At a memorial in St. Paul for a 14-year-old who loved gaming, there’s a framed graphic of a video game controller and also the words, “Just 5 More Minutes.”

It’s what most kids playing video games ask their parents, but also what Kevin Reitmeier’s family wishes they had with him.

“I’d give anything for five more minutes with my nephew,” Jameel Marshall said Thursday.

Kevin Reitmeier (Courtesy of the family)

At a growing memorial for Reitmeier, who died in a motorized scooter crash Tuesday, his family remembered the teen and also called for more safety at the West Side intersection.

Reitmeier was going into his freshman year at St. Paul’s Humboldt High School. “He loved life, was very energetic, loved his family and friends, loved God,” said aunt Reese Marshall.

He was adventurous and enjoyed being in nature. He had told his mother he wanted to live in the woods when he grew up, said grandmother Angela Tucker.

Safety at intersection ‘should have been addressed,’ grandma says

On Tuesday at about 8:50 a.m., police Reitmeier was operating a gasoline-powdered scooter. A 13-year-old, who Reitmeier’s family said was a friend of his, was the passenger. The scooter struck the front of a pickup truck at Ohio and George streets, police have said.

Preliminary information indicated the scooter was being operated in the street, ran a stop sign before the crash, and that neither of the teens wore helmets, police have said.

Police have said the pickup driver did not show signs of impairment and is cooperating with the investigation.

Reitmeier, who lived in the area, was pronounced dead at the hospital. His 13-year-old friend was in critical but stable condition as of Wednesday morning, according to police.

The intersection is controlled by stop signs at all four corners. Grandmother Stacy Schminkey said there’s a problem with people not stopping at the intersection “and this should have been addressed.”

“I’ve seen the comments online and … they’re blaming” Reitmeier, Schminkey said. “… Don’t put the blame on him when you have grown people who are licensed, passed the test, and they’re not stopping. Then, you’ve got a kid and what’s he going to do? Follow the example of what everyone else is doing.”

When the family starts to heal, Schminkey said she’s wants to push for traffic lights at the intersection.

The city has already been intending to resurface George Street this year, according to the Public Works Department. The plan does not call for traffic lights at George and Ohio streets, though pedestrian and crossing improvements are intended for the intersection.

“Bumpouts (or curb extensions) will be added on the south side of the street to improve visibility of people crossing George Street, reduce the crossing distance for people walking, and slow drivers by narrowing the street. There will also be bumpouts into Ohio where possible,” according to a Public Works website.

A memorial for Kevin Reitmeier, 14, who passed away Tuesday, July 1 in a motorized scooter crash, marks the location Thursday, July 3, 2025 at the intersection of Ohio and George streets in St Paul. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

‘Wish this day wasn’t true’

Handwritten notes to Reitmeier have been left at his memorial: “I wish this day wasn’t true,” one said. “Hug your dad extra tight for us,” said another note (Reitmeier’s father died in 2018).

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At Reitmeier’s memorial, in addition to the gaming references, there are stuffed animals and balloons in his favorite color of green, flowers and plants because he enjoyed gardening with his mother and picking flowers for her, a Bible for his faith, and his favorite soda and chips — root beer and Funyuns.

Reitmeier was “fearless,” said uncle Jameel Marshall. “He never let anything stop him from achieving a goal.”

He loved fireworks — “the kid was a firework himself” — and he enjoyed the Fourth of July, Marshall said.

“Kevin was the light of all our worlds,” his uncle said.

Columnist’s note: Every year I choose a university student to accompany me on my win-a-trip journey, which is meant to highlight issues that deserve more attention. My 2025 winner is Sofia Barnett, a recent Brown University graduate and a budding journalist — and with that, I’m handing the rest of the column over to her.

— Nicholas Kristof

 

SIERRA LEONE — Secrets swirl through homes and villages around the world, and in a poor district of Makeni, Sierra Leone, they involve what families do to the genitals of their daughters.

More than 2 million girls around the world endure genital mutilation before their fifth birthday each year, and most women here in the West African nation of Sierra Leone have been cut. We often think of human rights abuses as wartime atrocities or what governments do to dissidents, but sometimes they involve what family members do to the people they love.

In a low-slung home in the city of Makeni, a mom explained why she wants her daughters to be cut: It is her culture. It keeps girls chaste. It marks their sacred transition into womanhood and welcomes them into a community.

But her daughter, Alimatu Sesay, 18, was having none of that. “I’m not ready to go” get cut, she said firmly. “It is my right.”

Sesay’s mother, Mariama Sillah, laughed and rolled her eyes. She herself was cut as a young girl, and generations of the female lineage have belonged to the secret Bondo society that conducts the cutting. She doesn’t want her daughter left behind.

