UPDATED

Azerbaijan minister suggests 'weapon' hit crashed plane

Azerbaijan's Transport Minister Rashan Nabiyev said "the aircraft was hit by something" and the "type of weapon" is to be determined. Most passengers were killed when the flight from Baku to Grozny crashed in Kazakhstan.

Aviation school cadets in Kazakhstan staged a ceremony to honor the 38 people killed in the crash

Uncredited/AP Photo/picture alliance

Indications that Wednesday's crash of a Russia-bound passenger plane from Azerbaijan was caused by Russian air defense systems continued to grow on Friday.

The Embraer jet came down near Aktau airport in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, killing 38 people. Twenty-nine survived.

Azerbaijan's Transport Minister Rashan Nabiyev said witness statements suggested there was "an explosive noise outside" before the plane was "hit by something."

"The type of weapon used in the impact will be determined during the probe," Nabiyev said.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby meanwhile said that Washington has observed some "early indications that would certainly point to the possibility that this jet was brought down by Russian air defense systems," but refused to elaborate, citing an ongoing investigation.

'External interference' caused crash, Azerbaijan airline says

Earlier on Friday, Azerbaijan Airlines said that preliminary findings from the investigation into the crash suggest "physical and technical external interference."

Azerbaijan Airlines on Friday also suspended flights to a number of Russian cities amid growing speculation the plane was downed by Russian air defense fire.

The airline said it was "taking into account the initial results of the investigation into the crash... and taking into account flight safety risks."

News agency Interfax said Azerbaijan Airlines would still run flights to six major Russian cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Meanwhile, an Azerbaijan Airlines flight to the southern Russian city of Mineralnye Vody turned back to Baku on Friday after a chunk of Russian airspace was closed, Russia's state-run TASS news agency reported.

Passengers heard at least one loud bang

Some of the survivors of the crash told the Reuters news agency they had heard at least one loud bang as the plane approached its original destination of Grozny, in southern Russia.

"It was obvious that the plane had been damaged in some way," said Subhonkul Rakhimov, one of the passengers speaking from hospital. "It was as if it was drunk — not the same plane anymore."

Another passenger, Vafa Shabanova, also heard a bang and said, "I was very scared."

Kremlin declines to comment amid investigation

The Kremlin said it was too early to comment on the allegations that a Russian air defense missile was responsible for the Azerbaijan Airlines crash.

"An investigation is underway, and until the conclusions of the investigation, we do not consider we have the right to make any comments and we will not do so," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.

However, the head of Russia's civil aviation agency, Dmitry Yadrov, said on Telegram that there was fog over the airport in Grozny — the flight's scheduled destination. He also claimed that Ukrainian drones were striking the city around the time of the incident.

"Ukrainian military drones were carrying out terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure... at the time," Yadrov said on Friday.

"The pilot was offered alternative airports. He took the decision to go to Aktau airport."

Ukraine blames Russia

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Moscow of being responsible for the tragedy.

"Every human life is valuable, and every loss of life deserves a thorough investigation to establish the truth," Zelenskyy said in a statement on X.

He compared the latest crash to the shooting down of MH17 flight over 10 years ago, which Ukraine and the West believe was hit by a missile fired by Russian-backed defense forces. Moscow has blamed Ukrainian military for the tragedy, which killed nearly 300 people.

"If Russia decides to spread lies in the same way that it did in the MH17 case, we will need to consolidate all international pressure on Moscow in order to establish the truth and ensure accountability," Zelenskyy said.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak also blamed Russia for "shooting down" the plane.

News outlets including Reuters and The New York Times reported that a Russian missile was likely involved in the crash, citing Azerbaijani security sources close to the investigation.

"No one claims that it was done on purpose. However, taking into account the established facts, Baku expects the Russian side to confess to the shooting down of the Azerbaijani aircraft," a source told Reuters on Thursday.

rmt,lo,zc/rc (Reuters, AFP)

Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash: Is Russia responsible?

Sergei Satanovskii

DW

Russia has so far resisted pressure from Azerbaijan to admit responsibility for the plane crash in Kazakhstan. Since Wednesday, the Kremlin has refused to comment on claims that a Russian missile caused the crash.

There are indications, including many small holes on the plane's tail, that an accidental strike by a Russian air defense missile led to the plane crash

Image: The Administration of Mangystau Region/AP/dpa/picture alliance


Two days after an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan appears to be increasing pressure on Russia.

Although an investigation is still underway in Kazakhstan, preliminary results have been leaked to the press. With an accidental Russian air defense missile strike now the leading theory behind the crash, more and more Azerbaijani officials are calling on Russia to admit responsibility.

What happened on Christmas morning?

The Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 crashed on Wednesday in a field near Aktau, in western Kazakhstan. Of the 67 passengers onboard, 38 died and 29 were hospitalized, some with severe injuries.

The plane wasn't supposed to land in Aktau. The aircraft had taken off from Baku, in Azerbaijan, on Wednesday morning and was due to land in Grozny, Russia, an area that has recently been heavily targeted by Ukrainian drones, when something happened to it that some survivors later described as a collision with a bird.

Videos of the emergency landing near Aktau show the plane gaining altitude, then sharply descending before crashing to the ground and catching fire. Other videos showed the wrecked aircraft lying in the field.

Apart from the damage caused by the crash, the videos show the fuselage riddled with small holes. Some experts, including those DW spoke to, said these holes may be attributed to a strike by Russia's anti-aircraft systems.

Investigation underway

Kazakhstan has launched an investigation into the causes of the incident. An investigative commission established by the country's prime minister will include the participation of, among others, a deputy prime minister and the leadership of several ministries. The commission is said to be collaborating with Azerbaijan.

As of Friday evening local time, no details of the investigation have been announced by any government official. Kazakhstan's parliamentary speaker, Maulen Ashimbayev, said Thursday investigators didn't yet know what had caused the tragedy. He also called the theory of a Russian anti-aircraft system strike speculation. "Spreading such allegations is not right and unethical," he said.

This reaction corresponds with the words of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. He has so far refused to comment on the allegations about the Russian air defense system strike. Instead, he has called on the parties to wait until the investigation in Kazakhstan is completed.


Reactions in Baku

In Baku, the authorities seem less patient. Sources in the Azerbaijani government have leaked the preliminary results of the investigation to the press. According to sources cited by Euronews and the Reuters news agency, the plane might have mistakenly been struck by the Russian Pantsir-S1 air defense missile-gun system, and the aircraft's communication "was paralyzed" by electronic warfare systems as it approached Grozny.

"No one claims that it was done on purpose. However, taking into account the established facts, Baku expects the Russian side to confess to the shooting down of the Azerbaijani aircraft," the source, who had knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan's investigation, told Reuters.

In another article published by the local news website Day.Az on Friday, sources in the Azerbaijani president's offices said they had abruptly refused to accept any help offered by the Chechen authorities in Grozny.

"We are providing and will continue to provide the necessary assistance to our citizens. Azerbaijan demands recognition of the fact, an apology, and the payment of appropriate compensations," a source said.

Allegations mount that anti-aircraft fire caused plane crash

04:12

Azerbaijan Airlines suspends flights to some Russian regions

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan Airlines has suspended several flights from Baku to seven cities in Russia starting December 28. These are areas at risk of Ukrainian drone attacks and where Russian air defense systems are active.

In an official statement, the airline said the plane that crashed on Wednesday experienced "external physical and technical interference."

After growing signs of irritation on the Azerbaijani side went public, Russian aviation authorities released more details about the circumstances leading up to the plane crash.

The head of Russia's civil aviation authority, Dmitry Yadrov, said Friday that the so-called Carpet plan had been implemented before the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash due to a Ukrainian drone attack.

The plan means that the airport in Grozny was closed for departures and arrivals and all aircraft were required to leave the area.

According to Yadrov, the pilots unsuccessfully attempted to land in Grozny twice. He mentioned that the area was covered in dense fog. The crew then allegedly refused to consider alternative landing options in Russia and flew to Aktau, before the plane crashed in the coastal area.

Pro-Kremlin bloggers admit a Russian strike

While Russian state-run media appear keen to avoid mentioning the possibility of a Russian missile hitting the plane, pro-Kremlin military bloggers on Telegram seem to have no doubts about what happened.

