The Poston Report

Josh Kezer praises pro bono work

2009-11-07T07:49:00.000-08:00

Read this story on STL Today.

BY GREG JONSSON
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
10/29/2009

ST. LOUIS – The day Josh Kezer was turned over to the Missouri Department of Corrections, four men bet cigarettes on how long it would be before he was raped or murdered.

He survived, but lived in a violent environment while serving 15 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

"What was done to me wasn't simply an error in judgment," Kezer told a group of attorneys Wednesday night. "It was an attempt on my life."

It took the help of St. Louis attorney Charlie Weiss, working without pay, to finally get Kezer released. Wednesday night at Washington University, Kezer called on more attorneys to do such work.

"Pro bono work shouldn't be a hobby," Kezer said. "It shouldn't be something you do on the side. It should be a career."

Kezer spoke at a reception at Washington University capping a day focusing on pro bono work sponsored by the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis and Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. The groups were responding to the American Bar Association's call to focus on such work.

Earlier in the day, attorneys sat through seminars on pro bono work in cases related to immigration, foreclosures, orders of protection and other topics. But Kezer was Exhibit A in making the case for pro bono work in criminal cases.

Kezer had been serving a 60-year sentence at the Jefferson City Correctional Center for the 1992 killing of Angela Mischelle Lawless, a 19-year-old college student. Lawless was found shot to death in her car just off Interstate 55 near Benton, Mo.

No physical evidence linked Kezer to the crime. No one saw him do it, and in fact, witnesses said he was 350 miles away. Others said they saw the crime and Kezer wasn't there. Still he sat in jail.

But in February, a Cole County judge overturned Kezer's conviction for second-degree murder and armed criminal action, saying prosecutors had withheld evidence and a reasonable jury would not convict him based on new evidence.

That's the kind of pro bono work organizers want to encourage.

Pro bono work is about giving defendants "real access to the courts and real access to justice" regardless of ability to pay, said Jim Guest, director of the Volunteer Lawyers Program at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri.

Kezer's speech was also at times an indictment of attorneys and investigators who sometimes see trials as more about winning or losing than justice.

The people who sent him to prison for something he didn't do "went home and toasted their victory," he said. And the life he endured in prison is "the cost when you only care about the victory."

But Kezer, a deeply religious man, said he takes his inspiration from the forgiveness Christ exhibited on the cross.

"The only true closure you can have is when you forgive," he said. "You strip the tragedy of all of its power. If you want to know how I can stand before you today, it's because of that."

Post-Dispatch story about Joshua Kezer

2008-01-28T09:45:00.001-08:00

Josh Kezer hugs Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter, whose efforts bolstered Kezer's claim of innocence. Kezer was exonerated on Feb. 17, 2009 and released a day later.

2/19/09: Josh Kezer is freed after 14 years in prison

2/17/09: JUDGE OVERTURNS JOSH KEZER'S 1994 MURDER CONVICTION

12/08/08: Southeast Missourian Sunday Story about Kezer Hearing

12/03/08: Wrongful conviction in killing? The review is on

8/04/08: Judge Callahan grants Kezer evidentiary hearing in December 2008

6/10/08: Scott City detective denies taking KEY report from Mark Abbott

PDF of report that Scott City Detective Bobby Wooten took 10 days after murder

Update From SE Missourian 6/1/08
/>St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)

November 25, 2007 Sunday

CASE CLOSED - THEN REOPENED

Mischelle Lawless was found in her car in 1992, fatally shot. Joshua Kezer was convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison. The officer who responded to the incident still has doubts.

Click here to read this story on STLToday.com

By Benjamin Poston
Special to the Post-Dispatch

BENTON, MO — Reserve deputy Rick Walter was catching up on paperwork one night in the fall of 1992 when he was told to check out an abandoned car near Interstate 55.

He found a 1986 Buick Somerset at the top of an exit ramp about 1:30 a.m., just outside of this southeastern Missouri town that rises above the Mississippi River floodplain. Inside was the body of Angela Mischelle Lawless, a 19-year-old nursing student.

Lawless had been shot three times, once in the back of the head. But when Walter looked inside the car, he couldn't determine exactly how she had died.

"It was dark, and I didn't know if it was somebody just passed out," Walter said. "We opened the door and saw all the blood."

Fifteen years later, Walter, now the Scott County sheriff, sits in his windowless office and lets the Lawless case play out in his mind. There should be little reason to think about it now. Joshua Charles Kezer was convicted for the killing and sentenced to 60 years in prison. The case is closed.

But things just don't add up, Walter said.

Lawless clearly fought for her life against at least two attackers, Walter said, and yet, investigators identified and pursued only one suspect.

There were no witnesses to the killing. No physical evidence - DNA, fingerprints or murder weapon - linked Kezer to the scene. In fact, Kezer's friends and family say he wasn't even in the state the night Lawless was killed.

"People in the law enforcement community and regular people here have told me that they got the wrong guy in jail," Walter said.

So in early 2006, Walter did something almost unheard of in law enforcement: He reopened a murder case that was not only closed, but had already produced a conviction.

The sheriff and one of his detectives began reviewing hundreds of pages of investigative reports and witness statements. It would be a daunting task.

Witnesses were scattered. Fingerprints and blood can be reviewed and retested, but it was unclear what could be gleaned more than a decade later.

None of that mattered to the sheriff, a former construction worker who regularly wears a quarter-size pin that reads "My Son is a Marine." He already knew that if he ever got the chance, he would reopen the case.

"I wake up most mornings and wonder, 'Why am I sheriff?'" said Walter, who was elected in 2004. "I think this is why - to find the truth on this case."

FIRST TO THE SCENE

Everyone called her Mischelle. She was a cheerleader for the Kelly High School Hawks basketball team in Benton, and a farm girl at heart, having been active in the local FFA Organization.

In her younger years, she was a Girl Scout who volunteered as a candy-striper at area hospitals, so it was only natural that Lawless would pursue a nursing degree at Southeast Missouri State University.

"That's what she always wanted to do," her brother Jason said.

In many ways, Lawless was a bundle of contradictions. By her sophomore year in college, she was juggling boyfriends and partying a lot, friends said, yet she remained a regular at the Baptist Student Union.

Though she weighed just 95 pounds, Lawless wasn't afraid to stand up for herself. She even tried karate, and earned a yellow belt. "She was 4-foot-11 and packed full of dynamite," Jason Lawless said. "She wasn't the type to back down from anything."

On Nov. 7, 1992, Lawless was cruising Malone Street in Sikeston. Later that night, she dropped by a boyfriend's house. But she had a curfew, so she left sometime before 1 a.m. to get home.

