At the end of a year of unrelenting news for the Washington region, Washington Post reporters returned to stories that resonated with readers.
Catching up with people who were at the center of those stories, they found lives changed in ways big and small. Some were still trying to find their way through tragedy or upheaval. Others were making progress on projects they took on — ones as quirky as finding D.C.’s forgotten panda statues and as lofty as helping people become more courageous.
Here’s what happened after we told their stories.
A new bedtime routine
For 7-year-old Kallen Beyer, bedtime became the hardest time to deal with it all.
That had been when his mom, Justyna, would tuck him in after a story, cuddling with the boy in his bunk bed. His dad, Andy, would often find the two of them asleep together in their Northern Virginia home.
Then in January, she left for a few days to take his sister Brielle — a talented young figure skater — to an elite training program in Kansas. Their plane collided with a helicopter above Reagan National Airport, killing them and 65 others.
Afterward, Kallen started falling into fits of silence around his dad — especially when it was time to go to sleep. He’d lie awake at night and struggled to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes, the boy would punch Andy as he tried to tuck Kallen in at night.
Andy made it a point to let himself cry around Kallen whenever their loss affected him. “I’ve tried to allow the grief to be integrated into our lives,” Beyer said.
One night, Kallen opened up about his feelings, too.
The pair have in recent months found ways to make space for their grief. Andy has left Brielle’s room much like she left it, with a Christmas tree she insisted on keeping up even in January. Kallen, who plays ice hockey, wears a black helmet adorned with wings and his mom and sister’s first initials.
Father and son also now have a new bedtime routine. After a bath and brushing their teeth, the pair spend five minutes lying on the boy’s bunk bed, scrolling through photos of Justyna and Brielle on Andy’s iPhone.
Sometimes they laugh together. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes, like on a recent night looking at photos of Kallen and Brielle making up a silly dance, they simply try to keep the memories alive.
“I remember that day,” Kallen told his dad, as they flipped through images of them jumping in the basement. “I miss them a lot.”
— Teo Armus
A new focus and home
To answer the most pressing question up front: Yes, Tiffany Flemming is still single.
In June, the now-29-year-old went to a bar, sat on a stool and let her friend give a five-minute slideshow presentation about her most attractive qualities to a room full of singles. And she let us tag along to watch.
That night, two men reached out over Instagram direct message. One brave suitor asked her out that evening in the bar. They went on a lunch date and texted for several weeks before he stopped responding — just like the men from dating apps who had ghosted her, and who had inspired her to try Pitch-A-Friend in the first place.
She’s not dating these days. Not intentionally, anyway.
“I’ve taken the time to just focus on me and things that are making me happy,” she said over the phone in December. “And if something happened organically, then something happens organically, but I’m not really putting myself out there like I have in the past. No apps, no nothing.”
Flemming has kept busy in other ways. In addition to her daytime tech job, she’s now a part-time Pilates instructor at Sculp’d in Old Town. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every Saturday and Sunday, she takes classes to learn how to teach yoga. She also bought her first property, a new build in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, with white cabinets and wood floors. She’ll have to buy plenty of furniture before her April move-in date; the townhouse has three levels and thousands more square feet than her one-bedroom apartment in Washington.
“It’s a very weird shift from where I was in the summer,” she said. “Now I’m getting a house, ready to leave the city and live my suburban life. I’ve just been doing things for me.”
— Sophia Solano
A conversation about courage
Standing in the pulpit on that frigid January day, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde turned to the president with a plea.
“In the name of God,” she said as President Donald Trump sat below her in the front row at Washington National Cathedral the day after his inauguration. “I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared.”
Her comments at the National Prayer Service ricocheted around the world, and were met with both delight and ridicule. Letters of gratitude poured into the cathedral. The president demanded an apology and denounced her as a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.”
Almost a year later, Budde would rather not linger on the viral moment. The leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington would much rather talk about her new grandchild, the picture book she’s working on or the endless stream of people she meets who, as she described in a recent interview, “treat one another with dignity in a culture that encourages contempt.”
