Latest news with #Merryman
Washington Post
04-06-2025
- Health
- Washington Post
Retired man takes on nemesis, cleans up 15,000 discarded tires
Soaked in dark, stagnant water and sweat, Jon Merryman stood at the bottom of a Maryland ravine choked with poison ivy, trash and his arch nemesis: illegally discarded tires. A horde of mosquitoes buzzed around his head, but just like the occasional rat, snake or hornet's nest he's uncovered over the years, he seemed unfazed by the bloodsuckers. Only tires truly grate his soul. 'For some reason, they tick me off more than anything,' he said, wiping his brow and standing near Greenbelt Park in Prince George's County. 'I definitely hate tires.' Merryman, 62, squatted down low and took a firm, two-handed grip beneath a massive tractor-trailer tire. With a grunt, he deadlifted the heavy rubber and flipped it up the slope. He did this over and over, tire by tire for days until he'd built an impressive staircase about 50 feet up to the guardrail along the shoulder of busy Kenilworth Avenue. Up and down the roadway, piles of trash and tires he wrestled up from the depths sat, waiting for highway cleanup crews to haul them away. Merryman usually contacts the crews ahead of time to let them know he's cleaning up, and he said he's never had a problem. Some people pay money to do this at a gym, but not at the swamps, ditches, dead ends and other illegal dumps where you'll find Merryman on any given day, in various corners of the country. The average automobile tire can weigh up to 25 pounds but truck tires can range anywhere from 35 to 100 pounds or more. He drinks a lot of water to combat leg cramps. On a recent afternoon, the Baltimore County resident was not far from home, but he'd also recently visited Philadelphia to help hundreds of others clean up a mountain of tires dumped by a creek there. He always wears gloves, a fluorescent vest for visibility and insect repellent. So far this year, Merryman has also wrangled tires in South Carolina and Florida and attended something called a 'tire party' in Atlanta. He has a goal of cleaning up trash in every county in America — there's more than 3,000 of them — often with his trusty orange bucket, trash tongs and his mascot, Sharkey D'Shark. The plastic, Great White shark was trash of course, but Merryman said it was 'too cool' to actually throw away so he uses it in his social media posts about garbage pick up. Merryman said he will be in Alaska around Labor Day for vacation, but he's carved out some time to pick up trash in new counties there, too. 'I used to call him 'tire man,' but I also call him the 'trashiest man in the whole Patapsco valley',' said Betsy McMillion, the former environmental program director with the Patapsco Heritage Greenway, a nonprofit that protects what it calls Maryland's 'most dramatic river valley.' Earlier this month, Merryman took a non-tire-related vacation to South Korea with his wife, Kirsten, and once he got to Jeju Island, he couldn't help himself. 'There's a lot of trash there," he said. 'I was picking up trash all over the place.' This is what retirement looks like for Merryman. Fellow tire haters say the world should feel blessed that the former Lockheed Martin software designer didn't just take up golf or birding. He is one man against seemingly insurmountable odds, they said, and yet he soldiers on. 'He's the biggest trash champion that I know,' said Scott Zillmer, a map editor for National Geographic who has accompanied Merryman on dozens of cleanups. Zillmer, 48, of Silver Spring, said he doesn't have as much time to dedicate to de-tiring the world as Merryman, but he explained that Merryman has almost a preternatural ability to find tire dumps. 'He's proof one man can make a heck of a difference,' Zillmer said. 'What he's unique at doing is finding sites where you can make a massive impact. He's so good at getting in the mind of a guy who is going to make an illegal dump. He knows what their motives are and what their needs are: a place to pull off the road, quickly, with a hill going down. He can read the landscape and pretty much know if there will be tires there.' When asked how many tires he thinks he hauled away by himself, Merryman got to calculating. He said he averages about 900 to 1,000 tires a year, though he's on track to beat that average this year. Merryman isn't afraid to venture onto private land if it's clear someone dumped there, and said he's never had a problem with property owners once they learn about his hobby. In 2013, Merryman, a father of two, pushed himself and totaled 2,247. 'Probably over 15,000 total, and that's a conservative estimate,' he said. He rejects finger-pointing, arguing that littering is a collective problem requiring collective responsibility. His optimism rests on the simple math of removal: every bag collected means less pollution. Tires pile up in mind-boggling numbers in the United States. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that 280 million tires are discarded by Americans yearly, and just 30 million of them are reused or retreaded. That leaves 250 million that need to be 'managed,' and the highway administration estimates that 2 to 3 billion have accumulated in legal stockpiles and illegal dumps over the years as a result. Even legal stockpiles can turn disastrous. In 1983, an arsonist ignited millions of tires at a stockpile in Virginia, a toxic fire that burned for nearly nine months and turned the land into a Superfund site. There's no perfect outcome for a tire's life, no real happy ending, Merryman said, and that's what irks him. If they're not recycled, they could seemingly last forever, but even the recycling process, he said, isn't ideal. So, they pile up, forgotten, for decades. He's found mature trees that have grown through tires. In most states, tire dumping is a misdemeanor, punishable with a fine. Jail time is rare, if ever. 