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COLUMNIST
Shawn Vestal shawnv@spokesman.com (509) 459-5431Shawn Vestal joined The Spokesman-Review in 1999. He currently is a columnist for the City Desk.
Most Recent Stories
Feb. 26, 2020, 5 a.m.
People of color have complained of harassment by border agents on buses not just in Spokane, but all around the country. A Gonzaga student whose family immigrated to the U.S. when she was 8 described being interrogated in a harassing, threatening manner while waiting for a bus home to Seattle, saying she was surrounded by agents and accused of faking her green card before being released.
Feb. 23, 2020, 4 a.m.
EWU made cuts of almost $7 million across campus in the past two years; it spent about twice that in a single year to subsidize athletics. Ask yourself if you could imagine the world in which those figures were reversed. Then ask yourself what’s so crazy about this new report.
Feb. 21, 2020, 5 a.m.
One obituary is a portrait of a life. Several taken together, though, build a portrait of a community. Recent obituaries in The Spokesman-Review have told the stories of farmers, nurses, plumbers, maintenance workers and engineers.
Feb. 19, 2020, 5 a.m.
Lest you think we’re the only region with a tiny but incurable case of the crackpot secessionist bug, cast your eyes toward rural Oregon.
Feb. 16, 2020, 4 a.m.
Lauren McCluskey, her friends and her family made more than 20 attempts to reach out to university officials in the days before her murder, according to a federal lawsuit filed by Lauren’s parents, interviews and reporting on the case by journalists in Utah and elsewhere.
Feb. 16, 2020, 4 a.m.
Lauren McCluskey has been gone for 16 months now, killed by a man who stalked, harassed, threatened and extorted her for weeks before shooting her on the University of Utah campus. But her parents are doing all they can to make sure their daughter – and the litany of institutional failures that preceded her murder – is not forgotten.
Feb. 14, 2020, 4 a.m.
Spokane has gone to great lengths to get good information and develop good ideas about how to dispense justice more smartly. But all the good ideas and hopeful recommendations will crash without any buy-in from the key players.
Feb. 12, 2020, 5 a.m.
Mayor Nadine Woodward’s State of the City speech last week was, in many ways, awfully standard fare. Lots of sloganeering and few specifics, with a call to employ the most common tool of the bureaucratic optimist: advisory committees.
Feb. 6, 2020, 5 a.m.
Back and forth it went Wednesday morning in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, held in the eighth-grade history class at Cataldo Catholic School. As in the actual Senate, 2,500 miles away and later in the day, Cataldo “senators” acquitted Trump on two articles of impeachment, with votes breaking down 12-10 along party lines.
Feb. 5, 2020, 5 a.m.
Take a gulp of relief, white people: Though we are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group in the state to be caught with contraband when searched by the smokies, we’re searched less than most any other group.
Feb. 2, 2020, 5 a.m.
The evangelist came from Texas just for this: to stand in the rain on Indiana Avenue on a Wednesday, preaching a sermon about the walls of Jericho and Roe v. Wade.
Jan. 31, 2020, 4 a.m.
It’s not the kind of language you often see in court documents – even in prosecutor’s strongest sentencing arguments for the worst convicts. However, in the case of Mikhail Yuriy Ageyev, U.S. Attorney Bill Hyslop found the perfect word to deploy when asking a judge to send him to prison for 50 years: monster.
Jan. 29, 2020, 5 a.m.
A lawmaker is taking aim at administrative bloat in Washington’s universities, with proposed legislation that would take a cleaver to nonteaching jobs in the state’s system of higher learning and save tens of millions of dollars.
Jan. 26, 2020, 5 a.m.
It was September 2019, and the Redoubters – Matt Shea, Heather Scott and the rest of the gang – were talking liberty at the Freedom Fest in Sandpoint. Alex Barron, the self-styled “Bard of the Redoubt,” officer of the Kootenai County GOP and candidate for the Idaho Legislature, took the stage and issued a challenge for those in attendance.
Jan. 23, 2020, 5:28 p.m.
Years from now, as the no-trial impeachment trial of President Trump is reduced to lowlights by history, one image will indelibly symbolize the travesty: Idaho’s Jim Risch asleep during the trial on the Senate floor.
Jan. 23, 2020, 5 a.m.
It happened Monday night for roughly the 10th time in the 20 years I’ve lived in Spokane. Someone broke into my car.
Jan. 19, 2020, midnight
One obituary is a portrait of a life. Several taken together, though, create a portrait of a community. Recent obits in the S-R have told the stories of tavern owners and music professors, auto parts dealers and train engineers, full-time moms and construction workers.
Jan. 17, 2020, 5 a.m.
Idaho Rep. John O. Green’s expulsion from the Legislature is well-deserved.
Jan. 15, 2020, 5 a.m.
With the recent arrival of actual winter, the city has injected a quick $45,000 into adding 50 emergency shelter beds for the homeless.
Jan. 12, 2020, midnight
What will make or break the relationship at City Hall – and what broke the last one – isn’t what happens when everyone’s looking. It’s what happens when no one is, and how honest you are about it.
Jan. 10, 2020, 5 a.m.
Decent people need to remember to speak out against racists and their dangerous messages.
Jan. 8, 2020, 4 a.m.
There are no crimes for which our justice system fails more consistently and completely than rape and sexual assault.
Dec. 25, 2019, 5 a.m.
If we had a wish for one big gift for Spokane this morning – something that would be a true gift to the health of the community long into the future – it would be for an expansion of the health district’s Nurse-Family Partnership.
Dec. 22, 2019, 4 a.m.
As a preschooler, she set her mind to becoming an astronaut. Now, a big part of her mission is talking to young people about space, science and service.
Dec. 19, 2019, 6:52 p.m.
There was a simple question hanging fire during the House-ordered investigation Rep. Matt Shea: Would there be a last straw? Turns out the answer is no. There’s no last straw. There’s a whole bale.