You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The senselessness.
They say NEWS is a four letter word.
Today it felt that way.
The Gods of video journalism spit at me, flipped me the bird, and said, NEWS YOU!
My story was assigned to me long before I arrived, before I ever awoke.
1 am, tragedy spilled all over the street like spaghetti sauce boiling over on high heat.
1 am. My God. Christmas is only over for an hour, but all ready Christmas Cheer is replaced by an evil that is lurking on the periphery of Music City.
1 am. Simmer turns to boil when Metro Police spot a stolen Toyota Corolla.
The car was stolen from a 25-year-old woman at a Christmas party a few days earlier.
Police say two young men point a long gun in the woman’s face and take her purse and her car keys.
Cops have had a BOLO out on the Corolla for 3 days.
Suddenly it shows itself and they want it.
Cops activate their blue lights, but the Corolla takes off.
2 minutes later, with speeds on narrow surface streets reaching 60 mph, it’s all over.
It ends as suddenly as it can. With a thud of silenced life.
Witnesses say the car hits a curb, goes air born, flips upside down and smashes into a Toyota pick up truck parked in the front yard of a little home.
The collision is tremendous, crumpling metal, and taking a life.
The force of the impact is so great, the truck is pushed through the brick wall of the home.
When I get there, bricks are scattered, and boards splintered. There is a black tarp hanging over the massive hole where the living room is.
Police say a 16-year-old in the rear of the fleeing vehicle is ejected and pronounced dead at the scene.
When I get to the home, there is 3 foot wide puddle of blood on the walk. I’m not sure whose blood, but there is so much of it.
I will later watch a ditzy news woman, fumble with her cell phone, walk up the path, and head right for the blood puddle.
I wonder if she sees the pool of death, that is now frozen in the morning chill.
She is wearing new Christmas high heels and she is walking right toward it.
Suddenly she stops, seeing it just in time.
She deviates into the grass while staring at the symbol of life lost.
I would laugh, but it’s so sad here, laughter just feels impossible.
Police say the 16-year-old driver survives this holocaust of felonious activity. The kid is lucky. The kid is not so lucky. He will be treated and released from an area hospital, and then he will face his own demons and those of the state which will include felony vehicular homicide and armed robbery and auto theft.
16 years old! His life is over. His buddy’s life terminated, ejected from a speeding car in the blink of an eye.
What is wrong with this picture?
16 year olds shouldn’t be dead or pointing guns at people stealing their purses.
16 year olds should be going to basketball games at the high school gym and hanging at the Sonic drinking shakes and looking for girls.
Police say there’s a 3 rd person in this wreck of human carnage. She is a 36-year-old felon who should have known better. She is out on bond for cocaine sales. What her relationship is to the 16 year olds is unclear. It certainly is not good.
I will watch video of her being rolled on a gurney to a waiting ambulance.
She is holding her head, bandaged, soaked in blood.
It’s an eerie video with blue and red swirling lights from an army of emergency responders.
So many lives affected in 2 minutes it’s hard to know where to begin.
For the man who lives in the house, who owns the truck smashed to smithereens, it starts around 1 am.
That’s when he tells me he hears the sirens coming and the tires squealing and then the crush of metal.
He says he looks out his window and sees blue lights and death.
“Show us your hands. Show us your hands. They kept screaming it over and over,” he will say.
For the woman whose car was stolen, it begins 3 days earlier.
Police say she was at a Christmas party and two young men stick a long gun in her face and demand her purse which contains her car keys.
Apparently the teens come back later and find the car that belongs to those keys and use it to create havoc and rob other people.
I call this 25-year-old car theft victim.
Her husband answers. He says she is still pretty shook up, but maybe she”ll talk to me about the crime in a few days.
I laugh as I hang up.
A few days, the Earth will have rotated on its axis 3 times in 3 days. That’s a lot of damn news that is going to explode across the spectrum of my existence.
A woman held up 3 days before Christmas? She will be a memory like christmas paper torn off a Christmas gift and tossed in the trash.
And then there’s the woman in the video who arrives a few minutes after the dust settles at the crime scene.
She is young, wearing no coat on a frigid night. She is clutching a cell phone and shaking visibly. I cannot hear her words, but I can read her lips.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
She puts her hands by her head, then drops to her knees and then bounces back up, all the time contorting, shaking.
I don’t know who she is or how she is associated with this tragedy, but she is deeply affected.
I notice she is wearing a t-shirt with a young black kid’s face. R.I.P. is over the child’s face and the child’s name below.
Apparently the child on her t-shirt has also died too young.
By dawn’s early light, a man walking his dog happens by this menagerie of crime tape and broken car parts and pools of blood.
He is well spoken and blatantly honest.
He gives the assembled news team quotes that are stinging and somber and soaked with truth.
He questions the parents and how the children were raised. He says it is a bad day when a child dies for any reason. He says that any time you mess with criminal activity like this, nothing good can come from it.
It’s so honest, it almost hurts to hear it.
His dog lifts its leg and pees on the mail box holding the crime tape.
It is oddly poetic.
I stare at this jambalaya of death and police lights and crying women and crumpled auto parts. How do I make sense of this?
What sense is there to make of this?
One hour after Christmas and the hounds of hell explode across the frosty streets of North Nashville.
The Pope has barely pulled the covers up to his chin in Vatican City, and all ready the night of nights is soiled.
There’s not much I can do with this story. All I can do is tell the story of a 16-year-old dead, A 16-year-old going to jail forever, A stupid crack head who should have been in jail, A man whose lucky to have home and car insurance, and A 25 year old woman who will be car shopping and forever afraid to walk in the dark.
And then that woman with the RIP shirt?
She all ready knows the pain of loss.
What can she learn from this? Who can she call on that cell phone of hers.
It’s a loss from every point of view, every perspective, every direction of the moral compass.
What a mess.
News is a four letter word.
NEWS THIS!
NEWS YOU!
It’s a cuss word and a slice of reality that doesn’t even make sense some days.
1 am. 2 minutes. 5 families’ lives blown apart.
The only good thing about news is that it never stops, and somewhere, somehow, there’s another story on the horizon.
Perhaps it will be a story of hope.
Sadly, it could be another story where the demons of hell walk the planet and wait for my cameras to arrive.
Life’s Crazy™