Border Patrol sweep, angry shrimpers and a lot of fair food among our 2025 memories

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Moments we’ll remember from 2025

As 2025 comes to a close, The News & Observer staff looks back at the stories that will stick with us from this year. In this five-part series, editors, reporters, photojournalists and more remember the stories that brought a smile, made us angry, gave us hope and caused us to shed a tear.

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We’ll remember nature’s fury, an endless election and off-the-field football drama

Border Patrol sweep, angry shrimpers and a lot of fair food among our 2025 memories

We take you inside internet cafes, detail a political breakup and offer money tips

Stories of mountain resilience, a jail death and an ageless band member stay with us

We celebrate joy on the gridiron, honor past champions on ice and visit a new hotspot

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This is part 2 of a five-part package revisiting the moments that The News & Observer’s staff members will remember long after 2025 is over.

Shrimpers turn out to protest their way of life

The story started with an email pitch about the impacts of tariffs on North Carolina shrimpers. But before we were finished with the project, no one was talking about the issues with imported shrimp anymore.

A proposed amendment to a bill — which surprised commercial fishermen, advocacy groups and lawmakers — would have banned trawling in waters, including North Carolina’s sounds, where most of the state’s shrimp is harvested.

After a whirlwind of a few days at the Legislative Building, House Republicans ultimately decided not to take up the bill for a vote. Shrimpers celebrated the victory.

I’ll never forget seeing hundreds of North Carolina shrimpers and commercial fishermen, and their families, filling the halls of the Legislative Building and lining the sidewalk along Jones Street — dropping everything to protect their livelihoods — and then quickly returning to their coastal homes. It was time to get back to work.

Renee Umsted is a service journalism reporter.

A silver lining for Lexi

Investigative reporting often focuses on breaches of public trust, government malfeasance and potential bad actors. But sometimes it leads you to a silver lining. I was reminded of that this year after meeting Krista Caraway and her legal ward, Lexi Abernethy.

Lexi, who is autistic and nonverbal, couldn’t sound the alarm when conditions inside her adoptive mother’s home became potentially dangerous. And despite two formal reports submitted to local social services in 2022 over concerns for Lexi’s well-being, she remained in a risky situation. That is until Caraway and a group of concerned community members staged an intervention to remove Lexi from the home. That spurred criminal charges, which Lexi’s former adoptive mother pleaded guilty to in October. Lexi is now safe and thriving. She walks to school, hangs out with her friends and is back into the flow of a healthy routine. But if Caraway didn’t come to The N&O looking to shed light on what happened, I wouldn’t have met Lexi. It’s a strong reminder, as a reporter, that it’s the people who muster up enough courage to surface deeply traumatic experiences that are the catalysts for change.

Nathan Collins is an investigative reporter.

The delicate, overnight choreography to replace a runway

Six years ago, I wrote about Raleigh-Durham International Airport’s effort to preserve its main runway by shutting it down at night, ripping out slabs of crumbling pavement and quickly pouring new concrete that cures in time for big planes to take off for Europe the following afternoon. It sounded stressful, like everything had to go just right. I decided then that I’d like to be there one night to see how the paving crews do it.

RDU only does the runway slab replacement in the fall, and for years other stories, including COVID-19 and Hurricane Helene, were a higher priority for me.

Finally this year, I reached out to RDU to see if they’d let me and photojournalist Travis Long watch the finely choreographed process. The airport and its contractors graciously agreed.

The resulting article and time-lapse video were among my favorites of the year. They’re a reminder of the benefits of covering a beat for a long time and not giving up on a good story.

Richard Stradling is a transportation reporter.

A good lesson to remember: Just keep swimming

I’m not much of a swimmer myself, but the moment I heard about a 16-year-old crossing oceans, swimming around lakes and planning to take on the English Channel, I had so many questions. How does someone even do that? And why?

Lorelei Schmidt didn’t disappoint. She shared with me tales from a 19-hour swim in Hawaii: the jellyfish attacks and the mind-numbing exhaustion. She talked about what it would take to cross the English Channel and all of the marathon swims she’d have to complete to even be eligible. She’d always been a competitive swimmer. Open water was just an extreme version of what she’d been doing her entire life.

Her story left a deep impression on me because it’s more than one teenager’s athletic triumphs. For Schmidt, the open water provided peace when mental health struggles threw her world off its axis and made her want to quit swimming entirely. It’s a reminder why we pay attention to sports in the first place: for the lows that are brutally relatable and the highs that inspire us to keep going — or in this case, to keep swimming.

Caroline Wills was a sports reporting intern in summer 2025.

