Murder-Suicide Appears to Be Rising Among Older Americans

Most often by men against women

By Jennifer Mascia for The Trace and Chip Brownlee for The Trace

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

This story was published in collaboration with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy, and power.

A day after New Year’s, 2025, a 91-year-old man fatally shot his 89-year-old wife in their house in Camarillo, California. He called the police to confess before killing himself. “They were inseparable for the 64 years they were together,” according to the couple’s joint obituary.

Last November in upstate New York, a 69-year-old retiree struggling with his mental health killed his 68-year-old longtime girlfriend and then himself in their home. A neighbor discovered their bodies. “I just don’t know what happened to him,” another neighbor said about the retiree. “He was just a good guy.”

Gun deaths overall have been declining in recent years, but murder-suicides in which at least one of the victims was age 65 or older are higher than ever, according to a Trace analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive. At least 134 older adults were killed in murder-suicides last year, a slight rise over 2024 and the highest number since GVA began compiling data more than a decade ago. Another 85 older adults perpetrated a killing before dying by their own hand.

GVA tracks shootings through media and police reports, so it may not capture every incident. Still, it is one of the most comprehensive sources of data on gun violence in the United States. The Trace took a closer look at the murder-suicides and whether there are points of intervention for people at risk.

What the Data Shows

There were 679 gun-related murder-suicides in the United States last year. In 144 of them, or 21 percent, at least one victim or perpetrator was 65 or older.

The circumstances behind the murder-suicides of older adults varied. Illness was a motivating factor in at least 15 percent of them. In several cases, the perpetrator was the victim’s full-time caregiver. 

A couple of shootings followed disputes over inheritance. Two other shooters reported financial struggles before pulling the trigger. A few couples left notes saying the decision to die was mutual, but most shootings appeared to be unilateral actions on the part of the shooter. In many cases, the motive will never be known — not even to the families.

In more than half of the cases we examined, the perpetrator fatally shot their spouse or a current or former romantic partner. In just over a quarter, the perpetrator killed their parent or child, or another immediate family member. Family annihilations — in which someone kills multiple members of their immediate family — accounted for 16 percent of the incidents. Over the past two years, family annihilation has become a twice-daily phenomenon in the United States.

Women made up 80 percent of the victims in last year’s murder-suicides among older adults. The oldest victim was 102. Her 75-year-old son-in-law fatally shot her and her 73-year-old daughter in La Porte, Indiana, in May 2025. A neighbor said the victims had health problems and that the son-in-law had been taking care of them.

All but two of the shooters were men. The oldest perpetrator, a 92-year-old man in Mesa, Arizona, killed his 93-year-old wife and then himself at their senior group home in October. 

Several of the incidents involved couples whose bodies were discovered during welfare checks instigated by neighbors or family members, sometimes days or weeks after the killings. In those cases, a motive was difficult to discern — and in a few cases, police couldn’t even tell who the shooter was.

Only a few cases involved a documented history of domestic abuse. In August last year, a 70-year-old man fatally shot his 69-year-old wife and 40-year-old daughter at their mansion in Rolling Hills, California, before killing himself. The couple was in the middle of a divorce. Both victims had a restraining order against the shooter.

Trump regime lets sales of sawed-off shotguns and silencers become legal

Just in time for fall hunting season

By Chip Brownlee for The Trace

Silencers and short-barreled firearms like sawed-off shotguns have been heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act for nearly a century. That just changed.

Under the NFA, enacted in 1934, owners of silencers, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and some other atypical weapons were required to register their guns with the federal government and undergo more extensive vetting. On August 5, a federal judge in Texas, James Wesley Hendrix, found the registration requirements unconstitutional and issued an injunction blocking the provision. He gave the Trump administration a week to appeal.

The Justice Department missed that deadline. So on August 13, the special regulations on silencers (also known as suppressors) and short-barreled guns were effectively scrapped for the first time in more than 90 years. 

