Roger Shepherd had no clue how
she'd pulled it off, but somehow Katie Couric managed to get his cellphone
number. And he was not happy about it.
Not long
before she called, Shepherd had learned that his brother-in-law, Jarrett Lane, was dead, a victim of the Virginia Tech
shootings.
And now
Katie was on the phone, asking for an interview.
Within
hours, TV trucks were lined up like train cars in front of the family's house
in the small town of Narrows, which people in these parts pronounce "Nairz."
But the
national media didn't know that. We at
The Roanoke Times did.
I'm not
originally from southwest
Virginia, but I've
been writing stories about it since 1989 -- about the time Jarrett Lane's grandma-teacher taught him to read.
I had
never covered an event like the Tech shootings. None of us had. A features
reporter until I moved to the newsroom earlier this year, I'd never had to call
a grieving family on the phone.
The
morning after the massacre, an editor handed me two pieces of paper. Each had a
victim's name and contact information. I was supposed to write two stories. Jarrett Lane's obit was one of them.
"Just
call them, tell them you're sorry and ask them to tell you about Jarrett," a
reporter-friend advised.
I
couldn't bring myself to do it, so I stalled.
I called
a friend, who knew someone in Narrows, who
knew Jarrett
Lane's
minister. The minister was not happy to hear from me; he made that clear.
Jarrett's mom, Tracey Lane, wouldn't be either; she'd already had a county cop stationed outside
her house, keeping the media at bay.
I wrote
my story after talking to Jarrett's coworkers at Tech and a family friend or
two. It sufficed, for what it was -- a
short account of a valedictorian super-athlete with a great career in
engineering ahead of him, and a nice person to boot.
By the
afternoon of April 18, it was a global-media event: There were 140 satellite
trucks on the Virginia Tech campus. Reporters from CNN International and elsewhere
were beating us on breaking news. In our newsroom, tempers flared, my own
included, as the inevitable turf wars broke out.
Media weariness was setting in big time at Tech, and I was feeling ashamed for
my profession at the stories I heard: stories like the one about the reporter
who sweet-talked a college kid into sneaking him into Seung-Hui Cho's suite; the one about the photographer who tried to get into a dead professor's
office for an atmospheric shot; and even the ones I couldn't confirm, like the
rumor about the reporter who faked a broken arm to sneak into an area
hospital.
I still
couldn't bring myself to call Tracey Lane.
But then
came absolution, in the form of an e-mail from Carole Tarrant, our managing editor. It can be frustrating, she wrote, "especially when national media find out new (and unattributed) details that we
don't have.
"But
please remember the satellite trucks and swooping reporters will be here,
and then leave. We will stay, and our readers will long remember how
we responded. ... That's what matters -- not the competitive blips of
who's got what right now at this very second."
By April 19,
photographer Sam Dean was tired of the Tech feeding frenzy and came to my desk:
Let's go to Narrows, he said.
What for? I
asked.
To see
what we can learn. Something that's deeper than sticking a camera in someone's
face. Something real.
I called
my friend Rick, who called his principal buddy at Narrows High School and vouched for me. When you've worked in
this region for as long as I have, degrees of separation are scant. This is bad
when you dash into 7-Eleven to buy coffee cream in your pajama bottoms and see five
people you know -- but it's good for story contacts.
I would
be respectful, Rick promised; he had known me for 18 years. With that
reference, they welcomed us, tentatively.
At the
school, the whole town was preparing for Jarrett's visitation and funeral. A
former teacher displayed his old sports jerseys. Grandmothers planted pansies.
His former Little League coach laid mulch.
They
seemed to get that we weren't Katie Couric and crew -- for one thing, I have
gray hair. As awkward as it was, Sam and I worked through it, intuiting
who wanted to talk and who wanted to be left alone.
At the
end of the day, Sam climbed atop a railroad trestle to photograph a bedsheet
hanging from the town entrance: "We'll Miss U Jarrett," it read. When
a Norfolk Southern truck pulled up, I thought they were
going to scold us for being on railroad property.
But they
actually offered to slow down the next train so Sam could take his time getting
the shot. That's Nairz for you.
Our
portrait of a town in mourning was real and raw, and when I heard that they read from it at
Jarrett's funeral, I knew we'd done the right thing.
It's
been three-plus weeks now since the shootings, and to tell you the truth, I'm
starting to wear out. We all are.
"Take a
break," our editors tell us.
"Who are
you?" our families half-snarl, half-joke at the end of another 12-hour day.
"Mop
me!" our kitchen floors call out.
But
there are so many more stories to tell, and my editor was right: The satellite
trucks are long gone.
We're
still here. And we aren't just typing these stories, we're feeling them. With
one story and then another, we're trying to peel away the onion's layers,
trying to help our readers grieve.
The Narrows article led to another story about Jarrett's
friends at Tech -- a piece that revealed a funnier, edgier Jarrett who had
pellet-gun wars with his roommates and favored Newcastle ale.
That
story paved the way for a longer story on Tech's civil-engineering department:
Faculty and staff were completing the semester at the same time they were
saying goodbye to nine of their own: 22-year-old Jarrett, eight graduate
students and their most-beloved professor, G.V. Loganathan.
When
we're patient and take time to build trust, I'm remembering, we get truer,
deeper stories. When I call a source to fact-check a graph or two -- a guy I
didn't know three weeks ago, a guy who lost two close friends in the shootings -- I'm learning that it's OK to cry right along with him. Not that I have a
choice.
Other
papers have been through similar tragedies (Columbine, Hurricane Katrina, the Oklahoma
City bombings), and our paper has received amazing support from journalists at
the Rocky Mountain News, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune and The Oklahoman, which just last
week sent two care packages full of candy and comfort foods -- though, alas, no
beer.
"We know
comfort food is not an ideal," read a letter signed by The Oklahoman newsroom. "We also know a lead might come more easily if an Oreo is handy, and M&M's
inspire good headlines."
Our
managing editor continues receiving e-mails from this strange alumni group:
Hire somebody to give chair massages, they advise.
Offer
counseling and make it mandatory.
Be very
careful about calling the victims' families too often or at the wrong time --
birthdays, for instance.
Four
days after the shootings, the boss brought in massage therapists. And one of my
reporter-friends on the front lines wisely went for emergency counseling at the end of the second week.
I'm not
ruling that out, but I'm OK for now.
At least
that's what I tell myself. Every night I take one Tylenol PM (two makes me sluggish the next day). Most
mornings I make myself walk up nearby Mill Mountain, whether I have the time or not.
Today I
hiked my favorite part, nicknamed "the car trail" for the rusted-out '53 Chevy
that rests akimbo next to the path. No one knows how it got there or why.
It looks
like something out of Harry Potter, and today as I passed it for maybe the 80th
time, it occurred to me: Jarrett Lane would've loved this.
I still
haven't called his mom, yet.
I too was apalled at the feeding frenzy in Virginia...
