You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The roadside hit and run.
A tire blows. A 13 year old boy does what a young man should do. He shows his momma, he can fix it. So with the family car, presumably, safely off the interstate, he begins to change the tire.
Suddenly an Oldsmobile speeds down I-24, weaving through traffic.
In an instant, life is altered.
BLAM!
The Oldsmobile crosses into the break down lane, rams the child and kills him. The driver speeds away. How do you run over a child and flee? What is going through your mind?
The driver might never have been caught, but a witness sees it happen. The witness follows the suspect vehicle calling police, alerting them to the location of the hit and run driver.
All the news stations do what they should do. They speed to the scene of the fatal accident. They set up live shots and Tweet about the horrific crime.
By the time I get to work at 2 pm, the story is covered, saturated, and still evolving like a news amoeba.
I am told I need to cover this big story.
We have multiple crews at the crash scene. The logical thing would have been to drive there. I am alone today. I am a one man band. Driving to an all ready saturated news scene is not appealing to me.
I’ve seen many pictures from the interstate, but little is known about the arrested driver.
“Have they located the suspect vehicle?” I ask the assignment desk.
I get blank stares.
“What are you going to do?” the producer asks.
Where would I run to if I just ran over a kid.
“I’ve got a hunch. I’m going to check out a truck stop off the interstate. Maybe someone knows something.”
It’s a long shot by any journalistic stretch of the imagination.
It’s a random truck stop off a major interstate. What do I really expect to find here. People gassing up, trucks idling, families getting groceries.
Truth be told; I just need to get out of this news room. I need to feel oxygen on my face.
There are problems the minute I walk in. I walk to m cubicle only to find an engineer in my chair.
My computer screen is bright blue.
“Your computer hard drive crashed,” she says.
I stare at her with disbelief.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you had a catastrophic melt down here.”
I don’t say much. My brain is racing. Every piece of video, every story, every frame of video I have shot or edited has disappeared into an enigmatic news fog.
“It’s gone,” the engineers say with all the compassion of wet dirt.
I’m angry. I have spent weeks editing some of these stories. Other video has been in my system for years.Now it’s gone.
“Just gone?” That’s stupid,” I mutter to myself.
Beside that, my email is down, my contact list lost, my internet sketchy.
I am fuming. I need to get out of the building before I fire myself.
I am almost to the interstate when my phone buzzes.
“You working?” It’s a cop I know.
“Yes. why?”
“That hit and run vehicle is off Harding in South Nashville,” he says.
I laugh out loud. The location is not far from where I thought it was.
“Thanks.”
I drive to this heavily populated business park. I drive up and down the block, looking for signs of police activity.
My head is on a swivel, like a Walter Cronkite bobble head.
That’s when I see several Tennessee Highway Patrol vehicles.
I pull up, keeping my distance.
The officers are on the ground taking pictures of a gold Oldsmobile with front end damage.
“Bingo”
I get out and work my way closer.
A smiling THP investigator meets me en route.”We were just saying, wouldn’t the media love to be here. And here you are.”
“Lucky guess,” I say.
“Well, it’s a crime scene,” he reminds me. “So if you can keep your distance, we’d be appreciative.”
“No problem,” I say.
I put my camera down and begin shooting.
I am trembling with adrenaline.
I am alone, the only camera. The suspect car, the investigators, and me.
It’s an exclusive and I own it.
I shoot the front end. I can see the damage in my viewfinder. I see the THP officer on his back, hat turned backward as he takes pictures of the underside of the chassis.
I move to the other side of the parking lot.
I see a plain clothed investigator in the breezeway. He has a badge on his belt. He has a note pad and is talking to a red headed woman who is trembling, nervous, smoking a cigarette.
I know she is some one to keep my eye on, but I walk by not wanting to irritate the officers who have granted me a lot of freedom to move around the crime scene.
I continue to shoot the car from all angles.
Suddenly my camera flashes DISC FULL.
WTF?
I have never seen this reading before.
I am baffled.
I turn the camera on. I turn the camera off.
Our engineers seem to think that fixes everything.
Again the display reads: Disc Full.
Damn.
I am anxious. I’m mad. I am pissed. I am standing in a pool of exclusivity and technology is preventing me from winning.
I call the chief photog.
He is driving to another scene related to this story.
He reminds me that he recently changed my camera settings to allow for high definition video. It eats up space on my video card he says.
I walk to my car to search for another card.
My problem is, I have been working as a two man crew much more than a one man band since joining the night crew.
My batteries are run down, my equipment in disarray. I have no one to really blame but myself.
But I am so mad, I’m fuming. I want to blame someone.
The reporter in me got to this exclusive moment on my own. Now the camera man in me is going to F*** it all up.
I can’t find another video card.
As I walk past the red head in the breeze way. I notice she is agitated. The THP investigator has left her side. She is talking loudly about Doctor someone. Doctor somebody is suppose to help her with something.
I stop. I’m pissed. She is pissing me off. I have no camera. No recording device. I don’t care.
