You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
I heard my heart pounding in my ears as I fumbled for the 2 way microphone to let my station I was on the call.
Before I knew it, I had the news unit barreling down the road. The speedometer was buried at 85 mph.
I put on my flashing hazard lights and began racing to the scene. This is rural North Carolina, and the highways are mostly 2 lane country roads, surrounded by pine forests. The roads wind and meander and there are not enough straight-a-ways for a newsman who is savagely breaking the law.
I was listening to the scanner, and trying to drive, while talking on the two way microphone. My brain was a fried neuron as I was balls to the wall. The scanner traffic sounded worse and worse. Possibly a dead officer. Possibly a botched bank robbery that was now a chaotic hostage crisis, and all of this in a tiny rural town far away.
In Eastern North Carolina, around any turn, you can expect to encounter a farm combine or a pick up truck towing tobacco. I had that in my mind as I pushed the limit, engine roaring, tires squealing.
It took 30 minutes, but I was the first reporter to arrive at the scene. It was chaotic and sporadic. There was no defined place to begin, so I just ditched the news vehicle near some cop cars and began moving forward, hunched over, my head on a swivel.
As I gathered my gear and military crawled to a good location, I noticed a half dozen deputies and police officers wearing bullet proof vests. They were lying on their stomachs and taking cover behind their police cruisers. They all looked hard and serious, clutching high powered weapons, their eyes trained on the front of the bank.
I would soon come to learn, the officers were concentrating on the robber within, a man who had already killed the sheriff and left him for dead in the bank’s breezeway. Law men were trying to get their cross hairs on a mad man who was now holding two cleaning people hostage, one of whom he had already shot in the leg.
It was a tense scene, with more than a little adrenaline flowing. Officers screamed to one another uneasily as they snuck through the grass on their bellies and talked into their radios.
I was lying near a State Trooper. He had his hat on backward and his eye stuck to his rifle scope. He was a rock of calm. He never moved, or took his concentration off the bank as he said in a slow deliberate tone; “You’re on your own, boy. The Sheriff’s dead! That son of a bitch is armed and he’s popping off rounds. I ain’t here to baby sit you, so if you stay, you are on your own.”
Without moving a muscle, a thin stream of chewing tobacco exited his mouth into the dirt.
Like a reservoir of adrenaline flowing unchecked through an open flood gate, I was tingling with anticipation. I was scared, but I was amped. I thought about moving to safer ground, while at the same time moving forward to get a better angle on the bank.
“He’s got a high powered 308 hunting rifle with a scope,” another SWAT team member whispers from behind a tree. “He could pick off any one of us with a flick of the trigger. If I were you, I’d stay low.”
Sound advice, I thought to myself, trying to make my body half as big so it will fit behind my bright orange porta pack.
Fleeting, sporadic images and questions race across the blank black board of my mind.
Was any story worth dying for? Is this one worth it? I had no time to debate myself. I had a job to do so I refocused on the task at hand.
It was going to be a long day, that would ultimately be more than 17 hours.
After an hour or so, the State Bureau of Investigation had been called in, and top brass for this stuffy organization were calling the shots.
Compared to the wild west chaos when I first arrived, when there were only a handful of lawmen holding the crazy scene in check, order was begining to unfold. Compared to an hour ago, when there was no tangible perimeter, no obvious safe zone, the scene was begining to feel more like crime scenes I have been to before. As more suits arrived, the perimeter for non essential personnel like news media was pushed way back, away from the blood and guts and bullets and sweat.
The director of the SBI knew me and didn’t like me. He didn’t like how aggressive I was and he didn’t like how many stories cops gave me cause they trusted me and they liked me too. It often made the shirt collar of his tight white shirt close around his adam’s apple.
TOO BAD!
But today, he was the man and he rounded the media into a circle and began to try and control us. He was telling us where we would have to stage. He pointed to a location on the other side of town. There would be no way to see anything. I was getting pissed. I was covered with mud and sweat. I felt like I had a vested interest in this. I saw the dead sheriff. I felt the spray of bullets. I was spit on with sniper chewing tobacco. I was part of this fabric. This suit, he was a tourist, playing a role his business card says he performs.
Now this bureaucrat was going to tell me to go a 1/4 mile away. I felt like I might as well cover this story from outer space.
So when the director turned his head I called out to a citizen sitting on his front stoop, about 20 feet away.
“Hey can I stay in your house?”
