Remembering the unthinkable

As hard as it is to believe, today is the one-year anniversary of the shootings at the Capital-Gazette newspaper offices in Annapolis.

One year ago today, five heroes of the people, five saviors of truth, five shiners of light on darkness, lost their lives.

Journalists Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara and Wendi Winters and sales assistant Rebecca Smith died June 28, 2018, when a gunman with a reported long-standing grudge against the paper entered the building and started shooting.

We as a society have become somewhat hardened to the news of another mass shooting on American soil because they have sadly become all too common. But when news of this shooting hit the local airwaves, I distinctly remember my heart skipping a beat. The blood drained from my face and all I could do was suck in my breath and wait for more details.

I instantly thought of Rob, whose work I had admired from afar for years, and Gerald and John, both of whom I had met over my years as a journalist.

I sat in front of a television for hours, waiting for more details to be released and for the dead to be identified. As the list of names was read, I started crying and couldn’t stop. It was almost inevitable, given the small size of the staff, that I would know some, if not all, of the victims.

As I sat and tried to come to grips with this shooting in my professional community, I began to feel somewhat guilty over becoming hardened to the news of such acts. Listening to news readers list the names of people I knew made me realize that, whether a shooting was in Georgia, or Kentucky, or Massachusetts, or (insert state/town here), the readings of those victims elicited the same response from people in those communities. We forget that these dead people are more than just a list of names; they are spouses, parents, offspring, siblings, aunts, uncles, neighbors, colleagues and friends.

Every time there is a mass shooting, members of that community are sitting in front of a television, sobbing hysterically over the mention of names of people they knew. We lose sight of that and I have been much more in tune to that personal loss since the Capital Gazette shootings.

I don’t want to get too political here, because I don’t want to disrespect the memories of my fallen colleagues, but it needs to be said that the Annapolis massacre occurred just a couple of days after both our president and right-wing conspiracy theorist Milos Yiannopolis referred once again to journalists as the “enemy of the people.”

I would be foolish to say there is a direct connection between that rhetoric and the shootings, because there simply is not proof. But the shooter’s beef with the paper was many years old, and his allegations of defamation against the paper had been dismissed in court on many years ago as well. So why the timing now to shoot these people? Why not five years ago? The timing is suspect, in any case.

Journalists are not the enemy of the people. They are the people; they often live in the communities they write about. Their children attend the local schools, they worship in the churches, they shop in the stores, they dine in the restaurants, they’re patients of local doctors and dentists. They throw cookouts with their neighbors, they plan vacations together, they support youth rec leagues and community theater. They are not the enemy.

But I don’t want to dwell on that, as I said. I want to pay respect to the memories of five every day people who got up on the morning of June 28, 2018, went to work and didn’t return home to their loved ones.

Much has been written over the past year about the loss of the Capital Gazette staffers. They have been honored with a special Pulitzer award and have been memorialized at the Newseum. Fallen journalists, dubbed "The Guardians,” were named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Their stories have been told, their survivors have shared more intimate memories and their work has been acknowledged and honored.

It’s interesting that the one person I didn’t know at all — sales assistant Rebecca Smith — is the person I got to know the best in the aftermath of the shootings. Rebecca was a member of the Greater Dundalk community and I was honored to write the article for the East County Times that shared both the news details of the shootings and details of Rebecca’s life that helped paint a personal picture of who she was as a significant other, colleague, neighbor and friend.

I made sure to include her in anything I wrote or said about the victims of the attack. Many news accounts tended to discount Rebecca because she wasn’t a journalist. When the Newseum added the names of Fischman, Hiaasen, McNamare and Winters to the Fallen Journalists wall earlier this month, many news accounts didn’t even mention that a fifth, non-journalist also died in the attack.

I saw one news account that mentioned the names of the four dead journalists and added that a “sales assistant also died,” without mentioning Rebecca’s name.

I’m sure her journalist colleagues would have been quite upset with that treatment.

A newspaper staff is much like any other professional team in that each person’s job is important to the overall mission; a weak spot anywhere affects the quality everywhere. While journalists tend to get the public attention and are the ones with their names on their work, the advertising folks are the ones who bring in the money that gives us the space to print our work.

I once worked in a newsroom where the owner of the paper reminded us all the time that reporters cost him money and advertising folks made him money. The ad staff often had catered lunch or treats brought in to meetings, or held receptions that involved food. It was a standing joke that right before the leftovers needed to go in the trash, they would miraculously appear on the kitchenette counter in the newsroom for the writing staff to share.

No matter how close the food was to a mouldering mess, it was quickly consumed because, well, because no journalist ever turned down free food.

In all of the accounts I have seen of this incident, as written by Capital Gazette survivors and others, it strikes me that this group was a particularly tight-knit team who got along, socialized together after work and genuinely liked each other.

The loss of all five individuals matters and my heart still breaks a year later for that loss of talent, passion, skills and leadership, and for the loss of community champions that left Annapolis without some important voices and cheerleaders.

We lose sight of how important a community paper is and how much we depend on those often underpaid, overworked writers who share the stories larger news outlets often overlook. We only notice how much we depended on those voices after they are silenced.

Most often, the voices are silenced by the closure of a newspaper. To have those voices silenced by workplace violence is relatively new to us here in the U.S. The news of journalists targeted and killed because of their work happens in other, “less civilized” nations, we think, but could never happen here.

It is shocking then, when it does happen here, and is something we should never forget.

So here’s to remembering Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters, and here’s to appreciating those points of light in all of our communities.

Press on, Annapolis!

Blogger's confession:

Because of my emotional connection to this incident, I find myself, even at one year later, unable to write as clearly or as eloquently as I would like in my effort to honor these fallen colleagues. For some much better-written coverage, including columns written by Capital staffers and Maria Hiaasen, Rob’s widow, please visit https://www.capitalgazette.com.

Be sure to also visit Paul Gillespie’s beautiful, sensitive and poignant collection of portraits. You won’t be sorry.