HARRISBURG — In 2025, Spotlight PA reporters uncovered a broken mental health system, missing rapes in a college town, and the death of a vulnerable older adult.
Below, read more about some of our best investigations of the year.
Cost of Failing
In 2011, Pennsylvania made a promise: Everyone living in a state psychiatric hospital would come home. The promise was a transformed mental health system, where getting care for depression, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia would be like getting care for bronchitis, or lupus, or cancer.
The plan was ambitious, but tucked within it was a dire warning against a darker future for people with severe mental illnesses should the commonwealth fail: homelessness, unemployment, relapse, incarceration. It is this premonition, not the promise, that has become reality in Pennsylvania, an investigation by Spotlight PA’s Danielle Ohl found.
Her reporting led to a family whose desperate situation mirrors that of thousands forced to make impossible choices by a system that failed them.
Read all of Ohl’s reporting on the state’s broken mental health system.
Elder abuse
There has been an alarming increase in the number of older adults who are dying during open abuse and neglect investigations: In 2018, 888 people died under these circumstances. In 2023, that number was nearly 1,511 — a 70% increase.
One of those people was Luen Ng, a 76-year-old Philadelphia woman who lived alone and whose memory was rapidly failing.
As Spotlight PA’s Angela Couloumbis reported in excruciating detail, her daughter pleaded with local aging officials for help. By the time it came, it was too late — Ng was struck by a van in a hit-and-run crash just blocks from her house, dragged for an unknown distance as her bones shattered and layers of skin tore from her legs. She died weeks later from an infection after multiple hospital stays.
Read all of Couloumbis’ elder abuse reporting.
Field of Screams
A three-part series from freelance reporter Ann Rejrat explored allegations that teen volunteers were harassed, groped, and pressured into sex by adults at a popular haunted attraction in Lancaster County called Field of Screams.
Read all of Spotlight PA’s Field of Screams reporting.
The Institute
A Spotlight PA investigation found that Raymond Hohl, who was then the director of the Penn State Cancer Institute, was the subject of a series of damning internal reviews between early 2022 and mid-2023. The reviews found a series of problems with Hohl’s care of at least 10 patients. His sloppy recordkeeping caused multiple errors. Several of Hohl’s patients received extra doses of chemotherapy by accident. Others faced unexplained delays in changing their treatment, or having scans done to check whether their cancer had progressed, according to documents obtained by the newsroom.
Hohl resigned shortly after the investigation, reported by Spotlight PA’s Charlotte Keith and Wyatt Massey, was published.
Read all of Keith and Massey’s reporting on Hohl.
Missing Rapes
Over nearly a decade, the State College Police Department underreported hundreds of rapes in public data, masking the true extent of the crime in the community surrounding Penn State. Spotlight PA’s Min Xian and freelance reporter Mark Fazlollah found that, from 2013 to 2021, State College police reported a total of 67 rapes in crime submissions to Pennsylvania State Police, when in fact there had been 321 — a 254-case difference.
The department had never acknowledged the longstanding error or disclosed it to the public until approached by Spotlight PA about potential data discrepancies.
Here are some of the year's other Spotlight PA highlights:
Foster care agencies in Pa. took millions owed to kids in their care, often keeping them in the dark
Powerful interests poured $18M into top Pa. lawmakers’ campaign coffers
Campaign cash flowed to key Pa. lawmakers as hunters launched an offensive to save pigeon shoots
Rare 2nd chance at freedom for Pa. woman serving life sentence reversed in unprecedented revote
Pharmacies are disappearing across Pennsylvania as operators blame a broken payment system
We finally know who paid for Josh Shapiro’s inauguration celebrations (kinda)
Why Erie and Reading’s special redevelopment districts are getting off to such different starts
Without legal help, fewer Reading tenants prevail in eviction cases