“Sure the old man said,” without blinking.
With that, I picked up my gear and walked into his house.
The director was flabbergasted, but I was an invited guest in a citizen’s home and he could no longer tell me what to do. If he was going to remove me, then he would have to remove the resident, and subsequently every resident. He was not prepared to do that, so again, I had out-manuevered this stuffed shirt.
As far as hostage crisises go, I was set up pretty good. I was in an air conditioned house, sitting in the man’s living room. My camera was on a tri pod and zooming through his picture window which had a pretty good vantage point on the bank. I could get the video I needed from relative safety and do Phoners with the station from the man’s living room. Talk about good fortune, his wife was even feeding me chicken salad sandwiches.
As day turned into night, live trucks surrounded the tiny community. Hundreds of people had gathered, and the cops were having to keep a large contingent of on lookers out of the danger zone.
By this time, larger stations from Raleigh had arrived and the scene hardly resembled the chaotic raw energy I encountered when I threw myself down in the dirt next to a sharpshooter who trained himself to be a killing machine.
Back in the day, I was a wild card. I got bored easily. It’s what made me aggressive and unpredictable, and probably a bit of a cavalier reporter.
As night enveloped the scene, I got bored. I decided I had to out perform the other tv crews. I had grown weary of the limited shots I had in the house. Wide shot, medium shot, tight shot. I mean how many times can you shoot the same thing. So I thanked my host and and began to implement a crazy strategy I had barely thought out.
In the dark of night, I entered the perimeter of woods on the far side of the bank. I was young and dumb and full of crazy and I was going for it.
I moved slowly and deliberately, stepping through the woods, moving in a large circle around what would eventually be the back of the bank. It took 2o minutes, and navigating the woods was difficult since I was lugging a camera that connected to a 3/4 inch porta pack. The cable between the camera and the record deck kept tangling on branches and stumps. Every few minutes, I would be yanked back from some invisible force cathing my gear and ripping at my shoulder.
As I get near the rear of the bank, I got down on my stomach and slithered through the mud. I remember lying in a mulchy patch of soft grass. It’s cold wetness had soaked thru the front of my coat and was now slowly freezing the skin on my belly. It was 2 or 3 in the morning and the woods were eerie quiet. I could hear myself breathing pursively in the pristine quiet.
I’m sure it was inaudible to anyone, but to me it sounded like a freight train screeching down the tracks.
It was in this hazy arena, lit by a dim bulb in the back of the bank, that I watched the gunman come out with his female hostage.
A negotiator was 30 feet away and I could barely hear them telling him to let her go.
“Just let her go,” they said over and over again.
The woman was in her mid 50’s. She was trembling and scared. The gunman was lean and angular. He was jittery, yet still somehow cool enough to make demands. I could hear his coarse whispers as he spoke in an angry hush to the darkness and the phalanx of law enforcement hidden within it.
“You think I’m joking?,” he said defiantly.
He raised his semi-automatic pistol over his head pointing it towards the heavens. I braced myself for the explosion of noise I expected to ring out any second.
Though I couldn’t see them, I knew that every roof top was manned by snipers with infra red scopes just waiting for an opportunity to introduce this crazed gunman to God.
I sank lower into the soggy turf clutching my camera, readjusting my focus on this terrible, surrealistic experience.
Then, as if angels had intervened, the female hostage broke loose and ran toward the safety of the waiting officers.
I felt a lump in my throat.
Then, in a bizarre, horrible twist of fate, the woman stopped. She was 15 feet from the cops. She was 25 feet from the mad man. She was in the middle of the parking lot, a frightened island to herself.
I watched her slowly turn and walk back to the crazed gunman. I can only speculate she did this because her beloved husband of decades was bleeding to death inside the bank, and she couldn’t bare to leave his side.
Devotion and love that cannot be fully understood or appreciated, brought her back to satan incarnate like a magnet picking up tacks.
Then, in a specter of finality, the gunman moved back into the bank with his frightened hostage. I was uneasy and the air was electrified.
Within moments, there was a sonic explosion and blinding flash of light from a flash bang device.
The sound of shattering glass tinkled through the misty night air as a concussion bomb turned the bank into a massive hand grenade of sizzling shrapnel, wood splinters and razor sharp glass.
The explosion tore apart the sanctity of the night like a car crashing through your bedroom wall, waking you from a deep restful sleep.
From the periphery, camouflaged gunmen stormed into the bank entrance. They were screaming in an orchestrated stream of confusion.
