Pulitzer Prize-Winning Reporter Retires From The Washington Post

Four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sari Horwitz retired after 40 years at The Washington Post, the newspaper announced in February.

Throughout her career, the investigative reporter wrote for nearly every section in the Post, with a penchant for covering criminal justice issues including the opioid epidemic, police shootings and, most recently, abuse within Native American boarding schools.

“I loved being a reporter at The Washington Post,” Horwitz said. “I feel so honored and privileged to work with The Washington Post for four decades.”

Horwitz and her colleague, Scott Higham, were awarded the Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 2002 for a series that exposed Washington, D.C.’s role in the neglect and deaths of more than 200 children in foster care.

Horwitz was among three teams of Post reporters who won Pulitzers: one for a series investigating the unusually high rate of D.C. police shootings in the 1990s, for breaking news coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings and for national coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“I loved finding out things people didn’t want me to know,” Horwitz said. “It’s exciting.”

The veteran reporter knew she wanted to pursue investigative journalism when the 1972 Watergate scandal broke out. She had been a high school student in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona.

“The idea that you could actually have such an important impact on the world was very enticing to me, and the idea that you could spend your days talking to people and getting information from them and finding out secrets and writing them was really appealing to me,” Horwitz said.

Inspired by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting and her father’s love of writing, Horwitz got involved with her college newspaper. She wrote for “Congressional Quarterly” for a few years post-graduation, then pursued her master’s at Oxford University.

Horwitz became a summer intern at the Post in 1984 before Ben Bradlee hired her as a full-time reporter.

“I started, like many reporters start across the country, as a night police reporter in D.C., and then worked up all the different beats: schools, government,” Horwitz said. “That was how it started.”

Though she went on to become a national reporter, spending most of her career on the Post’s Investigative staff, some of Horwitz’s favorite stories have taken place in D.C. She began the night police beat in 1986, during a surge of crack cocaine use.

“It was so dangerous at night — the editors were so concerned about it, they actually assigned me a bulletproof vest to wear,” Horwitz recalled.

She spent years covering the D.C. police through the 1980s. Horwitz’s stories documented the police response to the crack cocaine crisis, which had been to “sweep [the streets of] D.C. and arrest hundreds and hundreds of African American men.”

Her many late nights paved the way for a series years later on mass incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses in the United States.

“These stories I wrote about mass incarceration didn’t win any big prize, but they were satisfying in a whole different way,” Horwitz said.

Having their faces on the front page of the Post shed light on these individuals hoping for clemency.

“It made lawmakers, the attorney general, the president, [and other] people see these people, see their faces, hear their stories,” Horwitz said.

Sharanda Jones, the subject of a story, had been serving a life sentence in federal prison for a nonviolent drug offense, her first arrest. After Horwitz’s 2015 story featuring Jones was published, President Barack Obama granted Jones clemency: “That was more gratifying than any prize.”

Weldon Angelos had been 24 when he was sentenced to 55 years in prison for possession of marijuana. Angelos was released from prison after Horwitz wrote about him.

“That’s a different kind of impact,” Horwitz said. “It might not get accolades, but it felt so important to me. Having covered crime on the streets for so long, I could bring that experience to these stories about people who were serving extraordinarily long sentences for drug crimes.”

The last story Horwitz worked on before her retirement was an exposé on Native American boarding schools. For 150 years, the U.S. government had taken Native children to these schools and forcibly assimilated them to American culture in “one of the darkest chapters of American history,” Horwitz said.

Alongside a team of reporters, she spent a year and a half investigating the sexual abuse of these students by Catholic priests and the more than 3,100 deaths at the boarding schools between 1828 and 1970.

“It’s one of the most difficult stories I’ve ever worked on journalistically — to get all the information, to dig up the data to find the number of children who died — but also emotionally,” Horwitz said.

She drove in a caravan for four days with members of the Fort Belknap tribe from the site of the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, boarding school to Montana for the reburials of three children’s remains, while simultaneously coping with her own grief: the loss of her mother, who died in November 2023.

It was a “very, very emotional, intense” time of overlap for Horwitz, who found solace in the Jewish community at D.C.’s Adas Israel Congregation.

“Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt was incredibly supportive before and after my mother died,” Horwitz said.

Debbi Wilgoren, a Post colleague, took Horwitz to a morning minyan at Adas Israel after her mom’s death.

“I never imagined I would do this [for the full 11 months],” said Horwitz, who was raised Reform Jewish. “I began going every day. That community was so welcome and being there was so comforting.”

Horwitz went to minyan and said Kaddish for her mother for 11 months, sometimes in the early mornings or after working all day on the Native American boarding schools story.

“I remember coming back from Carlisle … and I went to a Shabbat service and I remember it just helped me so much, spiritually, to deal with all the trauma and the grief I was experiencing in my job,” Horwitz said.

Now, Horwitz is free from the near-constant news cycle and cross-country traveling for stories. She will miss the lifelong friends she’s made and the exciting nature of her work, but plans to spend quality time with her husband and daughter, who live in D.C., and get more involved with activities at Adas Israel.

“I want to live life not on deadline,” Horwitz said. “I’ve devoted my life to working as a reporter and now I want to bring more balance to my life.”

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