Finding Sexy Sweat
Finding Sexy Sweat
In February of 2020, a 48-year-old Black man named Reggie Payne slipped into a coma and later died after police restrained him face down on his parent’s living room floor as he cried out for help. No one filmed it on their smartphone. No footage flashed across newscasts. Reggie’s death came and went quietly, unlike the murder of George Floyd just a couple months later. But journalists Rick Jervis…Social links:
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Episode 8: No One Will Know My Struggle
On the afternoon of Friday, May 8, 2020, Sacramento Fire Capt. Gary Loesch received a call from an assistant city manager urging him to attend an unplanned meeting at Old City Hall—one he hadn’t been formally invited to, but suspected was about a recent incident involving his department. Two mont…
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Episode 7: The Big Red Handle
Reggie Payne was rushed by ambulance to Sutter Medical Center, four miles north from the family’s home in Sacramento. This was February 25, 2020. He arrived at the hospital at 8:22 p.m., and was wheeled into the emergency room—clinging to life. At around 10 p.m., Reggie could no longer breathe on …
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Episode 6: Rodeo Star
On the evening of February 25, 2020, Harriett Jefferson became alarmed as her son, Reggie Payne, lapsed into a bad diabetic reaction. He hadn’t eaten all day and had sat through four hours of dialysis. Now, he was acting strange. Wobbling back and forth. Speaking incoherently. Harriett was growing …
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Episode 5: Voices Travel
In 2019, Reggie and his sister Janine went to a high school reunion. It was going great...until it wasn't. Janine had to pull him off the dance floor when she started to see the paranoia and aggression signaling a bipolar episode. That’s how it was with Reggie: a few hours of him being happy, cal…
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Episode 4: Homecoming
Reggie's time as a sports editor at the Grambling student newspaper suggested he had it all in front of him. He was a gifted rider with a ton of talent and street smarts. But after a violent encounter at the school, Reggie got on a bus, which was a two-day ride home, and something in his head snapp…
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Episode 3: Where Everybody is Somebody
In 1989, Reggie Payne became a local hero when he overcame the hardships of Oakland’s 69 Village to attend Grambling State University. Yet college life some 3,000 miles away is anything but easy. While he dives into journalism as an editor at the student newspaper, Reggie becomes a first-time fathe…
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Episode 2: 69 Village
In 1971, Harriet Jefferson gives birth to her first child, a baby boy. Reggie Damone Payne is born in San Leandro, just south of Oakland, the oldest of four children. Reggie Payne's biological father was out of the picture and Harriet moved in with her future husband, Rufus Jefferson, shortly aft…
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Episode 1: Exactly
In the summer of 1993, Rick Jervis and Jeff Pearlman—two college journalists at the time—arrived in Nashville for a summer internship at the daily newspaper, The Tennessean. It was a dream come true, and to their surprise and delight, they were accompanied by an aspiring Oakland rapper/Grambling st…
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Introducing: Finding Sexy Sweat
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