'That's if they're even caught or prosecuted,' Merryman said. Merryman's quest began in 2008, he said, while on a lunch break at Lockheed Martin. He likes to get outside for lunch, so he walked along Deep Run, a creek behind his office in Hanover. Merryman had already started doing cleanups with the Patapsco Heritage Greenway, but this day, in particular, felt like an epiphany. 'I saw a washing machine, then I saw a motorcycle chassis, all kinds of stuff. It looked like people had been dumping there for decades,' he said. 'I thought, 'Someone has to clean this stuff up.' The dump behind Merryman's office nagged him, and the second time he visited, he saw more trash but also spotted a bald eagle, his first ever in Maryland. He's not saying the bird spoke to him that day, but it felt like something did. 'That time I thought 'we'll I'll be the one to clean it up then' 'he recalled. Merryman had the trash bug before that epiphany, McMillion said. She saw how a submerged shopping cart, mired in muck in Catonsville's Bull Run, became a white whale for him. 'I had college kids trying to get this thing out, and they couldn't do it,' she said. 'He spent a of of time on it. He was obsessed.' Merryman defeated the shopping cart, of course, she said, explaining there was one year when Merryman was responsible for 60 percent of her organization's trash cleanup totals. 'He's literally a one-man show,' she said. Merryman prefers to work alone or with Zillmer, rather than large group cleanups typically organized around Earth Day. Every day is Earth Day for him. Along Kenilworth Road, Merryman eventually flipped every tire up the staircase, then he flipped those up too. The woods, at least for the moment, were mostly clean. Someone, somewhere, was rolling tires down another ravine, though, and Merryman will find those too, clearing away the detritus of our disposable culture one piece of trash at a time.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Yahoo
‘Opening people's eyes': Experts partner with law enforcement to find a killer in MMIW case
Mary Annette PemberICTTwenty-three-year-old Emily Morgan of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma joined the heartbreakingly long list of unsolved murders of Native American women in the U.S. on Aug. 26, best friend, Totinika Elix, 24, was also killed, gunned down as they sat in Morgan's car near McAlester, Oklahoma. Both young women were single mothers; Elix was non-Native. SUPPORT INDIGENOUS JOURNALISM. Tragically, like many such cases, police were unable to positively identify a perpetrator or perpetrators and the investigation had slowed in recent in a remarkable turn of events, the case has recently taken center stage in police circles. Not only has it attracted the attention of the recently created Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit but also a little known, elite group of criminal investigators, the Vidocq Society. The society, founded in 1990, is named after Eugene Francois Vidocq, an 18th century French criminal-turned-cop who was the confidante of writers Victor Hugo and Honore Balzac and an inspiration to poet Edgar Allan Poe. The society of 82 members, one for each year of Vidocq's life, has played a role in several high-profile cold cases, including the case of Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the 'Boy in the Box ' who remained unidentified for decades after his 1957 death. His case remains of the society conducted training in 2023 with BIA police in Billings, Montana, and this year, in April, the society invited the BIA Missing and Murdered Unit to its monthly meeting in the Philadelphia meeting, the society announced members would assist in investigating the Morgan case from Oklahoma and had committed to working on one case involving Native American victims each year. The all-volunteer, nonprofit Vidocq Society takes on nine cases per year.'I'm so honored that the Vidocq Society took on our case,' Kim Merryman, Morgan's mother, told ICT. Merryman is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of of attentionMerryman has been discouraged that police have not yet arrested a suspect in the shooting, and about the lack of public attention to the case. Merryman believes racism and her daughter's involvement with drugs played a role.'I was extraordinarily happy [that] Gabby Petito's family got the help they had, but for mothers like me, it was infuriating, because the whole nation came together for this blonde-headed, blue-eyed beauty. And I've had to fight the public ever since my daughter was killed,' Merryman said.'From the very first phone call I made with Oklahoma police they started with victim-shaming comments,' Merryman said. The public also seemed to blame Morgan for her own murder, saying that she knew what she was doing when she got involved in an illegal lifestyle, according to Merryman. Morgan delivered drugs and money for a drug dealer, and the mother believes he arranged for Morgan to be was born and raised in the little town of Hugo, Oklahoma, but moved to Oklahoma City in 2016 to attend Rose State College. She was interested in a career in environmental sciences like her mother, who is environmental assessment officer for the Choctaw was in Oklahoma City that she met Elix, who was from the city and was raising her young daughter. They quickly became mother, Twanna Brown, declined to speak with ICT, but in an earlier interview with NBC News Dateline, said her daughter was in the wrong place at the wrong time.'The next thing we know, she lost her life,' Brown struggled with drugs for several years. She was 18 when she met the unidentified drug dealer, who quickly got her involved with his business of running drugs between Oklahoma City and small towns like years older than Morgan and married with children of his own, the man showered her with money, gifts and drugs. But he also demanded sex from the young woman, in addition to her work as a drug mule.'He's a sick predator,' Merryman said. 