After Nikko Jenkins, a killer who covered half his face with hieroglyphic tattoos, set out on a murder spree that took the lives of four Nebraskans in August 2013, reporters at the Omaha World-Herald learned something unsettling about his family. 

Many of his relatives — past and current — had run-ins with the cops. At least 38, it turned out, had been convicted of 633 crimes in Omaha between 1979 and 2013, according to the reporting. 

That finding was reported in a package of stories that explored generations of crime and violence in the family’s history. This was more poignant because it marked an extraordinary fall from grace that began with a Native American ancestor, Levi Levering, who had been a distinguished tribal leader. He was the first Native American commissioner to the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1911 and successfully lobbied Congress in 1920 to protect tribal members’ rights to their land. 

“A name that was respected in Nebraska 100 years ago has become synonymous with lawlessness as generations of Leverings succumbed to alcohol, drugs and violence,” the World-Herald reported.  

But, while accurate in their details, the stories missed the bigger picture, including social and racial factors that would further explain the family’s trajectory, according to critics. Where the newspaper could have used the family’s history to examine the root causes of the criminality, exploring the forces that warped some of Levering’s descendants, the stories instead largely just recounted their misdoings, complete with a photo array of police-style mugshots.  

Crystal Edwards, an adjunct professor in sociology at the University of Nebraska Omaha, said the reporting posed Omaha as a victim of the Levering family, though she said Omaha also let the Levering family — and generally the Black and Indigenous communities — down. The family included members of both communities. 

“By pointing out that some members of this family know better and criminality is a choice, the analysis is shifted away from policies that create negative social conditions, which play a role in defining and creating crime,” Edwards said after reviewing the coverage. 

Edwards said the coverage began with a model minority group member — Levi Levering — and then described Nikko Jenkins, Levering’s great-great grandson, as a natural result of a series of bad choices, including drugs and alcohol, child neglect and criminal behavior. 

“While that may be true, it is also part of a long line of bad policy choices, abuse of native people, genocidal education via mission schools, misappropriation of resources by state and federal governments, racially biased lending practices and misuse of child welfare systems against Indigenous people,” Edwards said. “The history of abuse of native people in these systems is rampant and genocidal.” 

None of these factors are examined in the reporting. Instead, it dwelled on the crimes, flicking at their causes in passing as though race was not a factor. A couple of family members were convicted in connection to Jenkins’ murders, and many family members had a prior criminal history.

The World-Herald devoted five articles in December 2013 to the family, which the then-executive editor Mike Reilly described as investigating a small circle of violence in Omaha. 

Published on two Sundays and one Monday between Dec. 15 and 22, 2013, the stories detailed several generations of criminal history in the family and highlighted two family members who successfully escaped the circumstances and made positive community impacts. 

While the coverage earned awards and succeeded in showing there was a group of related individuals involved with crime, some experts and those who worked on the articles faulted them for not telling the full story. 

Roots of the multimedia 

The first part of the series opened with a family tree — titled the “Roots of a Crime Family” — detailing four generations of the family’s criminal history beginning with Levi Levering’s son: Lincoln Levering.  

The graphic noted the family tree was not comprehensive and that some Leverings have minimal or no criminal history. It also included the following sentence: “The 50 individuals named include the clan’s worst criminal offenders and others who are important to telling the family’s story.” 

The package made clear that the family had problems with crime, according to Tim Anderson, a former editor at the World-Herald and the New York Times and a retired journalism professor from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

While it mentioned poverty, addiction and other issues, however, there was little discussion of race beyond Levi Levering. 

“I find that kind of remarkable, and I can’t speculate as to why there’s no mention, like what was behind that, but there are certainly cues in the stories that would tell any reader of the Omaha World-Herald that this story is about race,” Anderson said, noting mentions of North Omaha. 

The World-Herald presented the package as a crime story and offered a glimpse into how community members have “roles in turning the tide against crime.” But, critics said the reporting didn’t go far enough, while going too far in others.

While crime is a major factor, the facts involve both crime and race, as well as family relations — something also not explored.  

“Even though the whole thing is about the family, I don’t get a clear sense of how important the family was to the criminal enterprise,” Anderson said. 

Some family members were not included in the family tree or were described vaguely, including Nikko Jenkins’ grandfather — George Jenkins — who passed down his last name. It’s unclear what impact George and other family members had on one other. 