Gun rights proponents cheered the decision. In Texas, far-right congressional candidate Brandon Herrera — known online as TheAKGuy — was among the first to buy a legal, unregistered silencer just after midnight at an event organized by Gun Owners of America. Hours later, in South Carolina, the National Association for Gun Rights posted a video claiming silencers were “flying off the shelves” at the Greenville store of Palmetto State Armory, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Starting Saturday, don't get mistaken for Bambi's mom

Stand out during Hunting Season with Orange Safety Clothing

During hunting season it’s safety first, fashion second. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) reminds the public that it’s time to wear your fluorescent orange clothing and embrace high visibility fall fits. Bright and bold, orange clothing helps keep you safe while outdoors. 

Starting this weekend with archery deer season, anyone in state management areas and undeveloped state parks during hunting season must wear at least 200 square inches (a hat or vest) of orange from Saturday, Sept. 12 through Sunday, Feb. 28. Archery hunters are exempt from this requirement during archery deer season. For more details, visit www.dem.ri.gov/orange.

For a complete breakdown of hunting season dates and regulations, please review the 2026-27 Hunting and Trapping Regulation Guide available online at www.eregulations.com/rhodeisland/hunting and at local sales agents.

 For more information on DEM programs and initiatives, visit www.dem.ri.gov. Follow DEM on Facebook, Twitter (@RhodeIslandDEM), or Instagram (@rhodeisland.dem) for timely updates. Follow DFW on Facebook and Instagram (@ri.fishandwildlife) to stay up to date on news, events and volunteer opportunities. You can also subscribe to DFW’s monthly newsletter here.

And Make sure you abide by these rules, too.

For the humor-impaired, this is satire.

South County Democrats: Beware of DINOs on the Sept. 9 Primary ballot

The League of RI Businesses is a wolf in sheep’s clothing

An oped from Bill Ibelle

There’s a new, big-money player on the Rhode Island political stage that’s targeting many of our finest environmental legislators because they also support gun control.

The League of RI Businesses is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, posing as a moderate, bipartisan, pro-business organization, when in fact, it was created last year specifically to knock off legislators who voted for a ban on assault weapons.

So if you feel safer knowing the guy down the street has an assault rifle hanging in his living room gun rack, then by all means, vote for a League-endorsed candidate. (listed below).

The League’s founder, David Levesque, knows that most Rhode Islanders don’t believe a deer hunter needs to pump out 60 rounds a minute to bag a doe. 

So Levesque and his cohorts rarely mention assault weapons when explaining why the League has targeted so many fine legislators. Instead, in an interview with Ocean State Media, he said that the League is merely targeting legislators who “fail to support the Constitution.” Only when pressed repeatedly by an interviewer does he concede that he’s referring exclusively to the Second Amendment—the right to bear arms.

Apparently, the League believes that James Madison had assault weapons in mind when he introduced the amendment to Congress in 1789. Never mind that an assault rifle, at that time, was a musket, a ramrod, a powder pouch, and a lead ball that took nearly a minute to load and, because it had no rifling, had the accuracy of a pea shooter.

He’s also against renewable energy because it’s unprofitable, doesn’t work, and has driven up electric rates by 27 percent — all untrue. What is true is that he revealed his true colors when he claimed that if we eliminated all state wind and solar programs, “we could literally put almost $30 million a month back in the hands of Rhode Island businesses.” Translation: The heck with our children’s future, we want bigger profits now.

Levesque insists that his group wants “middle-of-the-road, common-sense people” in office. This seems just a wee bit hard to believe, given that Levesque is a vocal Trump supporter who, when asked by the Providence Journal about our president’s second term, said, “I think it’s going awesome.”

So if ICE raids make you feel safer; if you think the war with Iran is the best use of $37 billion in taxpayer money; if you believe the skyrocketing price of oil is the path to affordability; and if you thrill at the grade-school insults our leader routinely hurls at our foreign allies—then by all means, take the League’s advice on who to vote for.