“Mam, you associated with that car?”
“No” she says emphatically daggers darting through her eyes.
“OK,” I say. “It’s just it was involved in a hit and run fatality today and I saw you talking to the THP investigators.”
“I don’t know nothing bout it,” she says with shards of contempt filling the air.
I move away. I need to free up card space. How do I delete some video clips while not deleting all the video clips.
I call the station again. Nobody seems to know. I am passed around like a tip jug in a honky tonk.
I am growing angrier by the minute. My thoughts are jumbled. My reporter brain is sending out signals, but they are not going anywhere. Like confetti blown by a fan, they are haphazardly dissipating inside my brain.
The fact that I can’t collect my thoughts, and come up with a plan is infuriating. This should be so easy. If I wasn’t trying to be a camera man, I know I would know what to do next.
I know I would be able to figure out that red head in the breezeway. What is it about her that is so troubling. Why is she here? Why are they talking to her. Why is she screaming about her doctor. Why is the THP chaplain now talking to her.
It means something, but my brain is locked on gizmos and circuits and techno babble.
I kick the ground with my boot. I want to throw a hissy fit, but figure it will do me little good.
Come on man, think.
What’s going on here.
Suddenly a buddy of mine gets on the line.
He begins to walk me through the procedure. It’s as if I am in the pilot seat of a plane I don’t know how to fly and he is going to talk me through the landing.
Push this. Double highlight that. Now push operation. Now hit delete clips.
I follow his words and 2 clips full of something unrelated to this story disappear.
Suddenly I have room for more video.
“Thanks man. You are a life saver.”
I hang up. I decide I am going to get off my tripod and walk over to the red head.
I start to unfasten my camera from the sticks.
Suddenly the battery chunks.
My viewfinder is black.
“Oh my God!” The battery dies.
I now have a camera with room to shoot video, but unfortunately I have no juice to turn the camera on. And because I am a bad photographer, I have no extra batteries with me.
My brain feels like that commercial. This is your brain on drugs as the egg hits the frying pan
I want to throw the camera against the ground and watch it explode.
I stand there and sulk, huffing and puffing, like a big journalistic baby.
With no camera to clog my thoughts, my reporter brain starts to work again.
I see the red head talking to the chaplain.
“F*** it!” I say to nobody in particular.
I turn on my iphone video recorder and walk up to the woman. She spots me and her crazy switch flashes hot.
“Oh no,” she shouts, taking an aggressive step toward me. “go away. nobody needs to say anything to you. I don’t know what the F*** is going on and you don’t either so go away.”
She is full of hostility. She is holding a water bottle in one hand and a little straw purse slung over her shoulder. Her nose is pierced and her hair flaming red. As she speaks, I can’t help but think she is under the influence of something.
“I just want to know if you were in that car?”
“I was not,” she spews like a fire breathing drug dragon.
“And if I was, it is none of your business. Now go away.”
She summons the THP investigators to her side.
One of the men smiles at me as they walk away.
My camera man brain isn’t sure what the hell just happened, but my reporter brain realizes that this is gold.
I walk up to the nearest THP officer. “Who is that woman?”
“She’s the passenger in the car,” he whispers.
Boom.
What I couldn’t do with my $5,000 HD video camera, I was able to do with a $250 iphone 4.
Long story short. I will eventually meet up with another reporter at a nearby gas station. Unbelievably, the red head is there, leaning against the convenience store smoking a cigarette. This time we have a 2 man crew armed with a fully functioning HD video camera.
I am a reporter now. I walk right up to her and begin asking her questions.
She tells me she doensn’t know about hitting any child. She claims the car she was riding in was hit by a truck. She is angry that her friend was arrested. She is irate that she has no ride.
I tell her that she was the passenger in a car that THP officers say killed a child.
“I don’t know a F***** thing about that,” she hollers.
She is a red headed, foul mouthed tornado.
Is she lying? It sure seems like it to my reporter brain.
She is spewing spit as she tells me to leave her alone.
“What? You wanna hit me?” I ask holding my ground.
“No I don’t want to hit you,” she says.
that’s sort of where it all ends.
She walks hurriedly down the sidewalk. She is fuming, a combustible lump of untethered emotion.
My reporter brain is smiling. I have that jam, that quiver, that feeling that tells me that was a big get.
I go back to the station and I show my cell phone footage to the anchors. I show it to the producer and the other photographers.
Everyone knows it’s a home run.
It turns out the woman was the passenger in the car when it hit and killed the little boy.
What she saw, what she thinks happens, that’s another story for another day and perhaps a court of law.
Despite being alone and facing a bevy of technological gremlins, I accomplished my mission.
My boss will never completely understand how his newsroom obtained this piece of video that no other newsroom has.
It’s not really his job to know. It’s not really my job to explain it.
It just is.
A child is dead. The driver of the car charged with vehicular homicide. And, thanks to the redhead, perhaps we have a better understanding of the mental state of mind inside that suspect vehicle at the moment of impact.
Life’s Crazy™