Lakeside School

"I’ve come a long way since I wrote the horoscopes for the [Tatler],” jokes Susie Neilson ‘11. Indeed, Neilson — who is now an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle — has. In May 2025, she was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for a series entitled “Fast and Fatal.”

The yearlong investigation, which Neilson co-reported with colleague Jennifer Gollan, found that police pursuits in the United States cause nearly two deaths a day. Their analysis revealed other unsettling facts: that most fatal police chases were initiated over nonviolent or minor crimes and that officers who initiated them were rarely held accountable. The series received a number of accolades — and led to calls for reform from members of Congress, informed a bill passed in Hawaii that limited police chases, spurred the creation of model policies by organizations such as the NYU Policing Project, and more.

Neilson’s reporting took her to Kentucky and Southern California — and even to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department training course, where she rode in a police car while an officer performed a “PIT” maneuver, a technique that can cause cars to crash and roll over when performed at high speeds, and which has led to numerous deaths during chases. She also rode in a car that got “pitted.”

“We wanted to write about this maneuver with authority,” she says, “and one way we thought we could do that was by experiencing how it felt.”

Neilson credits Lakeside with pushing her to think critically and always “go the extra mile” with her work.

I think, being at Lakeside, one of the primary things I learned was humility.... I just never felt like the smartest person in any room that I was in. I always felt, for better or for worse, like I would have to work really really hard to just pursue my dreams and… produce work of the quality and rigor that I wanted to. - Susie Neilson ’11

Currently, Neilson is working on a series about insurance companies shortchanging survivors of the 2025 L.A. wildfires. In September 2025 , she met with Tatler staff members and advised them on a complicated article involving immigration and ICE detention.

“I just really like the process of digging into complex topics and uncovering things and trying to right wrongs,” she says.