Shelley Brown left WTOL to return to her hometown of New Orleans. Check her out at WVUE - FOX 8.
Shelley Brown is News 11's anchor for News 11 at 5:30 -- and a weekday reporter. She arrived in Toledo in August of 2005, the night before Hurricane Katrina washed ashore and destroyed her family's home in New Orleans.
In 2008, Shelley won her second regional (out of four states) Edward R. Murrow Award for her investigative series of stories on teen prostitution in Toledo. She also won an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2006 for her piece "Katrina: Back Home."
A New Orleans native, Shelley interned in New York City with Court TV and WNYW Fox 5 News before earning a degree in Broadcast Journalism with a minor in Business Administration from Louisiana State University. That experience helped her land a job with a small cable television station in Houma, Louisiana, then moved her to WTOL's sister station, KPLC-TV in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she was discovered by WTOL.
Shelley is the oldest of three children and the only girl in the family. She enjoys spending time with her family, and traveling. She has been to Vienna, Austria, and Paris, France. She's not just a television storyteller -- she studied Hawaiian dance from age 5 through high school, learning to tell stories with swaying, rythmic movements.
Shelley went back to her hometown of New Orleans for some of the most powerful first-person reporting on the destruction of Hurricane Katrina that Toledo viewers ever saw. "On Saturday morning, August 27 (two days before the storm hit), my father called me. There was an urgency in his voice," Brown said. "He told me that I needed to get out of the city soon, and that my mother would have to make the trip to Ohio with me."
"Every gas station and bank branch that morning had lines like I've never seen it. I never thought that my family's home or community would never look the same again," Brown said. And when she went back, that statement came true in ways she never imagined.
After zipping herself into a hazardous materials suit, mask, gloves and boots, she entered what was left of her family's home. What she saw took her breath away. "Black mold everywhere, swamp grass and muck knee-deep downstairs, furniture like a pile of rubble, and a smell you would not believe," said Brown. "The water line was above the doorways. We couldn't even walk downstairs."