Lawless would get no farther than the Route 77 exit ramp off I-55 in Benton - less than a mile from her home. That's where Mark Thomas Abbott of Scott City, Mo., said he found her bleeding.

Currently serving a 20-year federal sentence for drug trafficking, Abbott, now 38, said he was driving home after a night of heavy drinking at a honky-tonk in Sikeston, when he stopped his truck to check the Buick. The car's headlights were still on, and the engine was idling.

Abbott told authorities he reached into the car, grabbed Lawless by the waist and felt blood. He said he heard gurgling and realized she was wounded.

"At first I thought she was drunk, but when I seen her head with her hair over it," Abbott said, "I knew something was viciously wrong with her."

Abbott drove to a nearby gas station to call police, but the pay phone wasn't working, he said. As he walked back to his truck, Abbott said, a white hatchback darted into the gas station.

He told police that he saw the driver's face for a few seconds in the darkened parking lot. The driver had a dark complexion, Abbott said, and may have been Latino.

Abbott then drove northwest on Route 77 to the Scott County sheriff's department. A jailer reported that Abbott had burst into the sheriff's office.

"You need to get someone down there," Abbott shouted, "because a girl has been shot!"

COPS GET A NAME

Lawless was found wearing a turquoise sweatshirt, unbuttoned jeans and blue socks covered with blades of grass. She had been struck on the top of the head twice. A blood trail from inside the car continued over the guardrail and about 100 feet down an embankment. She hadn't been raped.

Walter believes Lawless tried to escape whoever killed her, judging from the grass on her socks and the blood outside. She also clawed her attacker. Tissue and blood were found under her fingernails.

"There was definitely some type of struggle," Walter said. "If you look at the crime scene photos, she may have been put back in the car or she could have been carried back up the slope. One person couldn't have done all that."

The Missouri Highway Patrol and the Scott County sheriff's department interviewed Lawless' friends and family, co-workers, fellow students - anyone who might have information.

Every path led nowhere until February 1993, when three inmates at Cape Girardeau County Jail claimed that Kezer, an 18-year-old high school dropout from Kankakee, Ill., had told them that he had shot Lawless.

The inmates had hung out with Kezer the month before. They said that he was a Latin Kings gang member and that he had confessed to the murder in an apartment where they were getting drunk and high.

About a week after Kezer became a suspect, police interviewed Abbott for a fifth time. He repeated his earlier story, except that this time he didn't say the driver of the hatchback at the gas station might have been Latino. Instead, he picked Kezer, who is white, out of a photo lineup. Abbott would be the only witness to place Kezer near the crime scene.

"When I picked him out, they damn near jumped through the roof with joy," Abbott said. "Sheriff wanted that case bad - it was like they broke the case open."

By early April, Kezer was extradited from Illinois on an unrelated felony assault charge later dismissed for lack of evidence. While police were bringing Kezer to Missouri, Scott County Sheriff Bill Ferrell obtained warrants for first-degree murder and armed criminal action charges, which carried the possibility of the death penalty.

Investigators had not conducted a polygraph test, taken a blood sample, thoroughly questioned Kezer or checked his alibis, according to police records.

Don Windham, the lead investigator of the case for the Highway Patrol who brought Kezer back to Missouri, said he was unaware that Kezer would be charged for murder upon their return.

"I was livid," Windham said. "I wouldn't have arrested him at that point in the investigation. We weren't ready."

THE TRIAL BEGINS

Kezer's murder trial began June 13, 1994. Prosecutors presented a case built primarily from the testimony of the jailed informers and Abbott. The DNA from Lawless' fingernails was tested; it didn't match Kezer's.

Prosecutors also lacked a motive, or any proof that Kezer and Lawless had met - until the fourth day of the trial.

Chantelle Crider, a friend of Lawless', had been watching the court proceedings and came forward to testify that she recalled seeing Kezer arguing with Lawless at a Halloween party one week before the murder.

The next day, June 17, 1994, the jury deliberated for three and a half hours before returning a verdict. Kezer was convicted of second-degree murder and armed criminal action.

"No, I didn't do this," Kezer yelled in the courtroom. "I didn't kill her."

After the verdict, special prosecutor Kenny Hulshof acknowledged that getting the conviction hadn't been easy. "There was no physical evidence to link Josh Kezer to the crime scene," he said.

Kezer was sentenced on what would have been Lawless' 21st birthday - Aug. 2, 1994. Just before hearing his sentence, Kezer was allowed to speak.

"There was other people's blood at the scene of the crime," he said. "The DNA reflected that my blood was not at the scene. My fingerprints or my palm prints were not at the scene. ... I don't why the jury found me guilty."

After the trial, Walter was surprised the case was considered closed. "I kept waiting for them to charge someone else with the murder."

HELP FROM OTHERS

In 1996, Jane Williams of Columbia, Mo., visited the Jefferson City Correctional Center, also known as "the Walls." She was there for an evening worship with her church group when she saw Kezer for the first time.

He was the only inmate kneeling during the service.

Williams became riveted by Kezer's case and his claim of innocence, but she didn't know how to help. "I felt like I couldn't do anything," said Williams, 52, a retired social worker.

In May 2006, she wrote a case summary that made its way to the Missouri committee of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Charlie Weiss, a partner at Bryan Cave law firm in St. Louis, took the case pro bono in September 2006. About a month later, he discovered that Walter had reopened the case.

"How in the world did they convict (Kezer) with this evidence?" said Weiss, a former president of the Missouri Bar Association. "If there was ever reasonable doubt in a case, this was it."

In late June, the Innocence Project, based in New York City, offered to assist Weiss. The nonprofit organization, which has helped exonerate more than 200 people, is reviewing legal documents and helping with DNA testing.

The organization's staff believes there's compelling evidence to conclude that Kezer's conviction should be re-evaluated and thrown out, said Olga Akselrod, staff attorney.

"We normally don't have the amount of non-DNA evidence like what (Weiss) has amassed."

CHANGING HIS STORY

During Walter's investigation this spring, Detective Branden Caid was checking witness statements when he learned about an interview Abbott had given to police in 1997.

At the time, Abbott was awaiting transfer to federal prison, and he was seeking leniency. Abbott had proved to be a credible informer on cases involving methamphetamine manufacturing, said William J. Bohnert, a Cape Girardeau narcotics detective.

So, when Abbott announced that he had new information about the Lawless murder, Bohnert was ready to listen. Once again, Abbott described the night Lawless was killed. Only this time, he said he was there when she was shot.

The Post-Dispatch obtained a summary of the interview. The following is Abbott's description of that night:

Abbott said a male friend who was married was having an affair with Lawless. Shortly after midnight, the pair argued, and Lawless jumped in her Buick, heading north on I-55. According to Abbott, she was going to tell the friend's wife that Lawless was pregnant with her husband's child. (An autopsy showed she wasn't pregnant.)

