GBH Daily: Thursday morning quarterbacking

🌂Cloudy and foggy with a chance of showers and highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 7:14 p.m.

Rep. Seth Moulton challenged Sen. Ed Markey in part because of Markey’s age, 80. That argument didn’t seem to resonate with primary voters this week: they picked Markey by a margin of 65% to 35%.

“I think it’s clear that a majority of Democratic primary voters just thought that was kind of a thin case to make against someone like Markey, who’s been in office for a while and is pretty popular among Democrats here in Massachusetts,” GBH’s Adam Reilly said in an analysis of the race.

Something that may have resonated with voters more, to Moulton’s disadvantage, are comments he made after the 2024 presidential election about trans people, saying he doesn’t want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” And: Moulton’s attempts during a debate to tie Markey to sex offender Jefferey Epstein, pointing to evidence that didn’t check out. You can hear more of Reilly’s analysis here.

Four Things to Know

1. Jurors found Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins not guilty of extortion yesterday. Tompkins had been accused of using his job to pressure a cannabis company into letting him buy shares before it went public, then into giving him a refund on the investment when shares were less valuable than expected. But jurors did not find that prosecutors proved that.

“Suffolk County has their sheriff back,” Tompkins’ attorney Martin Weinberg said.

2. For the second day in a row, jurors deliberating whether to find Lindsay Clancy criminally responsible for killing her three children told the judge they could not reach a unanimous decision. And for the second day in a row, Judge William Sullivan gave them the routine jury instruction asking them to go back and try again.

A woman arrested outside the courthouse, accused of filming jurors as they left the building for the day, told reporters she was trying to see Clancy. “And I did see her. She was getting picked up by the van,” said Dawn Light, a 56-year-old retired nurse from Sutton. Light pleaded not guilty to intimidating a juror after police found videos of jurors on her phone. Light’s lawyer called it a misunderstanding.

3. Parents who sent their kids to the Croft School in the South End — and who were left scrambling after the school’s founder announced it was closing last year — are reopening the school under new management and a new name: South End Village Academy.

“This was a story that rocked our world as a community, but it’s not the story that is binding us. We’re very much looking forward to a new school where there are so many of the values that we’ve preserved,” said Suzanne Mendes, a board member and spokesperson for the new school.

4. Young Hudsonian Whimbrels — brown-and-white speckled birds with curved beaks — are flying from the arctic to the Cape, where they’ll spend some time eating and growing before they migrate to South America.

“One of their long migratory stopover legs is staying at the Cape, getting fat, ready for that next move, which invariably for the birds in the Cape is a launch out over the Atlantic Ocean down to South America,” said Dan Ruthrauff is Senior Shorebird Scientist at Manomet Conservation Sciences.

Proposed settlement between Mass. debt collector and state could help thousands of debtors

We have an update about a GBH News investigation from 2024: the state’s Attorney General’s Office has reached an agreement with a debt collector accused of predatory practices, like seizing people’s cars over unpaid credit card bills.

Two years ago, GBH’s Jenifer McKim reported on Andrew Metcalf, a businessman from Avon. He had at least 20 legal complaints against him at the time, some of them saying he seized cars from the wrong people in pursuit of paydays. Metcalf owns about 6,500 debts that his company says are worth $53 million, though their real value is likely much less. Still, if you’ve gotten a notice saying you owe money to Champion Funding Inc., Champion Funding LLC or Judgment Acquisitions Unlimited, know that those debts will be forgiven if a judge approves the settlement.

“Metcalf is going out of business, which, given what I heard from Massachusetts consumers and clients, I think will be a good thing,’’ said Alexa Rosenbloom, director of the Consumer Protection Clinic, part of Harvard Law School. “Unfortunately, there is not just one bad apple in the orchard. There’s plenty more.”

McKim has much more on this story here. 

🏛️More from our Debt Mills investigations:-Have an old or forgotten credit card bill? You might end up carless.

-The Debt Mills: How state courts grind through consumer debt cases

-The rise of ‘survival debt’: Mass. debt lawsuits jump 50 percent