“Put your hands up, put your gun down, hit the floor!”
The directions were unclear and unfocused as they nervously pranced in front of the darkened entrance pointing their weapons and flashlights into the haze. Red lazer beams criss crossed through the smoke like a star wars movie.
Then, like a thunderstorm of scalding, whizzing metal, the officers opened fire in the darkness.
Like humming birds on cocaine, they fired off round after multiple round of automatic death.
Then after what seemed like 30 seconds, the shooting stopped. It was quiet, except for the buzz from the nearby street light. I watched as a cloud of man made smoke floated in the air.
The front of the bank was illuminated by a buzzing, orange street light nearby. It was a surreal, tragic vision and it wasn’t over yet.
I strained to hear what was happening. I heard cries, and low guttural voices of men. I heard the muted whimpering of the woman inside the bank rising over the swell of panic and men scuffling.
Then, sadly and without warning or explanation, the female hostage who I had seen just a few minutes before, emerged from the bank, fleeing in panic. Her screams echo off the centuries old brick of the building.
I feel hope fill my heart as I see the woman running to safety.
“She’s going to survive,” I think to myself.
Then it all goes bad in a blink of an eye. I watch in amazed horror, as the SBI gunmen turn their laser beams of red light onto the running woman fleeing the hostage scene.
I wonder why they are painting her up in red laser beams, don’t they realize she is safe?
Like cheap speakers being over loaded by a massive power surge, the air again fills with confusion and static. The gunfire is loud and ugly and finalizing. Over the thunderstorm of violence I hear a bullet wrizzle by my head. It sounds like a pissed off mosquito with a bad attitude. It hits a nearby satellite truck.
There was no time to think. I stay low and keep video taping the atrocity before me. I watch in horror as the woman’s figure topples forward in slow motion.
She will never move again.
I was so close, I swear I heard the air compress from her lungs, exiting her body in a warm rush of life leaving behind only a cold shell of humanity.
This idiotic, surrealistic, unbelievable scene climaxed with one more burst of gunfire into the darkened bank.
BLAM BLAM BLAM. DOWN DOWN DOWN!
There’s more Smoke and lights flashing and anger and craziness.
Then the storm was over.
“Clear?, Clear!,” come aggressive shouts from the smoky confusion.
Anonymous shadows scream in the distance. Like a tidal wave of emotion, the tiny town and tiny bank will be consumed by a tsunami of controversy.
The rest of the siege is a blur of ambulance lights and sirens and choppers taking off to trauma centers.
It quickly reverts to the chaos that it began as, but now it is being broadcast live to the world.
I remember it being the lead story on CBS WorldNews with Dan Rather.
I remember as the sun began to rise over the North Carolina pines, a cluster of impromptu interviews and camera lights and weeping relatives in the dawn of a new day.
The SBI officers will ultimately assume responsibility for the shooting and killing of the hostage. She was a wife, a mother, a daughter. She has also, in the flick of a trigger, become a lightning rod in a racially tense community.
The SBI claims they thought she was the gunman making a run for it. Ironically, though hit by several rounds, the bank robber survives his injuries. In a twist of fate that will be questioned as part of some greater conspiracy, the bank robber goes to prison where he is found hanging dead in his cell, before the case can ever come to court, and the truth can be revealed.
The woman’s husband, who was shot in the bank robbery, also miraculously survives this tragedy. He is compensated by the state and he is so distraught, he will never publicly talk about the tragedy.
This ordeal polarizes a community which claims the woman wouldn’t have been killed had she been white. It’s not enough that an atrocity like this has occurred, but now the ugly history of the South’s racial inequities have reared their ugly head. It’s a whirlwind of controversy and a flatulating enigma of angry press conferences and unsubstantiated allegations orchestrated by the SCLC.
It’s in the middle of this great, raging storm that I find myself, clad in journalistic rain gear and sound bite galoshes and a sagacious ability to describe it all.
Though reporting the ugliness is sometimes cathartic, it can also rob you of your humanity and compassion.
Unfortunately, tomorrow is another news day, a day in which someone else will die, be cheated, or hurt.
Sometimes the best reporter is a reporter who can suck it all in and then channel it right back out like a parabolic mirror gathering in the energy of the sun and focusing that deleterious light into a concentrated beam of productive matter.
Once that matter has been transported, it is gone, cleansed, ready to gather in the next light and begin the transformation again.