The most popular military Telegram channels such as Rybar, Yuri Podolyaka and Alex Parker write that the Russian anti-aircraft system strike seems to be the most likely cause of the crash.

"But I am sure that the Chechens will manage to avoid responsibility, and no one will be punished," a post on the Alex Parker channel reads.

Edited by: Rob Mudge

What we know about the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash 

A Russian-bound Azerbaijani aircraft crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, killing 38 of the 67 onboard. Experts suggest shrapnel damage indicates a possible accidental shootdown by Russian air defence. Authorities have urged caution against speculation until the investigation concludes.


Issued on: 26/12/2024 
FRANCE24
By: NEWS WIRES

02:15

 drone view shows emergency specialists working at the crash site of an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane near the city of Aktau, Kazakhstan December 25, 2024. © Azamat Sarsenbayev, Reuters

The official cause of the crash of a Russia-bound Azerbaijani plane in Kazakhstan on Wednesday that killed 38 of the 67 people on board is still unknown.

But, pointing to apparent shrapnel damage on the wreckage, experts have said the plane could have been accidentally shot down by Russian air defence.

Russian and Kazakh authorities have warned against "hypotheses" and "speculation" on causes, calling for patience until the investigation is concluded.

Here is what we know about the crash:

Air defence

Military and aviation experts have said the Embraer 190 could have been shot down by Russian air defence.

The plane's scheduled route was from the Azerbaijani capital Baku to Grozny in Chechnya, where Ukrainian drone attacks have been reported in recent weeks.

Drone attacks were reported earlier on Wednesday in Ingushetia and North Ossetia -- two republics near Chechnya also located in southern Russia.

"The traces seen on the plane suggest that it is quite probable" that it was shot down by a missile, Jean-Paul Troadec, a former director of France's BEA air accident investigation agency, told AFP.

Russian military expert Yury Podolyaka said holes seen in the wreckage of the plane were similar to the damage caused by an "anti-aircraft missile system".

"Everything points to that," he wrote.

A former expert at France's BEA also said there appeared to be "a lot of shrapnel" damage on the wreckage.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said the damage was "reminiscent" of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was downed with a surface-to-air missile by Russia-backed rebels over eastern Ukraine in 2014.

That crash killed 298 people.

Four sources say Azerbaijan Airlines flight was downed by Russian air defences

Birds theory

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "It would be wrong to make any hypotheses before the investigation's conclusions."

Authorities in Kazakhstan, a key Russian ally, also warned against "speculation".

Azerbaijan Airlines initially said the plane flew through a flock of birds before withdrawing the statement.

Russia's aviation agency also mentioned birds as a possible cause.

The former BEA expert said it was unlikely since the impact of birds "does not prevent the plane from flying".

A regional department of the Kazakh health ministry referred to an "explosion of a canister" on board, without giving any further detail.

Strange trajectory

The plane was far from its intended flight path on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, crashing in Aktau on the eastern shore.

The reason why it veered off is unclear.

Former BEA director Troadec said the route was "a great unknown" in the incident.

Russia's aviation agency said on Wednesday that "due to an emergency situation on board the plane, the pilot decided to go to another airport -- Aktau was chosen".

The specialist website Flightradar24, which tracks flights, said the flight had experienced "significant GPS interference".

The plane "stopped sending positional data" for a few minutes, the site said.

Victims

The plane was carrying 62 passengers and five crew members.

Kazakhstan said 38 people were killed and 29 survived, including three children.

There were 37 passengers from Azerbaijan, six from Kazakhstan, three from Kyrgyzstan and 16 from Russia on board, the Kazakh transport ministry said.

The crew were all Azerbaijani nationals.

Fourteen survivors were flown to Azerbaijan, TASS news agency reported, while nine Russian survivors, including a child, have been taken to Russia.

(AFP)

Did Russia shoot down the Azal passenger plane that crashed in Kazakhstan?

Confusion surrounds the cause of the crash of Azal passenger plane in Kazakhstan that killed 38 of the 72 people on board. There is evidence that it was caused by a bird strike but what appears to be shrapnel damage suggest that it could have also been hit by a Russian missile. / bne IntelliNews

Feedly

By bne IntelliNews December 26, 2024

Confusion reigns over the cause behind the crash of the Azal passenger plane on December 25 that killed 38 of 67 people on board. There is conflicting evidence. Some evidence points to a bird strike, other evidence to a possible strike carried out with Russian surface-to-air missile defences protecting the Chechen capital of Grozny.

The passenger plane crashed near the city of Aktau, Kazakhstan, during a flight from Baku to Grozny. A total of 25 people survived with 22 hospitalised, the press service of the Kazakh Emergencies Ministry reported. Among those on board were two children and five crew.

Initial reports said the crash was caused after the plane struck a bird that caused an explosion, doing critical damage to one of the engines. The plane was then redirected to the Dagestani city of Makhachkala but after flying over the Caspian Sea, crash landed just short of an airport in Aktau in Kazakhstan.

The Russian government on the morning of December 26 cautioned against promoting "hypotheses" about the cause of the crash

Video footage posted on social media show what appear to be bullet holes or shrapnel damage in the fuselage and tail of the plane.

Andrii Kovalenko, Ukraine’s Head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, said on Telegram, as reported by Ukrainska Pravda: "Azerbaijan Airlines’ Embraer 190 aircraft, which was flying from Baku to Grozny, was shot down by a Russian SAM.” 

Kovalenko said that Russia was obligated to close the airspace over Grozny but failed to do so. "The plane was damaged by Russians and sent to Kazakhstan instead of being urgently landed in Grozny to save lives,” Kovalenko added.

According to Kanan Zeynalov, a representative of the press service of Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office, a joint investigation is being conducted with the Kazakh authorities.

“We cannot disclose any investigation results at this stage. All possible scenarios are being examined, and relevant expert analyses are underway. A team led by Azerbaijan’s Deputy Prosecutor General has been dispatched to Kazakhstan and is working at the crash site,” Zeynalov stated, reported Jam News.

Kazakhstan’s KazAeroNavigation suggested that the crash took place after the plane hit a bird,, causing the steering system to malfunction. Kanat Bozumbayev, Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister has been appointed the head of the state commission investigating the crash.

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, who had travelled to the Russian Federation to participate in an informal CIS Heads of State Summit in St Petersburg, was informed of the plane crash while in Russian airspace. He immediately ordered a return to Azerbaijan and declared a day of mourning.

MH17 Redux

If it is confirmed the Azal passenger jet was shot down by Russian air defences it would be a repeat of the Malaysian commercial airliner MH17 tragedy. Just under 300 people were killed after MH17 was shot down with a Russian BUK SAM over Ukraine in July 2014.

An eyewitness account from Kristina, a survivor of the crash in Kazakhstan, posted online claimed that the plane hit a bird that caused an explosion in a video posted online.

The passengers flew over the sea for an hour before crash-landing. During the entire hour, the passengers were wearing oxygen masks and life jackets because they were over water, according to Kristina, who added in a clip posted by Russian social media platform MASH: “A bird hit the engine, causing an explosion, and the oxygen masks deployed.”

However, photos and videos of the body of the plane on the ground show what appear to be bullet holes or shrapnel damage, raising suspicions that the plane was brought down by a Russian surface-to-air missile.

Zaur Mammadov, one of the surviving passengers, said in a video recorded after his rescue that two loud bangs were heard before the crash, causing panic among the passengers, Jam News reported. Other images posted from inside the plane show limited but clearly visible damage to the interior of the plane that was caused by the explosion.

bne IntelliNews has been unable to confirm if the damage was caused by a SAM or if it would be consistent with an engine explosion caused by a bird. Most of what appears to be shrapnel damage appears to have been inflicted on the back half of the plane, behind the engines, from what can be seen in the video and images from the crash site.

Other videos shot by the passengers in the plane after the incident show passengers worried but calm. Moreover, the footage suggests the passengers were unsure what had happened.

One video from the cabin of the Baku-Grozny flight was taken just minutes before the crash by passenger Subkhon Rahimov, who recited the "kalma-shahadat" - a prayer Muslims say before death.

He sent the footage to his wife when he realised something was wrong before the plane attempted to land. However, he made no mention of a missile strike and appears to be unaware of the exact nature of the plane’s problem. Subkhon survived the crash.

There have been many reports that the airport in Grozny was under attack by Ukrainian drones, which may have led to the plane being rerouted from Grozny to Aktau. However, during the diversion, it remains possible that the plane sustained damage from a missile fired by Russian air defence, which was intercepting the drone attack.