If you’re still not convinced that this organization is poison, consider the League’s subversion of the state’s campaign finance laws. To get around the state’s $2,000 limit on individual donations, they formed 40 separate Political Action Committees (PACs). In an interview with Channel 12, Levesque boasted that “What we did is extraordinary. It’s never been done before. We opened more PACs than anybody’s ever done [in Rhode Island]. This will allow us to give $80,000 to an individual candidate. There’s no other organization in the state of Rhode Island that can put that kind of money into a candidate’s hands.”

Just to be clear, the state donation limit is $2,000 and the League says its armada of 40 PACs makes it legal to give $80,000.

If you would like to reduce the influence of money in state politics, you might want to vote against the candidates the League is financing.

Here is a list of incumbents the League has targeted and the candidates it is backing to unseat them:

The League also endorsed nine incumbents: John Brien, Elaine Morgan, Leonidas Raptiakis, Patrick Maloney, Gregory Constantino, Marie Hopkins, Paul Santucci, Stephano Famiglietti, and six candidates running for open seats:

 

MAGA guy wants to buy Charlestown election for pedo-defending lawyer

As early and mail-in voting starts for the September 9, beware of phony Democrats

By Will Collette

As I've reported previously, there is a push by a MAGA group called "the League of Rhode Island Businesses (LORIB)" to oust Democrats around the state, but especially in South County. Some of their candidates are masquerading as Democrats so they can run in the Sept. 9 Primary. Others are running in the General Election.

LORIB is run by a rightwing MAGA guy named Dave Levesque who owns a chain of coffee shops. He lives in Narragansett. He formed LORIB to push his agenda of protecting the rich from taxes and opposing sensible measures to control gun violence. He set up a state Political Action Committee, as well as 39 local PACs, one for every Rhode Island city and town, including Charlestown.

None of these local PACs are actually local. He runs them all and set out this year to challenge just about every South County Democratic woman legislator, including Charlestown’s own state Representative Tina Spears.

In Charlestown, Levesque and the LORIB machine are promoting criminal defense lawyer Leah Boisclair to oust Tina Spears in the September 9 Democratic Primary. They actively tried to get Republicans and MAGA supporters to switch their party registration to Democrat to swing the numbers in Boisclair’s favor.

The deadline to make that party switch was August 10. Nancy Levin reported in the Rhode Island Current on August 17 that only 198 Republicans statewide had switched to Democrat. 

Boisclair’s signs and her mailings (so far) have been pretty low-key and vague. My main take-away from them so far is that she owns a dog. She stripped her Facebook page of dozens of rightwing posts – although not before we captured those posts in screenshots.

One fact she absolutely does not mention is that her law practice is built on representing people accused of heinous crimes, including child rape, human trafficking and domestic violence. She not only represents them but actively tries to recruit such clients with come-ons like this from her own website:

Nice touch with the stilettos and red lace underwear

And what specific sex crimes does Boisclair want to defend against? Conveniently, she expressly tells us on her website:

She has no record of community service, involvement in the Democratic Party or political interests in anything other than MAGA, guns and defending pedos.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall for Boisclair family Thanksgiving dinners. I'd love to hear Boisclair explain to her grandmother what she does for living. 

The money war

But who cares if you have enough cash to create a thick enough smokescreen.

LORIB kicked in $10,500 from six of its PACs that showed up in Boisclair’s campaign finance form for the last quarter of 2025. According to that report, she received $2000 each from the PACs claiming to be in Charlestown, Block Island, North and South Kingstown and Westerly, plus $500 from Newport.

