L.A. County sheriff’s deputy injured after accidentally shooting himself, officials say

Keri Blakinger covers the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 2023, she spent nearly seven years in Texas, first covering criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle and then covering prisons for the Marshall Project. Blakinger was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing for For her insightful, humane portrait, reported with great difficulty, of men on Death Row in Texas who play clandestine games of “Dungeons & Dragons,” countering their extreme isolation with elaborate fantasy. Her work has appeared everywhere from the BBC to the New York Daily News, from Vice to the Washington Post Magazine, where her 2019 reporting on women in jail helped earn a National Magazine Award. She is the author of “Corrections in Ink,” a 2022 memoir about her time in prison.

Kevin Rector is a state and national politics reporter for the Los Angeles Times who has also written extensively about police and crime, courts and legal issues and the LGBTQ+ community. Rector has won multiple national awards, including as part of a Baltimore Sun team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting.