Breaking news you've been involved with

I wasn't involved beyond chasing results and watching the Secretary of State's website spit out haywire messages right before all hell broke lose, but being in a newsroom in Florida on Election Night 2000 was surreal. No pizza though.

 

I saw a man shoot another man in Reno.
I was the first on the scene and asked him why he did it.
His answer: "Just to watch him die."

 

Hurricane Katrina.

 

My last stop was at a resort community by a large lake and there were at least a couple of drownings every summer. If the body didn't surface immediately, seems like it would at dusk and I'd have to make all the calls, but I usually ended up knowing more than the sheriff since I learned to take notes off the police radio. One time though, a hiker fell from a cliff in a recreational area south of town and died. I was alone on the desk and couldn't go out to the scene (it was remote anyway), but again relied on the scanner, plus I had good sources with the fire dept. and the city's flak.

 

I thought this was going to be about breaking sports news... But it's interesting when I think of the "breaking" sports news I've covered (Mets/Yankees make World Series for Subway Series), (being live with local college basketball team when it finds out it got at-large bid to the tournament)... It doesn't seem to hold a candle to someone being gunned down.

But breaking news is like crack for me. I did 2 stints in news, and my favorite breaking news story was when Al Gore unexpectedly picked Joe Lieberman to be his running mate. I was producing a local morning news show. One of our reporters had Joe's cell phone number. I called him to see if he'd do a phoner on our show, which he did. I think we got him on the air within 5 minutes of the news breaking. It had to have been his first on-air interview-- maybe his first interview period. Our anchor was a total pro. Amazing.

 

Most of my career was covering crime in the D.C. and Baltimore areas, so I had a role in covering many big breaking stories: Sept. 11, D.C. Sniper, Anthrax attacks, etc.

But the breaking news-type story that has stuck with me the longest was one that only ended up being a news brief. I was working the night cop shift and it was kind of late when a report of a fatal car wreck comes across the police radio. My shift's about over, so I decide to swing by on my way out of the office and see if it's anything worth writing about.

I get out there and it's in an industrial part of town on a small side street where it was really dark. A semi-trailer was parked perpendicular to the road backed up to a loading bay. A pickup truck had been driving down the street and apparently the driver hadn't noticed the truck in the road until it was too late. He had driven under the trailer and sheered the top off the cab of the pickup, taking with it the head of his passenger. I got there fast enough to see all of the gruesomeness before the cops bust out the tarps. I call in what I'm able to get right before the absolute drop dead deadline and it ends up being a brief in the paper.

The next day I find out the full story. The dead passenger was a hooker. The driver was a john. Apparently she'd been giving him head while he was driving down this back street and so he's not paying attention real good. When he realizes they're about to drive under a trailer, he manages to get his head down, but she pops her head up precisely at the wrong time.

News editor decides it's too gruesome/salacious for a follow-up. We didn't typically follow-up on fatal accidents unless there was something unusual, driver was drunk or the deceased a teenager. So the only thing that ever appeared in the paper was the brief, and I've got that horrific image permanently seared in my memory.

 

Let's see ...

- Gainesville student murders, 1990. Turns out the killer was living in the woods behind my apartment complex and my roommate (female) fit the profile (petite, brunette) of the victims. A little too close for comfort. Certainly paled in comparison to Moddy's circumstance, above, though.

- September 11, 2001. Spent part of the day at MacDill Air Force Base (home of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East) since I lived closer to Tampa than anyone else at the paper where I was sports editor. (My sports section got killed for the day anyway, so, hey, what else was I going to do?) Adding to the surreal aspect was the fact that Hurricane Gabrielle made landfall in our area three days later.

- Speaking of which, numerous hurricanes. The biggest was Hurricane Hugo, a Category 4 storm that hammered Charleston, S.C., in 1989. It was supposed to make landfall at Jacksonville, Fla., and I was a stringer for UPI in Gainesville (80 miles away), so they had me go over and prepare to report from the scene. Have to admit, I wasn't displeased that the storm went north.

- Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, 1996. Was in the press center across the street when the explosion took place. Seriously re-evaluated my career track when I realized I was running INTO the park while everyone else was running OUT OF the park.

- UF athletics department scandal, 1989. Numerous NCAA violations stretched out over about a year that led to the dismissal of football and basketball head coaches, athletes, administrators and more.

 

I just saw a FBI case files or a similar show like that on the Discovery Channel the other day on the student murders

 

As a 19-year-old, I was a stringer for the weekly newspaper in town. Also shot a lot of the sports section's art.

Our town had a railroad track running directly through the middle of town. One Sunday afternoon, a 9-year-old boy, one I knew in passing, tried to hitch a ride on the train and was pulled under the wheels.

The coroner's photographer was out of town, and I was called to shoot body pieces up and down the street. One by one, they'd lift up a sheet, and I'd shoot the remains.

I became physically ill while doing it, then again while developing the photos. And thank God I was never asked to do something like that again.