Woman killed in Middleborough crash remembered for love of reading, plants
Rosemarie Dias, of Wareham, was killed along with Cecil 'Tex' Johnson, 70, when their car crashed into the woods off Interstate 495 North. Both were pronounced dead at the scene.
Dias was born in Wareham and lived there her entire life. She graduated from Bridgewater State University and worked as a supervisor at Upham's Corner Health Center in Dorchester for more than 40 years.
The obituary remembers Dias for her love of reading, tending to her houseplants and flower gardens, and trips to the movie theater, the casino and the beach.
But 'most of all, she loved her family and spending time with them,' the notice reads.
A celebration of life for Dias will be held on July 26 at the Dudley Brown VFW Post in Onset.
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USA Today
8 hours ago
- USA Today
Deported from US, these social media influencers are now monetizing their misfortune
More than 70,000 Mexicans were deported from the US in the first six months of the year. Now, they're (re)building lives south of the border. Deported and alone, Annie Garcia landed in Mexico with $40 in her pocket, a criminal record in the United States behind her and an unknown future ahead in a country she barely remembered. Fast forward to the present, to a video shared with her more than half-a-million social media followers in August. Her hair blows in the wind as she speeds on a boat through an emerald sea. She tagged the clip: #LifeAfterDeportation. Expelled from the United States, young Mexican immigrants like Garcia, 35, are documenting the aftermath of their deportation online. Their videos – raw grief over what they lost in America, surprise and gratitude for what they've found in Mexico – are rapidly gaining them tens of thousands of followers. At least a dozen of these deportees-turned-influencers, Garcia included, have started over in Mexico's west coast beach gem, Puerto Vallarta. 'If there's one thing I wish my content could embody it's how much life there is on this side of the border," Garcia wrote June 15 on Instagram. "Our countries aren't what they were 20 or 30 years ago when our parents left." Returning to an unfamiliar 'home' More than 70,000 Mexican nationals were deported from the United States to Mexico in the first six months of 2025, according to Mexico's Interior Ministry. That's down from the more than 102,000 deported during the same six-month period in 2024, when people were being deported after crossing the border. Now, the people being deported are more likely to have built lives and families in the United States. With President Donald Trump's aggressive mass deportation campaign underway, Francisco Hernández-Corona feared being detained. So he self-deported to Mexico, accompanied by his husband. He started vlogging. The 30-something Harvard graduate and former Dreamer had been taken to the United States illegally as a boy, he explained on TikTok. Multiple attempts to legalize his status in the United States failed. In June, he posted his migration – and self-deportation – stories online. Between photos of golden sunsets and mouthwatering tacos, he posted in July: "Self-deporting isn't always freedom and joy and new adventures. Sometimes it's pain and nostalgia and anger and sadness. Sometimes you just miss the home that was." 'Life in the pueblo is not easy' Mexico remains a country of extremes, where stunning vistas and limitless wealth can be found in big cities and beach resorts, while hardship and poverty often overwhelm smaller communities. Olga Mijangos was deported from Las Vegas in on Christmas Eve 2024, two years after being charged with a DUI. She returned to the Oaxaca state pueblo she had left when she was 5. Mijangos, 33, has tattoos on her neck, stylized brows and long lashes – all part of her Vegas style. Back in her hometown, she began posting videos of goats being herded through the streets; the community rodeo; the traditional foods she began cooking. She posted videos from her first job: harvesting and cleaning cucumbers, earning 300 pesos a day, or $15. "I clearly understand why my mother decided to take us when we were little. Life in the pueblo is not easy," she said in a video of the cucumber harvest. "There is hard-living. There is poverty." Struggling to make ends meet for her family, including two children with her in Mexico and one in the United States, she moved to Puerto Vallarta where she met Garcia and Hernández-Corona. They began forming an in-real-life community of deportees-turned-influencers and others who left the U.S. They meet up for dinner at least once a month, and they create content. In their videos, they're having fun, drinks, laughs. But they're also celebrating what binds them to each other and to their parents' migration stories before them: their capacity for reinvention, and their resilience. "I'm very proud to be Mexican, and I'm learning to love a country I didn't get to grow up in, but I shouldn't have had to leave the home I knew to find peace and