charges of homicide, robbery and carjacking, along with gang enhancements if they’re brown or black, is a challenge and an honor.
For 26 years, I was an investigator in Richmond, California with the Contra Costa County Public Defender’s Office. Then I became chief investigator in 2012 and supervised eleven investigators until retiring in 2018. Now I’m doing the same work as a private investigator, minus the workplace drama of overseeing eleven staff investigators.
I began my career in the Bay Area as a crime reporter with the Contra Costa Times and the West County Times. My journalism degree is from the University of Minnesota. I won the job as editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Daily in a contentious battle with a male candidate, an experience that taught me to never doubt myself. I reported for newspapers in Lawrence, Kansas and Nyack, New York, where it turned out that doubt was an important attribute for delving deeper and working harder.
I continue to investigate criminal allegations in gang cases charged against Richmond residents.
This blog is my punishment for writing a book. The book is called True to the Hood: Neighborhood Loyalty on the Streets of Richmond, California. It is the story of one of the men I worked for and how his fierce commitment to his street family kept him alive and almost killed him. Everyone says a writer needs a social platform if she’s going to sell a book. Well, damn, here I am.
Linda Sanderson 