Guests - Juan Ciscomani, Betsy Smith, Scott Schara
Fighting at Every Level: Washington, Pima County, and the Medical System That Killed a Little Girl
Eighty-eight days to the primary. The Pima County fair was running. Volunteers were collecting recall signatures. The Board of Supervisors had just voted to double their spending cap and put the question to voters in November. And a father in Wisconsin was preparing to spend seven weeks on a radio show in Tucson telling the story of how his daughter with Down syndrome was killed by a hospital that called itself a place of healing.
Thursday on Winn Tucson moved through all of it — from the halls of Congress to the streets of Memphis to a Wisconsin civil courtroom — with the same underlying question threading every conversation: who is fighting for the people they claim to serve, and who is fighting against them?
Juan Ciscomani: From the House Floor to Fort Huachuca
Congressman Juan Ciscomani of Arizona's Congressional District 6 joined from Washington, fresh off the Turning Point USA event in Tucson where President Trump drew a full, energized crowd.
DHS Funding and the Senate Blockade
The most urgent legislative item on Ciscomani's plate is the funding of the Department of Homeland Security — and the Democratic Senate's decision to hold it hostage.
"We had four Democrats voting for it in the House," he said, referencing the DHS funding bill he helped pass in the lower chamber. "But the Senate needs more than that and they're just not funding it. I don't know if you got a glimpse of Chuck Schumer today — just bashing the effort, calling the agency a rogue agency. And it's unreal when you're talking about Border Patrol being 10 percent of the entire DHS bill. You're talking FEMA, Secret Service, TSA, security — the list goes on. They are bringing everything down in homeland security just for their political reasons."
The bill that ultimately failed in the Senate was not a Republican imposition — it was a bipartisan negotiated measure that had moved through the full process in both chambers before Senate Democrats walked away from their own agreement.
"They ended up voting against a bill that they had negotiated," Ciscomani said. "Between the House and the Senate it had gone through the whole process and at the end they decided to pull it. We can't wait on them. It's gone up a record number of days. We've got to move on."
Ciscomani was characteristically direct about the stakes. At a moment of heightened security concerns — with the situation in Iran still unsettled and global tensions running high — refusing to fund the nation's primary security apparatus for political leverage is not an act of opposition. It is something closer to sabotage.
Honoring Ed Honey of Marana
Before turning to the race ahead, Ciscomani paused to acknowledge a community loss — the unexpected passing of Ed Honey of Marana, a figure whose family has served that community for five generations, three of them on the city council.
"Ed Honey was a friend to so many people around here for a long time," Ciscomani said. "Veteran, work at the post office, council member, and then mayor. Deep ties in Marana. He passed unexpectedly. Shocked and made us all very, very sad."
One of the tools available to members of Congress is the ability to rename federal buildings — including post offices — if the entire congressional delegation signs off. Ciscomani pursued exactly that.
"I talked to the rest of the delegation — all Democrats and Republicans have to sign off — and we were able to get to an agreement to rename the Marana post office after Ed Honey. He worked there, and that's fitting. It passed the House unanimously and now it goes to the Senate. We should be able to officially rename that post office very soon."
Ciscomani also took a quiet moment to honor Chris Sheaf, another community figure whose sudden passing hit both him and Winn personally. He described how Sheaf had been the connective tissue between the two of them — working separately to build bridges across the aisle and between community leaders.
"You and I are an example of what he wanted always to do — have people work together, put differences aside, focus on the big picture," Ciscomani said. "A lot of what you and I can now lock arms on was really something he had been working on. I saw him on Good Friday and then less than a week later, we lost them."
The Mission Coming to Fort Huachuca
The most consequential piece of news Ciscomani delivered was the announcement that Sierra Vista and Cochise County have been selected as the preferred location for a new military mission.
"We've been working on this for over a year," he said. "There were a lot of different bases they were looking at, but for Fort Huachuca, Cochise County — working with them, we put our best foot forward. I was on the phone with the Air Force, the Department of the Army, and the White House. They kept telling me: you made another list. And the list kept getting smaller and we kept being on it. We finally got the call a few weeks ago that we were the preferred location."
Security considerations are limiting what can be disclosed at this stage. What can be said is that this mission will bring employment and economic vitality to an area Ciscomani described honestly as aging out — home to a large, valued retired veteran population that is not growing. A new active military mission reinjects both youth and economic activity into a community that has earned the investment.
"Along with serving our great nation with military, Arizona as you know in this district has a plethora of veterans," he said. "You want to continue to support all those efforts. It's quite an accomplishment."
Chiricahua and Appropriations Wins
Ciscomani added two more results. The Chiricahua National Monument is being reclassified as Arizona's fourth national park — a significant move for economic development, tourism, and permanent land protection. He credited Congressman Paul Gosar, a senior member of the Natural Resources Committee, as the key ally who helped move the measure through the House.