Videos shot by the passengers before the crash show some damage to the wing and holes in the interior of the plane, but not catastrophic damage that would have been caused by a direct missile hit.

It is possible that a missile exploded near the plane, but then it is likely the passengers would have seen the explosion through the windows. It is also possible the plane was hit by shrapnel from a missile that exploded much further away from the plane out of the line of sight, but the concentration of shrapnel damage on the fuselage and in the tail strongly suggests the explosion was close to the plane. That strongly supports the theory of an explosion in the engine caused by a bird strike.

Russia says Azerbaijani plane tried to land during Ukraine drone attack


ByAFP
December 27, 2024

Russia claimed the plane was hit by shrapnel during a Ukrainian drone attack - Copyright AFP Issa Tazhenbayev

Russia’s aviation chief said Friday that an Azerbaijani Airlines plane that eventually crashed in Kazakhstan tried to land in the Chechen city of Grozny as it was being attacked by Ukrainian drones.

The Azerbaijan Airlines jet crashed near the Kazakh city of Aktau on Wednesday after attempting to land at its destination in Grozny and then diverting far off course across the Caspian Sea.

Thirty-eight of the 67 people on board died, with some reports suggesting the plane could have been accidentally shot at by Russian air defences.

A surviving passenger told Russian TV that an explosion appeared to take place outside the plane, with shrapnel flying in.

The head of Russia’s civil aviation agency, Dmitry Yadrov, said in a statement that “the situation on this day and at these hours in the area of Grozny airport was very complex”.

“Ukrainian attack drones at this time were making terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure in the cities of Grozny and Vladikavkaz,” Yadrov said, referring to a nearby city.

Yadrov said the Azeri pilot made “two attempts to land the plane in Grozny that were unsuccessful” in “thick fog”.

“The pilot was offered other airports. He took the decision to go to Aktau airport,” he added.

The Kremlin earlier Friday declined to comment on the deadly crash.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “until the conclusions of the investigation, we do not consider we have the right to make any comments and we will not do so”.

Some aviation and military experts have pointed to apparent shrapnel damage on the plane wreckage as evidence that it was hit by air defence.

Azerbaijan’s pro-government website Caliber and several other media have cited unnamed Azerbaijani officials as saying they believed a Russian missile fired from a Pantsir-S air defence system caused the plane to crash.

Ukraine’s presidency said Russia “must be held responsible for the downing” of the plane.



– Shrapnel –



Russian survivor Subkhonkul Rakhimov told RT state broadcaster that an explosion appeared to happen outside the plane, causing shrapnel to penetrate inside.

He said the explosion took place as the plane made a third attempt to land in Grozny in fog.

“The third time there was an explosion. I wouldn’t say it was inside the plane because the skin of the fuselage near where I was sitting flew off,” he said.

“I grabbed a lifejacket and saw there was a hole in it — it was pierced by shrapnel.”

“Somewhere between my legs this piece of shrapnel flew in and went right through the life jacket. I took a picture of the hole on my phone.”

The daughter of an air steward on the plane told AFP that her father, Zulfugar Asadov, was being treated in hospital for injuries to his head and back but had not broken any bones.

“He is in pain, his back hurts, he cannot speak much,” the woman, Konula Asadova, told AFP.

Azerbaijan Airlines said Friday it was suspending flights to 10 Russian cities, “taking into account flight safety risks”.



– Apology urged –



Contacted by AFP, Azerbaijani government officials did not respond to questions about the possible causes of the crash.

But Rasim Musabekov, an Azerbaijani lawmaker and member of the parliament’s international relations committee, urged Russia to apologise for the incident.

“They have to accept this, punish those to blame, promise that such a thing will not happen again, express regrets and readiness to pay compensation,” Musabekov told AFP.

“We are waiting for Russia to do this.”

He said the plane “was damaged in the sky over Grozny and asked to make an emergency landing”.

“According to all the rules of aviation, they should have allowed this and organised it.”

Instead the plane was not allowed to land at Grozny or nearby Russian airports and was “sent far away” across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan with “GPS switched off”, Musabekov said.

He suggested that the aim could have been for the plane to crash into the sea to “cover up a crime”.

If air defences were operating near Grozny airport, “they should have closed the air space. The plane should have been turned around as it approached Grozny. Why wasn’t this done?” he added.

burs/dt/phz

PIMP

The Matt Gaetz ethics report, explained

The report accuses Gaetz of paying women for sex — including a 17-year-old.


by Ellen Ioanes and Li Zhou

Dec 23, 2024
  VOX

Rep. Matt Gaetz speaks during the Republican National Convention at Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images



After much back-and-forth, the House Ethics Committee released a bombshell report about alleged sexual misconduct by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), stating that he broke multiple state laws and that he’s previously paid a minor for sex. Gaetz has categorically denied the allegations and on Monday filed a lawsuit aimed at preventing the report’s release.


The review, which is the culmination of a years-long investigation, contains multiple allegations of wrongdoing, including that Gaetz spent tens of thousands paying women, and in at least one instance a 17-year-old, for sex or drugs, and that he’s used illicit drugs like ecstasy and cocaine. Although the Ethics Committee concluded that Gaetz had not violated federal sex trafficking statutes, it found that the lawmaker had broken other state laws.


“The Committee concluded there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report reads.


There was some question about whether the report would be released, and substantial portions of it leaked before it was formally published. The Ethics Committee, a bipartisan panel that investigates wrongdoing by lawmakers, initially deadlocked when it came to releasing their results in the wake of Gaetz’s resignation from Congress. It’s uncommon for the panel to share its findings after a member is no longer in Congress, though it’s not unheard of.


Gaetz abruptly resigned following his nomination to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general. After he withdrew from consideration for attorney general when it became clear that he wouldn’t get sufficient Senate support, the Ethics panel ultimately voted to publicize the report.


The report contains detailed documentation of the allegations it levies against Gaetz and is the product of contacting more than two dozen witnesses and reviewing 14,000 documents. Whether the report will lead to additional legal consequences or political ramifications for the bombastic former member of Congress is still an open question, however. Here’s what you need to know about the report, and what may come next for Gaetz.

What does the report say?


The report centers on allegations of Gaetz paying women, and one teenage girl, for sex, his use of illegal drugs, and his acceptance of improper gifts.

“Commercial sex”: The report alleges that Gaetz paid women for sex on numerous occasions between 2017 and 2020, and paid a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017.

In the course of its investigation, which included multiple interviews with women who said they had sexual encounters with Gaetz, the Ethics Committee’s report said there were at least 20 instances when he paid women for sexual activity or drugs. They found such payments were made on platforms including PayPal, Venmo, and CashApp, as well as via check and cash. When given an opportunity to explain the payments he made, Gaetz did not provide any information to the committee.

Gaetz allegedly met many of these women via his friend Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County tax attorney who’s now serving 11 years in prison for multiple crimes, including underage sex trafficking and wire fraud. Greenberg connected with the women via a website called SeekingArrangement.com that aims to link older affluent men and younger women. Broadly, the report says there was evidence that women expected payment for their interactions with Gaetz and Greenberg, with the report citing explicit examples including one when a woman noted: “I usually do $400 per meet.”

RelatedMatt Gaetz’s scandal and legal problems, explained

One of the people who Gaetz allegedly had a sexual encounter with was 17 years old at the time of their meet-up in July 2017, the report notes. He allegedly had sex with her at a party that month; she did not disclose that she was under 18 nor did he ask her age. The committee concluded that he was not aware that that person was a minor, though the report also notes that “ignorance” of a minor’s age doesn’t shield an offending adult from being charged with statutory rape under Florida law.


Gaetz has repeatedly denied that he paid women for sex and denied that he had sex with a minor.


“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated - even some I never dated but who asked,” Gaetz previously wrote on X. “I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18.”


The panel determined that Gaetz’s actions were a violation of Florida state laws addressing commercial sex and statutory rape. It also did not find that Gaetz had violated federal sex trafficking laws, claiming that he did transport women across state lines for commercial sex, but that there was no evidence those individuals were under 18 or that they had been “induced by force, fraud, or coercion.”


Illegal drug use: Two women that the committee spoke with also testified to seeing Gaetz repeatedly engage in illegal drug use including that of ecstasy and cocaine, while additional evidence points to his regular use of cannabis.