But Sesay has seen the damage. She’s heard horror stories from friends. And she doesn’t see it as a rite of passage but as a brutal relic of the past.

Yet Sesay knows that her mother wants what is best for her, and she doesn’t resent her for it. “She is my everything, my light,” she said, embracing her mom with both arms.

And Sillah said she would not force her daughter, even if she thinks she is making a mistake. The argument grew more impassioned when it moved to Sesay’s younger sister, newly 9 years old: The mother said she wanted the girl cut, while Sesay said she’d do anything to protect her.

To an American like me, appalled by the practice and allowed to listen in, the conversation reflected something hopeful — not only Sesay’s resistance but also the way that more girls are pushing past the taboo of talking about female genital mutilation, or FGM. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to report on the practice, because traditionally it has been unmentionable, but it seems to be losing its silencing power. In a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia, I found some young women were reluctant to discuss the topic, but many others were willing to candidly discuss it.

Here in West Africa, FGM usually entails cutting the clitoris and the labia minora. Some other African countries practice a more extreme version, infibulation — removing the clitoris and labia, and then sewing the vaginal opening shut to ensure virginity before marriage. More than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM, according to the World Health Organization.

The practice, also sometimes called female genital cutting or female circumcision, is often meant to reduce female sexual pleasure and thus disincentivize sex outside marriage. But in West Africa, it can also mark a girl’s transition into womanhood and welcome her into one of the culturally revered Bondo and Zoes female societies.

As it has become more possible to discuss FGM, it has also become possible for health officials to discuss the consequences. Cutting is often done with an unsterilized razor blade, without anesthetic, and the risks include infection, hemorrhaging, pain during intercourse and diminished sexual desire. Fatmata Kondowa, a midwife in Makeni who underwent FGM as a child, said that infections are common but often go untreated because of the insular nature of the societies. Girls sometimes die, she said, and then are buried quietly and secretly.

FGM is so horrific and widespread that it should be much higher on the global human rights agenda. To their credit, organizations like the United Nations Population Fund, UNICEF and U.N. Women have long spoken out against the practice, as have many aid groups. But my conversations with women and girls left me thinking that the most effective path to bring about change isn’t outside pressure but education.

Time and time again, I heard the same refrain: Education gave girls a vocabulary to name what was done to their bodies and a framework to say no before it could happen. It gave them access to biology, to human rights, to peers who shared their resistance. It gave them voices, sharpened by facts, strong enough to challenge their mothers, their aunts, their entire lineage.

So I came to see girls’ education as the most effective tool we have to dismantle FGM from within. Not international condemnation, not even criminalization — though both are crucial. It’s the girl in a school uniform, textbooks under her arm, asking her mother: “Why?” And the mother, for the first time, pausing before she answers.

In Bo, Sierra Leone, I asked a group of more than 20 girls if they wanted to be initiated into the secret societies, meaning that they would be cut. Nine hands shot up immediately.

As I was tallying the number in my notebook, a 35-year-old mother named Fatu pulled me aside. She said that many of the girls who raised their hands don’t actually want to be cut. In this community, she said, noninitiated girls are marginalized, and women in the Bondo secret societies pick fights with them to pressure them into submission. Fatu said that for this reason, she sent two of her daughters to live in a different village for their safety.

Mabinty Thoronka, a 19-year-old who was initiated when she was 4 or 5 years old, said that women in the Bondo society will “flog you” if you resist.

“They say that you are stubborn,” she said.

Sierra Leone’s Parliament has weighed a ban on FGM. The Caucus on Female Genital Mutilation has urged the societies to continue without FGM. International bodies continue to urge lawmakers to criminalize the practice, framing it not as a cultural rite but as a human rights emergency.

Tity Sannoh, 22, a Freetown resident, was initiated when she was 12 years old. She felt pain in her vulva for two years after being cut, and she said she has lingering trauma as a result.

She described what happened to her: “You have more than five, 10 people. Some will hold your mouth for you not to shout, so people won’t hear. Some will hold your feet, spread your feet widely. Some hold your hand.” Then one person holds the clitoris and cuts it underneath. Sannoh said she did not sleep for the next two days because of the pain. “I started having tender pain in my leg down to my foot,” she said.

When someone like Sesay opens a biology textbook, she learns about infection and scar tissue and trauma. But she also absorbs a far more dangerous idea in the eyes of the cutters: that she has a right to say no. And that is the quiet revolution already underway — in classrooms, in whispers among friends, in small communities like Sesay’s, where a daughter brings to the table the talk of girls’ rights.

