PGN learned this week that our longtime reporter Tim Cwiek was awarded a prestigious national award for his investigative reporting on the unsolved homicide of Nizah Morris. While the award recognizes the exemplary research, reporting and writing Cwiek employed in his coverage of the case last year, it ultimately is an acknowledgment that justice for the victim — even more than 11 years later — is worth the ongoing fight.
Cwiek has been covering the Morris case since her death at the end of 2002. Morris suffered head trauma shortly after receiving a police courtesy ride and died days later. Her killer has never been found.
In the ensuing years, the case has been hampered by missing and withheld information — including files that were reported to have been “lost” for eight years. Last year, a civilian-oversight committee called the local investigation “appalling” and urged state and federal authorities to step in.
Cwiek has not only been present for each development in this case, but has been leading the call for a proper investigation: His coverage has taken him to court numerous times as he fought for transparency in records, and his tenacious insistence that the case’s wealth of inconsistencies be explored is largely credited with getting the Police Advisory Commission to reopen its exploration of the investigation.
Cwiek is an old-fashioned reporter. He doesn’t cull information from news sites — he visits the courthouse itself and pores over files. He doesn’t shoot an email to press representatives — he calls sources themselves and spends, sometimes, hours on the phone, talking through nuances that some people may never have considered. He has spent many a day walking PGN colleagues, now including three editors, through minute-by-minute police call logs, or comparing handwriting on redacted and unredacted files or detailing each piece of paper missing from files. He knows this case backward, forward and inside-out.
But it is his commitment to uncovering the details of this case that have given Cwiek such a clear understanding of the multitude of missteps that have been made — and fortified his commitment to finding justice for Nizah.
While this award from the Society of Professional Journalists is a personal and professional honor for Cwiek, it’s not one that he wants for himself. Upon learning about the award, his first response was, to paraphrase: “Maybe this will help move the investigation forward.”
Cwiek’s not pursuing this case to make a name for himself, to win awards or to get national headlines. All he wants is to uncover the truth and, in so doing, to bring about some measure of justice for a family and community that lost a loved one. And that is the mark of a truly great journalist.