'It was simple for him to take advantage of a young woman with a toddler to care for and whose baby-daddy was in prison.'She believes that her daughter was not his first victim and that he continues to prey on young women to forward his criminal enterprise.'Yes, she was involved in criminal activity but not at a level to get her killed,' Merryman Merryman named the dealer, ICT is not naming the man since police have not yet publicly identified him as a suspect. Merryman believes that the dealer grew tired of Morgan's increased demands for more drugs and money and simply decided to get rid of her. What Morgan thought was another routine drug delivery turned out to be a frequently took others along when she made those trips. Eager for some time away from childcare duties, Elix accepted Morgan's invitation to join her on the trip to said that shortly after Morgan's murder, the drug dealer called and offered to pay for her silence, claiming that he had loved her daughter.'I said, 'If you think I'm going to keep my mouth shut about anything that I know about the relationship you had with Emily, then you've got another thing coming,'' she said. 'If you loved her like you said you do, then you would want to do everything in your power to find her killer.'According to Merryman, the dealer is a member of a gang known for its violence related to its activities in selling drugs. Indeed, the Oklahoma Gang Investigators Association names southeast Oklahoma as a region known for violent gangs. High murder ratesMorgan's and Elix's families have worked tirelessly to keep the case before the public the case was handled by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. But Merryman and advocates for the Northeast Oklahoma Indigenous Safety and Education Foundation, known as NOISE, have insisted that since the area where the women were killed is covered by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the case should be investigated by federal authorities. In that opinion, the court ruled that a large portion of eastern Oklahoma constitutes Indian Country, so criminal cases are subject to tribal or federal court jurisdiction.A lot has changed for Native American victims of violence since 2016, in Oklahoma and the rest of the country. The Choctaw Nation had virtually no resources to offer in support at the time of Morgan's death, according to Merryman.'But now things have changed immensely; the tribe created MMIW Chahta, a missing and murdered support group,' she said. Chahta is the term used by the Choctaw for themselves in their language.'I thank God for my tribal membership and my MMIW groups; they've pulled me through this whole thing,' Merryman police first told her of Morgan's murder she laid down on the floor and screamed. 'But I couldn't lay down and die of a broken heart,' she said. 'I have grandchildren and a daughter to care for.'Merryman is now on the board of NOISE and regularly gives talks about her family's experience and MMIW.'When I go out to speak I always say before this happened, my daughter and I didn't know that murder was the third leading cause of death for Native American women. None of us knew that back in 2016,' she of murder, rape and violent crime are all higher for Native Americans than the national average. Oklahoma ranks among the top 10 states with the highest rates of missing and murdered Native American women. Joining forcesIn August 2024, the anniversary of Morgan's death, Merryman and her colleagues among MMIW advocates organized a social media blitz to draw new attention to the case.'We put out the BIA's Missing and Murdered Unit's number asking people to text and urge them to take on Emily's case,' she long afterwards, Vincent Marcellino, special agent for the BIA's Missing and Murdered Unit contacted her. Marcellino said the agency was taking on Morgan's case and that he would be in charge of the BIA's Missing and Murdered Unit was created in 2021 as part of directives under the Not Invisible Act of 2020, designed to address the crisis of violence against Native American and Alaska Native people. Headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the unit collaborates with other agencies to solve violent crimes committed against Native peoples, works with the FBI to coordinate a centralized intake process for missing and murdered case referrals, and focuses on solving cold cases as part of its Operation Spirit Return, which identifies unknown human unit also conducts and coordinates training among tribal and mainstream police was a training course that brought the unit and the Vidocq Society together. In 2023, O.J. Semans, executive director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, known as COLT, helped organize a Vidocq training in Billings for tribal law enforcement and leaders from South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana, as well as local police departments in Rapid City and of the hopes was to help open up dialogue regarding MMIW cases among the various departments, according to Semans, a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. The Vidocq members were surprised at the jam-packed schedule COLT had organized.'I told them we're so short-handed in Indian Country that we can't bring that many police officers together for 5-6 days. We had to condense things because these people need to get back to their reservations,' Semans spending on law enforcement in the BIA is funded at just under 13 percent of its total need. A 2021 BIA report shows that although the need was around $1.7 billion, only $256 million was about the lack of funding and resources under which tribal police operate touched the Vidocq members, according to Semans.'They made a commitment to take on one Native case per year,' he society has also agreed to offer more training to Indian Country, Semans said. Marcellino and two of his colleagues – Micah Ware, deputy unit chief of the Missing and Murdered Unit and Christopher Lorenz, associate