Gaetz has denied allegations of unlawful drug use.


The committee found that these actions were a violation of Florida state laws, which bar the use of all three drugs for recreational purposes.


Excessive gifts: The panel alleges that Gaetz also accepted gifts in excess of the $250 limit that Congress members are supposed to adhere to (but that lawmakers, in practice, aren’t always held to). This specifically included a trip to the Bahamas in 2018, during which Gaetz allegedly accepted a flight on a private plane as well as lodgings.


Gaetz has denied these allegations, but failed to provide the committee with evidence that he paid for these services himself.


The committee determined that his acceptance of these gifts was an ethical violation of the House Gift Rule.


Obstruction of Congress: Gaetz did not voluntarily participate in an interview with the committee and also did not respond to a subpoena he faced for testimony. He provided some documents in response to the panel’s requests, but little relevant information, according to the report.


Gaetz has repeatedly cited the lack of charges levied against him by the DOJ inquiry and argued that the Congressional investigation was targeted.


The committee, however, stated that Gaetz was required by federal law to cooperate with a congressional investigation regardless of what the DOJ decided to do with its investigation, or how he may have felt about the House inquiry. Failing to answer the committee’s questions and being unresponsive to its subpoena constitutes “obstruction of Congress,” according to the report.

Why is the Ethics Committee report coming out now?


The Ethics Committee first began its investigation into Gaetz in 2021, but put it on pause once the Justice Department started its own investigation later that year. It took up its review once more after the DOJ inquiry ended in 2023. The department did not release any details about its findings or why it declined to continue its probe, though the New York Times reported that federal prosecutors were uncertain about their ability to make the case that Gaetz had broken federal law.


The panel was scheduled to release its findings in mid-November, right around when Trump announced Gaetz as his AG pick. Gaetz stepped down from Congress swiftly following that announcement, a surprising move as Congress members who are nominated typically haven’t given up their jobs before getting confirmed.


Gaetz’s departure raised questions about whether the committee would still publish the report, with some Republicans arguing that it was no longer in its “jurisdiction” since the conservative was no longer a lawmaker. While Gaetz was still under consideration for AG, the committee deadlocked about releasing the report. After he withdrew from the role, the majority — including at least one Republican member — voted on December 10 to release the report.


“The Committee has typically not released its findings after losing jurisdiction in a matter,” the report reads. “However, there are a few prior instances where the Committee has determined that it was in the public interest to release its findings even after a Member’s resignation from Congress.”

Is the Ethics Committee investigation connected to the DOJ’s investigation?


The two investigations aren’t connected in any legal way, though the Ethics Committee noted in its report that it tried to use some of the DOJ’s work in its investigation. DOJ pushed back on that effort and according to the committee, the DOJ failed to comply with a subpoena and FOIA request for information.


“The Committee hopes to continue to engage with DOJ on the broader issues raised by its failure to recognize the Committee’s unique mandate,” the report states.


The committee hoped to work with the DOJ in part because the two investigations covered many of the same allegations, primarily that Gaetz regularly paid women for sex, had sex with a minor, and transported women across state lines for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex.

RelatedMatt Gaetz, Trump’s uniquely unqualified pick for attorney general, withdraws


The DOJ investigation, which started in 2020 during Trump’s previous term, had a more limited scope than the ethics investigation. That’s because the DOJ looks for proof that a federal crime was committed, while the ethics panel is concerned with — as the report put it — “upholding the integrity of our government institutions.” That is, an act can be deemed unethical without being a federal crime.


Again, the DOJ’s investigation did not result in any federal charges against Gaetz and is no longer open.

Will the ethics report have any legal repercussions?


Although the federal government is no longer investigating Gaetz, the ethics report highlights several acts allegedly taken by Gaetz that lawmakers claim are state crimes. And that could lead to further legal entanglements for Gaetz, Donald Sherman, executive director and chief counsel for legal advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Vox.


“Of course, the committee no longer has jurisdiction over Mr. Gaetz, but … I would venture to guess that there is some conduct that he engaged in that can and should be investigated by local law enforcement,” dependent on state laws, statutes of limitations, and local willingness to launch an investigation, Sherman said.


The ethics report finds that Gaetz violated Florida state law by having sex with the 17-year-old, paying for sex, and using illicit drugs. Florida law enforcement officials have yet to announce any investigations into Gaetz related to either allegation. The DOJ has also made no indication it intends to revisit the matter, and given Gaetz is a Trump ally who was once in line to lead that department, it seems unlikely that Trump’s DOJ would reopen the case into Gaetz.

The high-tech future of assisted suicide is here. The world isn’t ready.

A “suicide pod” in Switzerland roils the right-to-die debate.


by Marin Cogan

Dec 26, 2024
VOX

Drew Shannon for Vox

LONG READ

The pod looked like a tanning bed from another planet: a human-sized chamber, white and sparkly purple with a clear glass door, resting on an inclined platform. Previously, it had been on display in public exhibitions, but now it was in Schaffhausen, in a large park in northern Switzerland, near the border with Germany.

A woman stood in front of it, under a dense canopy of trees. She wore a white fleece jacket, dark pants, and flip-flops. It was late September 2024, and the air in this part of the country had become cool.


The woman, a 64-year-old American whose name has not been made public, had come to the Alpine country, to this place of vineyards and rolling meadows and mountain views, to end her life.


It was a private decision that, paradoxically, would have global implications for the debate over end-of-life care and whether people have a right to medically assisted suicide.


For more than 25 years, Switzerland has been a destination for people who want a medically assisted suicide, thanks to the country’s longstanding and liberal law regarding the practice. Each year, the number of people choosing assisted suicide in the country grows; in 2023, that number reached more than 1,200. Most people who end their lives in Switzerland are elderly or have an incurable illness, though a person can sometimes get approval for an assisted suicide under other circumstances. And though the majority who die this way are citizens, Switzerland is one of the few countries that also allows foreigners to travel there for the purpose, a practice critics have derided as “suicide tourism.”


The country’s largest assisted suicide nonprofit, Exit, takes only citizens and permanent residents. But other prominent organizations, including Dignitas and Pegasos, accept foreigners. People who are interested reach out to the groups online and apply for membership, which provides counseling and guidance around end-of-life care. Those seeking a medically assisted death are required to have consultations with a doctor associated with one of the organizations. After determining that the person is eligible, of sound mind, and, when applicable, has considered their full range of treatment options, the doctor writes a prescription for sodium pentobarbital, the same substance used for pet euthanasia and many lethal injection executions in the US, to be used at a later date chosen by the patient.


The doctor is not allowed to administer the medication themselves. That practice is known as euthanasia, which is not legal in the country because it is considered “deliberate killing.” Instead, they provide the medication to the patient, who, in the presence of the doctor or an aide for one of the organizations, either swallows it or takes it with a gastric tube or an intravenous infusion.


The entire process, for foreigners, costs about $11,000 and usually takes a couple of months.


Had the American woman chosen to end her life under the standard Swiss protocol, it probably wouldn’t have been controversial. She reportedly had skull base osteomyelitis, a rare and painful inflammatory condition that is often fatal if untreated. She told the group helping her that her adult children fully supported her decision.


But she wasn’t there to end her life the standard way. Instead, she was about to become the first person to try a controversial new method for suicide, using a technology that would roil public debate over assisted suicide in Switzerland and capture attention around the globe.


She would use the Sarco pod, an invention of Philip Nitschke, a strident right-to-die advocate. Nitschke hopes that the 3-D printed pod, with a name that’s short for sarcophagus, will revolutionize the practice of voluntary assisted death by taking doctors out of the picture.


The Sarco, he has said, doesn’t require a lengthy screening process or thousands of dollars. Rather than relying on sodium pentobarbital, a person who wanted to use the pod could buy nitrogen. They would lie down inside the pod, resting their head on a neck travel pillow. Then, they would close the door and push a button. The chamber would fill with nitrogen gas, and oxygen levels would quickly drop below levels humans need to survive.


As a method of execution in the US, nitrogen hypoxia has been highly controversial. Earlier this year, UN experts raised concerns that the execution of Alabama death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith using nitrogen gas could constitute “torture,” and the state is currently being sued by another inmate alleging the practice is cruel and unconstitutional. Right-to-die advocates, though, say that when administered properly, it’s a relatively painless death because people exposed to high levels of nitrogen quickly lose consciousness.


