As the fourth iteration of its prestigious annual Investigative Journalism Prize approaches, the University of Belize has unveiled the three shortlisted teams competing for this year’s award, an honor created to highlight impactful reporting that confronts Belize’s most urgent unaddressed public issues.
Among the semi-finalists is a flagship investigation from News Five, *Stella Maris Child Drowning*, reported by a team of seven journalists led by Paul Lopez. The piece centers on the tragic 2026 drowning death of six-year-old Gabriel Orellano, an autistic student at Belize’s Stella Maris School. Unlike standard accident reporting, the News Five team went far beyond surface-level facts to expose deep-rooted systemic failures and long-overlooked accountability gaps at the institution.
Through months of on-the-ground reporting, the team uncovered that Gabriel’s death was not the unforeseeable tragedy it was initially framed as. Drawing from exclusive interviews with a sanitation worker who was the last person to see Gabriel before his death, as well as a parent who reported their own child had slipped off campus unnoticed just weeks prior, the investigation revealed repeated prior security breaches, chronic underfunding of campus safety infrastructure, broken perimeter fencing, insufficient on-campus supervision, and unaddressed internal safety concerns that never triggered urgent corrective action. Lopez also cross-referenced witness accounts with surveillance footage to map the full timeline of Gabriel’s final hours, bringing irrefutable clarity to the series of institutional missteps that led to the child’s death.
The reporting triggered immediate national outrage and sparked urgent public debate across Belize around school safety standards, emergency response protocols, and the collective responsibility to protect vulnerable children with special educational needs. Within weeks of the investigation’s publication, Belize’s Ministry of Education launched a full independent inquiry into the incident, committed public funds to rebuild and secure the Stella Maris campus with updated safety fencing, and announced nationwide structural education reforms designed to improve protections for neurodivergent students.
The two other shortlisted investigations include *Marine Protected Areas Are Everybody’s Business*, a climate-focused report by Andre Habet and Marco Lopez of *Climate Spotlight*, and *Taken: The Budna Abduction and the Police Cover-Up*, an investigative series from Jules Vasquez, Brian Castillo, and Denver Fairweather of Tropical Vision Ltd.
All entries were evaluated by an independent panel of regional and international media professionals, drawn from news outlets and institutions across the Caribbean and the United States, to ensure impartial judging.
The winning team will walk away with a BZ$10,000 cash prize, while the two remaining semi-finalists will each receive BZ$5,000 in recognition of their work. The final results will be revealed during a public awards ceremony hosted on May 2 at the House of Culture in Belize City.