Abbott and the friend followed Lawless in Abbott's Chevy S-10. They caught up with her at the Benton exit. Abbott's friend got out of the truck and rushed to her idling car, where the pair argued again.

Sitting in his truck, Abbott said, he heard gunshots.

The gunman fled on foot. Abbott ran to the car where he could see Lawless was bleeding. In shock, he said, he got in his truck to report the shooting.

Abbott said the friend had threatened to kill him if Abbott told anyone. The friend's name is being withheld because he has not been charged.

"I knew he was the star witness in that case, and now he's changing his story," Bohnert said. "Mark put himself at the scene, and he gave me a bunch of detailed information."

After getting the statement, Bohnert said, he contacted the Cape Girardeau prosecutor, who advised him to call Windham, who investigated the case for the Highway Patrol. According to Bohnert, Windham said they had gotten a conviction in the case and would not reopen it.

Windham said he recalled the conversation but "didn't take any stock in" Abbott's statement.

MOVING FORWARD

For Walter, discovering the Abbott interview was a turning point in the investigation, though he won't boast about its significance. "I thought, 'Maybe I'm on the right track here.'"

Walter said he believed the statement Abbott gave to Bohnert, except he doubted that Abbott was an innocent bystander. "The story makes sense other than him sitting in the car and reading Bible verses," Walter said sarcastically.

Abbott is being held at the Federal Correctional Institute in Oxford, Wis., and is eligible for release in 2015. In a phone interview, Abbott claimed the 1997 statement never took place.

"I can't understand why Bohnert would say something like that - it blows my mind that he would even make that up," Abbott said.

Bohnert said he had no reason to lie. "I know what the guy told me. He seemed convincing enough for me to talk to the prosecutor," he said.

Windham said he now had doubts about the integrity of the original investigation, adding that he and other investigators should have considered Abbott in a different light.

"One of the big rules of thumb is to eliminate the first person who found the victim ... and it sounds like we didn't eliminate him," said Windham, now a sergeant with the Highway Patrol's Division of Drug and Crime Control. "I'll feel bad if it comes out that Kezer is not involved in this thing."

REBUILDING A CASE

Attorneys at Bryan Cave plan to file a petition on behalf of Kezer that will ask the court to vacate his conviction based on new evidence:

- Crider, who said Kezer argued with Lawless one week before she was killed, now says she mistook Kezer for another man at the Halloween party. Lawless wrote about the man she met at the party in a diary passage. It wasn't Kezer.

- Another round of testing this year showed Kezer didn't match any DNA found at the scene.

- The sheriff's department discovered a November 1992 police interview in which Abbott identified a black man he knew from Sikeston as the driver of the white hatchback. The report was never given to Kezer's original defense team.

Walter said his investigation hadn't produced any evidence that Kezer killed Lawless. He declined to discuss whether others would be charged, but he said he would do all he could to make sure whoever killed Lawless was behind bars.

"I think Mischelle deserves justice, and I think her family does, too," he said.

Meanwhile, Walter keeps a faded mug shot of Kezer underneath the glass of his desk.

"People might say, 'Kezer is a nobody, and what does it matter, why would I even care?'" Walter said. "We owe him this - to find the truth, because he is somebody. If I don't stand up for these people, who will?"

ONE MAN WAITS

Kezer's request for parole was rejected in October, and he continues to serve his sentence at the state prison on No More Victims Road.

He wears a faded T-shirt, gray prison-issue pants and plain white sneakers. Now 32, his hair is prematurely gray; his skin is prison pale. He has muscular shoulders and biceps but is a little soft in the middle - a byproduct of watching TV as much as 10 hours a day.

Kezer said the justice system had failed him, but he also sees his conviction and imprisonment as part of God's complex plan.

"I had to decide the bigger purpose in life was God," he said. "That's why I didn't slit my wrists, but I instead dropped to my knees to pray."

Kezer earned his GED in prison, but he wonders how he will adjust if he is ever released. He has other doubts, too. Will anyone remember him? What will they think of him if they do?

"If you ask people who I am today, they will say I'm a murderer," Kezer said.

"I'm not."

---

LOOKING BACK ...

- Albert Lowes, defense attorney for Joshua Kezer: Lowes said he regretted that he didn't have Kezer testify in his 1994 murder trial. "He would have been a good witness," said Lowes, now practicing law in Cape Girardeau, Mo. "This is the only case I defended where the wrong guy went to prison."

- David Rosener, defense attorney for Kezer: Prosecutors accused Rosener of threatening the jailhouse informers who had claimed that Kezer had confessed to the crime. Rosener said he should have brought an investigator with him when he interviewed the jailhouse informers, to observe the depositions he took. If he had done that, Rosener said, the investigator could have testified that the informers had recanted and had not been not threatened. "(Kezer) didn't get a fair trial, and I could have done a better job," said Rosener, now practicing law in Festus. "I was devastated by this case."

- Kenny Hulshof, special prosecutor at the Kezer trial: Hulshof, a Republican from Columbia, is serving a sixth term in Congress. He declined through a press secretary to comment for this story.

- Stan J. Murphy, circuit court judge who presided over the trial: He said that the verdict hadn't surprised him and that he supported the jury's decision. Murphy declined to comment on the new investigation into Angela Mischelle Lawless' murder. He retired in 2000.

- Bill Ferrell, former Scott County sheriff whose department investigated the Lawless killing: Ferrell said he had no reaction to the decision to reopen the case. "You need to talk to the Highway Patrol instead of me, because they are the ones that conducted the investigation." When Ferrell retired in October 2004, he said the Kezer conviction was a highlight of his 28-year tenure as sheriff, according to the Southeast Missourian newspaper. "We got a conviction almost entirely on circumstantial evidence," he said at the time. "I'm really proud of the effort that went into that case and brought it to a conclusion."

---

USING INFORMERS

Since 1989, more than 30 of the 208 convictions in the United States that were overturned through DNA testing involved cases based on the testimony of snitches or jailhouse informers, according to the Innocence Project.

When investigators lack physical evidence or witnesses to the crime, they sometimes rely on other criminals to get the information they need, said Rod Uphoff, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law.

Three jailhouse informers, all facing felony charges, claimed to authorities that Joshua Kezer had told them he had killed Angela Mischelle Lawless. Months before Kezer's trial, a fourth informer, this time Kezer's cellmate, said Kezer had confessed to the crime.

Although jailhouse informers can be valuable, relying on them to build a case is risky, Uphoff said. In Kezer's case, for example, two of the three informers recanted before trial - one of them later reversed his recantation. Kezer's cellmate at the Scott County Jail also recanted before the trial.