Beyond the reference to Levi Levering, the paper did little to examine his background or the marks he left. Instead, it just cast a negative light on the community, critics said. 

“That timeline is just awful,” Kevin Abourezk, managing editor for Indianz.com, said in an email. “I can’t imagine the World-Herald doing this for any non-Native murderers in this state. I don’t know why they thought it was OK to do here, to connect a good man to generations of broken people and criminals.” 

Online, though not in print, the first article opened with a rogues’ gallery of sorts, combining photos of 26 family members, the same used in the family tree, beside the larger, well-known mugshot of Nikko Jenkins. 

A former World-Herald staffer who worked on the articles, but asked not to be named, said reporters made efforts to include family photos rather than mugshots provided by law enforcement. Eleven of the photos included in the family tree were not police booking photos, but it was challenging to get personal images when some family members declined to comment or couldn’t be reached. 

The use of mugshots generally is controversial and has been for more than a decade, and many journalists have moved away from them altogether, contending they are damning on their face and have lasting impacts. 

Reilly, who oversaw a team of editors and reporters on the project, said he was proud of the work and continues to be proud of it. He said the team tried to be fair minded and put everything in context regarding the family. 

To him, the story was never primarily about race but about crime and violence and how it can be inbred. 

“You want to write a report honestly about crime,” Reilly said. “You don’t want to gloss over realities, difficult realities, because you’re trying to tread lightly on a delicate subject like race.” 

Reilly said he likely would not include the collection of mugshots online if he were doing a similar story today, however, though that would be a joint decision with colleagues. 

Even though the paper zeroed in on otherwise private individuals, splashing them across its pages, Reilly and one of the main reporters on the series, Roseann Moring, said the World-Herald is always cautious about bringing relatively unknown people into the public eye. 

Moring said in an email that the reporting team reached out to as many family members as possible for interviews. They corroborated official records when possible. They avoided detailing information about family members who weren’t convicted of crimes or who had been convicted of lower-level crimes. 

But, among those who were named, it wasn’t always made clear whether they had turned their lives around after their legal run-ins, and this information often wasn’t available through the police records at the center of the articles. 

Systemic factors left out of reports 

The stories touched on how poverty, addiction, alcohol abuse and child neglect scarred the family, but they didn’t mention race as one of those factors. And they didn’t discuss systemic factors that can drive criminal activity.  

“I would try to weave into a story that looks at all of the structures, all of the institutions that really contributed,” said Carla Kimbrough, a former UNL journalism professor. 

Moring and the anonymous staffer said the reporting team wanted to discuss how racial disparities impacted the family, though there was an unclear path forward without other articles to base their work off.

“To me, this was a story about how racism and prejudice impacted the family as much as it was about the family itself. However, at the time it felt like it would be impossible to make a more explicit connection,” Moring said in an email. “In retrospect what was obvious to me could/should have been more explicitly laid out to readers.”

Sociologist Edwards said Omaha’s history of discrimination against Black and Indigenous residents was ignored. This history includes redlining, limiting access to resources or jobs and undermining Black businesses and community cohesion through such actions as building interstates in neighborhoods. 

“In essence, the dominant society has participated in the creation of the cultural conditions that produced the Levering family,” Edwards said. 

She pointed to domestic violence in Native American communities that stemmed from family disruptions caused by Indian Boarding Schools and forced assimilation. 

“The coverage mentions their tribal connection but not the transgressions against their tribes creating a set of conditions that would have made life very difficult for the Levering women and their children,” Edwards said.  

These factors likely affected every generation of the Leverings, saddling them with baggage that they couldn’t overcome, according to Edwards. 

Because the stories came at the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, which pushed such concerns to the forefront, Moring said she believes she was ill-equipped to tackle the idea of structural racism at the time. But, if given the opportunity today, she would discuss the topic further. 

Black Lives Matter began in the summer of 2013 during the criminal trial regarding Trayvon Martin’s death. Police shootings have occurred for decades, and the Black Lives Matter movement would pick up more momentum in 2014 after the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. 

“This was pre-BLM, and journalists around the country gave a lot of deference to police and court records,” Moring said. “I tried hard not to fall into that, but I think you’ll find that even just eight years later institutions like newspapers now have very, very different standards around writing about crime.” 

