My name is Wheeler and I’m a reporter at the The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, and have been since December 2019.

I was previously the courts reporter at the Cape Cod Times in Massachusetts, but was laid off on Aug. 13, 2019.

Previously I was the cops and courts reporter for the Rio Grande SUN in Española, New Mexico.

I covered overdose deaths, homicides, trials of all stripes, and various other sundry deeds related to my beat, including police corruption. Check out my clips.

On June 15, 2017, I covered quintuple homicide and did most of the work for that week’s entire spread.

I’m a public records fiend with upwards of 140 active requests at any given moment. Many of those pending requests are results of appeals and other records fights with agencies and records custodians who do not know the law.

I’m spearheading and writing a guide for reporters covering criminal justice in New Mexico and I’ve even written the only (that I know of) how-to for looking up federal search warrants here in New Mexico.

I previously reported on the same beat, cops and courts, for the Nevada Appeal in Carson City, Nevada as the crime reporter. I wrote about senseless killings and their aftermath.

Before that, I was the cops/breaking news and state government reporter for the Elko Daily Free Press in Elko, Nevada.

I take photos. Most are on Flickr. They’re also featured in the newspaper I work for. Almost all of the photos I don’t take for work are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution/share-alike license. Feel free to use them with attribution. They’ve been featured in homebrewing books and news websites across a broad spectrum of languages. I even have a photography portfolio.

I write food columns and make videos about cooking.

I write a blog about food, travel and other things. It’s called “Put some cilantro on it!“

In addition to food and photography, I also like to homebrew.

Feel free to contact me at cowperthwaite@gmail.com or follow me on twitter, @WheelerReporter.