ProPublica

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State and local officials in Wisconsin said they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to the 2019 death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm, as well as the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Now they say they want to address some of the issues highlighted by a ProPublica investigation, published last month, into Jefferson Rodríguez’s death.

“What happened should never have happened,” said state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, a Milwaukee Democrat whose mother’s family worked as migrant farm laborers in Wisconsin in the 1960s.

Jefferson was run over late one summer night in 2019 by a worker operating a skid steer on a farm in rural Dane County, about a half-hour north of Madison, the state capital. It was the worker’s first day on the job, and he told us that he had received only a few hours of training. Our investigation showed how the authorities who investigated Jefferson’s death wrongly concluded that his father had run him over.

The failure was due in large part to a language barrier between the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, and the Dane County sheriff’s deputy who interviewed him. Rodríguez does not speak English; the deputy considered herself proficient in Spanish, but not fluent. When we interviewed the deputy, we learned that when she questioned Rodríguez in Spanish about...

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