Her most recent campaign finance report filed with the Board of Elections shows TWENTY LORIB PAC donations. All give their addresses as 1140 Reservoir Avenue in Cranston, with Levesque as their leader. Here's the list:

1. LORIB statewide: $2,000
2. LORIB Bristol: $250
3. LORIB Charlestown: $500
4. LORIB Cranston: $1,300
5. LORIB Cumberland: $600
6. LORIB Hopkinton: $250
7. LORIB Jamestown: $250
8. LORIB Lincoln: $250
9. LORIB Narragansett: $500
10. LORIB Newport: $250
11. LORIB North Kingstown: $200
12. LORIB North Providence: $300
13. LORIB North Smithfield: $1,000
14. LORIB Pawtucket: $300
15. LORIB Portsmouth: $250
16. LORIB Providence: $300
17. LORIB West Greenwich: $500
18. LORIB West Warwick: $250
19. LORIB Westerly: $500
20. LORIB Woonsocket: $250

It’s amazing how much interest our local House District 36 race is drawing from all over the state, drawing in a total of $20,000 just from LORIB affiliates.

But understand, it’s all Levesque.

Levesque appears to have some pretty good legal advisors on how to work around campaign finance laws. He avoids the $2000 limit on contributions through his 40 PACs. If he wants to drop big bucks in a campaign, he just cuts separate checks, each no more than $2000.

Four of his PACs gave more than $2000 to Boisclair but again, no problem because there were two checks, one in calendar year 2025 and the other this year. I checked with the Board of Elections, and the $2000 contribution cap is an annual cap.

Boisclair’s campaign finance reports show lots of money from unidentified donors, lumped together as "aggregated donations." 

Again, LORIB’s strategy has been to encourage dark contributions by asking donors to write checks UNDER $200, so the money doesn’t have to be identified by source.

Boisclair may be a nice person who is kind to dogs. But that doesn’t make her a good state Representative. Boisclair made a voluntary career choice in setting up law practice to represent clients accused of terrible crimes. 

She has a right to represent them but her choice to do that means I don’t want her to represent me.

She certainly is no match for our current Representative Tina Spears who has an impeccable record of achievement, integrity and public service. For me, Tina is the only choice.

Other LORIB news of note

As I expected, LORIB has added incumbent wingnut Senator Elaine Morgan as an endorsed candidate. Morgan has been an embarrassment to her district, which includes the northern half of Charlestown, since she was elected.

Morgan has been busted for campaign finance fraud and likes to cavort in places she doesn’t belong, pretending she’s a law enforcement official. The most recent escapade happened last year, when she “raided” a housing for the homeless project in Providence. She claimed she was an official with Elon Musk’s DOGE and was looking for waste, fraud and abuse.

Morgan faces a serious challenge this year from Samantha “Sam” Wilcox, chair of the Richmond Town Council. Go Sam!

Sen. Alana DiMario (Narragansett/So. Kingstown) also faces a DINO/LORIB challenger in the Democratic Primary as does Democrat Bob Craven, Jr. in the race to fill his father's vacant seat. The same dynamics are at play in these races as we're seeing in Charlestown.

LORIB also has challengers to South County Democrats in the General Election, including Charlestown's Democratic state Senator Victoria Gu, but we'll hold off on going into those races until after we've passed the Primary.

While LORIB doesn't seem likely to officially push any candidates seeking office beyond the General Assembly, there are several "LORIB-Adjacent" candidates to flag.

They include DINO Attorney General candidate Joe Solomon whose yard signs seem to appear right next to Lean Boisclair's all over Charlestown. He also tried the ploy of enticing Republicans to cross over to vote in the September 9 primary to vote for him. 

Republican Gubernatorial contender Aaron Guckian, behind in the polls in the Republican primary, announced his candidacy at a LORIB event. 

Finally, the Florida MAGA nut Vic Mellor who is running in the Republican Primary for the party nomination to run for US House District 2 against Seth Magaziner, also seems pretty tight with Levesque and LORIB. Of note, even though Mellor is a serious rightwing nut, he is also a registered agent of the government of Cuba. 

One of my colleagues speculated that maybe Mellor wants to front for hotel and resort businesses after Donald Trump invades Cuba.

Booga booga!