Nicholas Kristof writes a column for the New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

Some will remember Melvin Giles as an apostle for urban gardening, a lifelong advocate for St. Paul’s Rondo and Frogtown neighborhoods that he called home, or as a stalwart voice for peace who installed raised beds, community gardens and symbolic “peace poles” wherever he could find green spaces.

Most everyone who knew Giles will remember him as the “bubble man” — constantly armed with a smile, a wand and the drive to blow bubbles at any community event.

Giles, a co-leader of the Urban Farm and Garden Alliance and a respected elder in Rondo’s Black community, died in his sleep Tuesday at his Woodbury home. He was 66.

“I only know maybe a handful of people in my whole life who I’ve never seen get upset and yell or share any expression of anger,” said his nephew, Anura Si-Asar, in an interview Thursday. “He always had a positive and uplifting energy. I don’t know how that’s possible. He lived the peace that he talked about.”

A fan of “Star Trek,” Giles likened himself in a 2023 interview with the Pioneer Press to a time traveler looking backward in time to draw lessons from the past, while also looking generations into the future toward a better world. He called the peace poles he installed in urban gardens simple monuments, each bearing the inscription “May Peace Prevail On Earth” in several languages.

“The peace poles are my time-traveling vehicles, and the bubbles are the fuel,” he said at the time.

Born in Chicago to a traveling Baptist preacher, Giles was the youngest of four brothers. He never married or had kids of his own, but he treated his 18 nieces and nephews like his own children, Si-Asar said. The family moved to St. Paul when Giles was about five years old.

Giles worked for Catholic Charities for 15 years, serving for seven years as the director of its Catholic Charities Frogtown Center. He also served as an adjunct community faculty instructor at Bethel University’s Anthropology Department.

He was active in urban growing and anti-racism initiatives such as AfroEco, which attempts to source sustainable products from South Africa, and served as an adviser to the diversity committee of the Ramsey County Master Gardeners.

He was also a certified facilitator of Racial Sobriety workshops, an anti-racism trainer for the Minnesota Tri-Council Commission of the Council of Churches and a founding member of the St. Paul Pluralism Circle.

Giles received the Martin Luther King “Dream Keeper” Award in 2003, the McKnight Foundation “Virginia McKnight Binger Awards” in Human Service in 2005, the “Outstanding World Citizen” Award in 2008, Bethel University’s “George K. Brushaber Reconciliation Award” in 2009, the “Morrill Hall/Rachel Tilsen Social Justice Award” in 2011, and the Blooming St. Paul Garden Advocate Award in 2017.

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In 2023, he was named as one of seven inductees in the inaugural Black Legacy and Leadership Enrichment Initiative, a pilot program that awarded unrestricted grants of $55,000 to local activists to rest, recharge and ultimately better serve the community.

Through the work of the Urban Farm and Garden Alliance, Giles was instrumental in installing raised beds of edibles in backyard box gardens, larger community gardens and a greenhouse or two, providing fresh food in areas where leafy greens were otherwise in short supply.

Recent garden locations included the green outside the Lexington Commons apartments on Lexington Parkway, a housing development that caters to the previously homeless; the Lovejoy Family Community Garden on Grotto Street; the Greenhouse Garden on Dale Street in Frogtown; the Pilgrim Baptist Church on Central Avenue; the Morning Star Baptist Church on Selby Avenue; and the Peace Sanctuary Garden on Aurora Avenue.

Memorial services will be announced later this month, Si-Asar said, with arrangements to be made by Brooks Funeral Home.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s dismantling of Americans’ trust in — and ultimately, access to — vaccines isn’t happening with one sweeping policy that grabs the public’s attention. It’s unfolding quickly and quietly, in bland conference rooms where hand-picked appointees make decisions that will have far-reaching consequences for our health.

Inside one of those nondescript rooms last week, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an independent panel that makes vaccine recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offered a glimpse of what’s to come. The group, few of whom have any expertise in vaccines, infectious diseases or epidemiology, at times cast aside evidence-based science and sowed doubt in some of our most valuable public health tools.

This panel of seven replaced the 17 ACIP members Kennedy fired last month in order to stack the committee with members who share his anti-vaccine agenda.

Their lack of expertise and, for some, even basic knowledge of epidemiology, were evident throughout the two-day meeting. Some were unfamiliar with the Vaccines for Children Program, which provides free shots to those eligible. (The program has provided some 71.5 billion doses to kids since 1994.)

