A Maine Camp for Deaf Children Carries On After an Unthinkable Loss A Maine Camp for Deaf Children Carries On After an Unthinkable Loss
The New York Times
Joshua Seal, a Deaf man killed in a mass shooting last fall, did not get to see the third season of the camp he started. But 22 Deaf or hard-of-hearing children did, including his own.
As the three girls drew closer to their Maine summer camp one morning in August, text messages pinged between their separate cars as they tracked each other’s progress toward their destination.
Maya Fitts, 16, reported that she was only 17 minutes away. Autumn Laughlin, 11, chimed in; her E.T.A. was almost exactly the same. Soon they would turn onto a dirt road that led through a forest of tall pines, rolling slowly down a steep hill until the shining surface of North Pond popped into view. The third friend, Ingrid Hagenbuch, 11, was delayed by a stop to buy a bathing suit.
They had looked forward to this reunion since last August, and every minute mattered. Their weeklong overnight camp in Rome, Maine, Pine Tree Camp’s Dirigo Experience, is the only one in the state exclusively for children who are Deaf or hard of hearing. For some of the 22 campers from around the state — many of whom are the only Deaf or hard-of-hearing students in their small rural schools — it would be the only time all year they spent with peers who were like them in this way.
“I’m finally home,” said Jayson Seal, 13, describing how he felt when he arrived. Like several other people interviewed for this article, he spoke through an American Sign Language interpreter.
His father, Joshua Seal, created the Dirigo Experience two years ago, determined to provide his four young children, and others across Maine, with an experience he never had as a Deaf child growing up there: a traditional summer camp adventure alongside Deaf and hard-of-hearing peers. The name comes from Maine’s state motto, Latin for “I lead.”
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.