Westerly culture war erupts again

After victory for trans student rights in Cumberland, all eyes turn to Westerly

Steve Ahlquist

Credit: Mel Woods/Xtra

As the Cumberland School District wrestled with and ultimately declined to pass changes to its transgender student policies last week, Westerly School Committee Solicitor William Nardone provided a freewheeling and imaginative overview of a recent United States Supreme Court decision, West Virginia v. B.P.J., regarding the eligibility of transgender athletes in female sports at last Wednesday’s meeting during his “solicitor’s report.”

In the decision, SCOTUS ruled that under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may maintain women’s and girls’ sports teams based on “biological sex.” The decision permits—but does not strictly mandate—the exclusion of trans girls from female sports, said Solicitor Nardone. The solicitor advised the School Committee that the district should align itself with the court’s decision, even though the ruling did not affect Rhode Island General Laws or the Department of Education’s mandated Guidance for Rhode Island Schools on Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students.

Nardone went even further than the court’s decision, interpreting the ruling’s “umbrella” to apply to spaces such as locker rooms and bathrooms. Christian nationalist Committee member Peter Nero was quick to point out the difficulties of enforcing a ban based on “biological sex,” noting that birth certificates can be legally altered in many states. Solicitor Nardone dismissed the concern and noted that the Supreme Court decision does not address the issue of verification, and that the “day-to-day” policing of the policy is up to the district administration.

Committeemembers Seth Logan and Lori Wycall cited Mirabelli v. Bonta, the case that was at the center of the kerfuffle in Cumberland. Unaware that Cumberland would conclude that altering their policy was, at the very least, premature (if not dangerous for the health and well-being of students), they suggested the district ensure parents are informed if a student begins to socially transition at school (that is, adopt names, pronouns, or the dress of a gender different from the one assigned at birth. Committeemember Logan is fairly new to the Committee, but Committeemember Wycall has long wanted to impose policies to discriminate against trans children. (See: here, here, and here.)

Though the opponents of trans girls playing sports couch their arguments in terms of competitiveness, safety, and fairness, their true agenda is Christian Nationalism, complete with Christian prayers and Bibles in public schools.

Committeemember Peter Nero formerly served as the Superintendent of the Cranston Public Schools until his retirement in 2012. During his tenure, an atheist student, Jessica Ahlquist (full disclosure, Jessica is my niece), was a plaintiff in a successful case brought against the city by the RI ACLU to remove a Christian prayer banner from the auditorium wall of Cranston High School West:

“We wanted to keep the banner,” said Committeemember Nero at Tuesday night’s meeting. “We thought it was the relic. It was Christian, and I’m a practicing Catholic, so I didn’t find a problem with it. We ended up getting a pro bono [lawyer] from the Diocese, but the [ACLU] won the case…

“…if the Supreme Court was empowered back in 2012, that prayer banner would still be up … because you can see now they’re putting Bibles in some schools, Bible studies… I had the prayer banner cut down from the wall, and I’ve had it hidden. And someday, if [the Supreme Court] turns that around, I’ll have it put back up.”

Here’s the transcript of the relevant parts of the committee meeting. You can watch the video here.

Why we have the Second Amendment

 

Public opinion on abortion has shifted 4 years after Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade

We're more polarized than ever

Laurel Elder, Hartwick College; Mary-Kate Lizotte, Augusta University, and Steven Greene, North Carolina State University

It’s been four years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion.

In the immediate aftermath of the decision, national attention centered on implementation of state bans and a rapidly shifting legal landscape.

But four years later, one of the most impactful developments has been less visible: a significant, sustained and politically consequential shift in public opinion. In the wake of Dobbs, the debate over abortion rights did not simply return to the states. It fundamentally altered how many Americans think about the issue and how they vote.

Why did energy-saving tips disappear from the Energy Department website?

Spite

Kate Yoder, Senior Staff Writer

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

If you wanted to save some money by learning how to check your home for air leaks, poor insulation, and power-hungry lightbulbs, the Department of Energy’s website was ready to help. And if you needed an expert, the site guided you to another page for help lining up a professional energy assessment, a well-established first step to cut utility bills and curb pollution at the same time. 