The American woman entered the chamber just before 4 pm, according to Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, which had a photographer in the woods of Schaffhausen before and after the death to document the scene. To protect against the possibility that they might be accused of foul play, Nitschke and his colleagues also set up two video cameras to record. Then Nitschke went across the border to Germany, possibly to avoid the risk of arrest. The only person who remained with the woman at the scene the entire time was Florian Willet, a colleague of Nitschke’s who co-founded The Last Resort, an organization to promote the Sarco pod’s use in Switzerland.


Seconds after entering the pod, the woman pressed the button to release the gas. Willet waited with her, monitoring her vital signs on an iPad and relaying them to Nitschke over the phone. After confirming her death, Willet called the police — a standard practice after an assisted suicide in Switzerland.


Typically, police examine the scene to verify that there are no signs of foul play.


But this wasn’t a typical death. Police arrested Willet, his attorneys, and the de Volkskrant photographer nearby on suspicion of “inducing and aiding and abetting suicide,” according to Reuters.


More than eight weeks later, Willet remained in jail, with police investigating the woman’s death as a possible “intentional killing.”


And Switzerland, a country that has for decades maintained a public consensus in support of assisted suicide, has been confronted with a series of questions that have implications for one of the most significant moments of every person’s life: To what extent should people have the right to determine when and how they die? What are the moral and philosophical implications for a society that sanctions the practice of medically assisted suicide? How does a nation handle the need for the safety of vulnerable people while also protecting their dignity and individual rights?


Switzerland isn’t the only country that allows assisted suicide. Other nations, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Colombia, Spain, and Canada, also permit the practice, which some advocates call medical aid in dying (MAID) to differentiate it from the usual connotations of the word “suicide.” In late November, the British Parliament took the first step to pass a bill that would legalize assisted dying for some terminally ill patients.


In some countries, the law goes further than it does in Switzerland, allowing voluntary euthanasia, where doctors can administer lethal doses for patients who can’t or don’t want to do it themselves. Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, allow physician-assisted euthanasia for mental illnesses if a doctor determines that the condition creates unbearable suffering. What constitutes unbearable suffering, though, is inherently subjective and open to interpretation.


The number of deaths via euthanasia in both countries has grown considerably in recent years; the same is true of Canada, which recently passed some of the world’s most liberal euthanasia laws. Critics worry that the easy availability of assisted death creates incentives for people to see it as the only solution to their suffering, even when there might be effective treatments. They also worry about a “slippery slope” where doctor might approve assisted suicide for more and more reasons, ultimately resulting in suicides for non-medical reasons being enabled by law.


The United States does not permit euthanasia, but physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 states, including California, Oregon, and Washington. According to a Gallup survey earlier this year, 71 percent of Americans believed that a doctor should be able to administer a euthanasia drug if requested by a patient or their family member, and nearly the same amount supported physician-assisted suicide for people with terminal illnesses.


Erika Preisig, a family physician and founder of the organization Lifecircle, which helps foreigners come to Switzerland for assisted suicide and advocates for other countries to legalize it, says the issue is going to become more important as more baby boomers reach the end of their lives.


“They will not let others decide how they have to die. They will decide themselves,” says Preisig, who is a member of that generation. “This will raise the percentage of assisted dying all over.”

Drew Shannon for Vox


But even with widespread support, the practice is still controversial in the US and elsewhere. The American public, despite supporting legalization, is more divided on the morality of doctor-assisted suicide. It’s opposed by the Catholic Church and other Christian organizations, which believe the practice goes against God’s will. Some disability rights advocates have argued fiercely against it, saying that it allows medical professionals to offer disabled people death rather than finding ways to improve their lives. The American College of Physicians (ACP) also opposes medically assisted dying on the grounds that the practice is incompatible with a doctor’s duty as a healer who takes the Hippocratic Oath, promising to do no harm.


“[T]he focus at the end of life should be on efforts to prevent or ease suffering,” the ACP’s president said in 2017. Partly as a result of those disagreements, Americans have different rights regarding assisted suicide depending on which state they live in. That’s led some Americans, including the woman who used the Sarco pod, to come to countries like Switzerland to end their lives.



The birthplace of Calvinism and an intellectual center of the Protestant Reformation, Switzerland has a long history of bucking the dogma of the Catholic Church and charting its own moral and philosophical path. Famously neutral during the World Wars, and now home to world governing bodies like the United Nations and the World Health Organization, the country can appear to be a tightly regulated place like many other Western European countries.


In reality, it’s a society built on compliance with social and cultural norms moreso than government regulations. Political scientists point to it as among the most libertarian societies on earth, and Switzerland is consistently ranked as the number one country in the Human Freedom Index report put out by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.


Assisted suicide is no exception. The practice has been permitted in Switzerland longer than in any other country. In 1942, the government put into effect a statute outlawing abetting assisted suicide for “selfish purposes,” like gaining access to an inheritance, but otherwise, it wasn’t explicitly banned — which meant that, by omission, assisting suicide for non-selfish purposes was technically legal. To this day, the 1942 statute is the only law explicitly referring to assisted suicide. In an email to Vox, the prosecutor in charge of the case confirmed that Willet was arrested under suspicion of breaking this law.


In place of those laws, requirements for obtaining a medically assisted suicide were developed by doctors and codified into guidelines maintained by Switzerland’s medical professional organizations. The regulations are nonbinding, but disobeying them can in theory lead to professional sanctions. In practice, this has meant that the doctors are regulating themselves.


“We have one of the most liberal systems in the world,” Yvonne Gilli, the president of the country’s professional association for doctors, told Vox in an email. For most of the medical community, the desire seems to be to keep it that way. “We would therefore do well to leave doctors in a central role in assisted suicide,” Gilli wrote.


In a small, relatively homogenous nation of just under 10 million people, assisted suicide has never been quite the culture war issue it was in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a right-to-die advocate nicknamed “Dr. Death” by the media, filmed himself performing a voluntary euthanasia and sent the video footage to 60 Minutes, intentionally triggering a trial that would result in his conviction for murder.


In 2011, a referendum that proposed a ban on assisted suicide in Zurich, the country’s most populous canton or state, was rejected with 85 percent of the vote. That high level of public support has allowed assisted suicide organizations to operate with relatively little friction and without much public debate, even as demand increases. According to a long-term study of assisted suicides in the country from 1999-2018, the total number of physician-assisted suicides doubled every five years.


“Suicide assistance has been quite calm. The Swiss assisted suicide organizations were under the radar; there wasn’t much discussion about them,” says Bernhard Rütsche, a professor at the University of Lucerne and an expert on assisted suicide in Switzerland. “They care for their reputation. The whole branch of suicide assistance has been shaken up with this new method, and they don’t like that, quite understandably.”


The intervention of Nitschke and his Sarco pod threatens to upend the status quo.



In 1996, Nitschke became the first doctor in the world to help a terminally ill patient die legally by assisted suicide in Australia. A decade later, he and his partner Fiona Stewart published The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a guide that provides information about methods of assisted suicide and describes the process of obtaining one in Switzerland.


Nitschke, according to Katie Engelhart’s book The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die, began his work believing that patients with terminal illnesses should have the right to choose an end to their suffering. But as his advocacy deepened, his thinking evolved. Why should doctors like him be the one to make the decisions? Why should doctors get to determine what counts as extraordinary suffering and what doesn’t?


Over time, Nitschke came to believe that the right to die should be entirely in the hands of individuals and not medical professionals. The deeper his advocacy became, the more he clashed with other members of the medical community. He burned his medical license in 2015 after a protracted battle with Australia’s medical board. He also became more critical of mainstream MAID groups that focus only on the sickest patients.


He takes issue with the Swiss system, which he has said is too deferential to doctors and too expensive. “We are convinced that no money should be charged for an assisted death. Especially when you realize that it is already very expensive for foreigners who wish to die to travel to Switzerland,” Nitschke said of his organization, Exit International, in a recent interview. (Exit International, which is not related to the Swiss group Exit, pointed to statements on their website and declined to be interviewed before deadline.)


Nitschke approaches end-of-life issues with the zeal of a libertarian techno-futurist. In interviews, he’s spoken about a future where the Sarco pod’s blueprints are posted online, allowing anyone to 3-D print one anywhere in the world. He has said that AI could replace doctors in assessing whether a person meets the criteria to end their life. “We really want to develop that part of the process so that a person can have their mental capacity assessed by the software, rather than … spending half an hour with a psychiatrist,” Nitschke told Wired.


