Aviva Okeson-Haberman, the KCUR reporter who was killed last month by a stray bullet, was a Jewish woman from Springfield, Missouri.
Okeson-Haberman, 24, was struck while in her first-floor apartment in the 2900 block of Lockridge Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri.
No arrests have been made and the case remains under investigation, a spokesman for the Kansas City Police Department said via email Monday.
“She was an especially beloved friend and colleague just beginning what promised to be a brilliant career. We, at KCUR, join her family and friends in mourning her passing,” KCUR senior reporter and editor, Dan Margolies, wrote in the April 25 online story about the death of Okeson-Haberman.
The day of the incident she had come home after apartment hunting in Lawrence, Kansas, where she was about to start a new job covering social services and criminal justice.
KCUR reported that Okeson-Haberman was found unconscious April 23 by a colleague who had gone to check on her after she’d failed to respond to messages throughout the day. Okeson-Haberman was rushed to a hospital, where she was placed on life support.
“Social services is a tough beat, but I’m a tough reporter,” she wrote in her application for her new job at the Kansas News Service, a statewide reporting initiative headquartered at KCUR. “I’ll ask the hard questions, dig into the data and spend time building trust with sources. It’s what’s required to provide an unflinching look at how state government affects those entrusted to its care.”
Okeson-Haberman hoped to focus on foster care because she had spent time in foster homes in her teens.
One of her most compelling recent reports was an audio diary of nurses on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. Peggy Lowe, the reporter who found Okeson-Haberman unconscious and went with her to the hospital, told the first responders about those reports.
“That made the nurses love her last night, even though she wasn’t conscious,” Lowe said in the KCUR obituary.
Kansas City’s mayor and the governor of Kansas were among those who offered their condolences and memories of Okeson-Haberman on Twitter.
Okeson-Haberman won prizes for her efforts at the University of Missouri’s highly regarded journalism school, from where she graduated in 2019.
One of her early reports for KCUR was in 2018 at an event featuring talks by survivors of gun violence, among them Jewish students from the mass killing that year in Parkland, Florida. She also spoke to Jack Reeves, a friend of Reat Underwood, one of the victims of a deadly antisemitic attack on Jewish facilities in Overland Park in 2014.
“Losing someone that you personally know is unlike any other feeling because it’s not like it’s some issue that you are isolated from that’s happening on the other side of the country,” Reeves told her. “It’s something that is happening in your community that you have a direct relationship with.”
Okeson-Haberman’s passion and powers of suasion are evident in a high school report from 2015 on practical ways to help the environment. She urged other students to emulate her temple, which she said was “like a church for Jewish people,” and which donated 50 cents for each page of Hebrew school homework for a cause chosen by the class.
“Last year we chose WWF (World Wildlife Foundation), a charity that helps wild animals,” she said at the time. “They wrote back, telling us we raised enough money that we had saved a tiger! They had also enclosed a picture of the tiger. So maybe you could do something like that for your neighborhood. Many small steps lead to one great deed.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency contributed to this report
