You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Baby death!
Some stories are easier to tell than others.
Some stories are easier to care about than others.
Some stories tear at your heart.
Other stories are hard to even remember the next day.
Monday night at 9pm, I race to North Nashville to cover a double shooting.
It feels hinky from the beginning. A double shooting, a rough part of town?
When I get on scene, the wind is whipping, and the night is cold as advertised.
I’m told the wind chill factor makes it seem like 14 degrees.
It feels like 14 degrees if 14 degrees means pain in my toes, burning in my fingers, frostbite on my nose.
I am standing in front of a live camera with blue lights swirling behind me. It’s disorienting.
You know the feeling of being pulled over and looking up into your rear view mirror. That swirling blue light fills your brain, assaults your equilibrium, beats on your pupils.
Just one light is like being sea sick on a cruise ship.
Now imagine 12 squad cars, lights swirling like a Disco out of the 70’s.
I hate it here.
10 minutes earlier I am quietly editing what has potential to be the lead story.
Then that F***ing scanner chirps and I am suddenly jerked out of a warm cozy newsroom and tossed into an arctic crime scene.
I hate that the story I was working on will be incomplete, finished by an editor who doesn’t know the story, doesn’t care about the story, doesn’t even know what the video represents. The editor? All he cares about is covering up black holes before it airs.
That sucks.
The story was compelling. It was about a man pulled over 4 times in one week because his car resembles that of a bandit using a police light to pull people over and rob them.
This guy and his girlfriend are great interviews. His car is bright yellow. He calls it BumbleBee. Imagine that? The story has character and memorable sound bites.
But then some idiot decides to kill another idiot. Some where in the vast darkness someone targets another human with a gun and pulls the trigger.
BLAM BLAM BLAM.
One dead. One injured.
It’s a drug deal gone bad. I know it. The cops know it. Why for heaven’s sakes doesn’t the assignment editor and producer know it. Better yet, why do they even care? For whatever reason, this is still considered breaking news. A shooting between bad guys in the middle of the night.
Is that the last thing people watching the 10pm news want to see before they go to bed?
don’t make these decisions. If I did, we wouldn’t give it a single sentence of air time.
So I am standing at the crime tape with the other night side reporters from the market. Apparently we all work for the same idiotic mentality of poor news judgment.
We are all cold, blowing on our hands, mumbling and grumbling and bumbling through similar narratives just minutes before air.
Up till this moment, we had less knowledge than Jessica Simpson in the Dukes of Hazard.
That’s not a good thing when you are scrambling to figure out what the hell you’re about to say on live TV.
Strangely, I am neither concerned, nor do I care.
Thankfully, at the last second, an officer on the scene tells us that one man is dead. One man shot in the arm. There are two crimes scenes. There is a helicopter over head and there is a K-9 working the perimeter. Motive? He won’t say. Sure it could be something other than a drug deal gone bad, but I doubt it.
Somewhere nearby there is a crying woman. She obviously cares about someone. Who I don’t know. Who I decide I don’t care.
It’s a dark crime scene filled with yellow tape and blue lights.
I can’t decide what I hate more, the wind burning my face, or a job that mandates I be here, standing in a gale force assault, trying to find some reason to care.
I just don’t care. Maybe if it was 60 degrees, I would care more. Somehow all my care sensors are tending to my aching toes and burning face and rapidly freezing fingers. I know I care about this.
I do my job. I don’t stutter. I don’t slander anyone. I say what I know. No more. No less. I never feel an ounce of care.
I leave and feel drained, disillusioned.
WTF was that? Who even cares? I don’t. Did the viewers?
Fast forward 24 hours.
I am telling the sickenin,sad story of a baby girl killed by her father. He is charged with 1st degree murder. The mother charged with abuse. The other two small children removed from the home.
The father will tell investigators he doesn’t know how the child died. The Medical Examiner will say the cause of death was Inflicted head and spinal cord trauma.
According to the detective handling the case, the baby’s father shows no remorse. Instead he tells police he had a dream in which his baby wasn’t breathing. In his dream, he shakes his baby to help her breathe. Too bad everyone can’t just wake up from this nightmare.
The detective is skeptical, almost angry. He is a father. He is a human. He charges the man with 1st degree murder. Too bad he couldn’t execute him in the office or in the town square.
This story just makes me mad. It should make all of us mad.
The shooting the night before ends up being a drug deal gone bad. What a surprise.
But the baby dying after only 8 weeks of life?
That is disgusting. It is nauseating. The father, if guilty, should be held accountable.
I am guessing the 30-year-old will spend many years in jail to think about the dream death of a baby, his baby.
Neither story is good.
But one is more memorable, more concerning, more justified as a broadcasting topic.
I’m sorry a man was gunned down in the street. If he owed someone money or dope, then that’s the code of the street.
Bad Boy Bad Boy, what you gonna do?
Gonna get a cap busted in yo A**.
But an 8 week baby?
But the baby?
We owe that baby more. Life owes that child more.
Now all we can do is remember her on the news, and perhaps get people at home to silently say a prayer.
Two lives lost. Sadly, only one matters to me.
Life’s Crazy™