Nitschke’s unapologetic belief that people should be able to choose how and when they die, combined with his confrontational style, has made him a lightning rod for controversy, leading some of the doctors who support assisted dying to think that he does more harm to their cause than good.


“Nitschke wants to give everybody, without thinking, the possibility to die. For me, this is unethical,” says Preisig, the founder of Lifecircle. “This is very bad for Switzerland. It’s a big problem for us.” Leaders of other assisted suicide organizations have also been critical.


The debate over the Sarco pod has even reached the Swiss government. Nina Fehr Düsel, a member of the Swiss National Council (which is similar to the US Congress), has made a motion for the National Council to discuss assisted suicide in the coming months. She’s also asking her colleagues to consider banning the Sarco pod explicitly.


“I don’t want to overregulate this,” Fehr Düsel, a member of the populist right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which controls the most seats in the federal assembly, tells Vox. She has concerns about the use of nitrogen, which is at this point cheap and easy to obtain in the country. In general, she says, the organizations that are already established in the country should be left alone. “We already have these two longstanding organizations and that is enough,” Fehr Düsel says.


For others, the Sarco pod case has merely exposed the extent to which assisted suicide is operating without clear legal guidelines. “We need some regulation that ensures that autonomy is safeguarded and capacity is properly assessed, and the means for suicide assistance — the instruments and the medications — are safe and comply with human dignity,” says Rütsche, the professor at the University of Lucerne.


According to Rütsche, the government should codify the existing standards doctors have established, with laws around the assessment of someone’s capacity, obligations to provide information and counseling to make sure the decision is well considered, requirements for how the process takes place (including what drugs and devices are allowed and what aren’t), and oversight for the assisted suicide organizations — with the ability to ban a group for flouting the guidelines.


Whether Switzerland moves forward with a new law remains to be seen. But the Sarco pod’s future seems more certain.

Drew Shannon for Vox


Police confiscated the pod at the scene of the woman’s death. In November, Schaffhausen prosecutor Peter Sticher confirmed to Vox in an email that one person remained in police custody regarding the investigation. Willet, according to The Last Resort’s website, has been held in jail for two months.


Holding someone that long on suspicion of abetting a suicide for selfish purposes is highly unusual. But in late October, de Volkskrant, the Dutch paper, reported another reason that may explain Willet’s long detention: According to court records, a forensic doctor told investigators the woman was found with injuries to her neck, raising the possibility that Willet was the subject of an “intentional killing” investigation.


“The allegation of a [killing] is simply not true, and I’d guess everyone involved knows this,” says Andrea Taormina, the lawyer for the photographer who was detained after the woman’s death. “There are no facts that would indicate differently. This is mainly an allegation brought forward simply to raise the stakes in this procedure.”


De Volkskrant, which had access to and reviewed the camera footage, said in their report that nothing on the recording showed Willet opening the pod or doing anything to disturb the woman.


Ultimately, after 70 days in detention, Willet was released in early December.


Exit International and The Last Resort, Nitschke’s organizations, celebrated Willet’s release. “The allegation of intentional homicide was, and remains, absurd,” it said in a statement.


But in response to an email, Sticher told Vox that both investigations remained open. “All persons are still under investigations, for aiding and abetting a suicide for selfish purposes and for intentional homicide,” Sticher wrote. “But we had no more reasons to keep this last person in custody.”



While the drama brought by the Sarco pod’s use is exceptional, the broader debate shouldn’t be.


According to a UN report from 2023, the world population of people over 65 is expected to double, from 761 million in 2021 to 1.6 billion in 2050. In 25 years, people over 65 will make up 1 in 6 people on Earth — part of a global trend toward aging. Thanks to legalization in several countries, many of these people now know that physician-assisted suicide is an option. Assisted suicide remains rare, both globally and in the US. But as more attention is paid to it, the moral, philosophical, and political questions that the case prompted will only become more urgent.


In Switzerland, where assisted suicides are still a relatively small percentage of overall deaths, supporters say it’s important to maintain that right. “Modern medicine is keeping people alive longer and longer. This is why there are more and more very old people, and therefore more and more medical problems towards the end of life,” Marion Schafroth, the president of Exit, said in an email. “Human support for suicide is certainly not morally wrong. It serves the dignity and self-determination and safety of those who wish to die.”


Even if they don’t ultimately choose assisted suicide, says Preisig, the founder of Lifecircle, it’s important for people who are seriously ill to know they have the option. “People are not afraid of death, they’re afraid of unbearable suffering,” she says. “When they know they could [die] if they wanted to, then they lose this fear of unbearable suffering. This is the most important point for me.”


Still, other countries, like Canada, are grappling with serious concerns about whether the criteria for approval is expanding too quickly, enabling or even encouraging people who aren’t suffering to end their lives.


Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program is a primary example for critics of what can go wrong. When MAID was first legalized in 2016, Canada had strict criteria: It was only to be used to end unbearable suffering in patients whose conditions were advanced and whose impending death was reasonably foreseeable.


In 2021, following a court ruling, the government removed the criteria that a death be reasonably foreseeable. Stories emerged of people who had been approved for euthanasia who didn’t have terminal illnesses. Health care workers have said they’re struggling with the ethical implications arising from people requesting euthanasia not for incurable illnesses but because they’re on government subsidies, were recently widowed, or are dealing with chronic but nonfatal conditions like obesity. And in October, a Canadian committee found that people had received approval for euthanasia for reasons such as social isolation.


Some disability rights groups in Canada are challenging the country’s expanded MAID laws in court. “We are witnessing an alarming trend where people with disabilities are seeking assisted suicide due to social deprivation, poverty, and lack of essential supports,” a leader of the group, Inclusion Canada, said in a statement in September. “This law also sends a devastating message that life with a disability is a fate worse than death, undermining decades of work toward equity and inclusion.”


The controversies around these cases, like the Sarco case, are raising uncomfortable questions for which there might not be easy answers. A legalized assisted suicide program without strong guardrails runs the risk of creating opportunities for abuse. Among those who decide to die via assisted suicide will likely be complicated people with complicated motivations, some of which might not seem reasonable to others. On the other hand, in countries where assisted suicide is illegal, people often find other ways to end their lives. (The leading cause of suicide deaths in the United States is not a new technology like the Sarco pod but a much older one: guns.)


How governments balance the need to protect their citizens’ rights while also safeguarding the most vulnerable among them is a real conundrum. Switzerland found a balance, but the Sarco pod threatened to upset it. Restoring the balance is more than just a major imperative. It’s a matter of great moral significance — and of life and death.

Marin Cogan is a senior correspondent at Vox. She writes features on a wide range of subjects, including traffic safety, gun violence, and the legal system. Prior to Vox, she worked as a writer for New York magazine, GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and other publications.

LA thinks AI could help decide which homeless people get scarce housing — and which don’t

Without enough houses for its growing homeless population, the city is using machine learning to make its process fairer.

by Carly Stern

Dec 27, 2024

VOX


Drew Shannon for Vox

LONG READ

Reba Stevens held her breath as she walked up the steps to the apartment, her then-6-month-old son perched on her hip. After 21 years of homelessness, she prayed: God, please let it be a decent place for me and my baby to live.

Stevens turned the key and walked through the gray front door into her first stable home since she was a teenager. She couldn’t believe her eyes: a spacious living room, two large bedrooms, a beautiful bathroom, even a walk-in closet — thanks to a Los Angeles County housing voucher. She stepped back into the hallway. “I hit the floor and I cried,” said Stevens, recalling that day in the fall of 2000.

More than 20 years later, Stevens, a Black woman now in her 60s, has become an influential advocate for unhoused people in Los Angeles. She is working alongside other people who have been homeless, as well as frontline caseworkers, academics, data scientists, and city administrators, on a pilot project that aims to more accurately and equitably identify vulnerable people in need of housing assistance — with guidance from machine learning.

It’s a project that is badly needed. Today, at least 75,000 people are unhoused in LA County, up from nearly 53,000 in 2018 — and the true number is likely much higher. For every available slot for permanent supportive housing in LA County, about four more are needed. That has left about 17,000 people waiting in line, while thousands in need of a home remain unconnected to the system that is supposed to provide them aid.