A powerful document of lives lived and lost

Western North Carolina is where I met my wife, started my career and learned to appreciate a good walk in the woods. These days, it’s where I go to reunite with old friends, listen to live music and send my son to summer camp. So it hurt to see what Helene did to the mountains. But even more heartbreaking were the pictures of the people the storm took from us, and the voices of the ones who lost a wife or husband, a mother or father, a son or daughter.

This year, News & Observer and Charlotte Observer reporters assembled a list of Helene’s victims — more than 100 of them — and did the best they could to find details about each one. I’m thankful for their friends and family members who took the time to help us document their deaths and, more importantly, their lives.

Jordan Schrader is the politics editor.

A First Bite of fair food and fun

This fall, I led a group of 20 First Bite newsletter subscribers through the NC State Fair. We munched and crunched, met the chefs behind our favorite fair foods and became friends with each other along the way. It was The N&O’s first event of this kind, and we had a blast. Events like these are part of our expanded food & dining efforts at The N&O. Our team doesn’t only loop you in on the news you might’ve missed — we’re here to build a community of foodies.

If you’re not a part of it, we’d love to have you. Sign up at newsobserver.com/newsletters for First Bite. You’ll get the latest news about our local food scene and have first dibs on more exclusive events coming in the new year.

Kimberly Tutuska is the service journalism editor.

Wendell woman caught up in Border Patrol sweep

When President Donald Trump talked about removing illegal immigrants who rape, kill and pillage from the streets, I don’t think anyone thought that included a young woman from Wendell who had nothing more than two traffic tickets to her name.

But that’s who U.S. Border Patrol agents picked up in November during a deportation dragnet that began in Charlotte and moved to the Triangle. Fatima Issela Velasquez-Antonio came here from Honduras at age 14, according to her family and her attorneys. Her father had been killed by a gang member, and her mother had died earlier from cancer. She was raised here by family who say she graduated from Corinth Holders High School in Johnston County, has a work permit and has been seeking asylum.

Now 23, she was at a construction site in Cary, working for an HVAC contractor, when agents cuffed her and took her away, ultimately to a detention facility in Georgia. She spent a month there until a federal judge released her Dec. 22.

So far, public officials who support what Trump is doing have been silent on Velasquez-Antonio’s arrest. We’ll see if she’s a topic for discussion when they run for re-election next year.

Dan Kane is an investigative reporter.

Sex, secret recordings, blackmail and a school board member

Former Johnston County school board member Ronald Johnson is the exception to the rule that school board meetings are usually monotonous.

The story began in 2022 when Johnson’s fellow board members censured him for sending inappropriate texts about a female school employee and trying to transfer the two children of a friend-turned-enemy. But the case reached a whole new level during Johnson’s two-week trial in January on charges of extortion and other crimes.

The trial revealed information about secret recordings and lascivious details of Johnson having multiple affairs with school employees, including having oral sex in cars. Johnson also denied he was trying to blackmail former congressional candidate DeVan Barbour when he played a recording for him with a woman describing a nude Facetime call between her and Barbour.

The jury didn’t believe Johnson and quickly convicted him, resulting in him being removed from the school board and serving six months in prison. The weirdness continued when the son of one of Johnson’s school board allies created a Facebook account called “Ronald Johnson’s Prison Cell Phone” that mocked local officials and community members.

T. Keung Hui covers K-12 education.

The healing hands of Paperhand Puppet Intervention

I am always dreaming of summer. It has been a frigid stretch in our neck of the woods, and I’m sustaining my weary winter spirit with memories of cricket symphonies, skies dotted with fireflies and a sunset glow that lasts well into the evening. There’s no better way to experience summer than by taking in a performance by Paperhand Puppet Intervention at Chapel Hill’s Forest Theatre.

I feel enormous gratitude to this collective of artists for allowing me to document the preparations for their summer show, “The Gift,” while they continued to navigate losses because of devastating flooding from the remnants of Tropical Depression Chantal. The organization experienced $100,000 in damage, as floodwaters from Chantal wreaked havoc near the banks of the Haw River in early July.

The artists welcomed me into their new studio — a move that was expedited due to Chantal’s impact — and patiently explained the intricacies of set production while allowing me to tiptoe among their whimsical creations. I perched on a ladder as a team of three huddled around a whale puppet, carefully adding the finishing touches to bring the gargantuan structure to life.

A couple of weeks later, I stood backstage behind a towering sheet of blue fabric and marveled to see how many hands brought an assortment of shadow puppets to life. As the crew worked to perfect every detail, I was struck by the myriad ways that our communities support each other through difficult times.

Kaitlin McKeown is a photojournalist.

Next: See this story for Part 3 of the 2025 moments we remember.

This story was originally published December 23, 2025 at 5:15 AM.