News

Local couple proud of son's work that earned Pulitzer

By Bill Moss, Published: October 23, 2016

Linda Miller was happy and proud when her son, T. Christian Miller, won the Pulitzer Prize. She could not say she was totally surprised. The boy was ink-stained at an early age.

“He has had a very long history in newspapers because in Charleston he was a paper boy for about seven years,” said Miller, a schoolteacher who retired to Hendersonville with her husband, Donald, a scientist. “And he always wrote stories, he wrote little poems. And when he got to high school he was the editor of the English magazine there.”
His family called the boy “T” “because we have a lot of Thomases,” his mother said. A senior reporter for ProPublica, Miller won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a story he co-reported with Ken Armstrong on a rape case that had been badly mishandled before ultimately being solved. The story, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” exposed “law enforcement’s enduring failures to investigate reports of rape properly and to comprehend the traumatic effects on its victims,” the Pulitzer judges said.
T. Christian Miller, the son of Linda and Donald Miller of Hendersonville, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism.Linda and Donald Miller traveled to New York City last week to watch their son receive the medal during a centennial celebration of the Pulitzers at Columbia University.
“It was wonderful,” she said. “The guy who wrote ‘Hamilton’ (Lin-Manuel Miranda) was there too. He received a Pulitzer. There were so many people and they all knew each other and they all talked to each other. It was just exciting.”
Born in Baltimore, T was raised in Germany, Indiana and Charleston, S.C., as Donald Miller took jobs with different institutions.
By nature and nurture, T had sharply tuned antenna for injustice. As a youngster he attended inner-city public schools in Charleston.
“He was always a leader at the schools and we were always very active in social justice issues,” said Miller, who is active in the League of Women Voters. After graduating from a Catholic high school in Charleston, Miller earned a degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He still lives in the Bay area with his wife and their three children. Come July, T. and his family travel to the N.C. mountains for a month of R&R at his parent’s home, where the grandkids enjoy swimming in a small lake.
“They love to come here to Hendersonville,” Linda Miller said.
T. has been as gratified that the series showed investigators, as one headline put it, “how not to handle a rape investigation.”
“He was absolutely delighted with this, of course,” she said of the recognition. “It gave him a wonderful opportunity, a platform. He’s been invited by police groups and that kind of organization to tell the story. He’s able to tell them that there’s a right way and a wrong way.”