F**K CHRIS JONES

That's what it said.  "F**k Chris Jones!"  The Facebook post was stark, simple, and to the point.  I'd be lying if I said the words didn't sting.  I'd also be lying if I said I didn't return every few minutes to read the post, along with the 40 others that followed on the the Facebook page of Gibson Clark.  None of them said "F**k Chris Jones" but they might as well have.  People were angry.  No, check that, people were enraged by me.  It all started with this direct message I sent to Gibson on New Years Day.  Read it, then I'll give you the context after.

 What happned to Gibson's family was terrible.  His mother had just shot and killed his 9 year old sister, then turned the gun on herself.  I had written this message the day after this tragedy.   I know what you're thinking, and I understand why you're a bit taken aback.  Gibson, didn't like it either.  He took a screen shot of my message then posted it on his Facebook page, with the simple caption, "Seriously?"

Within a few minutes my phone was buzzing, and my messages on Facebook, pinging.  "How could you?" someone asked in a text message.

On Gibson's page, someone tried to defend me, "Hey guys, this guy is just doing his job."  A defense that was met with resounding derision.  "Well then he has a shitty job!" was one popular quip.

After about an hour of this, with me constantly logging in my head every comment.  Gibson, eventually put a stop to it, announcing: "it's ok guys.  I did an interview with a TV station about this few minutes ago."

The comments stopped almost immediately.  Then one final shot.  "It's still a sh**ty job," someone added.

The truth is, sometimes, it can be quite sh**ty.  Sending messages like the one above is sh**ty.  It's sh**ty to send, and I can only imagine, it must be devastating, heartbreaking, and enraging to receive.  It is, without questions, the worst part of my profession.  That and actually knocking on the door of someone who has been randomly dealt the worst imaginable tragedy.  I remember sending that message.  I shook my head, took a deep breath, then clicked the send button.

I guess I could just cop out and, as that one person said, "hey, I'm just doing my job."  To which you might, and probably should say, "then get another job."  I refuse to take the easy way out on that issue.  It might be my job, but I do it, with the intention of advancing understanding. (That sounds self-righteous) Also, people have been saying, "it's just my job," for centuries, with historically and morally catastrophic results.

When you cover a story, you have to go to the source.  Several months ago I'd uncovered what sounded like, at least in the reading of the probable cause statement, a horrific crime.  Police accused a Davis County couple of feeding their son drugs as a punishment for misbehaving.  I went to the home and knocked on the door.  The couple was crushed to see me on their front stoop, and they were in a fury when I asked about the allegations.  "Just get the f**k out of here!"  The boy's mother yelled in my face, while the husband asked incredulously "why the hell are you here?!"   After I explained the charges (which they were not aware had been filed) they told me that their son was mentally disabled and suffered from panic attacks and had a rage disorder.  Sometimes he would go on wild rampages, hitting people and destroying the family home.  Someone in a position of influence suggested to the exasperated couple that they give the boy, about 8 years old, a third of a Xanax to calm him down.  They did so on a handful of occasions the father told me, and it worked.  The boy mentioned it at school one day, mostly in passing, and the police soon followed with an investigation, then felony charges.  We didn't report that story that day, because I was able to get a clearer picture of what had happened.  Without that face-to-face, we would have had to take the word of the police, which, is just one side of the story.

Several years ago, I was at a restaurant, and a man, who'd been looking at me from across the room, finally approached me and said, "You did a story on my mothers' murder."  I was concerned that the next comment would not be in words but in fists.  He continued, "Thank you."  To my relief he went on.  'I recorded that story, and I look at it often.  What you said about my mom was beautiful.'" he continued, "I didn't have a great relationship with her towards the end of her life, so when you came to my door, I got to say all the things to you, that I didn't get to say to her while she was alive.  Like 'I love you mom.'"  He hugged me, and with tears welling up in his eyes, shook my hand and walked away.