Across the US, the gap between the housing we have and the housing we need is estimated to be in the ballpark of 4 million units. In California alone, the shortfall is estimated to be roughly 840,000 units.

This leaves housing administrators grappling with the most vexing question in public policy: Who should we help first? The people most likely to recover quickly and gain stability, or those in the most dire emergencies? As long as housing remains scarce, must we accept that one unhoused person’s well-being can only be improved at the expense of another’s?

The housing crisis has exposed flaws and racial biases in the old system, and it requires extraordinary solutions. Los Angeles is making a bet that machine learning can help solve that problem. But, at the same time, the increased application of machine learning and AI in public policy continues to raise concerns about unintended consequences — which, in the case of having housing or not, can make the difference between life and death.


Eric Rice, a social work professor who co-founded the University of Southern California’s Center for AI in Society, a collaboration between USC social work professors and engineers that applies AI to tackle social problems, has helped lead a multi-phase project to create a more rational process for allocating housing to unhoused people. He and his team started with identifying the issues with LA County’s old housing assessment process; Rice’s research revealed that LA’s process for evaluating people most in need of housing falsely scored Black and Latino clients as being less vulnerable than white clients. They then recruited community members to revise the assessment survey and the process for administrating it, and worked with researchers who applied machine learning techniques to more empirically correct for potential biases in the results.


“This is the first project to do this in a major city with the complexity that LA has, the scope of homelessness that LA has, and also the concern about race equity,” Rice said.


Stevens joined a community advisory board that would set a new vision for how to identify the people truly most in need. They are part of a quiet, nationwide revolution in thinking about how to best help the people who need a home. In LA, Pittsburgh, and even rural Missouri, officials are asking the same question: Can new algorithms that predict a person’s risk make a dent in America’s homelessness crisis?

Homelessness, by the numbers

When Stevens was homeless, in the 1980s and ’90s, there was little rhyme or reason to who got housing assistance and who didn’t. Across the nation, the de facto models for homeless services either were first come, first served or functioned as lottery systems.

Over the years, housing officials struggled to make the system more rational. In 2012, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) required states to set up “coordinated entry systems” to standardize how people were assessed and prioritized for services. Coordinated entry became the new “front door to the homeless services [system],” as Stevens puts it. “You can’t get nothing without going through the front door.”

RelatedAfter decades of inaction, states are finally stepping up on housing

A year later, a new screening survey called the VI-SPDAT was rolled out across the nation to impose more rigor on the process. The survey asked a few dozen questions meant to quantify — in a single number — a person’s risk of severe outcomes like ending up in the emergency room, having a mental health crisis, becoming incarcerated, or dying on the streets. Answers to the survey questions produced a score out of 17, ranking a respondent’s vulnerability.


The goal was to identify people in the most severe circumstances and get them help first, precisely in order to prevent those extreme outcomes from coming to pass. “HUD has found that when there are few incentives, people with the highest needs go unserved and often die on the street. This is a tragedy in this country,” said a HUD spokesperson.


The higher the survey score, the higher a person is ranked in the queue for permanent supportive housing, or apartments with on-site support services, like help with employment or mental health care. In theory, this approach — used not just in LA, but also in cities nationwide — was meant to deliver what scarce housing existed to those who needed it most.


But this system still isn’t working functionally or fairly. Black people, who are less than 10 percent of the county’s population, make up more than 30 percent of people without a home in LA County. Decades of racist redlining, predatory mortgage lending, and the criminalization of poverty have combined with a housing shortage to create an epidemic of Black homelessness.

In 2018, LA County convened the Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness to propose measures to address the root causes of the crisis. Stevens became a trusted voice on the committee. One key finding: The VI-SPDAT survey was broken. LA needed to fix the front door to its homeless services.

Rice’s study found, through community advisory board meetings and case manager interviews, that a key problem was people often aren’t told how this information will be used — so many clients are afraid to be honest.

Compared to white clients, Black clients were 6 percent more likely to get “false negatives,” or risk scores lower than more objective measures of their vulnerability. To make those estimates, Rice’s team used county data on psychiatric holds, emergency room visits, jail, continued homelessness, and death, and then compared what actually happened to clients against their assessed vulnerability. Black clients were clearly more vulnerable than the survey detected; Latino clients were also 3 percent more likely than white clients to get false negatives.

Why would someone in need of housing be less than forthcoming? Survey questions can be convoluted and invasive, inquiring about substance use, sexual trauma, and domestic violence. “It’s worded in a way that it can come across accusatory,” said Debra Jackson, a housing matcher for the homeless services nonprofit St. Joseph Center, who serves clients across Malibu, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica.

Sometimes, caseworkers administered the VI-SPDAT when they’d only just met someone, or when a client was in a crisis state and couldn’t think clearly. “Particularly Black people, who encounter law enforcement a lot more than someone else … have this fear of the judicial system not working up on their behalf in a fair way,” Jackson said.


Debra Gatlin, another person enlisted to guide Rice’s experiment, has leaned on her own experiences to help match the Los Angeles County mental health department’s clients with permanent housing. She became unhoused for the first time in her life in her 50s, after losing a job in the 2008 recession. She was shuffled from agency to agency, seeking referral after referral, like a game of hot potato. Nobody helped her.


“I am the person who helped me get housed,” she said. After finding a home without government assistance, Gatlin joined the mental health department staff in 2016. She’s seen its problems up close, as both client and administrator.


Before meeting with a client near the end of 2021, Gatlin checked the person’s file; he’d taken the VI-SPDAT survey at least twice before and gotten a low vulnerability score of 6 out of 17. (The county’s current threshold score to be prioritized for permanent supportive housing is 8.)


They began the evaluation, with Gatlin paying close attention to his facial expressions and body language. She tried to make him feel comfortable.


“None of this is meant to get you in trouble. This is to help you,” she reassured the man.


When Gatlin asked about military service, her client said yes. He had not disclosed this in prior surveys, but with her, he opened up and shared other details about his history he’d not previously revealed. His vulnerability score nearly tripled to 16 out of 17.

Several housing options were now available to him. He chose to move into a place near Brentwood, a neighborhood on LA’s Westside.

During the monthly meetings of the LA pilot project’s community advisory board, Gatlin shared her experiences seeing a client’s fate hinge on how the survey was administered. She joined Stevens, Jackson, and more than a dozen others every few months for nearly two years to map out how to overhaul the housing triage process.

Board members stressed the importance of timing; caseworkers should never undertake the survey when meeting someone for the first time or when someone was actively in crisis without organized thinking. Jackson watched people struggle to correlate their histories of trauma with their current situation.

“They can’t make that connection,” she said. “You see that pattern over and over again.”

Why the old system failed

The community advisory board recruited by Rice and his colleagues in 2020 first sought to identify problems with the old survey, propose best practices for administration, and refine the language to be more sensitive to people’s trauma.

That was the relatively straightforward part. The members next had to decide how the new triage process would assess vulnerability — a dilemma with no clear answers. Should they prioritize housing assistance for the highest-need people who face the most significant risk of adverse events like emergency room visits, incarceration, and death? Or should they prioritize the people most likely to quickly exit homelessness for good, those who might need less support for less time than others to achieve stability?

“It’s like the sinking ship law that comes into place. You have a lot of people who are drowning. Who are you going to save first?” said Sam Tsemberis, an associate clinical professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, who created the Housing First model that prioritizes housing for at-risk people before contending with other issues. “It’s an impossibly difficult decision we shouldn’t even be having to make. It’s like ranking levels of misery and poverty and desperation.”


Building more housing would, of course, make this less of a zero-sum exercise. But parochial political feuds and byzantine zoning codes have hampered LA’s efforts to get more new housing off the ground. Until enough new housing is built, someone has to figure out who gets the accommodations that currently exist — and who doesn’t.


Stevens grappled with these questions from the perspective of someone who had needed help long before it came.

RelatedWhy buying a house feels impossible right now


At age 19, she had been a caregiver for a family friend while raising her toddler and attending college. But when that friend passed away, the woman’s extended family kicked Stevens out of the house.


Stevens had no savings. She left her child in her mother’s care while attending classes and couch-surfed for as long as she could. Sometimes she rode the bus all night, hiding in the back. One driver used to silently pass her a doughnut and coffee at daybreak. Stevens had never used alcohol or drugs while she had housing, but she started using. “I was embarrassed, I was ashamed,” she said. She dropped out of college later that year.