That is, until this summer, when both of those resources vanished from the agency’s site, each now redirecting to “Page not found.” They were taken down by July 3, around the same time that the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages from the Energy Saver section of its site, gutting a resource for people looking to conserve energy and lower bills.

“I can’t remember another time that, with DOE specifically, we’ve seen an entire domain go down the way that [it] has been reported on now,” said Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Over a 30-day span this summer, as swaths of the country suffered under heat waves, more than 300 of the webpages had received 160,000 page views, according to an analysis from The Guardian.

The news coverage of the missing websites has focused on the disappearance of one recommendation in particular. Ahead of a heat wave that roasted New York City with 100-degree temperatures earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked businesses and residents to set their AC to 78 degrees to conserve energy, drawing the ire of Republicans who mocked the restrictions as “socialism.” 

Internet sleuths were quick to notice that similar guidance had vanished from the Department of Energy’s website, which used to direct people to keep their thermostat between 75 and 78 degrees. The timing suggested that the agency might have removed the pages as a rebuke to Mamdani’s advice.

The purge looked suspiciously timed for another reason:  On July 2, the Energy Department announced a proposed rule to make it harder for future administrations to approve energy efficiency standards for household appliances, saying it would “permanently end Green New Scam appliance mandates.” The move was part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on energy efficiency requirements.

Dear Leader has an ingenious plan to end school shootings

Guess you still have the right to choose

Who's responsible?

Jim Mageau critiqued for false information

Charlestown's leading Trumper strikes a nerve

Philip Eil

Some people know exactly why this mural was funded. (April 10, 2026)

By now, the Great Providence Mural Kerfuffle is mostly over.

The in-progress mural of Iryna Zarutska on a downtown building has been permanently discontinued. The owners of The Dark Lady, the LGBTQIA-friendly bar that greenlit the project, have said they are “deeply and sincerely sorry.” A smaller mural of Zarutska has been completed on the wall of Opa, a Lebanese restaurant on Atwells Ave. And some excellent reporting on the affair has been published by the Boston Art Review and The Providence Eye (where I’m a board member), among other outlets.

But there are still aftershocks reverberating in the local media. And one of them is worth mentioning.

Mageau (left) is Charlestown's most prominent Trumper

On April 25, the Providence Journal published a letter from a reader named James Mageau in Charlestown who expressed outrage at the way the first mural on the wall of The Dark Lady was halted. The letter – written in response to the Journal’s coverage of the brouhaha – made a lot of bad points, which is hardly noteworthy for Journal letters.

But it also included a significant error of fact. In the last lines of his letter, Mageau wrote:

I believe the controversy rests primarily among the left-wing socialist, communist and progressive community. They are having nervous fits over it because Elon Musk is helping to underwrite the costs of painting murals of victims attacked by undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added]

This is not true.

EDITOR'S NOTE: That Jim Mageau twists the truth beyond recognition is no surprise to Charlestown residents who have been subjected to Mageau's bullshit for decades. We've cited Mageau's confabulations for much of that time, even giving him his own "Topics" tab (click HERE) that links to almost 200 Progressive Charlestown articles.  - Will Collette

Two Presidents speak...

Thanks to a MAGA gun nut, Charlestown and South County are about to become a culture war battleground

Charlestown to get ripped up over guns

By Will Collette

Dave Levesque has created 40 pro-gun Rhode Island
PACs and is targeting Democratic women in South County

Rhode Island just experienced its second mass shooting this year. First, Brown University and now the mass shooting at a Pawtucket hockey rink.

Quick to respond was Republican House Minority Leader Mike Chippendale (R-Foster). First, he gives us the rote thoughts and prayers line and then shifts to deflecting away from guns to mental health and the MAGA-inspired national controversy over gender.