freedom," said Hernández-Corona, a clinical psychologist, in a July post on TikTok. "This isn't a blessing. It's resilience." Spanish skills, savings and support all matter A lot of their content has the draw of a classic American up-by-their-bootstraps success story, with a modern social media twist: from hardship to sponsorship. But the reality is that deportees' experience of building a life in Mexico can vary dramatically, depending on their earning capacity, language and cultural skills, and other factors, said Israel Ibarra González, a professor of migration studies at Mexico's Colegio de la Frontera Norte university. Deportees with savings in U.S. dollars and a college degree, those who speak Spanish and have supportive relatives in Mexico, may have an easier time than those who don't, he said. Others may face life-threatening risks upon their return, from the violence of organized crime to political persecution or death threats. "However much violence they've lived with in the United States, it's not the same as going back to a war zone," Ibarra González said, referring to certain Mexican states where drug cartels are actively battling for territorial control. Wherever they land – with the exception of some cosmopolitan cities – deported Mexicans have faced local prejudices, too. They've often been viewed as criminals, or their deportations as a failure. "Did I feel a lot of judgment? Absolutely," Mijangos said of her return to Oaxaca. "Even though it's my roots, I basically came from a different world. I have tattoos. I lived my life a certain way that they don't. I could feel people talking." But friends back home in Vegas, and new friends in Mexico, started encouraging her to share her deportation journey. It took her a few weeks to work up the courage. She posted a video of sending her U.S. citizen son to a Mexican school. It racked up nearly 14 million views and 2 million "likes" on TikTok, she said. Suddenly, TikTok was asking if she wanted to join the app's content creators rewards program. 'Your criminal record doesn't follow you' By taking their stories online, deported content creators say they are dismantling longstanding taboos around deportation in Mexico, shining a light on their experiences as Mexicans who didn't grow up in Mexico, and on their past mistakes. Garcia speaks openly on her social media about the financial crimes she committed in her 20s, for which she was charged and convicted, and that ultimately led to her deportation. She migrated to the United States when she was 4 years old, "out of necessity," she said. Her mother married an American citizen in Salt Lake City, Utah, and she and her mother both became legal permanent residents. But when Garcia began acting out as a child, the state intervened. "I was taken from my mother at the age of 12 because I had behavioral issues," she told USA TODAY. "I was separated from my family, and I grew up with other juveniles with behavior (problems)." As a young single mother, she would steal from her employers when she couldn't pay the bills, she said. In Mexico she found a clean slate. "Your criminal record doesn't follow you," once you've paid your debt to society in the United States, Garcia tells her followers. "You can pursue higher education. Any debts you had in the U.S. do not follow you here." As Trump's immigration crackdown widens, Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo has been publicly offering moral support to Mexicans facing deportation. She has called them "heroes and heroines" who "have contributed to the United States their entire lives." "We're going to keep defending our brothers and sisters there," she said in a June 25 news conference. 'Maybe … things will change' Garcia's social media accounts have grown so popular that she's earning a living, in part, from content creation. She is doing research on reintegration after deportation for an American university. And she has "tunnel vision," she said, on completing a law degree in Mexico. The pain of her deportation, and the losses it brought with it, are mostly in the past. Except when she catches news of the immigration raids in the United States. The memories of her detention, and her separation from her five children, including an infant, remain fresh. It took Garcia more than a year after her 2017 deportation to win custody of her children, to bring them to Mexico. "It's very, very triggering to me to see what's going on up there," she said. "It's a bittersweet feeling. I feel safe. I feel relief. We're here. It doesn't affect us any more. But it feels heartbreaking to see other families living through it. "When I first started sharing my story my idea was, 'Maybe if I talk about this, things will change'" in the United States, she said. She kept at it, despite facing hate and trolls online. She kept posting, even after losing two jobs in Mexico for openly discussing her deportation and criminal past on social media. She kept sharing, thinking, she said: "This is what is going to change things one day: us putting our stories out there."