On appropriations, Ciscomani announced his top 20 community project requests for the year — covering roads, fire, police, schools, and rural healthcare throughout the district.
"If you don't take it, it's going to go back to the bureaucratic body in DC," he said. "Those dollars are going to go out somewhere. I want them back in my district."
Betsy Brantner Smith: Memphis, Nanos, the SAVE Act, and the Crisis in Law Enforcement
Betsy Brantner Smith — retired law enforcement officer, National Police Association spokeswoman, and the other half of what Winn calls "Smith and Wynn, more deadly than a Smith and Wesson" — came on with data in hand and frustration pointed in specific directions.
Memphis: What Happens When You Actually Enforce the Law
Brantner Smith had just been interviewed by Fox News about the public safety transformation in Memphis, Tennessee — a city still run by Democrats, but one where the Republican-controlled state has enabled genuine law enforcement. The results are now visible in black and white.
The numbers she brought to the show:
Overall violent crime: down 40.52 percent
Aggravated assault: down 28 percent
Arson: down 33 percent
Burglary: down 28 percent
Homicide: down 36 percent
Motor vehicle theft: down 63.98 percent
Robbery: down 44.9 percent
Sexual assault: down 27.43 percent
"This is another result of President Trump's policies," she said. "These are things that other presidents could have done but never did. And here he is. And all they can do is hate him because he's successful and he's getting the job done."
She was clear that Memphis is a model, not an anomaly. "When you look at our crime problem here in Tucson and Pima County, what you see is a leadership issue. I'm not talking about the police chief — she's too new to really judge. I'm talking about the City Council and the mayor." She placed specific blame for the decimation of the Tucson Police Department on former Chief Magnus, under whose leadership the department lost hundreds of officers and has never fully recovered.
Seven Officers Killed in April Alone
Brantner Smith arrived with a statistic that should have dominated headlines and didn't: as of late April, 33 police officers had already been killed in the line of duty in 2026. Seven of those deaths occurred in April alone. Four of the seven were from crashes — directly related to drivers who failed to yield for emergency vehicles.
"Pay attention, people," she said flatly. "Pull over to the right. Get out of their way when you see ambulances and fire trucks. Seven officers this month."
She noted that Police Memorial Month is approaching and that retired Arizona officer Mike Proctor was killed seven years ago while driving home from the national memorial in Washington, D.C. — struck in a highway accident in Texas while traveling to honor the fallen. The least a community can do is show up.
She made a pointed observation about the Pima County Board of Supervisors, which devoted eleven proclamations at a recent meeting to feel-good events while Supervisor Steve Christie, alone, pushes annually for a Police Memorial proclamation.
"Our board of supervisors would rather recognize things like one-legged transgender purple-haired queer week than police memorial week," she said. "I'm going to ask people to pay attention when that happens and show up in force."
Nanos: Partial Compliance Is Not Compliance
On Sheriff Chris Nanos, Brantner Smith was precise. He was ordered to provide a sworn statement to the Board of Supervisors by a Tuesday midnight deadline. He answered some questions — but did not make them sworn. Legally, he did not comply.
More revealing was what he chose to include in his response: continued attacks on Heather Lappin and Sergeant Aaron Cross — two people who are arguably the victims in the entire situation surrounding his falsified employment record from El Paso PD.
"He went on to malign them still," Brantner Smith said. "The Board of Supervisors has the ability to remove him — not for his handling of the anti-Guthrie case, that's a different situation — but for lying on his record. His record from his time with El Paso PD continues to come out. This man allegedly brutalized a suspect and put him in the hospital."
She drew the connection the Board seems unwilling to draw: the same supervisors who passed an ordinance micromanaging whether ICE agents wear masks are doing nothing about a sheriff with an alleged record of in-custody brutality.
"You're worried about ICE and you've got a rogue man running your sheriff's department," she said. "You need to find some balance, Board of Supervisors. Because you don't seem to be — except for Steve Christie — walking your talk."
Swalwell, Women, and the Internal Knockout
On Adelita Grajales's continued silence on Eric Swalwell — and the broader pattern of Democratic women refusing to denounce Democratic men until the party gives them permission — Brantner Smith offered a reading shaped by her career.
"I want people to think about this," she said. "I'm somebody who has handled hundreds and hundreds of sexual assault cases as a law enforcement officer. These women did not come forward until the Democratic Party told them it was okay to come forward. This is not a Republican hit. This was an internal knockout. Absolutely."
The timing of victims' disclosures was not organic. It was coordinated. That does not make the underlying conduct less real — but it means every politician who stayed silent while knowing the truth has questions to answer, including Adelita Grajales.
Five Senators Can Change Everything
Brantner Smith closed with a call to action framed in unambiguous terms.
