In the Friday, Dec. 10, 1999, issue of the Jacket, two students, Megan Greenwell and Iliana Montauk published an article titled “Young Indian Immigrant Died in Berkeley Apartment: South Asian Community Says ‘Indentured Servitude’ May Be to Blame.” At the time, Greenwell was a Berkeley High School sophomore who had only just joined the Jacket and had only written one Jacket article prior to this.
Greenwell was assigned to look into a girl named Seetha Vemireddy who had died from carbon monoxide only a few blocks away from BHS. Since Vemireddy was 17 years old, many assumed she went to BHS, as Vemireddy lived only a few blocks away and it was the only public school in the city. Greenwell described her reaction after finding out that Vemireddy didn’t go to BHS.
“I thought that (it) was kind of weird, because it's the only public high school in town. It just seemed surprising that she wouldn't have been a student,” Greenwell said.
According to Greenwell, after discovering that Vemireddy didn’t go to BHS she decided to talk to several students at BHS to inquire about Vemireddy and why she wasn’t in school. Greenwell was able to find multiple sources that said Vemireddy worked for Lakireddy Bali Reddy, who at the time was one of Berkeley’s wealthiest landlords. According to several of those sources, Reddy helped those in India get to the U.S., however, many of those people felt as though they were in debt to Reddy and worked for him for either a very small amount of money or nothing at all.
“Such immigrants are vulnerable because they do not have the skills necessary to find another job, they don’t speak English, and because they feel indebted to their employers,” read the article by Greenwell.
The article also found that “indentured servitude” may have been to blame for the death of Vemireddy. Greenwell’s sources had varying perspectives on indentured servitude, however, in the U.S. indentured servitude is clearly illegal.
Prior to publishing the article, both Greenwell, Montauk and many other Jacket editors were worried about the backlash the Jacket might get for writing about Reddy in a way that implied illegal behavioral. Greenwell described the steps they took before publishing the article to ensure its credibility.
“It was obviously edited by a bunch of people, including our then Jacket advisor. We had a media lawyer read it, which was not something I was used to doing for the Jacket,” Greenwell said.
Greenwell said the Jacket didn’t involve the police before they published the article because they decided that if it was something that the police wanted to look into they would.
“The story came out in the last issue of the Jacket before winter break, so we went on break, and we didn't hear anything about it … And then it wasn't until we got back in January that all of a sudden, everything exploded,” Greenwell said.
In January, Reddy was arrested for human trafficking and immigration fraud charges against young immigrant girls.
Following Reddy’s arrest, multiple articles were written about Greenwell and Montauk and how they were the first to write anything uncovering the truth about Reddy. Greenwell described how after Reddy was arrested, there were reporters everywhere, including her locker at school and in front of her parents’ house. Despite the chaos that erupted after Reddy’s arrest, overall the story shaped her life in a very positive way.
“This one story had (shown me) what I wanted to spend my life doing. And, you know, I think that's an uncommon thing to know quite that early,” Greenwell said.
This event gained recognition for the Jacket in a way that it had never received before, and also helped shape the careers of Greenwell and Montauk. Greenwell explained that this story was what made her want to become a journalist in the first place. Greenwell was the editor-in-chief of Wired.com and has written for the New York Magazine, Esquire, ESPN The Magazine, and GQ. Greenwell was also a member of the Washington Post team that recieved a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting.
“What a privilege to be able to start my journalism career in a place like Berkeley,” Greenwell said. Greenwell described how high schoolers have an advantage on some topics compared to professional journalists since young writers have the ability to know what other young people want to read about.
“I see every year with the high schoolers I work with that there are stories they think of that I would never in (a thousand) years think of because I'm not walking the halls of a high school anymore,” Greenwell said.