This might surprise you, but most of the people we contact in the wake of a terrible event will talk to us. (I'd guess 60 percent) Not because they crave media attention, but because they want to honor someone.  To tell the world, that this person was here, they meant something, and they were deeply loved.  In a world often filed with anonymity, being able to tell the story of someone you loved to your neighbors is powerful.

Every time I knock on the door of someone who has been victimized, I am always doused in guilt for intruding on them during easily the worst time in their lives, but I always recall that man at the restaurant, and I recall, how that short story gave him the opportunity to tell the world he loved his mom.

This sh**ty job, does, at times allow me to do some very non-sh**ty things.

Eyewitness

It's easy to understand why members of the military suffer from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  Life in a war zone, being a front row witness to death and injury to a member of your company, or even your "enemy" can and does, understandably leaves a mark, or scar on your psyche.

Recently The National Center for PTSD released a study that suggest, journalists too regularly suffer from PTSD, almost on a daily basis.  I noticed the study on my phone for a few seconds as I waited for a public information officer to come and give me some details about a man who had run over his girlfriend during a fight.

At first I scoffed at the idea that journalists could suffer from the same issues that plague soldiers, police officers and emergency responders, then, as I stuffed my phone in my pocket, a woman, who later told me she was the victims aunt, rushed to the edge of the crime scene tape wailing, and sobbing, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"  She anguished with tears streaming from her eyes, causing pronounced black streaks to angle around her cheeks, and drop on her white blouse leaving a dark spot above her clavicle.  As she thrust her arms into the sky, asking for answers, I found myself obligated, I had to intrude into her inner pain to see if I could find any answers about what had happened.  "Tell me! Tell me!" she pleaded with me, "what do you know, please, what do you know!"  I solemnly explained to her that a man had run over a woman during an argument, and she was taken to the hospital in critical condition, "Oh God, That's my niece, Oh Lord, that's my baby!" She then ended our conversation abruptly, "I don't have nothing to say to you!"  Then a friend coddled her head against her chest, while darting a look of absolute hatred deep into my eyes, as she ushered the grieving aunt on a crooked line to the curb where the 2 sat down, and wept privately.

"All in a days work," I thought to myself, as I peered over the police tape at officers taking pictures near a pile of bloody clothes, and talking with witnesses, while dutifully scribbling details into their small notebooks.  After the news cast, as I drove silently back to the station, I thought again about the PTSD study, and realized, no matter how much I wanted to deny it, I had just been through a traumatic experience.  Clearly nothing like the victim of this horrible crime, or her aunt, stricken with a terror punctuated by a lack of details, but a trauma non-the-less.  I found myself at the edge of tragedy, cloaked by shear grief, forced to insert myself into a private moment of despair, and engulfed in the usual rampant hate of the "media."

During my 20 years career I have witnessed plenty of horrifying scenes.  The remains of a woman struck by a train, and a man who smashed through his windshield during a Thanksgiving Day auto accident.  Early one morning on I-90 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, I stood under a dark, humid Mississippi sky as the highway patrol unraveled white sheets over the bodies of 5 teenagers who where riding in the back of a pickup that crashed into the jersey barrier late that night.

I've always been able (I thought) to bury the grisly carnage into a mental grave inside my brain.  Like the time my partner and I interviewed a woman whose only daughter had been struck by the school bus she was waiting for one morning.  The mother, heartbroken and likely sedated, spoke to us for  a few scattered moments and we left.  In our news vehicle, my partner poured himself behind the wheel, sat silently for a few minutes, then turned to me, "I can't do this anymore," he said as his  eyes filled with tears.  A few weeks later he quite, went home to live with his parents and took a job at a toilet seat factory in northern Mississippi.

It affects you, you feel it, but, are forced to move on, sometimes without properly processing what you have witnessed.

A few days after that woman had been struck by her boyfriend's Lincoln Town Car, I interviewed her mother.  She was stoic, but scared, and broke.  She was now  caring for her daughter's 2 children, and was unsure how she would pay for the medical bills climbing exponentially literally by the minute.