"Snitch witnesses right off the bat are questionable in any case," said Uphoff, who defended Terry Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing trial. "They have a lot to gain by manufacturing evidence against somebody else, and it may be very difficult to tell if they are lying."

---

ABOUT THE STORY

Reporting for this article included interviews with police officers from multiple agencies, private investigators, attorneys, law professors, and relatives and friends of Angela Mischelle Lawless and Joshua Kezer, who was convicted in Lawless' killing.

Kezer was interviewed in prison. Mark Abbott, the only witness to say Kezer was near the crime scene, was interviewed by phone from federal prison.

The 1,200-page transcript from Kezer's 1994 trial also was reviewed, along with coverage of the trial by the Southeast Missourian newspaper, transcripts from police interviews and a variety of court records.

Lawless' parents - Esther and Marvin Lawless, now divorced - declined to be interviewed for this story.

---

Ben Poston was a reporting intern at the Post-Dispatch in the summer of 2006. He holds a master's degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and works as an investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He can be reached at bposton3@gmail.com

Ethics Lecture

2006-02-20T19:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.sree.net/teaching/lateditors.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/07/60minutes/main552819.shtml

blogs

2006-02-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

BERLIN,ROBERT A http://robbysilikeapples.blogspot.com/

DESALVO,JOE CHRISTOPHER www.jcdesalvo.blogspot.com

DYKSTRA,JULIE MARIE ---- http://juliemdykstra.blogspot.com/

FISHER,HANNAH MARIE http://hannahblognews.blogspot.com/

FLEMING,PATRICK T http://pat20005.blogspot.com/

HOOK,JOHN FRANCIS http://johnsluh.blogspot.com

HURLEY,ELLEN ELIZABETH http://elsblogspot.blogspot.com/

JACOBSON,CHRISTINA ANN http://chrissysnewsblog.blogspot.com/

KLEIN,RACHEL LEIGH -- http://thoughtstobeconsidered.blogspot.com/

LAWSON,ERICA ROSE http://ericaland85.blogspot.com/

LUFT,ALEXANDER PAUL http://alexnewsblog.blogspot.com/

MURANO,JOSEPH WILLIAM – www.joesnewsthoughts.blogspot.com.

O'BRIEN,PATRICK TIMOTHY http://jnews06.blogspot.com/

PETIT,KYLE BRANDON http://mizzoukyle.blogspot.com/

PRAISWATER,ASHLEY http://praish2o.blogspot.com/

TULLY,JOHN PATRICK - http://2100class.blogspot.com/

WOLKEN,LUCIE F http://luciefwolken.blogspot.com/

WOOLDRIDGE,HANNAH CATHERINE http://sweetblogglob.blogspot.com/

anecdotal lede

2006-02-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/fashion/sundaystyles/25DIAPERS.html

Ledes

2006-01-23T17:55:00.000-08:00

Traditional inverted pyramid:

FORD ANNOUNCED PLANS to slash up to 34,000 North American jobs over the next six years and shut 14 plants as part of its restructuring plan. The auto maker also reported a $1.55 billion loss at its North American operations for 2005. 8:48 p.m.

anecdote lead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/national/23fire.html

On Engine 22, It's Women Who Answer the Bell
By SARAH KERSHAW
SAN DIEGO, Jan. 17 - When the crew from Fire Engine Company 22 raced off at 7:50 a.m. the other day for the first call of their 24-hour shift, a woman reporting chest pains, their big red rig was primed for action but missing a typical feature: a man.

The four members of Engine 22, Division A, a captain, an engineer, a firefighter-paramedic and a firefighter, protect the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego, an affluent peninsula on the Pacific Ocean. They are one of the few crews in the nation made up entirely of women, winding up together last October, as the captain, Joi Evans, said, because of "the way the cards fell."

Together they work, cook, shop, train and sleep in small dorm rooms in the station house, around the clock for 10 days a month, at a time when women are making some inroads into the fire service nationwide but are still only a sliver of the front line in one of the most physically grueling and male-dominated professions. With women accounting for about 8 percent of the 880 uniformed firefighters assigned to its station houses, compared with the national average of 2.5 percent, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, which has a female assistant chief, is considered one of the best departments for women to work, according to Women in the Fire Service, an advocacy group based in Madison, Wis.

With an even higher number of women, Minneapolis had its first female fire chief sworn in a year ago, and 17 percent of its 380 uniformed firefighters are women, the department says.

EPIC 2014

2005-12-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

stories to discuss

2005-12-01T10:08:00.000-08:00

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/opinion/01brooks.html?hp

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/politics/01propaganda.html?hp&ex=1133499600&en=3af8aaf9fa1cb0bc&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Advanced story styles

2005-11-10T10:16:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113158625034993089.html?mod=home_page_one_us

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/national/10johnny.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/opinion/10buckley.html

-Lede writing exercise - BIG Story

Wall Street Journal style

2005-11-08T10:14:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113141430905790743.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

A legit budget

2005-11-08T08:33:00.000-08:00

From Scott Swafford:

Good afternoon young reporters,

As you well know tomorrow is Election Day, and we're looking for as many
Missourian reporters as we can get to head out to the polls and talk to
voters. You can sign up for polling places on the sheet hanging on the
window outside my office, 311 Lee Hills Hall. Please write your name legibly
next to the polling place you want to visit and let us know what time you'll
be there. Please try to spread yourselves out. We don't need eight reporters
in the First Ward and none in the Fifth. (The number to the left of each
polling place on the signup sheet indicates which ward it's in. Also, please
be aware that some polling places serve more than one ward. Either avoid
these places or make sure you ask each voter which ward they live in.
Double-check the list to see whether your polling place does double-duty. A
few that come to mind are the Columbia Public Library, the Activities and
Recreation Center and Fairview United Methodist Church.)

There will be three major uses for this material:

(1) Fodder for our front-page story about general election results.

(2) Voter quotes that will run down the rails on inside pages.

(3) Voter vignettes from each ward.

More about those things later. But first, here are some rules of the road
while at the polling places.

(A) You MUST stay at least 25 feet away from the main entrance to the
polling place. This is the law, and you face arrest if you violate it.

(B) You can do nothing to campaign for or against an issue.

(C) You cannot talk to election judges about matters pertaining to election
results.

(D) The best time to be at the polls is from 7 to 8 a.m. The vast majority
of voters go to the polls on their way to work. This is also an optimum time
because we hope to have all the input from voters edited early in the day
and moved to the copy desk by early afternoon.

(E) Please go to the polls informed about the ballot issues. We don't need
people out there who can't ask intelligent questions or who demonstrate a
lack of knowledge about what people are voting on.

