Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children
And his cabin fallin' down - Bob Dylan, 1964
Bob Dylan told today's story, better than any journalist could, more than 40 years ago in “The Ballad of Hollis Brown.” Five found dead in Iowa City home. Does this ever bring back a flood of memories.
Seventeen years ago, I was in a radio booth wrapping up my 4 p.m. newscast on a snowy Friday afternoon. The station secretary poked her head in and said, "Did you hear about a shooting on campus?" I stuck my head out the window and heard the sirens coming. Then the phone started ringing.
That was November 1, 1991, and I was in the middle of the storm as the facts pieced together.
The mass killing is to journalists what a bright comet is to astronomers. Unpredictable, unexpected, spectacular, yet ultimately unrelated to the long-range work. You drop everything else to stop and look. Every class, every bit of training, every experience of a journalist, is designed to train you for this moment, when The Big Story happens on your turf, so you can put your head down and work on instinct and adrenaline when the deadline is NOW.
It's meatball journalism, just like the meatball surgery Hawkeye Pierce used to talk about on "M*A*S*H." You remember to measure your words carefully on a moment's notice, parsing the equally cautious police statements. Accused. Alleged. Apparantly. May have. Holding back on writing the conclusions that you, and nearly everyone else, have already jumped to. Right now, I have to put in the disclaimer that "police have not yet confirmed that the body in the van is the adult male resident of the crime scene."
Lightning isn't supposed to strike twice in the same place, but here we are again, for the third time in my county. First there was the bank shooting by a struggling farmer in 1985 that became a symbol of the farm crisis. Then there was the campus shooting by a disgruntled student in 1991. That was always the word we used, "disgruntled." It was headline and sound bite shorthand for "the guy was pissed off because he thought he deserved The Big Award and the other guy got it."
Now today: The family of an indicted banker -- cautious with the words here, remembering my training -- is found dead. So much is different now -- the blast phone calls and mass e-mails to warn the public didn't happen or even exist in 1991. And even though it's also "on the outside of town," Bob Dylan's crime scene on a bankrupt farm seems far away from 629 Barrington Road, in Iowa City's high-end Windsor Ridge subdivision. But so much is the same.
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
Your empty pockets tell yuh
That you ain't a-got no friend
What can you really add? A person under some sort of intense pressure decides there is no resolution but murder-suicide, ending it all and, facilitated by an easy to get gun, taking a predetermined list of lives with them.
You feel that same cold but exciting chill of danger, even though, as we found out later, the event was over and done with before we ever heard about it, even though the shooter had a specific plan and the public at large was never truly in danger.
Your babies are crying louder
It's pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder
It's pounding on your brain
Your wife's screams are stabbin' you
Like the dirty drivin' rain
I remember breaking into “All Things Considered” with each bit of information, thinking "just deal with it like a tornado warning." I was live on the air repeating the story to radio stations all over the country, and even to one in Australia, I was top of the NPR national news for an hour. I remember the details of updating the body count. Four dead, two wounded… now five dead, one wounded. "Plus the gunman." You never count the gunman in the body count. I stayed at the station nearly all night and was back at my post at 5 a.m., packaging it all for a national editor.
Your grass it is turning black
There's no water in your well
Your grass is turning black
There's no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar
On seven shotgun shells
There's standard boilerplate pieces to add to the story. If it's a visual medium you need the picture, usually cribbed from the yearbook. You need a voyeuristic reaction from friends or neighbors of the public. That was the worst part for me, wandering downtown on a Friday night sticking the microphone out at random students. The story is what everyone is talking about, but no one wants to talk to you, no one wants to share their grief, their shock, or even their relative indifference. You also need to throw in the heart-wrenching detail. In this story, that should be easy; four children are dead. In my case, one of the victims was an organ donor whose sister needed a transplant, but by the time officials at the scene found out it was too late to harvest the organ. "Harvest the organ." One of those horrific phrases you only use in stories like these, like calling a no-longer-living-and-breathing-person "remains."
Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can't seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin'
And your legs can't seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun
That you're holdin' in your hand
I felt guilty afterwards. I won awards and I made a fair amount of money on stringer fees. Fifty dollars from this network, 100 bucks from that one. I was a starving grad student at the time, and frankly it helped. Guilt or something led me to donate to the victim fund, but even now I feel funny, both for feeling the emotional need to say that and for not turning over every dollar.
It was really good work under pressure, but it was hard to feel any pride, any sense of accomplishment. Something awful happened; I was just -- no, not "lucky," that's entirely inappropriate, even though something like this can be a career-making moment for a journalist. Dan Rather's road to the CBS anchor chair began in November 1963. He was the local guy in Dallas who just happened to be there when big news happened.
There's seven breezes a-blowin'
All around the cabin door
There's seven breezes a-blowin'
All around the cabin door
Seven shots ring out
Like the ocean's pounding roar
No, not lucky. I was nearby by chance and did this parlor trick with words and voice that I knew how to do. I just did my job.
Two days later, I was at my girlfriend's apartment, finally getting some sleep, when I heard a loud bang. It was a door slamming, but in my sleep-deprived state I thought it was a gun. I sat straight up, wide awake, paused -- and then just started sobbing, as the weight of what had happened finally hit me.
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born.
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