I thought about her for several hours after the interview, but had moved on to other stories the next day.  Last week it was announced the woman struck by the car was dead.  As I heard the news, I picked up the phone, breathed in and out, then dialed her mother's phone number.

Behind The Wheel

My hands cling and wrestle with the steering wheel, as my little white news car squeals and bends its way around a winding Pascagoula street, reaching speeds of up to 70 miles an hour, a police detective revs up beside me in his unmarked Crown Victoria, and warns me, "DO NOT get too close to this scene Jones, or I will arrest you!"

It is 1996, and both our cars are careening towards the arrest of a teenager who it is believed with another man, to have gunned down a convenience store clerk, just hours ago.

When I slide to a stop at the edge of a police barricade, I see half a dozen officers, guns drawn, their black boots slapping the pavement as they frantically converge on one of the suspected murderer.

No one is manning the perimeter, so I awkwardly snatch my camera from the trunk, as begin to gallop towards a mob of officers, screaming, wrestling and fighting with a wirey teenager as the officers collapse his body to the ground.  His face is planted in the well-manicured grass of a bewildered Mississippian who stands, jaw gaping as police grab violently for the man's flaying arms and wildly kicking legs.

Just as officers click their handcuffs tight around his wrists, their police radios squawk to life, "We're chasing the other, He's on Martin Street!"

One officer quickly gathers up the dirty, sweating teenager and stuffs him painfully into his squad car.   A dozen other officers disperse in all directions as if they've been warned that a hand grenade has been dropped in the middle of the frantic men.  I follow their lead.  I run at full speed towards my waiting car, and fishtail the small Mercury Topaz behind the cavalcade of police cars, lights as their lights dart into the daylight, sirens wailing and squawking through the streets.  As our chaotic, motorized wagon train fumbles dangerously and disjointedly towards a second pursuit, I snatch a cloths from my backseat and try in vain to sop up what seems to be gallons of sweat invading my eyes, filling my ears, and settling in my mouth.  My face is streaked as salty sweat spiderwebs across my body. In Mississippi in August, if you move, you sweat.  If you run, you are awash in moisture, under the oppressive sun, and all consuming humidity.

After driving wildly, and blindly for a few seconds, I spot an army of officers in blue, wrestling a second man to the ground, he screams obscenities  as officers force their jagged knees into his back, and plant their boots firmly on the scruff of his neck, as the alleged murderer fights, then wiggles, then finally relents into submission.  I roll my camera catching the entire melee on tape, as my head thumps with the beat of my heart.

Some time later that day, I can't recall exactly how, but I come across the father of one of the teens.  He slumps on the stoop of a lilting shack.  The white paint clinging loosely to aged slats of wood.

He smells of urine and liquor.  His greasy hair speckled with sprigs of grass, suggesting he may have spent the evening passed out in a pasture  "Well," he slurs carelessly, "if he did it, I guess he's gonna pay."  The man then takes a long drag off his self-rolled cigarette, as the cherry at the end blazes a brilliant red, he drags his palm across the top of his head, extinguishing an itch, then pulling a dead piece of brown grass from his hair, "Huh?" he ponders the sprig between his fingers, then tosses it to the ground.

As police fingerprint the two men, disturbing details are beginning to emerge about the two killers.  They shot the woman with a shot gun AFTER she gave them the money the violently demanded.  According to police she was reading her King James Bible, just moments before the two entered the store to steal her money and her life, and just hours later I would capture two murderers in a violent, mindless run from justice.

I'd be glad NOT To Talk To You

Tick, Tick, Tick.  I can almost hear the clock literally ticking in my head.  In my business, particularly when your job is to produce news content for the 10 PM newscast, unlike most, the closer you get to 6 PM is NOT an enviable mark of time when you have yet to pin down a story for the day.