Here’s a key section from Chippendale’s statement:

In the immediate aftermath of events like this, public officials often reach for simple explanations. When leaders say this tragedy was “caused by gun violence,” they are transparently reducing a complex human failure to a single talking point. In cases like this, the firearm was the means, not the cause, and violence of this nature almost always involves deeper factors – severe or untreated mental health struggles, instability, isolation, and warning signs that were missed or ignored. If we are serious about prevention, those realities must be part of the conversation.

Granted, there is always a reason, rational or not, why a person takes a gun (or two or more) and kills people. And yes, it is important to look at those reasons and try to figure out how to prevent them from sparking more carnage.

But Chippendale is wrong to dismissively say “the firearm was the means, not the cause."  The decision to kill for whatever reason combined with easy access to guns is what makes the United States the gun murder capital of the world.

This wrenching issue is about to become a central part of Charlestown’s political culture between now and at least through the September 8 Democratic primary.

Send lawyers, guns and money

I went over the end-of-year campaign finance disclosures for Charlestown’s four major political committees to see how they look at the start of the 2026 election year when they engage in the biennial struggle over control of the town.

I also took a look at the campaign figures for House District 36, held by incumbent Rep. Tina Spears. Gun lobby-backed Leah Boisclair is the figurehead candidate for the League of Rhode Island Businesses (LORIB) seeking to defeat Tina in the September 8 Democratic primary.

Just based on the money, it looks like the District 36 race will be Charlestown's first major election event, focused as it is on the Democratic primary that takes place two months before the General Election.

The LORIB candidate Boisclair is running as a Democrat despite having no known ties to the party. Her sponsor, entrepreneur Dave Levesque, set up 40 political action committees (PACs), one for each municipality plus a statewide PAC, to promote his pro-gun agenda. 

He’s also a devoted MAGA dude who vehemently opposes taxes on the rich such as the state’s new Taylor Swift law that levees a state surcharge on high-priced absentee-owned property.

Levesque is running MAGA-style candidates against virtually EVERY Democratic woman in South County. That includes Charlestown’s state senator Victoria Gu. Levesque is backing MAGA nut Westin Place (R) – Victoria beat him handily in the last two elections.

Levesque is putting a lot of cash behind Carolina resident attorney Leah Boisclair, most of it coming from other LORIB PACs and from pro-gun groups. Boisclair’s campaign finance report shows around $25,000 came in during the final quarter of 2025, leaving her with a balance of $20,519.85 to start the year.

You should take a good look at who gave to each campaign because the numbers tell you a lot about the two candidates. As the adage goes, “follow the money.”

Tina Spears with Sen. Victoria Gu.
 Gu is also a LORIB target

Rep. Tina Spears support

Rep. Tina Spears begins the campaign year coming within $200 of matching Boisclair's gun cash. She has cash on hand of $20,306.21. She raised around $15,000 in the final quarter of 2025.

Of that $15,000, only $1,250 came from political action committees, including the state AFL-CIO, the RI Good Government PAC and PACs representing firefighters, construction and public employees.

There were lots of donations from people who appeared to be family, friends, colleagues from non-profits serving children and people in the district.

This list includes a number of well-known local leaders. Among them:

• ·       Charlestown Town Council President Deb Carney
• ·       Lifelong Charlestown activist Frank Glista
• ·       Former Charlestown Democrats chair Kathleen Marra
• ·       Rep. Carol McEntee, South Kingstown
• ·       Tomaquag Museum director Loren Spears
• ·       Jane Merner from Earthcare composting
• ·       Rob Lyons from Ocean House Marina

I’ll be on the list for the next report.

Very different funding profile for Boisclair

Leah Boisclair reported $25,000 raised in the last quarter of 2025. Here’s where her money trail takes us.