In February, she helped launch a series of free workshops to foster connection and courage. In October, she published an adaptation of her best-selling book “How We Learn to Be Brave” for young readers.
“Growing up is an act of courage,” she said. Learning to read and to tie your shoes, taking a tumble and trying again, asking for help. Those are acts of bravery, she said, and through it all she wants children to know: Us adults are cheering you on.
“Bravery isn’t something just for brave people,” said Budde, 66. “It lives in all of us.”
— Olivia George
A teacher’s hope for a path back
Eight months after moving to Spain, Jesus Rodríguez is still adjusting to the country — and trying to find a legal path to return to teaching elementary music in Virginia.
Until April, Rodríguez was a Venezuelan national legally living and working in Loudoun County under a humanitarian parole program. When the Trump administration announced it would end the program early, Rodríguez began making plans to leave the country.
Without a clear path to stay in the United States, Rodríguez worried about being deported or separated from his wife and 6-year-old daughter. So, he put in his notice with Forest Grove Elementary School and spent his final day teaching music before spring break. The Post spent that day with him.
The students wept as their teacher said his goodbyes. They made him cards and drawings. They left him with gifts and hugs.
Now in Oviedo, a city near the northeastern coast of Spain, Rodríguez works part-time playing the organ in a Catholic church while he pursues his master’s degree in music education.
His daughter has adjusted well to their new country, though she occasionally talks about the school “where everyone spoke English” and asks about the yellow school buses, which aren’t as ubiquitous in Spain.
His job in Loudoun, Rodríguez said, was the first time he’d ever felt valued as a teacher. He misses the teachers and the students. He misses driving to school through the affluent D.C. suburb known for its vast farmlands and wineries.
Most of all, he misses the community that embraced him. He wants another chance to contribute and give back.
“I felt like I was in a family,” Rodriguez said. Even though they had “another language, another culture, I felt like I was in my town, in my place.”
— Karina Elwood
A statue quest gets some help
Hector Biaggi launched a quest last year: Find all 150 panda statues created in 2004 as part of a District-wide public arts project.
Biaggi, 32, didn’t live in D.C. when the statues first popped up around town. He only moved to the District a few years ago. But as Biaggi was getting to know his new hometown, the self-professed “amateur local art historian” learned about the project, and decided to try to track down the locations of the pandas.
Spearheaded by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the original statues decorated D.C.’s nooks and crannies in 2004, occupying street corners and building lobbies, public parks and Metro stops. That same year, the statues were auctioned off to raise funds for civic arts programming.
When The Post first wrote about Biaggi’s search in October, he had located nearly 40 panda statues. Since then, Biaggi says, readers and others have alerted him to dozens more, bringing his current total to 70.
“Mostly it’s been neighbors or people who live in a neighborhood with a panda who have reached out to let me know,” Biaggi said. “I did also have a couple owners reach out.”
Some pandas, Biaggi said, have been thrown out, scrapped as junk or lost to time. One of the highlights of his search, Biaggi said, has been connecting panda statues with the artists originally commissioned to make them.
After the Post article, artist Barbara Gordon contacted Biaggi. Back in 2004, she and her late husband William created “Kung Pao Panda,” a statue that had landed on Janine Goodman’s front porch. Biaggi was able to facilitate a reunion between the artist and art.
“I thought it was so cool,” Biaggi said. “It put a smile on my face.”
— Kyle Swenson
A return home and to work
In the seven months since he was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, Badar Khan Suri has stopped going out at night. That’s because immigration officers first detainedhim on a March evening, setting off a tumultuous year for the Indian national.
Suri, a Georgetown postdoctoral fellow specializing in peace and conflict studies, was among a handful of international students and researchers who were swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on those who opposed U.S. foreign policy on Israel.
Suri and his wife had made several posts on social media supporting Palestinians, alleging Israel had committed war crimes and questioning some facts of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a determination that Suri’s presence in the country could have serious foreign policy consequences and that Suri was deportable.
