“Rock and roll!” Zeke said, burning rubber when he hit the brakes and opened the door with one fly-guy motion. As the truck sped toward the crime scene, so did my thoughts and my expectations. Doesn’t everyone have some recurring experience that makes them uneasy? Butterflies before making a speech? An anxious anticipation of something? I was nervous as a turkey in November as I fumbled with the metal fringes of my pad.
It’s not as if I’m a cub reporter. I’ve been to violent crime scenes a gazillion times. Sometimes the body is still there. Sometimes there is blood. Sometimes the victim is still alive, grappling with his spirit like a child trying to steer a runaway bike. I’m called upon to make sense out of it for more than 300,000 viewers.
Isn’t that a big dog of a responsibility, being the eyes, ears, and conscience of others? How can I ever take it lightly? How can I ever cruise through work? Each day is mentally tough, but I love it. How great is it to be able to tell a story that people want to know about? But the violent news always works my nerves in the beginning. Mentally I got prepared to do my best and deal with the violence by silently saying the Twenty-third Psalm. That got me focused for whatever lay ahead of me on this story. It turned out to be something to pray about and nothing to play with.
T W O
Over here! Bring the stretcher!”
“Get back! Get back!”
“Damn! I haven’t seen this many shell casings since Nam!”
The scene was ugly and chaotic. I know a veteran reporter in Cleveland who says he’s been in TV news so long that he doesn’t get emotional when he looks at a crime scene. Must be nice. I’d like to borrow his eyeballs right about now.
A block party had just ended when the shooting started. Four metal folding tables were turned over on their sides. A white tablecloth, splattered with blood, was swaddled around a folding chair. I stepped around two cracked plastic plates, a swirl of mushy food staining the ground beneath their edges.
We were the first crew at the scene and that’s always good. But, honey-chile, I knew the competition was smoking a path to get there. My mind spun into high gear. The caller said five people were hit. Were there more? We were a few blocks away from the park where the two gangbangers were killed last week. Was this drive-by retaliation like I thought? How many witnesses were there? Could I get them to talk?
The questions banging around in my mind were interrupted when I saw two people, a man and a young girl, being loaded into an ambulance. Both wore breathing devices that resembled a catcher’s mask; the apparatus was hitched behind their ears to protect them from the wild pitch that Death was throwing.
I glanced behind me. Zeke was on the case, panning and zooming with the camera. The strong arm of the law had a choke hold on the scene. There were eight to ten beat cops and three plainclothes detectives plus a couple of evidence techs wearing skintight beige gloves searching the grass for bullet casings.
I looked up to my left and saw groups of people sitting on their front porches watching, first the police, then me. A few of the younger, more eager ones were hanging over their chain-link fences. They didn’t seem frightened or angry or unhappy but just really tired. Maybe numb is a better word. A creepy feeling came over me as I realized how difficult it had to be to deal with violence like this on such a regular basis. It had become part of the neighborhood scene like the trees and the corner newsstand.
But the way they did nothing tripped me out. The violence didn’t seem to scare the hell out of these residents enough to make them grab anything they could get their hands on to fight back against the gangbangers. That may seem naive, but to me complacency is naive. Doesn’t history prove that action and change go hand in hand? And that’s not book knowledge talking, that’s street sense, too. You want something to go down, you have to make it happen yourself.
There were a few more pockets of people on the corners, too. In one group, a bunch of little kids were standing around watching the commotion.
In the other group, adults talked amongst themselves. I spotted a tall man in a sweat-stained work shirt, about six-two, wide across the shoulders, standing tensely. I guesstimated his age to be around about forty. His upper-body strength clearly established that he did some heavy lifting for a living. A spit of gray adorned his temples and he was hugging a teenage girl who was crying. I couldn’t see her face but I saw his. His eyes looked as if they were throbbing, the anger in them was just that intense. With an arm around the girl’s shoulders, he comforted her. I could see the oil stains beneath his nails. His jaw clenched as he gritted his teeth twice.
I was on it. Like radar, my eyes and mind focused in and read the person in front of me. The reporter in me knew that he was my man. It’s a tip-off to a reporter: Who is angry? Who is a leader? Who will open up for whatever the reason? That’s who a reporter has to find, a needle in a haystack, a good witness in the crowd. That was this dude in front of me. He was pissed off enough to give me the gutsy, for true interview that I needed.
“C’mon!” I told Zeke. We cautiously approached the man I wanted to interview. “I’m sorry to bother you during such a tough time. . . . Can you tell me what happened here?”
The teenager stopped crying for a second, then looked at me for a long moment before her tears began flowing once more. The man gritted his teeth again. “I’ll tell you what . . . these gangbangers are shooting up each other and anybody they see. They just missed my cousin Karen here but got her girlfriend Jackie in the chest. Shooting, that’s all they know. I’m so tired of it! You can’t walk the street, can’t have a damn block party for them trying to kill somebody over turf.”