She donated $2,500 from her own law practice. According to her website, she focuses on defending clients charged with some very unsavory crimes. In a later article, I will dive in more deeply into the choices she made with her law practice. Meanwhile, here’s how she describes her specialties:

She reported $1,650 from the water and wastewater industry – five different companies including local firms AB Hoxie and Benn Water. She may have won with this business sector’s allegiance through a 2022 Ashaway case (detailed HERE). She represented a residential landowner who wanted to put in a large-scale commercial water distribution well. Benn Water was one of the project’s biggest promoters, but the Town of Hopkinton rejected the proposal.

Several metro lawyers have written checks to Boisclair’s campaign.

The two main hardcore Rhode Island gun PACs, the Gun Owners PAC and the 2^nd Amendment PAC, kicked in $4000.

Very little of her cash comes from Charlestown or the other towns in District 36. One of the rare local donations came from Bill Coulter, owner of Stony Hill Cattle and former chair of the Charlestown Republican Town Committee. Does that mean there won’t be a Republican contender in this race?

The biggest single block of Boisclair’s cash - $10,500 – came from six of Dave Levesque’s League of RI Businesses (LORIB) PACs. They all give their address as a law office at 1410 Reservoir Ave. in Cranston. This includes the so-called Charlestown LORIB. The other five PACs contributing to Boisclair are the ones purporting to be in Westerly, South Kingstown, North Kingstown, Newport and Block Island.

In the Secretary of State’s corporate database, there is only one registration and that’s for the umbrella organization:

As for the financial reports for the PACs themselves, the search trick is to use “The League” when using the Board of Elections database. Other variations don't work.

Then you will find all of them each with basically identical CF-1 Notice of Organization filings naming Levesque as Treasurer. They are all located in Moretti and Preetti's law office shown above, the same incorporator and the same borad.

The Charlestown LORIB PAC is no exception as the screenshot below shows. It's not located in Charlestown and there’s no one from Charlestown on it.

There is a lot of money shuffling among the LORIB PACs. For example, Charlestown’s LORIB donation to Leah Boisclair appears to be a pass-through from the Narragansett LORIB PAC. Narragansett is where Levesque lives. Narragansett LORIB pays Charlestown LORIB who then funds Leah Boisclair. That’s along with five other Levesque PACs.

It’s an elaborate web but what I see is this: It's all about Levesque. Vote for one of his candidates and you are voting for him. A vote for Boisclair is a vote for Levesque’s pro-gun, anti-tax-the-rich MAGA agenda.

Boisclair used to use her Facebook account as a promotional site for gun-nut groups in Rhode Island. She scrubbed those posting, but not before they were captured on screenshots. I have those images. You can count on seeing a lot of them between now and September 8 Democratic Primary where this race is headed. Between now and then, I plan lots more coverage of this important race.

The General Election funding race

As for the General Election, the campaign finance reports for Charlestown’s four major political committees yield few surprises. The four committees go into the 2026 election with the following cash balances:

• ·       Current town leader Charlestown Residents United (CRU), $2,391.90
• ·       Former town leader Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA), $9,170.15
• ·       Charlestown Democratic Town Committee (CDTC), $182.15
• ·       Charlestown Republican Town Committee (CRTC), $3,583.08

None of these committees raised almost nothing in the final quarter of 2025. Charlestown Democrats brought in $15. The other three committees reported no income.

That’s not unusual since in the past, Charlestown’s real campaigning rarely started before July 4.

Finally, the matchups for Charlestown’s two Senate seats shows:

• Incumbent Sen. Victoria Gu (D) who has represented Charlestown south of Route One goes into the year with $28,299.50.
• Her opponent for the third straight time is MAGA nut Republican and LORIB-endorsed Westin Place who goes into the race with $566.66. He hasn’t gotten his infusion of LORIB and gun money yet.

Our embarrassing state Senator Elaine Morgan (R-MAGA) is again running for reelection to represent the northern half of Charlestown. She carries a cash balance of $3,248.27 into the year.

She faces a strong opponent in Samantha (Sam) Wilcox (D), Richmond Town Council President. Sam goes into election year with $7,533.71. I’m proud to say I am on her donor list.