Pat Duggins
News DirectorPat Duggins is APR’s news director. As a kid, he watched the Apollo manned moon launches along Florida’s space coast. Pat later spent 14 years covering NASA for NPR. After re-organizing the APR newsroom, he and the team were honored with over 150 awards for excellence in journalism. That includes APR being the first radio newsroom to receive RFK Human Rights’ “Seigenthaler Prize for Courage in Journalism.” Pat holds a master’s degree from the University of Alabama and has published two books on NASA. When he’s not at APR, he enjoys cooking with Lucia, and tending his beloved fig tree.
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A Brown University sophomore who was killed in an attack at the Rhode Island university was remembered Monday as “smart, confident, curious, kind, principled, brave,” at a funeral in her home state of Alabama. Hundreds gathered at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in downtown Birmingham to remember Ella Cook, 19. -
Investigators in the shooting that killed an Alabama college student are talking about the high tech tip that blew the case wide open. Gunman Claudio Neves Valente is believed to be the shooter at Brown University who left sophomore Ella Cook of Mountain Brook dead. -
The University of Alabama is the first team to advance in this year’s college football playoffs. Oklahoma was on its way to be the first team to beat Alabama twice in one season since Grover Cleveland was President. The Sooners led seventeen to nothing in the second quarter. That when the Tide came to life. -
A frantic search for the suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University ended at a New Hampshire storage facility where authorities discovered the man dead inside and then revealed he also was suspected of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. Alabama college sophomore Ella Cook was one of the two fatalities at the Brown shooting. -
Alabama’s football season may come down to one game tonight. The Crimson Tide will play Oklahoma before a hometown crowd in Norman. The winner will face number one ranked Indiana in the Rose Bowl during the championship quarterfinals. The only playoff game tonight is considered a toss-up, and that’s generating interest among sports bettors in what looks like a lackluster post season for Las Vegas oddsmakers. -
A retired Army veteran pleaded not guilty Thursday in the 1997 killing of an Alabama woman whose remains were found near the victims of Long Island’s infamous Gilgo Beach killings. Andrew Dykes, who had also served as a Tennessee state trooper and a corrections officer, was charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Tanya Denise Jackson, a fellow military veteran with whom he had a child outside of his marriage, according to prosecutors on Long Island. -
More than 20 Republican senators have signed onto a letter urging Trump to keep marijuana a Schedule I drug as he prepares to potentially loosen regulations on it. Punchbowl News is reporting that Alabama U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville is among them. -
Former University of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron announced Wednesday that he is ending his campaign for lieutenant governor of Alabama to pursue a sports-related opportunity. McCarron did not disclose the details of the new position but said “football is calling my name once again.” The announcement comes two months after McCarron announced his bid for office. -
Authorities have asked the public for any footage they might have of the gunman who fatally shot two students and wounded nine others at Brown University, even as they released a new video timeline and a slightly clearer image of a possible suspect. The shooter killed sophomore Ella Cook, of Mountain Brook, as well as another student. Nine others were wounded. -
A group of students and professors at public universities across Alabama are asking an appeals court to halt a state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools and prohibits the endorsement of what Republican lawmakers dubbed “divisive concepts” related to race and gender.