“‘Them’ who?”
“The Bandits and the Rockies.”
I’m hip to the nicknames for the Gangster Bandits and the Rock Disciples, two of the most notorious street gangs in Chicago. “Did you get a good look at the car?”
He inhaled deeply, stared a second, then said, “I didn’t see nobody. . . . I just heard a lot of gunfire.”
“What about the direction the car came from?”
The girl wailed and he clutched her tightly, soothing, “It’s okay, it’ll be okay, sshhhh.”
“Sir? Which way did the car come from?”
He waved his free arm wildly. “This way, that way, some kinda way! It just don’t make no sense. I’m through.”
“I understand how frustrating this is for you. But if you could answer just a couple more questions—”
“Enough is enough.”
Now at this point my reporter instincts kicked in. What kind of body language was this man giving off? How much could I push him? Could I push him? I made a quick assessment of his eyes, his stance, then back to those eyes.
“Okay, thank you.” I decided to back off and not blow up the bridge. “Sir, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. For editing purposes, say and spell your full name, please?”
“Calvin Hughes. C-a-l-v-i-n. H-u-g-h-e-s.”
I gave Mr. Hughes my card because he could be a good contact to have in the neighborhood. I could hear his cousin continuing to sob. I thought, I feel for you girl. It is so tough to watch people hurt. Even though I see so much of it, I have to stay focused, but that does not mean becoming numb. I don’t ever want to go there, because when it gets like that, then it’s time to bail. But you’ve got to do your job. I have to get the story.
I heard my pager go off. I knew it was them. The producer was worrying me about going live for the upcoming newsbreak. Zeke and I went back to the truck to set up a signal to air live pictures from the scene.
It works like this: An electronic signal is set up from equipment inside the truck. That signal is locked into a channel of a microwave dish on top of the Sears Tower or the Hancock Center. You can then transmit live pictures or play the tape that you’ve recorded back over those channels to the station where it’s recorded and viewed by a writer and tape editor. Then I write the story and read it back over that same signal, a process called tracking, and
the writer and editor put together a long story called a package. Normally I would do all this later, but we were doing a live shot for the newsbreak.
I had about twenty minutes to the newsbreak, so I pulled out my makeup. My sister, Peaches, says I look like an overdone French fry—toasty brown, tall, and lean. I rushed to put on eyeliner because my large chestnut eyes are my pow feature. My hair? Simply put, it was wrecked, getting puffier and puffier by the second. Sorry to say but I was hopeless about the head this day and there wasn’t a darn thing I could do about it. I grabbed a clip and pulled my hair back. I didn’t look great but I did look presentable. There wasn’t a lot of time to fool with myself. Even though this is TV, the story comes first with me.
I put my cosmetics away and began to practice how I would lead into my big story. I was talking it through to myself out loud, “I’m Georgia Barnett, live on the South Side where a neighborhood block party turned into a frightening scene of violence. . . .”
Zeke gave me an internal feedback device or IFB, a little earplug that lets me hear Nancy and the director back at the station. Through the IFB I heard them ask me for a mike check. I counted down for them. My audio was good. I saw that the little children who were on the corner were now crowding around me. They were anywhere between the ages of six and ten.
“We wanna be on! Hip hop hurray-hey, ho-hey!” one of them shouted and the others joined in waving back and forth at the camera.
“Hold it,” I said. “I’m working and I can’t put you on television doing that. This is not a music video. So there’ll be no ‘hip hop hurray-hey, ho-hey!’” I sang it and did the little wave part, too. They got a kick out of that. Even Zeke laughed. “You can stand behind me and be on air but no waving and yelling, okay?”
They agreed, then lined up with starburst smiles in a curbside class picture.
“Coming to you in ten,” the director said in my ear through my IFB. I got focused, looking straight into the camera.
“In five, Georgia!” He counted me down. I relaxed my face a little bit. Then the director cued me: “Go!”
“I’m Georgia Barnett, live on the South Side where a neighborhood block party turned into a frightening scene of gang violence. Five people have been shot—”
Suddenly I heard somebody yelling in my ear from the control room back at the station. The director? No. The producer? No.
It was Bing!
He wolfed, “Ask the kids something! Use the fuckin’ kids!”
How could I think and talk live in front of thousands of people with Bing yelling in my ear?
“Get a bite from the kids, Georgia!”
I struggled to finish my thought without stuttering live on-air. “There were only a few people outside cleaning up when the drive-by occurred—”
“Use the kids! Now!!!”
I turned to the kids behind me. “Did you see anything?”
A cute little girl with fuzzy-plaited hair was standing in front. She was wearing a faded pink and white sleeveless cotton dress. Large eyes brimming with excitement focused on me. The little girl grabbed the mike and said, “I seent a car. This real dark black boy with a scar, he was dressed all in yellow, and just shooting his gun!”