At least one member appeared to struggle to understand the distinction between a vaccine’s efficacy and its effectiveness. It’s a wonky, but important distinction referring to how well a vaccine works in a trial versus the real world. Some seemed not to take seriously the risk that infections like RSV and the flu can pose to even healthy children. One member suggested that the 250 children who died from the flu last season — a recent high — was a “modest” number.

But this group isn’t just unqualified — it’s dangerous. Its decisions directly influence insurance coverage and access to vaccines, affecting health outcomes for all Americans. The stakes are particularly high when it comes to protecting children against preventable diseases. Yet the tone of the panel’s first formal meeting suggested many members are more intent on sowing doubt about routine immunizations. Even worse, their actions could impede access to these important medicines.

“That whole meeting was a travesty,” says Fiona Havers, a physician and epidemiologist. After the ACIP firings, Havers resigned from the CDC, where she was considered one of its leading experts on vaccine policy.

Kennedy’s oft-repeated claim is that the COVID-19 response caused vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. and that his drastic changes at the CDC are a necessary step in rebuilding the public’s trust. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard epidemiologist and chair of the panel, echoed that sentiment during the meeting’s opening, emphasizing the importance of “rebuilding trust in sound science,” and again at the end, when he commended participants for discussing vaccines in an “unbiased, open and transparent way.”

It’s a convenient — and inaccurate — framing. It elides the role Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement played in spreading vaccine misinformation during the pandemic. It provides cover for their “just asking questions” approach to evaluating vaccine policy.

The problem, of course, is when people given the CDC’s imprimatur are asking questions that are purposely crafted to sow doubt. That became clear from the outset when Kuldorff announced that the committee would evaluate the cumulative effects of the childhood vaccine schedule, as well as any immunizations that had not been considered in the last seven years, including the hepatitis B shot given to newborns. The implication is that the CDC has been ignoring some unknown dangers of shots that have been safely used for years. Kuldorff, who was fired from Harvard, was a vocal critic of COVID vaccine mandates during the pandemic and refused the shot.

“The claims that were framed as efforts to increase vaccine confidence actually do the opposite — they undermine vaccine confidence,” says Sean O’Leary, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ liaison to ACIP. He called the meeting “a really long couple of days for science.”

A discussion of flu vaccines was a disturbing preview of what “rebuilding trust” might look like under Kennedy’s CDC — and how that mantra could be used to disrupt access to vaccines. After a thankfully routine vote to recommend that Americans get their fall flu shots, the panel stated that those vaccines should not contain thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that decades ago came under scrutiny for a now-disproven link to autism.

It was a disturbing development that upended the panel’s normally measured process for evaluating vaccines. The discussion was added to ACIP’s agenda at the last minute, but more alarming was that thimerosal was being discussed at all. The preservative’s safety has been thoroughly studied, but was removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001 to try to address parents’ hesitancy. Today, it is used sparingly — the single-dose flu vaccines that the majority of Americans receive don’t contain it, but it’s still used as a preservative in multi-dose vials, which just 4-5% of patients in the US receive.

Most troubling was that the “evidence” against thimerosal was presented by Lyn Redwood, a nurse and former head of the Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy. She used her time to make a series of false claims about the preservative’s risks. Her original presentation cited a fake study on the risks of thimerosal — a reference removed after the media raised concerns.

Pediatrician Cody Meissner, one of two rational members, questioned the purpose of her presentation and its contents. (Meissner was often the lone voice of reason and expertise on the panel during the two-day meeting.) Ultimately, when it came time to vote on recommending the preservative be removed from flu shots, Meissner was also the only member to vote against it.

The vote has real consequences. It means some Americans will lose out on their shots. The vaccine is more commonly used outside the U.S., and there’s concern about how ACIP’s decisions could ripple into global health. And vaccine hesitancy experts worry that re-litigating a settled topic could undermine broader confidence in immunizations.

And perhaps most alarming is the precedent set by the committee bypassing the CDC’s normal review process to push through what seemed like a preordained decision.

Typically, a CDC working group comprised of internal staff and subject matter experts would spend months developing recommendations that are presented to ACIP in a public forum. They would examine hard data on a vaccine within the broader context of its real-world use, considering, for example, the magnitude of the public health problem it addresses, challenges to implementing a rollout, and its impact on health equity, Havers explains. Before considering removing a shot like the thimerosal-containing flu vaccine, the working group would first study the public health consequences of the decision.

“None of that happened, which is why this was a complete farce,” Havers says.

That’s the antithesis of transparency. And it’s a sign for what we can expect from this group. After watching the panel railroad a vote on settled science, it’s fair to worry about their future plans. The next effort to “rebuild trust” could have far-reaching health consequences — and, without a doubt, will cost lives.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.