“Over three days, I spent most of my time talking to friends, neighbors and relatives of both the victims and the youth who shot them. Some were helpful, some declined to speak, and several were extremely angry that we would be calling or knocking on their doors in this time of immense grief.’ ‘
Randy Furst, for 30 years a Minneapolis reporter, summarizing his experience in covering the Sept. 24 shooting at Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minn.
The shooter, 15-year-old freshman Jason McLaughlin, took the lives of senior Aaron Rollins and freshman Seth Bartell.
Violence in America has ushered journalists into a world familiar to paramedics, firefighters and law enforcers.
The Dart Center at the University of Washington says that the Oklahoma City bombing, the shootings at Columbine High School and the World Trade Center disaster have stimulated interest in its seminars that prepare journalists for emotional injury.
Michael Seraphine of the Star Tribune’s Human Resources office said it is ready to offer assistance.
Furst said at Cold Spring “we felt much of the trauma that the family, friends and members of the community were experiencing.”
He told of two incidents:
“A friend of one of the victims shouted and swore at me over the phone in uncontrollable rage. He threatened to call police if I called him again. I felt I had done nothing to warrant his attack, and was shaken by the conversation.”
“I knocked on the doors of neighbors of the boy who was charged. One man shouted at me, saying his sons had been interviewed by a reporter earlier without his permission, and if I did not leave his yard immediately and never come back, he would call the police.”
In each case, Furst said, “I tried to express to him the deep sympathy I felt for him and the sadness I personally felt over what had happened.”
Colleague Jill Burcum said, “I do my best to treat people the way I’d want my family to be treated if they were interviewed. In Cold Spring, if people didn’t want to talk, I thanked them for their time and left. If they did want to talk, I framed my questions sensitively and left a business card so they could contact me later with questions or concerns.”
But, she said, “Sometimes this wasn’t enough. Though most residents were gracious, ‘media scum’ and ‘vultures’ were comments aimed in my direction. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ yelled one scowling mother as she grabbed her children and ran away.”
Burcum wrote me, “In this business you develop a thick skin to those comments. What you don’t shrug off is the knowledge that tragedy strikes ordinary places and ordinary people without any rhyme or reason. You go home at night feeling very vulnerable.
“I thought I was doing a good job of keeping things inside. But on the Sunday after the shooting my kids gave me odd looks as I puttered around the house. In my head, I was replaying the week and second-guessing the work myself.
” ‘Mom, why are you so sad?’ they kept asking.
” ‘I’m just tired,’ I told them. It was the truth, though not all of it. Some stories by their very nature aren’t put to bed for a long time.”
Community leaders, with one exception, praised the media’s behavior.
Doug Schmitz, assistant fire chief, said he was miffed by a succession of calls from a Star Tribune reporter on his cell phone while he was establishing a perimeter at the school. He did not recall the writer’s name, but said the Star Tribune called him five or six times the next day and he didn’t call back.
Mike Austreng, publisher of the weekly Cold Spring Record, said only one media person who pestered him for names of people to call was rude.
Police Chief Phil Jones said, “I was happy with it. The Rollins family is pleased. Some citizens thought the family didn’t want to deal with the media. Negative comments about the media were few and far between and none worth mentioning.”
The Rev. Cletus Connors of St. Boniface Catholic Church agreed.