An ashy hand belonging to a little boy with a jealous heart grabbed the mike away from her. He shouted, “Let me talk some! They were shooting, I was running! Bang! Bang!”
Now the rest of the kids went off the deep end, too: “Bang! Bang!”
Bing was in my ear again, yelling, “Wrap! Wrap!”
“Again, there’s been a drive-by shooting on the South Side. Five people shot. We’ll have a report from the scene and from the hospital. Channel 8 News will have all the latest details at ten.”
I stood very still until I knew I was no longer live on the air, then I threw down my mike and cursed, “Dap-gum-it!”
All the kids scattered, mocking me: “Dap-gum-it!”
“Zeke, Bing was yelling in my ear the entire live shot. I could barely think. He totally messed me up. Now all the viewers think I don’t know what I’m doing. But how can I do my job with a domineering boss yelling in my ear?”
Zeke just shrugged.
Then the phone rang in the truck. I didn’t need to dial 1-800-Psychic to know that it was Bing. I wasn’t about to take any more mess off Mr. News-it-all. I moved toward the phone inside the truck.
Zeke stopped me. “Don’t bother, Georgia. Bing will only piss you off. Let’s hustle up.”
Zeke was right. I needed to finish up what I had to do, and quickly, because the other stations had started to arrive at the scene. Zeke popped in a new tape and we got ready to flag down one of the cops handling this shooting. I was trying my darndest to swallow my anger and get focused when I caught sight of a newcomer to the scene, a calming force in the chaos.
I slowly approached this stunning man. He was an ab- and backplus masterpiece, his mountainous shoulders tapering down to a just-right waist. Obviously he believed in caring for his body. An overall rugged look was softened perfectly by his creamy reddish-brown skin. Mister-man squared his shoulders, spoke firmly, and gave orders as naturally as exhaling. His figure and his confidence cut a magnificent presence among the madness.
Who was he? I hadn’t seen him on any of the other murder stories I’d covered. Clearly he was somebody, or he would be soon. Could he help me with this story? I went straight over and introduced myself. “Georgia Barnett, 8 News. I’d like to talk to you about the investigation.”
He barely glanced in my direction. Mister-man was cool as the underside of a pillow. He said in a voice aged in a wine cellar, “I’m Detective Doug Eckart. And I’m busy.” Then he ignored me good old fashion. Detective Eckart turned and began talking to a beat cop who was now standing next to him.
“Excuse me, Detective,” I said louder, more forcefully. “I’d like to do a quick interview with you.”
“Nope.”
He didn’t even look at me. “Too busy. I can’t be bothered right now.”
Well, in the words of Chaka Khan, Please pardon me! Sometimes these detectives are super-helpful because they know we can assist them by asking the public for information. But sometimes old-school detectives don’t like to cooperate with us. They think we’re too glitzy or that we’re nothing but a pain in the behind. But this guy wasn’t old enough to have that kind of Jurassic ’tude! What was his problem? He had a job to do and so did I—and I only wanted to help and that’s all my news report would do.
“Detective Eckart,” I said firmly but politely, “I’m not asking for an extensive sit-down. I just want you to spot me up on what’s happening in a quick one-on-one. In return, any info I may get I’ll pass along to you. You know how it works.”
“In a few minutes I’ll do an interview with everybody. I’ll just get it over with then. Okay?”
Not okay! An interview with everyone? With all the other TV stations, radio, and newspaper reporters, too? Excuse the pun, but a gangbang was what we called it in the business. What made him think I’d settle for something as common as all that? I don’t think so, Detective Eckart. I wanted an exclusive interview, a shot of us walking together to show that I was here first, that I had the best stuff—I wanted to strut that stuff.
“Excuse me, Detective Eckart?”
He looked at me, annoyed. “Detective, I hustled to get here and I’ve got a lot of great stuff. I just want to cap it all off with a quick interview with you. Five minutes. My cameraman is right here, you can walk the block with me and tell me about this turf war. Otherwise, we’ll just hang around on your heels.”
“That’s all you reporters tend to do—hang around on our heels getting in the way.” Detective Eckart snorted.
“It seems to me that because we’re in the way, most of your cases get solved because we make people aware of what’s going on. We’re really not in the way, we’re helping make a way.”
To outsiders it would appear that we were now engaged in a stare-down. But it wasn’t. It wa
s a momentary mesh of understandings, the art of give and get. He realized that he must give to get me out of his way.
Detective Eckart suppressed a cough in the low end of his throat, then showed me his bad-cop scowl. “Five minutes and that’s it, understood?”
“Understood.”
We let Zeke swing around in front. That way he would have a walking shot of us together. I started by asking a question I knew the answer to. I wanted to get a read on this man’s body language. That way I would be able to pick up on habits that would distinguish truths from lies.
Details at Ten Page 2