(F) Expect that a lot of voters will not want to talk to you. Many people
consider voting to be a very private matter and will brush you aside or even
be rude. Let it bounce off and politely approach the next person. The more
people you talk to, the more success you'll have.

(G) When you interview voters, start with general questions: Which of the
propositions are most important to them? Which issue really brought them to
the polls? Why do they feel it's important that they vote? (Keep in mind
that about nine out of 10 eligible voters will not cast ballots.) Then you
can work your way toward asking how they voted on particular issues. Warm
them up before you go for the jugular.

About vignettes and voter quotes:

Every reporter out there should be looking for voters who have an
extra-special story to tell. Hard to tell what it might be. We've had people
come back with stories about a pair of Sri Lankans who were casting their
first ballots as American citizens and about mothers who take their children
to the polls to teach them about the democratic process. You never know what
will pop up, but it takes that something extra to make someone worthy of a
vignette. We're also looking for people in this election who might, through
their own words, capture the sentiment of their ward. Not to overgeneralize,
but a good example would be a First Ward resident who's on a fixed income
and feels he or she simply can't afford to pay more sales tax. We'll run in
the paper at least one vignette from each ward. The rest will go on line.
Remember, vignettes, while short, have to go deep with detail. No
superficial submissions please.

Those voters' whose comments or input don't rise to the level of a vignette
can still find space in our paper with voter quotes. We will NOT run any
quote without the name, age and occupation of the voter, however, so make
sure you get at least that basic information.

Once you get back to the newsroom, here's what you do:

(1) Create a file called "yourname-quotes." Indicate at the top of the file
what polling place you were in. Then, type in each of your voter quotes,
with an attribution at the end that gives the person's name, age and
occupation. Once you've typed them all up, send them to my queue: Swafford,
Scott C. We'll run the best of the best of these in the paper and the rest
on line.

(2) If you have voters who you think make good vignettes, create a separate
file and call it "yourname-vignette." Then write six to eight inches about
what makes them such a special voter.

Again, please do all you can to get these files submitted before noon.

I hope I haven't forgotten anything. Please pitch in and make our election
coverage the best in the city.

Scott

whose responsible?

2005-11-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

http://mediamatters.org/items/200410160003

Rampaging rooster attacks Tarpon Springs girl

2005-11-03T10:43:00.000-08:00

KELLEY BENHAM. St. Petersburg Times. St. Petersburg, Fla.: Oct 4, 2002. pg. 1

Copyright Times Publishing Co. Oct 4, 2002

When they heard the screams, no one suspected the rooster.

Dechardonae Gaines, 2, was toddling down the sidewalk Monday lugging her Easy Bake Oven when she became the victim in one of the weirder animal attack cases police can recall.

In the cluster of beige houses at Lime Street and Safford Avenue where Dechardonae lives, man and chicken have coexisted peacefully for years in quiet defiance of city ordinance.

That ended Monday afternoon, when authorities apprehended the offending rooster, named Rockadoodle Two, and its sister, named Hen. Hen was not involved in the attack, police said.

The rooster struck around noon as Dechardonae ventured from her house in the middle of the cluster to visit her Uncle Tony, waiting in the driveway. It's a short walk, even if you're 3 feet tall and carrying a toy oven.

Tony Kramer, 44, heard the little girl shrieking, spun around and saw the rooster.

Rockadoodle Two had knocked the 27-pound girl flat on her belly and was pummeling her with beak, claws and blue-black wings.

"He was beating the crap out of her," said her mother, Lori Current, 27. "A freaking rooster, you know?"

Kramer ran for the girl, snatched her up by one arm and chased the bird off, waving his arms and shouting, "Oooh, get! Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!"

The man and the girl had taken about three steps when the rooster attacked again, knocking the screaming girl to the grass a second time.

Kramer swatted at the rooster, backhanded, and it shuffled off.

He could not pick up the girl because he has a bad hip, he said, so he took his niece by the hand and headed for her mother's house.

But Rockadoodle Two flew at the girl a third time, latched onto her narrow shoulders and hammered at her face from behind.

Kramer knocked the rooster down, but it didn't run away this time. It glared at him.

So he kicked it.

The bird flew to a porch nearby, still staring. It puffed its chest and ruffled its feathers.

"He just sat there, all bold," Current said.

"That chicken was not scared," Kramer said.

The neighborhood has never had any chicken trouble beyond the usual scratching and crowing, Kramer said.

Everybody there knew Rockadoodle Two. Neighbors described the rooster as a normally well-behaved bird from a good family. Its father, Rockadoodle, and mother, one-legged Henny Penny, lived in the neighborhood until their deaths by pit bull and heat stroke, respectively.

Everyone knows Dechardonae too. She travels door-to-door in her too-big flip flops chatting with neighbors. She used to pet Rockadoodle Two when it was a chick.

Kramer raised Rockadoodle Two's father. He did not own the son, but thought well of the bird until this, he said.

"I had known him since he was an egg," Kramer said.

That did not matter to Current when she called authorities.

The call surprised police, she said.

A chicken? they asked.

"Come and get him now," she told them. "I am not going to rest."

Hen was captured easily, but Rockadoodle Two led six people on a chase. They flushed the bird out from under a house with a cane fishing pole. But the rooster dodged the Humane Society officer's net, eluded a couple of flying grabs, shucked and bobbed and skittered through the sandspurs and weeds. Finally, the officer tackled him.

"This was no scrawny rooster," Current said.

Rockadoodle and Hen were taken to the Humane Society of North Pinellas, said executive director Rick Chaboudy. From there, they were sent for rehabilitation in Odessa, probably permanently, he said.

This is the city's first rooster attack in recent memory, said Tarpon Springs Police Sgt. Jeffrey Young.

"It does not appear to be epidemic," he said.

But keeping chickens in city neighborhoods is illegal, although police did not cite any residents in this case.

Rockadoodle is the second Tarpon Springs rooster to make news in recent months. This year, a woman battling cancer befriended a stray rooster named Roosty and declared the bird her guardian angel.

The city told the woman the rooster had to go, and the controversy died only when Roosty did. It was killed by a raccoon in August.

Police were unaware of the chickens in Dechardonae's neighborhood, but residents there say the birds are scattered in back yards all over town.

"This right here is why we have those kinds of ordinances, so 2- year-olds can walk down the driveway safely," Young said.

Dechardonae was shaken after the attack but is recovering fine. Her scratches are almost gone; her right eye is barely puffy.

She hid in the house after the attack but said chickens don't worry her now.

"He gone," she said of the rooster. "The police got him."

- Kelley Benham can be reached at 445-4182 or benham@sptimes.com.