Katie Weddington  seems eager to talk about a pretty horrible experience.  She works as a satanic clown at a haunted house in Salt Lake City (Utah inexplicably loves haunted houses, that is another story altogether) On Saturday, a man shuffling through the eerie walls of plywood coated in black paint, with teenagers slathered in latex makeup, synthetic blood, and wielding unchained, chainsaws, allegedly rears back and cracks Katie in the mouth with his fist.  According to charging documents, he turns to his girlfriend and laughs hysterically.  Police say he isn't angry or frightened by Katie's horrifying portrayal of every child's nightmare, a clown barring long, yellow fangs, but rather that he just thought it would be "funny."

I track down Katie's home address and find her affable dad sipping a Natural Ice beer with an equally affable buddy.  He gives me a warm smile, a hearty handshake, and reenacts to me the lively story of his daughter's assault.  He dials up cell phone picture of his baby girl's bashed in teeth, while his wife, calls Katie, and sets up an interview for us near the haunted house where she was assaulted.

Parked in the haunted parking lot, with the second hand moving briskly around the face of my watch, I get a spooky sense that Katie is beginning to waver.  The first call to he mobile rings several times then lands unanswered in her voice mail.  The second call clicks directly to her digital answering service. 

I've seen this before, Katie, might be pondering the affects of being remembered as the gal who got socked in a clown outfit, or perhaps, her bosses, excoriate her that discussing an assault at their place of business for thousands to see is not good for business   To that point, few viewers hold business owners responsible for bad things that happen at their establishments, that are beyond their control.  If a wild-eyes crook steals someones purse when she steps away from her cart that is judged differently than if an elderly man slips in a puddle of water that has been left unattended for hours.

I send her a text message, "Hi Katie, we are here, we can meet you near the pink restaurant "  After a maddening 10 minute wait, my lifeless cell buzzes awake.  "I'm not really interested, I've started my shift," and with that, poof!  End, literally, of story.  I don't blame her, and  don't hold a grudge (Much) I've seen my share of interview success (see last blog) and interview fail (see three blogs ago) so you can't pound your fist for too, long, because frankly you haven't the time.  It's already 6:30, the news will go on as scheduled, and you better begin culling your sources and court records for something meaningful to report.

It's a Dirty Job

"Well, ya best tuck them jeans into ya socks if ya don't want vermin to get up them pants," the Moss Point Police detective rolls out in his long southern drawl,  as he adjusted his breathing apparatus over his mouth.  For me, a cub reporter, with maybe six months worth of experience, it is the most daunting piece of instruction I have ever received, and I quickly and nervously do the same as my teacher.

It is my first job in television, at WLOX-TV in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1995.  I am technically the bureau chief, of the station's Jackson County office.  I am in charge (by default) of the two-man operation, that includes myself and another, just as green, photographer/reporter.  Together we are eager, but not very experienced.  The two of us are stationed in a tiny little office in Pascagoula, the space is about the size of the guest room in your home.

Shipbuilding in Pascagoula.

Pascagoula/Moss Point/Gautier.  Those are the primary towns we cover.  It is a tough little community, weathered and shaped by the muggy summers, and perched on the rock of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  At one point the stubborn, blue collar towns prospered, because of a strong shipbuilding culture, that helped families build homes, buy modest boats, and make weekend trips to Bozo's Fish Market for a bag of Crawfish, seasoned in a secret Cajun concoction, but those boom days are over, and Jackson County is forced to limp along.

Pascagoula is built for functionality, not beauty.  The city has weathered too many hurricanes in the past to waste time building expensive, ornate structures.  The tallest building in town in a bank, it is five stories tall, of which the top two floors are utilized for storage. The Gulf Coast economy, is usually at the mercy of government spending of warships and aircraft carriers, making this a boom or bust environment.

The place is run, literally, by tough, good ol' boys.  The Sheriff, DB, "Pete," Pope, was a portly power broker, and he was more politician than lawman.

