The Marshall Project and St. Louis Public Radio have received a 2026 National Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Innovation for their collaborative project “Remember Me,” a community art installation and engagement initiative that honored the lives of homicide victims in the city whose cases remain unsolved.
The ambitious collaboration included public art, original reporting, resource guides for community members and a series of conversations and events. It was a follow-up to a 2024 investigation by The Marshall Project, St. Louis Public Radio and APM Reports that showed that over 1,000 murders in the last decade went unsolved.
Building on this reporting, Remember Me looks at the impact on family and friends who have had to move on with their lives without a sense of justice and closure for the deaths of their loved ones.
“The project was conceived to create space for families to remember their loved ones in joy, not pain — and help the world see more broadly the fullness of their lives, not just the way they died,” said Raghuram Vadarevu, TMP’s deputy managing editor for local investigations and engagement. “Importantly, through our engagement team, we were able to help share the wisdom of families on navigating the loss of their loved ones and the homicide investigation that followed.”
The project was anchored by a public art installation that opened in August 2025 and featured six original portraits by St. Louis-based visual artist Cbabi Bayoc. Bayoc’s vivid illustrations depicted each person as their families remember them: full of life and love. Bayoc created the portraits to help restore a sense of wholeness to the affected families and larger community. The portraits were displayed in multiple venues across the St. Louis region with an accompanying QR code taking viewers to a website where they can listen to audio vignettes of a loved one talking about the person who was killed.
Led by engagement reporter Ivy Scott and then-engagement editor Nicole Lewis, the project included extensive resource guides for affected families in St. Louis and nationwide. One resource includes tips for dealing with grief, crowdsourced directly from the families. Another highlighted what families wanted to know from police, and a final one explained what happens in a homicide investigation.
The resources are now available throughout the St. Louis Public Library system as well as in hospitals, clinics and community/violence prevention centers across Missouri. Direct service providers, such as grief counselors, have updated or made significant changes to how they provide services after meeting with affected families at a community resource fair organized by STLPR and TMP. The guides have also been adapted and used by community groups in Alabama and California to support families.