Kimbrough also faulted a lack of diversity in the World-Herald newsroom, an issue that plagues many news outlets. No Black or Native American journalists were on hand, and some might have pointed out problems with the stories before they appeared. 

“If you look across the country I could find lots of stories that are impacted by a lack of diversity in a newsroom, a lack of really paying attention to how we are portraying that and what our own perspectives are related to race-related to gender-related to life experience,” she said. “Unless you have a white senior editor who is open and recognizes the responsibility of providing a full picture, that truth that’s larger than what my white eyes and experience can tell me, we will continue to have this kind of coverage.” 

She took umbrage at the stories’ imagery, the mugshot-style family tree in particular. 

“It’s offensive as an African American woman to see all those faces of color,” she said. “Talking about the crime with no acknowledgment that it’s the system that sets people up.” 

Edwards noted a couple of instances where the language in the articles — primarily in headlines and graphics — was problematic. She noted that calling the Leverings a “crime family” was prejudicial. 

“A crime family suggests an organized family of criminals (not necessarily related) that is actually to some degree successful in the perpetration of their crimes, which usually go unpunished,” Edwards said. “It is hard to consider these very low-level crimes in the realm of an organized crime family.” 

Nikko and Jimmy Jenkins were gang members, which could be considered organized crime, but extensive interactions with law enforcement are part of life for the poor in the United States, Edwards said. That doesn’t indicate a criminal syndicate. 

The terminology also has racial overtones traced back to the Sicilian Mafia, which would be offensive if applied to an Italian American. 

The reference to the family as a “clan” in the family tree is also derogatory and presents an otherness factor for the family, she said. 

“At the same time that the analysis strips the family of their social context, it reinforces their tribal nature, which is another way of dismissing their modernity or the role of society in the creation of their existence,” Edwards said. “It also reinforces their ethnic differences because American society does not organize by clans and it has an association with premodern behavior.” 

Bob Houston, the senior community research associate in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha, said he doesn’t think he’s ever heard of a family called a clan before, at least in the World-Herald. 

To Houston, the word has traces back to the former days of the Ku Klux Klan and, like the family tree, unfairly characterizes a family. 

“If you’re going to talk about family, talk about family,” Houston said. 

While there is some blame to cast on the family, Houston said there wasn’t a strong connection to how Nikko Jenkins and others were brought up. Nikko Jenkins didn’t have sound role models. That, however, wasn’t addressed in the reporting.  

Houston is a former director of corrections for the state of Nebraska, serving from 2005 to 2013, just after Jenkins’ killing spree. He also faulted the World-Herald for focusing on what the publication deemed the justice system’s failures in his case. 

“It just seemed beyond fair play; it seemed to be foul play,” Houston said. 

Nikko Jenkins committed his murders after he was released from 10 years in prison for lesser crimes. Houston said the World-Herald neglected to note that his department had no choice but to release him because his sentence had run its course. 

“We felt the coverage neglected everything we’d done for Nikko Jenkins to try to prepare him to go into the community,” Houston said of the department’s perspective. “But his behavior would not be served or the safety if we put him out on the yard.”. 

He suggested the World-Herald rushed the story. 

“They have to go quick and they have to make a splash, and they need to make it bleed; if it bleeds, it leads,” Houston said. 

Ethics in Journalism  

A key component of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics is the tenet to “minimize harm,” but Kimbrough said this was flouted in reporting on family members uninvolved in Jenkins’ crimes. 

“What it does, in essence, is you label someone for the rest of their lives,” Kimbrough said of the attention paid to his relatives. “So you basically limit the opportunities for that person to thrive.” 

Moring said newspapers should consider the newsworthiness of their work and not shy away from reporting because it may contribute to stereotypes.

“However, I do think that careful consideration should be given about the holistic picture and what you are spending your energy on,” Moring said. “Specifically making sure that you are giving proportionate reporting energy to positive stories about minorities, and you need to look at the body of work as a whole, not just your own stories as one reporter.” 

To Kimbrough, the stories failed to deal with the many issues that plagued the Levering family.  

“You [journalists] get excited about this kind of story and you don’t understand how to connect the dots,” Kimbrough said. “We continue to provide fodder for people who operate on certain beliefs about people and that is problematic because the media is one of the main drivers of what people know or think they know about other people.”