It’s Wednesday, May 15.
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Good morning, readers.
On the front page of today’s new paper is “A Legacy in Limbo,” an investigative piece that INDY photojournalist Angelica Edwards and I have been reporting for the past three months.
The story begins with the death of the Reverend Lorenzo Lynch, Sr., a magnetic local pastor who led one of Durham’s most prominent Black churches for decades.
When Lorenzo Sr. died last January at age 90, he left 18 properties in North Carolina to his children, Leonzo and Loretta—including a handful of derelict houses in East Durham that he’d been leasing to tenants for years.
Tenants of the East Durham properties say that Lorenzo Sr. told them he intended for his kids to refurbish the houses and lease them affordably in perpetuity. “Him buying all these homes was about building the Lynch legacy,” one tenant told the INDY, about her late landlord.
But Leonzo and Loretta—who have already carved out legacies, respectively, as a fifth-generation Baptist minister and as the first Black woman appointed attorney general of the United States—apparently aren’t interested. Last summer, Leonzo sued the tenants for overstaying their leases.
As the tenants await trial, they’re still living—squatting, technically—in the houses, all of which have been issued laundry lists of housing code violations by the city.
To tell this story, the INDY drew from hours of interviews, hundreds of pages of court filings and city inspection reports, and more than a dozen trips to properties inherited by Leonzo and Loretta Lynch, neither of whom responded to repeated requests for comment.
It’s a story about a changing city, the dynamics of a family legacy, and how people living on the margins are caught between the two.
Have a good Wednesday.
—Lena
Durham
Durham District Attorney Satana Deberry discussed the city’s recent string of shootings that have come amid a 20-year low rate for violent crime.
Wake
Voices: Trey Roberts, one of the creators of the Dix Park Inter-Tribal Pow Wow, reflects on how the event, which happens this week, honors his Native American roots in Hollister, NC.
Mitchell Silver, a former Raleigh city planner, is running for the city council District A seat this fall. Silver recently relocated back to Raleigh following a stint as a planner in New York City.
Orange
ICYMI: Despite an unusual series of events leading up to yesterday’s runoff election, the Orange County Schools Board of Education seems poised to continue on its current trajectory of finding consensus on issues.
Incumbent school board member Bonnie Hauser looks to have been reelected to the board with about 64 percent of the vote.
North Carolina
Brad Knott, a Trump-backed former federal prosecutor, won the Republican runoff in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.
Hal Weatherman and Dave Boliek won GOP runoffs for the positions of lieutenant governor and state auditor, respectively.
Today’s weather
Sunny with a high of 50 degrees.
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