On Sunday, The Kansas City Star published one of its best stories in recent months. It was the heartbreaking story of a 14-year-old Afghan immigrant, Rezwan Kohistani, who committed suicide last May after he and his family were sent off by immigration officials to a small town in southwest Missouri, where there were no other Afghans and where no one spoke the Kohistanis’ native language, Dari.
Rezwan essentially died of loneliness and frustration.
Telling his story, and that of his family, were Matti Gellman, a reporter for The Star, and Kartikay Mehrotra, a reporter for ProPublica, a nonprofit organization based in New York. ProPublica was the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize.
One of the best parts of the story is how Gellman and Mehrota describe America’s “gutted system” of handling refugees — gutted in no small measure by former President Donald Trump’s decision to slash the number of refugees that the U.S. would accept each year by 80 percent. As a result, hundreds of nonprofits, which get a small payment for each refugee they relocate, had to cut their staffs or close.
Under President Joe Biden, the system’s cylinders are starting to fire up again, but many refugees are still getting lost in the shuffle.
After being passed along from one immigration organization to another, the Kohastani family ended up in Oronogo, MO, a town of 2,500 that is west of I-49 and north of Joplin. The family had asked to go to St. Louis, where a relative lived, but in the shuffle, the request got lost.
At Webb City High School, which Rezwan attended sporadically, he attempted to communicate with the few students who reached out to him through a telephone translation app, but most students simply ignored him.
Gellman and Mehrotra describe his last day at school like this…
On the last day of Rezwan Kohistani’s life, he ate lunch alone.
Three other boys were at his table in the high school cafeteria, two of their trays touching Rezwan’s, surveillance video shows. They laughed among themselves, seemingly oblivious to their classmate, even after one of the boys accidentally knocked over Rezwan’s milk carton. Rezwan, a tall and handsome freshman, had arrived at the school four months earlier, after fleeing Afghanistan with his family. He sat at the table for a few more minutes, at one point covering his face in apparent distress. Then he got up and made his way through the halls, past a bulletin board announcing, “You belong.”
Rezwan pushed open the school door, walked out into the rain and sent his mother a text in his native language, Dari, saying “goodbye.”
That was on May 4. The next morning police received a 911 call that a student had been found dead near the high school baseball field.
The preliminary autopsy report declared Rezwan’s death a suicide…The story does not describe the manner of death.
The story says that a few students who had befriended Rezwan grieved. One was quoted as saying, “I think this whole thing could have been avoided if there were other Afghan kids and he had a group to be in instead of being alone.”
Others, on the other hand, were completely indifferent. For example, when investigators asked the boys who had sat at Rezwan’s lunch table what they recalled, they said they had been unaware of him. One said, “What’s a Rezwan?
Sadly, Rezwan, the oldest of six children, had set his sights on moving to Dallas, where the family had relatives and where there is a large Afghan community that had offered to help the Kohistani family.
In mid-April, a few weeks before Rezwan took his life, he and his father had driven to Dallas to check it out. The trip went well, and the family decided to move. However, the executive director of the immigration organization that had brought them to Oronogo convinced Rezwan’s father to hold off until the end of the school year.
Rezwan must have been crushed…He had had enough of Oronogo, enough of life without significant connection to his peers, and despair overwhelmed him.
…Congratulations to Matti Gellman and Kartikay Mehrotra and The Star and ProPublica. I hope this story turns out to be a big prize winner.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
This is a truly heartbreaking story. The article Matti Gellman wrote in The Star six months ago also covered many of the hardships faced by Afghan refugees in general and the Kohistani family in particular.
Americans also need to remember the tragic circumstances the country of Afghanistan is currently experiencing. The Star posted this Associated Press article on its website (and it is in today’s Star e-edition): “Red Cross: Afghans will struggle for their lives this winter.”
https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/world/article269023202.html
I missed the story in June, which Matti wrote shortly after Rezwan’s death. I went back and read it today, and I’m more impressed than before how much she and Kartikay were able to unearth — and how they developed their material — the second time around. It’s one of those stories that keeps haunting a good reporter, and one you don’t want to let go of.
It’s unfortunate how few people will see the story, given the state of The Star and how poorly they feature the most important stories they have. Sunday’s story, for example, started out at the top of the page but was quickly boxed in by stories about that afternoon’s Chiefs’ game. And the way they cover the Chiefs now is simply to throw everything out there, like mud on the side of a barn. It’s confusing and overwhelming. They should pick the best one or two Chiefs stories for the front and then let the readers go to the secondary Chiefs pages from the main menu at upper left.