"If Republicans don't get something done in the Senate, Kathleen, the midterms are lost," she said. "And if the midterms are lost, they're going to pack the court. They're going to do nothing but prosecute and harass Donald Trump, his supporters, his family. And then we're going to all have to figure out somewhere else to move. I'm not moving. I'm going to fight back."
The math is simple. Changing Senate leadership requires five Republican senators to bring forward a resolution. Five. Marsha Blackburn is one who would act. There are others. What they need to hear is that the American people are watching and demanding results.
"Call Senator Thune's office. Reach out on social media. Because all it takes to change leadership in the Senate is five Republican senators getting together. Five senators is all we need."
Scott Schara: Our Amazing Grace — The Series Begins
The final hour belonged to Scott Schara — and to Grace.
Scott Schara is a Wisconsin business owner, certified public accountant, husband, and father. In October 2021, his daughter Grace, who had Down syndrome, was taken to a hospital with what was believed to be COVID. She did not come home. She was 19 years old.
In the years since, Schara has become a full-time researcher, author, and advocate — filing what became the first wrongful death jury trial in the country with COVID listed on the death certificate, and building a platform called Our Amazing Grace (ouramazinggrace.net) that has become a repository for research, documentation, and warnings for families navigating a medical system he has concluded is not what it claims to be.
This is the first installment of a seven-part series, airing every Thursday at 10 a.m. on Winn Tucson.
Who Grace Was
Scott Schara wants people to know who Grace was before they hear what happened to her. Not as a rhetorical device, but because Grace deserves to be known.
She was born September 22, 2002, conceived after Scott and his wife Cindy surrendered their family planning to God in December 2001. When she arrived, Scott could tell by her features that she had Down syndrome. The doctors confirmed it about thirty minutes later — and then asked a question that still stops him cold when he tells it.
"We suspect your daughter has Down syndrome. Do you want to keep her?"
They were invited to leave the room immediately.
Grace was never vaccinated — not for COVID, not for anything. She was homeschooled by Cindy, who had a background in special education. The family had been introduced, through homeschooling conventions, to the philosophy of trusting God with health rather than defaulting automatically to the medical system.
"God blinded us to her Down syndrome from the perspective of limitation," Schara said. "She ended up deer hunting with me. She rode a horse. She played violin. She could public speak. She was exceptional."
People with Down syndrome carry what many families call the "love chromosome" — an extra 21st chromosome that often expresses itself as unconditional, unguarded affection. Grace was that. She called her father "earthly dad" and her mother "earthly mom."
At the end of each day they spent together, Scott would ask her what her favorite part had been. Her answer never changed.
"Everything, Dad."
In the last years of her life, sitting in a deer stand on quiet mornings together, Scott found himself thinking he wished he had Down syndrome. "She just had this freedom. That's the freedom that God wants for us."
She was also genuinely funny. Bored one afternoon in the deer stand, Grace announced she had a joke. Scott asked for it.
"Where do bees go to the bathroom?"
He didn't know.
"The BP station."
What the Hospital Did
Grace tested positive for COVID on a home test before a family wedding in early October 2021. The family was following the FLCCC protocol — ivermectin, vitamins, monitoring. A pulse oximeter showed her oxygen saturation dropping below 94 percent, which the protocol indicated was the threshold for hospitalization. Scott took her in, under the assurance of an emergency room physician that she would be placed on oxygen and a steroid for three to four days and then come home.
She never came home.
What followed is a sequence of documented, timestamped decisions that Scott has reconstructed through the medical records, through the trial, and through more than 4,000 hours of research.
On October 10th — four days after Grace was admitted — Scott was escorted out of the hospital by an armed guard. Cindy was sick at home. Their daughter Jessica was supposed to come in as a replacement advocate. The hospital refused to allow her entry. The family had to hire an attorney to gain access for Jessica. That process took 48 hours.
During those 48 hours without a family advocate in the room, Grace was placed on Precedex — a powerful sedative — and her dose was increased seven times.
On the morning of Grace's last day alive, the doctor called Scott and Cindy at home. The night before, he had asked about a ventilator; they had said no. Now he was taking a different approach. Grace had been doing so well, he told them, that the focus should shift to nutrition, with a plan to discharge her within days. On the call, they approved a feeding tube.
What Scott did not know — what the timestamp of 10:55 a.m. in the medical records confirms — was that before the call ended, the doctor had already increased Grace's Precedex to the maximum allowable dose. One minute after the call ended, at 10:56 a.m., the doctor placed an illegal Do Not Resuscitate order on Grace's chart.
The DNR was never discussed with the family. Grace was not in hospice care. No one had authorized it. No one had been told.
By 6:09 p.m., Grace had no blood pressure. At 6:15, the ICU nurse — for whom Grace was her only patient — administered three doses of lorazepam on top of maximum-dose Precedex. Then came morphine. The combination is what palliative care professionals use to euthanize patients in end-of-life hospice settings.
