Kathy Lohr
Whether covering the manhunt and eventual capture of Eric Robert Rudolph in the mountains of North Carolina, the remnants of the Oklahoma City federal building with its twisted metal frame and shattered glass, flood-ravaged Midwestern communities, or the terrorist bombings across the country, including the blast that exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, correspondent Kathy Lohr has been at the heart of stories all across the nation.
Lohr was NPR's first reporter based in the Midwest. She opened NPR's St. Louis office in 1990 and the Atlanta bureau in 1996. Lohr covers the abortion issue on an ongoing basis for NPR, including political and legal aspects. She has often been sent into disasters as they are happening, to provide listeners with the intimate details about how these incidents affect people and their lives.
Lohr filed her first report for NPR while working for member station KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and began her journalism career in commercial television and radio as a reporter/anchor. Lohr also became involved in video production for national corporations and taught courses in television reporting and radio production at universities in Kansas and Missouri. She has filed reports for the NPR documentary program Horizons, the BBC, the CBC, Marketplace, and she was published in the Saturday Evening Post.
Lohr won the prestigious Missouri Medal of Honor for Excellence in Journalism in 2002. She received a fellowship from Vanderbilt University for work on the issue of domestic violence. Lohr has filed reports from 27 states and the District of Columbia. She has received other national awards for her coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Midwestern floods of 1993, and for her reporting on ice storms in the Mississippi Delta. She has also received numerous awards for radio pieces on the local level prior to joining NPR's national team. Lohr was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She now lives in her adopted hometown of Atlanta, covering stories across the southeastern part of the country.
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After 22 years in prison, Willie "Pete" Williams was recently exonerated by DNA evidence. As he adjusts to his newfound freedom, he's taking advice from Calvin Johnson, the first man in Georgia to be exonerated by DNA evidence. -
Residents along the Gulf Coast whose property sustained damage in Hurricane Katrina are suing insurance companies for denying their claims. Insurers are citing the language of the policies, but attorneys for homeowners argue many of these claims were improperly denied. -
On Sept. 22, 1906, thousands of whites in Atlanta joined together downtown and began attacking and killing the city's blacks. Dozens were murdered in violence that continued for four days. But the riot hasn't been commemorated or taught in schools — until now.
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One hundred years ago Friday, thousands of white residents in Atlanta took to the city's streets, targeting blacks. Dozens of African Americans died in an ensuing race riot that lasted four days. Few in America know about the riot, but a coalition in Atlanta wants to mark the event as a key part of the city's history.
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Atlanta University Center's Woodruff Library will be the custodian of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers. Local donors joined forces to avoid a public auction that might have sent the documents to another city.
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Atlanta area donors didn't want to see the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers go up for auction, so they raised enough money to bring the collection to the city's library for historically black colleges and universities. Many say King's papers will be at home in the city of his youth. -
Sixty years ago, an angry white mob grabbed two black couples from a car, beat them and shot them to death. Townsfolk remained quiet about what they knew. Now, the FBI is reexamining the case. -
Along the Gulf Coast, thousands of residents are still living in FEMA trailers, close to the water. None of them are likely to rebuild where they lived, since they can't afford it or can't get insured. Meanwhile, drugs have become a huge problem in the trailer parks. -
In Gulfport, Miss., attorney Jim Wetzel and his wife, Garnette, have almost completed rebuilding their 20-year-old Georgian Manor on the coast. It's about the only home on Beach Boulevard that's still standing. The mayor of Gulfport calls it an inspiration to the community.
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In Houston, a retrial begins for Andrea Yates, the mother who claims she was insane when she drowned her five young children in a bathtub in 2001. An earlier conviction was thrown out.
