“What was growing up like for David McClain?” The questioner, a woman with a pad and pencil in her lap, seems in no hurry for an answer. Silently she waits as the 30-year-old man in the wheelchair across from her writhes mutely in his seat. There’s a long, slender ribbon…

Stephen Ryan came home one day in February to discover that his future had been erased by certified mail. At the time he was working as a substitute teacher at Pines Middle School in Pembroke Pines and had recently been invited by the principal to apply for a permanent position…

Near midnight off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, a pulsing white beacon on the black water signals the captain of the supertanker Chevron Arizona that the ship’s 800-mile journey is fast approaching the most dangerous mile of all: the last one. The wind is blowing briskly from the south as…

Sometime within the past four years in Broward County, a man in his early twenties developed a fast-spreading infection in his lungs and died within days. Because of his youth and the suddenness of his death, the man’s body came under the scrutiny of Broward County Medical Examiner Joshua Perper…

Last summer an untried labor activist named Ocean Dessoi saw his first union victory deflate into defeat in the time a fax machine spits out a single page. The scene of Dessoi’s dizzying free fall was a drab hotel conference-room in Deerfield Beach where he and nine colleagues had been…

Not for the first time, nor probably the last, Elizabeth Wurtzel has found a topic to set her to whining. This time it’s not the canopied bed that a local hotel was nice enough to set her up with (“repulsive”) or the Broward County scene (“shallow”) or even men in…

It wasn’t until David Tory failed his second breathalyzer test of the day that he started to beg. Flunking the first test after his arrest had been bad enough. Tory believed he was well under the legal limit, yet he’d somehow ended up sitting in the Palm Beach County jail…

To a casual passerby, the sight of Phillip and Doris Samarco probing and poking through the grass of their neighbor’s front yard on a summer afternoon might have seemed a familiar suburban tableau: a retired middle-class couple in West Boca Raton retracing steps in search of a lost set of…

With fireplug build, five o’clock shadow, and a green dragon tattoo across his forearm, Margate police officer Al Simon will never be mistaken for a fashion model on patrol. Still, standing in front of police headquarters on a bright, hot afternoon, Simon sports one striking fashion accessory: $90 black wraparound…

At ten minutes past three on the afternoon of January 22, a penniless, jobless, and nondegreed former Florida Atlantic University student named Gary Snyder sat down at a conference table across from the most powerful man on campus and began issuing instructions. “Please state your name for the record,” he…

To the untrained ear, it might not have been apparent that a civil-rights protest was under way last September 29 during the second-period string orchestra class at the School for the Performing Arts at Dillard High. As usual the students unpacked and tuned their instruments, locked eyes upon the conductor’s…

Having delivered their verdict, the members of the jury shuffled slowly out of the jury box, the gravity of their judgment reflected in somber, averted faces. Moments before, on this 19th day of December, 1997, the twelve sworn citizens had found 39-year-old Henry Wallace guilty of second-degree murder. Now they…

Leading a guest through the headquarters of the radio station known throughout Broward County as the Pipeline, owner and manager Jerry Lyddane sounds like a successful media entrepreneur trying to impress an investor with a can’t-miss business prospectus. “Now look at this,” he gushes, striding over to what appears to…

In a conference room buried deep amid the sprawling halls and cubicles of Ely High School in Pompano Beach, a recent discussion of the proper role of education in a child’s life is beginning to fray around the edges. Spurred perhaps by the continual blatting of the fax machine in…

Just north of the Boca Raton inlet, a vision of luxury rises suddenly from the beach. Dozens of chaise longues, each of them complete with plush, two-inch-thick padding and a retractable hood, sit in perfectly placed rows on carefully raked sand. Attractive as this seashore opulence may seem to those…

Seldom does the clock seem so unmerciful as when a child is trapped in a burning bedroom and the fire engine has yet to arrive. “Every minute — every second — seems like it takes at least an hour,” says Lt. Don Petito of the EMS division of the Coral…

Sean Newman swears he wasn’t trying to attract attention when he and his wife opened an ultrachic adult boutique complete with leather whips and $500 latex bodysuits in the rustic heart of downtown Dania. He almost manages to say it with a straight face, too. But then the flicker of…

It’s been more than six years, yet Ronnie Greenspan still can’t talk about the staff party without feeling a rise of queasiness in the pit of her stomach. The shame she felt that night, though diminished by time, has never quite disappeared. Rather, it has spiraled down through the years…

For a man who just pulled off an unlikely victory over a more powerful and entrenched opponent, Shane Anderson doesn’t look the part of the conquering hero. A sheen of sweat is breaking out on his forehead, his face is unnaturally pale beneath its sprinkling of freckles, there’s a slight…