The Story Capturer: Recent Episodes
Katherine Lewin
Welcome to The Story Capturer, where I tell the stories and histories of people, places and things using audio, video and photo. I cover the environment, investigations, people, places and things of Florida.
Renda Writer paints love - over and over again. One of his first murals, spray-painted in Wynwood Art District in Miami, Florida, features “I am love” over a million times. In the last five years, Writer has painted more 100 murals throughout the United States and Mexico and Haiti. But Writer didn’t always want to be a painter. He grew up obsessed with hip-hop music, and quickly turned to making his own music and performing his poetry. But after spending many years working in South Florida and New York, Writer was beginning to feel “less inspired” by his music. In 2012, he was working in a smoothie shop in Miami, living out of his car and spending most of his time walking up and down South Beach. The hours spent walking and people watching, oddly enough, paid off. The trash along the strip caught his eye, and would jumpstart his career into the visual arts, making him one of the most well-known graffiti artists in Miami.
Connell Crooms is the Man In The Mural. The largest mural in Jacksonville, Florida, standing at 150 ft. tall, features Connell Crooms and Sara Mahmoud, two activists in Jacksonville. Connell talks about the movement happening in Jacksonville and what happened the day he was taken to the hospital after police arrested him for saying "F--- the Police".
St. Augustine, Fla., America’s oldest city, was once a battleground for civil rights. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his supporters were harassed, beaten and jailed when they tried to enter segregated downtown restaurants and swim in segregated sections of St. Augustine’s beaches. A hotel manager once poured acid into a pool where both black and white integrationists were swimming in protest. Dr. King was even in St. Augustine the day that the Senate passed the civil rights bill on June 19, 1964.
A Cuban immigrant pleading "not guilty" to heinous crimes against children in his care. Undocumented parents who are afraid to come forward for fear of being deported. An undercover operation that finally resulted in the arrest of one Gerardo Carracedo Ramirez: a well-known, married, trusted church pastor - and possibly - a child rapist.