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Washington Post
‘Vulture' is a scorched-earth critique of war reporting
'Innocence is a kind of insanity,' Graham Greene wrote in 'The Quiet American,' his classic novel about 1950s Vietnam. The innocent in question is a young CIA agent, freshly baked in the halls of Harvard and ready to impose freedom on the Vietnamese at any cost. 'Innocence always calls mutely for protection,' Greene wrote, 'when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it.'
The Hill
3 days ago
- The Hill
School choice may be the fix to DC's crime crisis
Washington, D.C., faces a serious crime crisis, with violence and homicide rates dangerously high. Even government officials have been targeted. While the Trump administration's plan to increase federal involvement may help temporarily, relying on permanent federal intervention is unsustainable. The long-term solution requires tackling root causes — especially chronic disengagement from education, which is widespread in D.C.'s traditional public schools and contributes significantly to youth crime. In the 2023–2024 school year, more than half of all high school students in Washington, D.C., were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10 percent or more of the school year. This absenteeism represents a failure to keep students connected to constructive environments and opportunities for success. When young people are not in school, evidence overwhelmingly shows they are at much higher risk of engaging in criminal behavior. The academic outcomes for D.C. public school students further illustrate the crisis. On recent standardized tests, only about 32 percent of students in grades 3–5 met or exceeded expectations in English Language Arts, a slight improvement from the previous year but still alarmingly low. Just 11 percent of high school students met or exceeded math standards. These outcomes are a direct reflection of an education system unable to provide the foundation students need for success, making disengagement and subsequent criminal activity more likely. Charter schools offer a proven, evidence-based alternative that can disrupt this cycle. Unlike traditional public schools in D.C., charter schools provide students with 30 to 50 percent more instructional time, effectively giving students up to four additional months of schooling each year. This extra time in the classroom correlates with improved academic performance and stronger student engagement. A landmark study conducted by Harvard and Princeton researchers demonstrated that winning a lottery to attend a New York City charter school almost completely eliminated the chance of incarceration for male students in the study sample. The same study also found a 59 percent reduction in teen pregnancy rates for female students who attended charter schools through the lottery. Another study, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that winning a lottery to attend a school of choice in Charlotte, N.C., halved the rate of criminal activity among high-risk male students. And research on Milwaukee's voucher program found that students attending charter schools were significantly less likely to commit crimes by their mid-twenties compared to matched peers in public schools. Despite delivering compelling results, D.C.'s charter schools face significant funding disparities compared to traditional public schools. Though only a few studies have examined the precise funding differences between charter schools and public schools, one found that charter schools in D.C. receive approximately 41 percent less funding per pupil than public schools, averaging $17,525 per student compared to $29,808 per student — a gap of $12,283. This significant disparity limits charter schools' ability to expand facilities, attract qualified staff and improve programs. Meanwhile, demand for charter school seats far exceeds supply, with 17,047 students on waiting lists during the 2021–2022 school year, reflecting strong parental preference for alternatives to the struggling traditional system. Despite this funding disparity, evidence shows that public charter schools in Washington, D.C., specifically, continue to outperform traditional public schools. The success of charter schools in other cities demonstrates what could be achieved if D.C. removed these barriers and increased support. New York City's Success Academy, whose student population is 98 percent non-white and predominantly low-income, achieved remarkable academic results: 96 percent of students passed state math exams and 83 percent passed English Language Arts exams. This starkly contrasts with New York City's overall public school proficiency rate of around 49 percent, illustrating that well-supported charter schools can deliver superior outcomes even among disadvantaged populations. Washington, D.C. must view charter school expansion and equitable funding as integral parts of its strategy to reduce crime. Increasing access to quality education through charter schools addresses the root causes of criminal behavior by keeping youth engaged in structured, rigorous environments that foster academic achievement and discourage delinquency. Ultimately, no city can arrest or incarcerate its way out of a crime crisis. Long-term, sustainable solutions demand investments in education and opportunity. The District of Columbia has a proven tool in charter schools to disrupt the cycle of violence and provide at-risk youth with a pathway out of crime and into success. It is time for policymakers to remove funding disparities, lift arbitrary caps, and prioritize school choice as a core component of public safety reform in the nation's capital.
