L.A. County sheriff’s deputy injured after accidentally shooting himself, officials say

Keri Blakinger covers the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 2023, she spent nearly seven years in Texas, first covering criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle and then covering prisons for the Marshall Project. Blakinger was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing for For her insightful, humane portrait, reported with great difficulty, of men on Death Row in Texas who play clandestine games of “Dungeons & Dragons,” countering their extreme isolation with elaborate fantasy. Her work has appeared everywhere from the BBC to the New York Daily News, from Vice to the Washington Post Magazine, where her 2019 reporting on women in jail helped earn a National Magazine Award. She is the author of “Corrections in Ink,” a 2022 memoir about her time in prison.

Kevin Rector is a state and national politics reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Times in 2020 and previously covered the Los Angeles Police Department, state and federal courts and other legal affairs. He has written extensively about the LGBTQ+ community, and helped lead the paper’s Our Queerest Century project in 2024. Before The Times, Rector worked at the Baltimore Sun for eight years, where he was a police and investigative reporter and part of a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. He also was part of a Sun team that was named a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting, and part of a Times team that won the 2023 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress. He is from Maryland.