Zuber investigation the focus of podcast by OPB

If you live in Columbia County, especially Rainier, you’ve heard about Sarah Zuber and the continued quest by family, friends, and community advocates to find justice for her untimely death in 2019, which still remains a mystery.

Despite an initial multi-agency response, there are still more questions than answers. “Hush,” an “investigative podcast uncovering the buried truth about critical stories in the Pacific Northwest,” is produced by Oregon Public Broadcast (OPB) and led by two investigative journalists, Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas. The two have spent a year investigating the Zuber case as the focus of the podcast’s recently-released second season.

“The more we talked to people and did pre-reporting, we felt this was pretty interesting and representative of a lot of the issues, which is small town police departments and politics that can take place and a lack of media,” said Haas. “Those all felt like really interesting things to us.”

The result is an eight-episode arc with a detailed, fact-driven look into what happened on the surface and behind the scenes. One undercurrent is the impact the lack of local journalism has on rural communities. “We sort of felt like Columbia County is not going to get this kind of coverage if we don't do it so that was a big factor for us,” said Haas. “Caring that these rural communities are getting good coverage. I think that was ultimately one of the deciding factors of why we picked this story,”

The year-long investigation involved more than 75 interviews and reviewing thousands of documents, many of which were procured through Oregon Open Records requests, a detailed law the journalists discovered wasn’t always well understood by local representatives.

The investigative reporting began in September of 2024 with knocking on doors, making phone calls, conducting interviews, requesting records, reviewing them for next steps, and following up on details. “As investigative journalists, all we care about is the facts, like, what can we factually say about what happened here,” said Haas. “This question of how she could die so close to home and nobody knows for sure is really the point we kept coming back to. I think we all have a right to ask questions of our government and of people in positions of power. That is our role as journalists; to ask those questions for folks who perhaps aren't able to advocate for themselves.”

To Haas, a few investigative surprises emerged. One is unexplained changes to the medical examiner’s report regarding cause of death, which first stated a neck fracture but then changed to hypothermia and intoxication.

“I think early on, everybody pursued this as homicidal violence, whether that's a hit and run or she was attacked in some sort of way, and then a year later, sort of because they could not find evidence to support that, changes their story to ‘Oh, she got drunk and laid down and died from hypothermia,’” said Haas. “I found it extremely shocking that a medical examiner, six years later, would tell us this neck fracture never existed when she wrote [it] in her autopsy report...I think that is emblematic of the type of ‘cover your butt’ that I see in this case, which is, ‘I'm just going to change what I said.’”

Another is regarding a letter-to-the-editor of the Chronicle & Chief by Rebeccas Zuber that was published but then removed from the website. The letter in question expressed concerns regarding the investigation into Sarah’s death. The investigative team remained baffled as they got deeper into details that seemed to only create more questions versus bringing clarity. “I think the way this was handled initially - and avenues that law enforcement and the medical examiner went down - were incorrect early on and that makes it much harder to come in years later and definitively say this is what happened,” said Haas. “[We] seem[ed] to ask a question that was not asked early on, which is, if you believe Sarah was highly intoxicated, where did she get the alcohol? She's 18 years old. She cannot go to a liquor store and buy alcohol and nobody ever seemed to answer that question or thoroughly investigate that early on. I think that question is, if she got alcohol, where did she get it from? That’s the only thing I've been thinking about for the last four months. Answering that question, I think, tells you a lot about what happened.”

Describing the role he and Sottile can play as “the voices of accountability,” Haas said, “I told the Zubers early on, ‘I can't promise you I'm going to solve what happened to Sarah, but what I can promise is I will go to the people involved and ask them hard questions and make them answer those questions, and people will hear what those folks have to say.’ I think there's a lot of room for people to fill in the lack of information that has existed since 2019 in this case and that's really unfortunate. Sarah and the Zubers deserved a more thorough police investigation from the get go.”

The full second season of “Hush” is now available on all podcast services and can be found at opb.org/show/hush.