A Times reporter reflects on and talks to others about the haunting job of covering mass shootings in America.
in yet another American city, the first thing I felt was my heart sink.
In 2007, when I was a college kid working for the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, I traveled to Virginia Tech to cover the campus shooting that killed 32 there. I listened to fellow students tell of the horror and wondered, justifiably and naively, if it would be the worst thing I ever covered in my career.
I’d met Thurman, briefly, at the memorial outside Club Q the day after the shooting. He had been in the club when the shooter opened fire, was devastated and crying in spurts and didn’t want to talk. But he took my card. When I neared Club Q, I saw mourners gathering along the street and turned into a parking spot. Before I got out of the car, I looked down at my phone and saw my family’s messages.‘Heroic’ patrons of gay nightclub subdued gunman after he opened fire, killing 5 people
R.J. Lewis, center, attends a vigil at All Souls Unitarian Church with others, Sunday, Nov. 20, in Colorado Springs, Colo., following the fatal shooting at Club Q the night before.. People who were there just to show solidarity with the queer community. People who were sad but also pissed off — angry that intolerance and gun violence persist in this country, often in tandem.
Later, I saw the same mourner sitting away from the memorial. He had calmed down but was still crying. I approached him again as an unexpected lump formed in my throat. At the time, I was a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun, which owned the Capital. I still remember an editor walking over to my desk and assigning me the task of anchoring our story about the shooting, which would be posted to both the Sun’s and the Capital’s websites.
When I decided to write this piece, to try to articulate what it’s like to cover this endless American horror show, I thought again of Davis, who later became a colleague at The Sun. Having survived a mass shooting, and having experienced the wave of media attention that follows, Davis said journalists responding to such tragedies should be taking a much different tack.Journalists honored the five Capital Gazette employees who were shot to death in their newsroom last year by unveiling a plaque Friday with the names of the dead in a garden next to five rosebushes.
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