Civil Beat Series On Abusive Hawaiʻi Foster Dad Wins National Award
The Mike Berger Award is conferred by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, whose faculty judges cited the “tenacity” of Civil Beat’s reporting.
“When No One Is Watching,” a series by Honolulu Civil Beat Investigations Editor John Hill, is the 2026 winner of the Mike Berger Award for outstanding human interest reporting, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism announced today.
“We were astonished by what Hill uncovered, and amazed by the tenacity of his reporting,” the judges stated in their citation.
The series documented how a foster dad held up as a model by the state of Hawaiʻi physically and sexually abused boys in his care and presided over a household in which older boys preyed on younger ones. Despite many warning signs over two decades, the state sent almost 60 boys to live with John Teixeira.
On several occasions, the state failed to act on evidence that Teixeira was far from the miracle worker it portrayed. Only after the boys became adults and one of them filed suit against the state and his former foster father did the truth come out.
“Writing in a four-part series for the Honolulu Civil Beat, Hill told their stories, interviewing JR, the lead plaintiff in the case, and other boys who had lived with Texeira. Amazingly, he even talked to the accused, John Texeira, himself,” the judges wrote.
Federal assessments at the time showed that many of the problems occurring in the Teixeira foster home were rife across the state and persist until this day.
The award is named for Meyer “Mike” Berger, who won a 1950 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on a veteran who killed several New Jersey residents in a shooting spree. Berger went on to write a human interest column for the New York Times. The award was created the year after his death in 1959 to honor his compelling human interest narratives.
The judges for the award, for reporting on any platform, are faculty members of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Recent winners have included Business Insider, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, ProPublica and the Boston Globe. It comes with a $1,500 prize, and is conferred at the journalism school’s graduation ceremonies in May, where Hill will speak.
Hill, himself a graduate of Columbia journalism school, has been a reporter and editor for four decades. He came in 2016 to Civil Beat as investigations editor, where he has investigated the state’s workers compensation system, illegal adoptions of babies from the Marshall Islands and the child welfare system.