Thursday stuff

2005-11-02T19:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=68&aid=88301

What Did Cheney Know, and When Did He Know It?
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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 1, 2005
Come on, Mr. Vice President, tell us what happened.

A federal indictment charges that criminality swirled around your office, and it demeans this administration and the entire country when you hide in your bunker and refuse to say whether you knew of any such activities.

Five lawyers I've consulted all agree that there is no compelling legal reason why you should not discuss the situation. It's urgent that you clear the air by answering these questions in a televised news conference:

Did you ask Scooter Libby to undertake his inquiries about Ambassador Joseph Wilson? Mr. Libby made such a concerted push to get information, from both the State Department and the C.I.A., that I suspect that you prodded him. Is that right? If so, why?

Why did you independently ask the C.I.A. for information about the Wilsons? The indictment states that on June 12, 2003, you advised Mr. Libby that you had learned, apparently from the C.I.A., that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie, worked in the agency. So did you ask George Tenet, then the director, about Mr. and Mrs. Wilson? Did you review the related documents that the C.I.A. faxed to your office?

Did you know that Mrs. Wilson was a covert officer? The indictment states that you knew she worked in the C.I.A.'s counterproliferation division. You would think that anyone as steeped in intelligence issues as you are would know that meant she worked in the Directorate of Operations and was perhaps a spook's spook.

Did you advise Mr. Libby to leak information about Mrs. Wilson's work in the C.I.A. to journalists? Mr. Libby flew with you on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, and according to the indictment, one of the issues Mr. Libby discussed onboard the plane (with you?) was how to deal with the news media. Within hours, the indictment charges, Mr. Libby told two reporters that Mrs. Wilson worked in the agency.

When Mr. Libby made his statements in the inquiry - allegedly committing perjury - were you aware of what he was saying? Mr. Libby rode to work with you almost every morning, but this topic never came up?

Was Mr. Libby fearful of disclosing something about your behavior in the summer of 2003? Mr. Libby is renowned for his caution, yet he is alleged to have suddenly embarked upon a high-risk campaign of leaks and lies. If he did do that, was it a misguided attempt to protect you? The alleged lies shielded you by indicating that the information you gave him about Mrs. Wilson instead came from reporters.

Would the truth have been so potentially damaging to your position that Mr. Libby chose perjury instead?

My guess is that there was no malevolent conspiracy to "out" Mrs. Wilson. Rather, my hunch is that you and Mr. Libby were enraged at what you perceived as false suggestions that you had been personally responsible for sending Mr. Wilson to Niger and had then ignored his findings.

I'm speculating that you may have thought that you were just knocking down unfair exaggerations and rumors - and then Mrs. Wilson's identity was disclosed to suggest that she was more responsible for sending him to Niger than you were.

And once a criminal investigation began, perhaps Mr. Libby didn't want to acknowledge that you were knee-deep in actions that at a minimum looked petty and unseemly.

Whatever happened, Mr. Vice President, the American public deserves some reassurance. If you had nothing to do with any of this, then say so. But don't cower behind your lawyers. As it is, you're pleading "no contest" in the court of public opinion, and that's painful for all of us who want to believe in the integrity of our government.

When Richard Nixon was a candidate for vice president and embroiled in scandal, he addressed the charges in his Checkers speech: "The best and only answer to a smear or to an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth." (Mr. Vice President, any time a columnist quotes Nixon to you in an exhortation to be honest, you're in trouble.)

Even when Spiro Agnew was embroiled in a criminal investigation, he tried to explain himself, repeatedly. Do you really want to be less forthcoming than Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew?

We don't need to try to turn this into Watergate, and we don't need gloating from the Democrats. But we do need straight talk from you. The indictment has left a cloud that impedes governing, and if we're to move on, we need you to clear the air.

So, Mr. Cheney, tell us what happened. If you're afraid to say what you knew, and when you knew it, then you should resign.

More Articles in Opinion >

Tuesday stories 11/1

2005-11-01T09:36:00.000-08:00

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=35690

http://www.slate.com/id/2129169/?nav=tap3

The News Media and the Racialization of Poverty

Giles, M. (1999) “The News Media and Racialization of Poverty,” Why Americans Hate Welfare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Giles, in examining the existence of racial bias in mainstream print media, argues that blacks are more often portrayed in negative stories relating to poverty, whereas they are written about and photographed less in sympathetic stories of the poor. Using content analysis statistics he gathered from Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report from 1950-1992, Giles shows though even though the percentage of black people who were poor remained relatively constant around 29 percent, blacks were pictured 57 percent of the time in stories of poverty. In some time periods, such as the mid-1960s, when many race riots occurred, and in 1972-1973, when welfare reform was a hot topic, those percentages became even more skewed. When in the early 1980s, many sympathetic stories were written about white Americans who lost jobs and felt the pinch of a recession that portrayed them as “noble victims,” fewer blacks were written about or photographed for these stories, Giles argues. Could it be that a racial bias exists? Likely.
The overall idea is that in 1999 there was (and probably still is) a misconception in public opinion that roughly 50 percent of poor Americans are black, when in reality only 27 percent are. Why is this? Could it be partially the media’s fault for inaccurately depicting blacks? As Giles writes: The mainstream (white-dominated) news media were more likely to associate negative poverty stories with blacks and neutral or positive stories with whites.” It will be interesting to see if the more diverse newsrooms of the 21st century succeed at alleviating this stigmatizing problem.

Katrina: A Case Study

• The question of demographics has been raised in the media as TV news and photographs showed primarily black citizens stranded in New Orleans. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the 2004 New Orleans population to be 20 percent white and 68 percent black.
• The racial impact of the tragedy may affect African-Americans most. According to poll data and media accounts, the treatment of victims in New Orleans led to feelings of distrust, alienation and anger among black Americans nationwide. Katrina served as a wake-up call for millions of Americans.

• Semantics: Evacuee vs. refugee
• Looting vs. finding – the now-infamous story that ran on Yahoo!News
• Dean Mills comment about Katrina Images: He remarked about blacks being shows as victims was a change. He also remarked about the barrages of footage from the looting. If the majority of the looters were black, is it wrong to have that group dominate the coverage?