Former Jackson County Sheriff Pete Pope

 His piercing, blue reptilian eyes framed by his stark mop of white hair, and his checkered sports coat accented with a pair of hand-made cowboy boots was terrifying for me, as he would summon me into his office-lair, either schmooze me or more likely, excoriate me for a story I wrote that angered, a man whose soul was born mad.  He was one part southern gent, 2 parts Boss Hogg.

He once warned me that he had a machine in his office, that alerted him whenever a recording device was operating in his presence, his ominous pronouncement told the kid reporter, that I better never think of trying to tape any of his rangy rants.  It wasn't until later that I learned that, "machine," never existed.

He was sheriff  but his political power was immense because, to borrow a cliche, he knew where all the bodies were buried and so did the body buriers, and that made him more like the king of his own tiny sovereign, southern nation, than the bureaucrat in a county department.

County Commissioner Tommy Brodnax, wasn't a power broker,  he was more like the people he represented, a former shipyard worker and a stout fireplug of a man, with stubby limbs punctuated by thick, brawny forearms, and round, beefy fingers, weather worn and streaked with scratches, scars, and finernails caked with soil from his garden, and grease from his tractor.  He was quick to pick a verbal fight with fellow commissioners, and physical ones with just about anyone else.  He was once arrested for punching a man in the face during a dispute over fallen tree branches.

Jackson County Commissioner, Tommy Brodnax

He relished in harassing me about my green reporting skills and unseasoned on-air presence, that included a terrified face accented by no expression, what-so-ever.   Whenever I'd fumble into a county meeting, awkwardly juggling a camera and tri-pod, he'd interrupt the proceedings, no matter how important, to announce, in his high pitched southern accent, reminiscent of billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, "hey everyone, here comes stone face!"

As a young reporter you do as you're told, and that means you are on call, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.   On this muggy August night, my station issued beeper buzzes abruptly alive at 1 am, waking me starkly with a gasp back to consciousness.

I am ordered to the end of a desolate  dead end street, in Moss Point, a small town just north of Pascagoula.

Moss Point isn't exactly the best run town in Mississippi, in fact it's the opposite. At one point the Moss Point Chief of Police, out of sheer incompetence, had his permit to carry a gun revoked by the state's top police agency.

One cost saving measure enacted by the city council, led to a state of utter calamity.   In an effort to save money on the restoration of weathered, dulling street signs, the city concocted a scheme that may have literally lead to houses burning to the ground, and residents dying while waiting for an ambulance.

The town leaders decided NOT to buy new street signs, but rather to pull all the old signs down, then repaint them. Unfortunately , instead of repainting, for example the "Oak Street" sign with the words "Oak street," the parks and rec. department  stenciled, without much thought, over that sign, with the words , "Main Street." instead of Oak.   They did this all over town, all the signs. That was fine for a while, but  after a few months battered by the blazing Southern Mississippi sun, the cheap store bought paint faded, and the signs began to read a mish-mashed combination of the two, think "OaMakin Street."

The fire department, and ambulance service found themselves racing around the city searching in vain for a burning house or man in cardiac arrest, only to get garbled, maddening guidance from the disastrous Scrabble-like street grid.

Somehow, no thanks to Moss Points, illegible signs, I fumbled my way to a modest home surrounded by Moss Point officers, blazing flood lights, and a cacophony of critter wranglers.

After a welfare call from a resident of a house nearby, concerned for the safety of an ailing, immobile woman inside, police force open the door, only to find it barricaded by rotting garbage, cat feces, and carelessly discarded soda bottles.  It was a clean freaks nightmare, and a hoarders dream.

after rescuing the sick woman, and arresting her daughter for neglect, police had the unenviable task of removing dozens of feral cats from the home, collected over years by the two women.  The pair only took in a third of that, but the wild animals spent the next few years breeding with each other, creating a inbred cat version of "Lord of The Flies."