The father of three spent some two months in a federal detention center in Texas before being released in May, after a federal judge found that Trump administration officials likely violated his rights in their attempt to deport him. He hired a new legal team and used crowdfunding to pay $70,000 of his fees.
There have been some silver linings for Suri. His children made friends with the many community members and volunteers who supported his family. He has also returned to his research at Georgetown — with more motivation — and revels in being with his students again. But he’s also made sure to spend more time with his family. His wife comes with him to work, and they return home earlier than he used to.
“I now make it back before sunset,” he said. “I don’t trust the night any more.”
— Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
An empty space where a vigil stood
As temperatures have fallen and snow has blown through the District, the dedicated crew of demonstrators who have kept the White House Peace Vigil alive for 44 years — widely considered the longest continuous act of political protest in the nation’s history — have become scarce.
In mid-December, just about three months after Trump ordered federal law enforcement to dismantle the long-standing protest, the space the protest usually occupied in Lafayette Square was empty.
Tour groups gathered at the center of the park, posing for photos, browsing the wares of vendors hawking pins and hats, and pulling their coats tight against the brutal gusts of wind. Park regulars, including several vendors, said they hadn’t seen the Peace Vigil folks for days.
In September, the National Park Service and U.S. Park Police officers hauled off protest banners, flags and a large blue tarp that kept the vigil-keepers shielded from the elements, leaving demonstrators and their protest signs more exposed than they had been in decades.
Philipos Melaku-Bello, 63, the vigil’s longest-serving steward, said then that it was probably only a matter of time before the protest became unsustainable for the small outfit of demonstrators who have worked to keep it alive. Melaku-Bello did not respond to multiple calls for comment for this story.
Keeping the vigil going without the help of a tarp or a tent to blunt the sharp edges of the wind and cold has made continuing the protest 24 hours a day virtually impossible, protesters said.
The peace vigil began June 3, 1981, when its founder, William Thomas, appeared outside the White House holding a placard that read “Wanted: Wisdom and Honesty.” Over the years, those who have maintained the vigil have been subject to harassment by police and passersby, protesters said.
But no president had ever directly called for the vigil’s removal, protesters said, until Trump.
— Marissa J. Lang
An effort to ditch smartphones grows
It started out as two friends batting around a question: Could they get a group of people to ditch their smartphones for a month?
Month Offline kicked off in the spring with an information session no one attended, before launching its initial cohorts of 15 or so participants — including a Post reporter — who switched to flip phones and got together for weekly in-person meetings and offline activities.
Word spread almost entirely through posters glued to city signposts; there was no website. Grant Besner and Danny Hogenkamp, who hatched the idea after bonding over their own disillusionment with smartphones and embrace of dumbphones, were still trying to figure out what they were building.
Just a few months after The Post wrote about their effort, their company, Offline Inc., is selling out cohorts, Besner said. The first Month Offline program being hosted outside D.C. — in New York — starts in January with about 30 people, while D.C. has 65 or so people spread between two cohorts that will run simultaneously over the month. An app allows people to forward texts from their smartphones to their dumbphones. And now there’s a website.
“In the early days of this, we were just holding our breath up until the last day to see if we could get another person or two to sign up, and I was on phone calls with people trying to convince them to do it,” said Besner, 28. “And now it’s a thing.”
In addition to Month Offline, Offline Inc. offers dumbphones and plans and is exploring partnering with other organizations, like schools, clubs and universities, to expand their reach. They experimented with a mail-order program in September, getting 41 people across the country to switch to flip-phones, but have dropped that effort for now after deciding the in-person component is key. Of the dozens of Month Offline graduates, many have kept their flip-phones.
The “wild ride” of the last six months has shown there’s an appetite for disconnecting, for reevaluating technology’s grasp over peoples’ lives, Besner said.
“We’ve kind of proven that hypothesis,” he said. “And so now the experiment is, can we shift the culture?”
— Brittany Shammas
The post We told their stories in 2025. Here’s what happened after we published. appeared first on Washington Post.