See below:
http://www.nola.com/katrinaphotos/ap/
Katrina devastation 10 and 2

Thursday stuff

2005-10-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

http://jfig.missouri.edu/j2100/Brooks/index.htm

http://www.coburnphotography.com/soccer/

http://www.digmo.com/news/story.php?ID=16689

Football frenzy

2005-10-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

Here I am, in all my sorry soccer glory :-)

tuesday lecture

2005-10-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:rWwt9SQ4U4cJ:www.hhs.csus.edu/CJ/Red%2520Bluff-2.doc+andrew+mickel&hl=en

http://www.jsonline.com/onwisconsin/movies/jul03/156641.asp

Wrong turn
A middle-class college student, onetime peace activist and Army veteran, Andy Mickel didn't fit the profile of a cop killer
By Marjie Lundstrom and Sam Stanton -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 am PDT Monday, August 1, 2005
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee
Andy Mickel drove away from the murder scene in silence in his maroon 1992 Ford Mustang hatchback, sticking to the back roads as he left Red Bluff.
His radio was broken. That was not part of the plan.
But everything else went just the way the 23-year-old man had wanted: the murder, the cop, the small town in California.
Behind him, 31-year-old Red Bluff Police Officer Dave Mobilio - a bear of a man with a wife and toddler son - lay facedown on the pavement of a filling station, shot twice in the back and once in the head.
An execution, pure and simple.
A homemade flag depicting a snake lay beside Mobilio's body with the words: "This was a political action. Don't tread on Us."
Mickel, who had fashioned the flag along with a homemade brass catcher to collect his spent shell casings, always figured he'd have time to get away and complete his plan.
A 5-foot-10, 160-pound man with dark hair and sharp, angular features, Mickel did not fit the profile of a cop killer. He wasn't a criminal or drug dealer. He was a college student. He'd been a peace activist. He'd served in the Army. His middle-class parents were college teachers, his brothers were successes, his childhood friends were solid citizens with promising careers.
And he was a long way from home.
The man who had ambushed and executed a small-town cop in Northern California in November 2002 was best known in Springfield, Ohio, a town of about 65,000 between Columbus and Dayton. A former railroad hub where freight trains still thunder through the city, Springfield is a key stop for presidential candidates scouting votes in bellwether Clark County and all of Ohio.
It would soon be on the map for something else.
* * *
Even from childhood, friends would say, Andrew Hampton Mickel seemed destined for something big. A boy who would make his mark one day.
"I always knew that Andy was going to do something great," said Ben Poston, a friend since grade school. "I just didn't know if it was going to be great in a good way or great in a bad way."
No one foresaw the mark Mickel would leave before his 24th birthday - an act so violent and unexpected that his friends and family, like those of the victim, would be left to ask: Why?
It is the enduring mystery in the murder of Dave Mobilio, whose life collided with Mickel's in a dimly lit gas station on Nov. 19, 2002. Now Mobilio, a cop, was dead, ambushed by Mickel when he stopped to fill up. Two and a half years later, Mickel would be sentenced to death for the crime.
Yet here were two young men with seemingly similar backgrounds - educated parents, successful siblings, loyal friends and solid middle-class upbringings with world travel and rich opportunities.
So what went wrong with Andy Mickel?
"This is a situation we never ever dreamed we'd have to face," his mother, Karen, recently said, softly weeping.
"Not ever."
Andy Mickel, the second of Stan and Karen Mickel's sons, was raised in Springfield, Ohio. Surrounded by farm country, the Clark County city - with its historic clock tower overlooking a neglected downtown core - has the usual urban problems: poverty, drugs, some violence. One of its largest employers, International Harvester (now Navistar International), continues to shed jobs. Civic leaders are pinning their hopes on the revitalizing possibilities of a hospital consolidation.
With four exits off Interstate 70, Springfield also is home to Wittenberg University, a small liberal arts college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Stan Mickel, a professor and scholar specializing in Chinese language and literature, came to Wittenberg in 1971. In 1978, he was awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to do research in Taiwan, where Andy was born.
Years later, sitting in a jail cell in Red Bluff, Andy Mickel would display a string of four Chinese symbols he had later tattooed in dark green on the inside of his left arm. Translated, he said in an interview with The Bee, they read "Central Clinic," the place of his birth.
A fifth Chinese symbol, he said, was one he and his father came up with together when he decided to get tattooed: "Compassionate Warrior."
* * *

Despite their world travels, the Mickels returned to Springfield to raise their boys in a quiet neighborhood of 1940s-and 1950s-era homes.
The established neighborhood, with expansive front lawns and a leafy canopy of maple, elm and locust trees, is made up mostly of two-story houses with crisply painted shutters and colorful awnings.
The Mickels were among the first on the block to have a computer, an appealing draw for the neighborhood kids. Karen Mickel, a math instructor at the University of Dayton, served on the local school board. Her husband, who had earned his bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and his doctorate from Indiana University, was widely published.
The Mickels initially agreed, then declined, to talk in depth with The Bee about their son, worrying they would say something to hurt or alienate him.
Friends describe the couple as gentle, sincere people whose lives have been turned inside out by the crime. Shortly after they returned from California for their middle son's murder trial, they attended their youngest son's graduation from Notre Dame. Patrick Mickel is going on to get his doctoral degree in physics; their oldest son, Jeremy, is a graphic artist in New York.
Andy is on death row in San Quentin.
"I'm scared to death we're going to do something that's going to be worse for our son. I know it's hard to imagine anything worse," said Karen Mickel, her voice trembling.
But others who knew Andy Mickel did share recollections, scouring their memories for markers - for anything - that might explain the eruption of violence. They are hurt, they are sickened, they feel horrible for Dave Mobilio's family - and, without exception, they are baffled.
Poston, Mickel's childhood friend, remembers his buddy as an adventurous, somewhat dramatic playmate. "Every day of the week was a chance to get into a kind of adventure," said Poston, 25, a newspaper reporter who recently left Ohio for the Missouri School of Journalism.
Andy was the fantasy-loving kid who liked Indiana Jones and comic books featuring Batman, the Joker and the Green Lantern.
"He was really into fantasy and kind of creating his own reality, even as a little kid," Poston said. "You always got that sense that he looked at his life like he was living in a movie, and he was the star."
Judi Smith, whose backyard is catty-corner from the Mickels', found the neighbor boy to be a "sensitive child." Andy was close friends with Smith's twin daughters, Rachel and Lindsay, from the first grade. He was especially close to Rachel, digging with her for worms as a kid, then escorting her to Prom Court as a teen. Being neighbors and in the same class, the kids were part of the same circle all the way through high school.
Judi Smith and Karen Mickel would talk over the back hedge and picket fence, occasionally having cookouts or taking the kids on "little field trips" in the summer.
It deeply touched Smith that Andy once spent his summer afternoons visiting her mother, who had Alzheimer's disease and was living temporarily at the house.
"I remember one time Andy came over and I said, 'The girls aren't home, Andy.' And he goes, 'That's all right, I came to see your mom,' " said Smith, a 54-year-old mother of four. "And he would sit with her and she'd go on and on about stuff, and he'd just hold her hand and he'd just laugh with her, and kiss her on the cheek when he left."
* * *