When Jessica called her parents in a panic, Scott told her to get the nurses into the room. Jessica said they wouldn't come.
The family started screaming: save our daughter.
The staff hollered back: she's DNR.
"She's not DNR — save our daughter," Scott told them.
They refused.
Scott and Cindy watched their daughter die on a FaceTime call at 7:27 p.m. on October 13, 2021.
That evening, as a nurse walked Cindy out with Grace's belongings, she leaned in and said quietly: "Mrs. Schara — me and several of the nurses don't think Grace should have died today."
That sentence is what started everything.
The Lawsuit — Why Almost No One Filed One
The path to the courtroom was not obvious, and Scott is clear about why so few families pursued it.
The first medical malpractice attorney he spoke to — described as the best in Wisconsin — outlined the obstacle plainly. Even in cases where a sponge was left inside a surgical patient, attorneys lose. Defense teams circle the wagons and bring unlimited resources to bear. He estimated Schara had less than a one-in-ten chance of winning.
There is also a structural legal barrier. Because COVID was classified as a public health emergency, hospitals that administered the designated COVID "countermeasures" were granted immunity from prosecution. Grace never received any of the listed countermeasures — which meant the hospital had no immunity from a lawsuit in her case. This pathway simply did not exist for most grieving families.
Scott eventually found his legal team through what he describes as God's providence — a sequence of introductions that led to four attorneys and, ultimately, to a case he came to regard as winnable despite all the warnings against it. He became the fifth member of the legal team. He spent 25 percent of his time for two years on preparation, and the final four months working every day, seven days a week, before a three-week jury trial.
Their medical expert was Dr. Gilbert Berdine — a physician who, in 46 years of practice, had never once represented a plaintiff. He had always worked for the defense. When he reviewed Grace's records, he found what he later called the worst medical decision of his career. He agreed to represent the Schara family without taking a cent and spent hundreds of hours on the case.
"What happened at 6:15 was the worst medical decision he had ever experienced in 46 years of medical practice," Schara said.
The trial was live-streamed. Portions were viewed by over a million people. Viewers followed it daily, calling it compelling in the way a drama is compelling — except every person in it was real and the stakes were not fictional. When the verdict came back after only 15 minutes of deliberation — 11 to 1 in favor of the defense — people watching the stream were in tears.
"They were in shock because they had seen the whole case," Schara said.
The verdict, he maintains, was never the point. "My expectation filing it was that we were going to lose — but that didn't matter, because the goal was to shed light on evil."
The Bigger Picture: Faith, Forgiveness, and What 4,000 Hours of Research Revealed
Scott Schara does not speak about what happened to Grace as an isolated failure. The research it set in motion points somewhere larger — somewhere he is careful to distinguish from the grief and anger any parent would feel.
"The medical industrial establishment is designed to kill us, and I can prove it," he said. "That's why I wrote the book."
His book, Is the Government Legally Killing Us?, was released in March 2026 and is available at ouramazinggrace.net through Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.
He also addressed organ donation — a subject raised by a caller named Lisa who had survived her own COVID hospitalization and described staff who, in her account, appeared more interested in compliance than recovery.
"The organ donation form you sign when you get your driver's license is a contract, and that contract supersedes your estate plan," Schara said. "If you end up in a situation where they want your organs, you cannot change your mind when you're on that table. You've already signed a contract to give your organs." He recommended the work of Dr. Heidi Klessig, who has spent her career documenting this issue, and noted that he and Cindy have removed themselves from the organ donor list.
Asked how he has given more than 1,300 interviews about his daughter's death without breaking down, Schara reached for the Book of Esther. For such a time as this.
He has only lost it a handful of times. The reason, he explained, traces to a prayer he had prayed twenty years earlier — a prayer asking God to do whatever was necessary to break him and remake him into something useful. On October 17, 2021 — four days after Grace died — Schara was in a different hospital himself, sicker than Grace had been when she was admitted, genuinely unsure if he would survive. He recovered the following day. And in that hospital room, he received what he believes was the answer to that twenty-year-old prayer: a spirit of forgiveness toward the doctor and nurse who killed his daughter.
"That's why I'm able to do this," he said.
Next week's conversation will take the series into territory Scott Schara calls the bigger picture: Was Grace targeted? Was her Down syndrome a factor? Was her youth a factor? And is the population reduction agenda — the framework 4,000 hours of research has led him toward — real?
"In America, are we funding a depopulation agenda?" he said. "Yes, we are. That's what I have discovered."
Scott Schara's book, Is the Government Legally Killing Us?, and all related research are at ouramazinggrace.net. The series continues every Thursday at 10 a.m. on Winn Tucson, KVOI 1030.