Each year she went without a home, Stevens’s situation continued to deteriorate. She spent time in jail and experienced domestic violence. She found an affordable apartment, but relapsed and lost it. When she found housing again, in 1986, she had a new job, but fell behind on rent and eventually was evicted.


It was not until the summer of 2000 that Stevens’s name was called for a subsidized housing voucher. She was celebrating two years of sobriety, almost to the exact day, and making strides in therapy. “I believe that it was an act of providence,” she said.


Despite her gratitude for this breakthrough, Stevens believes the system should intervene before people’s lives fully unravel. The VI-SPDAT wasn’t in place when she was unhoused, but her vulnerability score at age 19 would have been much lower than at 40, after all she’d been through. Had she received help much earlier — even though her score likely would have been lower — she might have been able to prevent two decades of suffering.


“The truth of the matter is that everybody is vulnerable,” Stevens said. But under the current approach, “you got to be broke down and shattered for me to help you.”


“You’ve got a better chance with somebody who just fell because they lost their job. Those people should be prioritized, too, because they can get up. They already got boots, they just got a broken strap. Help them fix the strap.”


But this would mean people on the verge of crisis would be less likely to get resources. “Some chunk of those people are going to continue to experience homelessness, and they’re going to continue to do badly, and they will eventually be the people that are being prioritized,” Rice said.


He emphasized that the longer people are homeless, the more likely they are to experience adverse events. Without help, the people today who are deemed not vulnerable enough to warrant aid will eventually become the most downtrodden — but only after years of difficulty, suffering, and diminished health.


“Without enough resources, we can’t … put to the front of the emergency room the people who’ve got a sprained ankle when we’ve got people who have arterial bleeds,” Rice said. “The thought process, for better or for worse, is that people with sprained ankles just have to wait.


“In this context, the people with sprained ankles will eventually have arterial bleeds.”

How machine learning could help


To Stevens, based on her experiences, it was clear they should bandage the sprains. But HUD had a federal mandate in place that coordinated entry systems must prioritize people with more severe needs and vulnerability for assistance first. (A representative from HUD couldn’t confirm whether local agencies would lose funding if they didn’t comply.)


The other board members, while sympathetic to Stevens’s argument, concluded they were bound by this mandate. LA County’s revised triage process would focus on the highest-need people.


The next phase of the project would involve using data science to reduce some of the biases, both human and systemic, exposed in the old triage process.


The previous triage tool had relied solely on self-reported information from the survey to produce a vulnerability score. Now, Rice’s colleagues would build a more complex predictive risk model. They evaluated historical data from the last five years to identify which survey questions were actually correlated to adverse events and which were not. They used criminal, hospital, and death records, as well as data collected through housing authorities.


The mission to produce the new risk model was assigned to Brian Blackwell, a senior data scientist for California Policy Lab, a research group affiliated with the Universities of California.


His goal was to slim the survey down to only include questions with a statistical correlation to the outcomes that Rice’s team cared about. That way, the team could cut extraneous questions that obscured a client’s true vulnerability and could be traumatizing for a client to talk through unnecessarily.


But a better survey alone wouldn’t eliminate all the preexisting biases that prevented people in need from being identified, particularly racial biases. Blackwell wanted the predictive risk model to correct for the old tool’s error rate for clients of color. “That’s someone who perhaps could have benefited from permanent housing or a housing subsidy,” he explained, “but the tool didn’t recognize that.


“All predictive models make errors — that’s inevitable — but what you want to make sure is that those errors don’t systematically discriminate against certain groups,” Blackwell added.

Blackwell’s team sought to ensure the new model would no longer have a statistical difference in accuracy by race. They opted for a simple algorithm that would allow housing officials to continue administering the survey to clients in the field. The machine’s decision-making would also be transparent. The model — known as “ordinary least squares linear regression” — estimates the relationship between different variables to make forecasts. (Some liken it to the way a GPS navigates through data to find the best route to a destination.)

The new tool now rests in the hands of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). Marina Flores, LAHSA’s director of systems and planning, said the agency will start training workers on the new process in December. LAHSA plans to implement and start using the tool for permanent supportive housing prioritization by January 2025.

Caseworkers will still administer the new VI-SPDAT with a pen and paper, but will input each answer on a computer. The new model assigns different point values to different questions, with more weight given to questions that are most closely associated with negative outcomes. The system will spit out a single number summarizing a person’s vulnerability, as before, but the adjusted scoring system should correct for previous racial biases.

Flores said the new process is needed to rebuild trust with the case workers who saw how flawed the old system was. She’s glad LAHSA’s new model will cut extraneous questions — such as “do you have planned activities, other than just surviving, that make you feel happy and fulfilled?” — and will only include ones with a demonstrated correlation to adverse outcomes.

“We’re able to use something that actually has some validity to do it,” she said.

The new risk prediction model will tell case workers like Gatlin about who needs housing most urgently. But the caseworkers will still have discretion about which housing resources should be allocated to the people identified as most vulnerable — at least for now.

Phebe Vayanos, a USC engineering professor who co-directs its Center for AI in Society with Rice, had built a housing allocation algorithm that would match clients with specific housing as part of the project. But LA officials have opted to hold off on implementing it.

Flores knows integrating AI into a process that alters the fate of so many could be controversial, given public skepticism about the technology. Experts routinely warn that models are only as fair as the datasets they train on and that machine learning could amplify existing racial biases. Skeptics caution against removing too much human judgment from subjective, life-or-death decisions. LA officials wanted to be cautious and test the waters.

Already, the same concepts motivating LA’s project are being scaled elsewhere. In 2023, a team based in rural Missouri launched a similar project to overhaul their triage process and fix their own “front door” by adopting many principles from Rice’s pilot.

“When people are talking about machine learning … some people may hold a view in terms of, ‘Oh, it’s frightening, it’s biased,’” said Hsun-Ta Hsu, who studied under Rice before joining the University of Missouri’s School of Social Work from 2015 to 2022. Hsu is helping lead the Missouri project.

“It’s probably likely so. But there’s a way to address those [biases],” Hsu said. “Our community stakeholders, the most vulnerable population who are likely to be directly impacted by the consequences of the tool … they help us to define what the prioritization should look like.”

“A huge leap in the right direction”

Even some of those closest to the project are critical and harbor doubts. At times, they question whether they’re fighting the right battle. While those like Gatlin feel it’s worthwhile to fix the front door, others like Stevens don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that the house is still broken.

Stevens is not convinced these changes to LA’s coordinated entry system will make a dent. “This thing has just gotten too far out of hand for any kind of tool to be a right tool,” Stevens said. “We can’t say, ‘Housing is a human right,’ and then be saying, ‘Oh, but you gotta score [a] 15.’”

“It’s urgent,” she said. Yet the message “is still hold on and wait.”

Rice is learning to live in the gray area. “What I’ve done is helped to work on making a system that is inadequate to deal with the scope of the problem fair, or more fair, but not necessarily … [solved] a larger, more fundamental problem of inadequate housing resources in our country,” he said.

“That is a more profound problem,” he said, one that requires “a shift in our thinking as Americans about the value of taking care of citizens who fall through the cracks.”

In the meantime, he believes in the value of incremental progress. “Until our country has the political will to address homelessness … with a greater emphasis on creating more housing, we need to make sure that the existing system that is being funded — that is in existence — is fair,” he said.

Jackson takes a pragmatic view: She sees the project as a crucial first step. “If it rolls out the way that we hope, then it will be a huge leap in the right direction for helping to identify vulnerability, and getting the most information you can in the least harmful aspect,” she said. “The goal is to move someone from unhoused to housed with the least amount of trauma.”

Gatlin, for her part, feels hopeful that changing the triage process will be consequential. She’s seen how much this single interaction can make or break an unhoused person’s fate. “This is your life that we’re dealing with,” she said. Each life saved makes a difference.

To finally have a seat at the table — to feel her own agency in shaping LA’s course on an issue that had so deeply affected her — felt “exhilarating.”

“I’ve been out here advocating for homeless populations and homelessness for a long time,” Gatlin said. “I really felt like my voice is being heard.”

Carly Stern is an independent journalist based in New York who explores different facets of inequality through narrative stories. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and California Health Report, among other publications.


This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.