director of the BIA special investigations division – then traveled to a place as unlikely as the Union League of Philadelphia to present the case of Emily Morgan to the Vidocq Society at the group's monthly of the society's work is conducted virtually among its 82 members and another 100 or so special members. The society is a closed organization that doesn't take membership requests; members must be invited. Special membership is by referral to the board of directors by a full society works only with law enforcement organizations and only at their invitation. Models of discretion, full members are entitled to wear the Vidocq Society boutonniere, the tiniest of pins, a powerful 'if you know, you know,' organization's Form 990, a federal tax form required of nonprofits, indicates that the society has net assets of $23,223 and barely generated enough income through membership dues and private donations to pay its expenses of $56,880 in 2023. Investigative work conducted by members is entirely voluntary; recipients pay the society maintains a tiny office in Philadelphia, it's the monthly luncheons at the Union League that reflect the exclusivity of the organization. Built in 1865, the Union League of Philadelphia is on the National Historic Register and occupies an entire city block in the city's center. The creaking sounds from the massive wooden staircase leading to its meeting rooms on the second floor have a sobering effect, informing visitors they are entering a space mostly reserved for the powerful, old-money leaders of a stratified society. The league publishes a dress code, advising visitors to 'exercise discretion' in their attire, and prohibiting T-shirts or athletic wear. Looking aheadAfter lunch, ICT was invited to wait outside the meeting while Marcellino presented Morgan's case to the members, who are keen on confidentiality and protecting the integrity of the cases on which they members offer insight and opinions on cases brought to them. They don't like to take credit for cases, and prefer to leave that to the local law enforcement.'Law enforcement is always leading their own case but we bring fresh eyes,' said Vidocq board member Joseph Pitri, a state trooper from New Jersey in charge of missing persons for the state. 'We anticipate additional opportunities to work with the BIA. We think it's a great partnership.'Marcellino talked to ICT after the closed-door meeting.'We all know there's a disconnect between law enforcement, but we are here in a good way,' he said. 'Hopefully, we can use [the collaboration with the Vidocq Society] to propel the work forward. We got phenomenal feedback today.'Marcellino, who works out of the BIA's Oklahoma City office, urged people to reach out to the Missing and Murdered Unit via the website or call the tip line, (833) 560-2065, with information about missing or murdered cases. The unit also offers a victim services program.'We are dedicated to this case, to Emily Morgan and other victims,' he on Morgan being the first Native American case presented to the Vidocq Society, Merryman noted that her daughter yearned for recognition.'She always wanted to be famous,' she said. 'I know she didn't want it to be this way but through her case maybe she will be. She wanted everyone to know who she was, to see her.'Morgan's story is changing things for other women, opening people's eyes.' Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Woodland Elementary and Harrison High teachers selected as TSC Teachers of the Year
LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Tippecanoe School Corp. has named Lisa Merryman as the TSC Elementary Teacher of the Year and Kristen Trella as the TSC Secondary Teacher of the Year. Merryman, a kindergarten teacher at Woodland Elementary School, has garnered over 28 years of experience in education after earning her bachelor's degree from Purdue University. In a news release, Woodland Elementary Principal Lee Sweet said Merryman's commitment to student success shines in everything she does. 'Her unwavering dedication to students, creative teaching methods and passion for inspiring a love of learning are just a few reasons she deserves this honor,' Sweet said in the release. 'Her peers would say she is knowledgeable, kind and always ready to help. She fosters an environment of collaboration, invites input and shares her expertise generously.' Merryman extends learning beyond the classroom through meaningful connections with the community, the release said. Partnering with the McCutcheon High School FACS department, Merryman coordinates shared activities around topics like apples, pumpkins and pizza making. Trella, an English teacher at Harrison High School, has garnered over 25 years of teaching experience after earning her bachelor's degree from Indiana University Northwest and a master's degree from Indiana Wesleyan University. Harrison Principal Cory Marshall said in the release Trella has the ability to meet students where they are, helping struggling learners grasp important concepts while also challenging high-achieving students to reach new levels. 'Ms. Trella's classroom is one of constant activities,' Marshall said in the release. 'Her students clearly realize that her classroom is a place of learning and work, but also that enjoyment and fun can come from such activities.' Beyond the classroom, Trella serves as a travel club sponsor and coach for the girls swimming and diving team, the release said. Earning the NCC Coach of the year award several times, Trella emphasizes character development and community involvement, the release said, by organizing service projects that support the American Red Cross and a local animal shelter. Merryman and Trella will move forward out of a pool of 19 nominees to represent TSC in the Indiana 2026 Teacherof the Year program. This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: TSC selects Woodland, Harrison teachers as 2026 Teachers of the Year