The cops, totally unaware, or unconcerned with protocol or the law, invite me to come in , "Hey there Jonesy, ya wanna check this out, brother, git yur camera and follow us in!"  The boys outfit me with a breathing apparatus and duck tape to strap my loose clothing to my body.  "Why am I doing this?" I ask as I peel long strips of tape off the giant, metal roll, "Roaches, boy!" one officer belts out with a laugh as he blows a wet, brown mouthful of spitting tobacco onto the city sidewalk, "roaches!"

As he scoot the rotting door open, I recall the sucking in and out of air through our masks belting out a Darth Vader-like pant.  The house doesn't have electricity, hasn't for months I'm told, and is lighted by flashlights and a flood light only.

The putrid stench of ammonia is overpowering, and I take it all in despite the protective gear over my face.  disintegrating garbage is 2 feet high and blankets the entire ground below me, I crunch and crack over the foul flooring, shuffling through waste, as tin cans crush, and tumble away as I push, like a canal boat icebreaker through the ocean of cardboard, food, and animal waste.

The garbage is everywhere, the floor, the shelves, inexplicable even the ceilings.  It is stacked in structurally defying mountains that line the halls.

The black insides of the house are revealed only in pieces when the darkness is broken by the faint flashlights, fumbled by disgusted police officers.

The flood lights reveal a tired, pea-green sofa, that appears to be made of wax, as the left side breaks down into what looks  like a melted mess of mushy fabric.  The sight defies my eyes, "what the hell?" I say with mouth agape.  "The cats have been peeing there for years," chirps the lead investigator  "Looks like they just went and melted the thing."

A dirty farm hand, in overalls, and a dingy CAT Diesel hat, called by police to help with the wild felines, stops the army of police officers and reporters, and warns, "Ok, this is where it gets bad," "Oh," I belt, "now it gets bad."

He wrestles the bedroom door open, and 4 or 5 of us shoe-horn ourselves into the back living space, someone closes the door behind us, and I find myself, squeezed on all sides, mountains of muck to my back, sweaty cops to my left, and the low guttural hum, of hidden cats echoing throughout pitch black room.

"Yall, ready?" he screams as he slaps his gloved hand to the left side of a stained mattress laying on the floor, "NO!" I yelp in pleading tones.  I remember the word just jump out of me, unprovoked, like a frog off a lily-pad, startled by a rock tumbling into his pond.

"Too late!" he hollers, as he overturns the bed, jerking it up on its side, revealing the wooden underbelly of the box springs. In the chaos, I see something, but the darkness makes it hard to make out.  It appears to be a sea of life is pulsating inside the box springs, and as the lights are directed to the bed, I see a wall of undulating cock-roaches, thousands of them, crawling and racing for safety as they are shocked into movement by the first light they have experienced in months, maybe years.

I have little time to catch my breath, because a dozen wild cats, who also inhabited the darkness under that bed are springing from their black, musty home.  They hiss and shriek as they bound up the walls, their claws scraping and propelling them higher up the grimy surfaces towards the ceiling of the room.  As they hit the acoustical tile, they rebound, like mangy, infected, overfilled basketballs towards our heads.

I feel like I am storming Utah Beach, as German soldiers try to repel me with gunfire and cannon fodder.

The farm boy, and police trip and stumble over one another, half of them desperately dodging the airborne cats, the other half trying in vane to catch them, clawing at the frightened, feral animals.  The chaos is more than my mind can handle, I jab at the door knob, my hands slipping and fumbling with it as I try to escape.  I finally jerk the door open, and fall out the portal, I'm darting my way out of the surreal disaster, when I notice the flood lights cast a sickly light on the homes living room, and catches a roach perched proudly on that melted couch, he appears to have his head lifted high, and smugly watches me as I scamper, terrified out of his home, the light casts his shadow against the dirty wall, and his dark outline makes him appear 3 feet tall, and for a young reporter struggling to learn the ropes, that roach and that job seems to be just a little to big for me.