As he grew up, Mickel ran with a crowd of about 16 boys and girls of similar age - a tightly knit group of kids, including Poston and the Smith twins, who didn't romance each other but simply hung out. The Mickels loved this crowd for their son. The kids gathered often in the Smiths' spacious family room, where they watched movies or played games like Scattergories.
"We weren't these prudish, perfect little kids," said Rachel Smith Wilson, who is now married and living in Tennessee, pursuing a doctoral degree in economics. "But we also didn't have to drink every weekend like a lot of high school students do."
In high school, the friends began having elaborate progressive dinner parties that continued into their college days, though Mickel often had to be prodded to participate.
In other ways, he showed himself to be a nonconformist, occasionally doing odd, attention-grabbing things. Rachel Wilson recalled how her friend once showed up at a school dance in a blue sweat suit, his entire body colored with blue marker, calling himself a "Smurf." In one of his senior class pictures, he posed standing in a metal garbage can. When his older brother graduated from high school, and friends gathered in the Mickels' backyard, Andy suddenly appeared on the roof, dressed like Indiana Jones and carrying a whip. With a flourish, he jumped down amid the guests.
"It was like a five-minute little episode. I remember thinking, 'That's Andy,' " said Wilson, now 25.
Andy's antics were well known. While his friends had their own claims to fame - Ben Poston was named in the senior yearbook as the "Teacher's Pet" and, along with Lindsay Smith, as having the "Best Hair" - Andy was chosen as both the "Most Witty" and the "Most Daring" in the class of '98.
"He had an amazingly witty sense of humor. He was really funny," said Griffin House, a close childhood friend singled out in the yearbook for the "Best Eyes."
House, now a musician living in Nashville, credits Andy with opening up his creative side. As kids, the two would grab House's mother's old Camcorder and make comedy sketches they thought were hilarious.
"He's so smart," House said. "His mind just works a lot differently than others'."
Scott Dixon, who tutored Andy in creative writing, couldn't help but notice the cynicism that crept into his pupil as he entered adolescence. But Dixon, a 42-year-old school consultant who deals with severely emotionally disturbed kids, never saw any violent tendencies in him, or any other red flags.
It was, Dixon thought, just "typical teen angst."
"He always seemed to be shackled by cynicism, and I always hoped that someday he'd break free of those chains," said Dixon, who enjoyed Andy's writing, which he described as "biting, dark humor," though enigmatic at times.
Andy Mickel did not excel in school; everyone agrees he didn't much care for classroom work. But they considered him exceptionally bright.
Linda Bodey, his drama teacher at North High School, still thinks of him as one of her "special" students, a kid so absorbed with detail he "could write a whole paper about one paragraph in a novel." When playing Tiresias, the blind seer, in "Oedipus Rex," Andy painstakingly practiced how to position his fingers on a cane to best resemble an old man. Bodey thought such attention to detail sometimes left Andy with tunnel vision, as he burrowed down a track without seeing the wider view.
He always had a cause; he was not caught up in the typical high school milieu," said Bodey, 52, an energetic teacher known to work 12-and 14-hour days.
Andy seemed drawn to her, often quizzing her at length about her long hours, her private life and whether she was happy. In 24 years of teaching, only two other students had ever broached such personal and penetrating topics.
"He was very bright, inquisitive, always processing in his head," said Bodey. "He was always the guy somehow not quite on the same rhythm as everybody else - enough so you might have picked him out in the crowd."
He could also use his mind like a weapon. Poston recalls how his friend sometimes tried to intimidate and bully people with his intellect - a characteristic that would be observed years later in a California courtroom.
"He was always kind of playing this intellectual mind game with people," Poston said. "He would say things then wait for somebody to say something that was maybe not the most thoughtful statement. Then he would push you and say, 'What do you mean? Justify what you just said.' "
* * *
If there was a chink in Andy Mickel's intellectual armor, it was his moodiness and occasional erratic behavior as he moved through North High School.
Everyone seemed to know that he suffered from depression and was prescribed antidepressants that he hated to take.
Depression appears to have played a key role in what would be his earliest, and virtually only, brush with the law before his move to the West Coast in 2001.
In October 1997, his family reported him missing after a night out with friends. Poston says he was with Andy that night in Springfield, going to see the film "A Life Less Ordinary" with Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz. Driving home in his Geo Metro, Andy - who Poston said was not drinking or using illegal drugs - began driving recklessly, racing the wrong way down a boulevard and crashing into a tree. The car, which his parents had given him, slammed into the tree on the passenger side where Poston was sitting. Neither was hurt.
Andy drove the car home, then ran away that night. Poston said his friend walked or hitchhiked some 15 miles to Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College, where he fashioned a lean-to from sticks and spent the night in John Bryan State Park. Poston and his friends went looking for Andy the following day, but he returned on his own, stopping by Poston's nearby home.
There, he talked with Poston's father, a psychologist, about his depression.
The episode disturbed his friends. "It kind of spooked everybody," Poston recalled.
Judi Smith also began to notice that the "sensitive" boy next door seemed "kind of troubled sometimes." She wasn't sure what medication he was taking - his family won't say - but she suspected it wasn't working.
One afternoon, as Smith stood on her front porch, Andy paid her a visit when the girls weren't home. Smith had been on antidepressants herself following some surgery, and she decided to broach the subject.
"I said, 'You know, I'm on something and it's helping me, and it's not the worst thing in the world.' And he hugged me real tight," she recalled. "He seemed so sad."
Apart from the depression, though, Poston, House and others saw little amiss. If there were large cracks in the Mickel family, they didn't see them. If there was anything wrong, Andy didn't say.
And despite their friend's occasional antics, he also did the typical things. He was a Cub Scout and a paperboy. He attended Lutheran Sunday school. He wrestled awhile. He went on canoeing and camping trips. He helped build a house for Habitat for Humanity.
Then, upon graduating in 1998, Andy Mickel threw his teachers and friends a curve. While the gang headed off to college, he decided to join the Army.
"I would've more expected him to join the Peace Corps than enlist in the armed forces," Bodey said.
Poston was equally perplexed.
"I don't know why," said Poston, who, along with House, attended Miami University, 75 miles away in Oxford, Ohio. "He wanted to kind of experience it all. I think he just wanted to be an Everyman - be everywhere, do everything he could."
Mickel spent most of three years at Fort Campbell, Ky., home of the Army's 101st Airborne Division. He graduated from Army Ranger School, Airborne School and Jungle Operations Training School.
Rachel Wilson saw her old friend during his Army days and was disturbed by how much he'd changed. Home for a visit from college, she was jogging in the neighborhood when she spied two strangers who looked like skinheads. She thought about turning around until she recognized Andy.
She ran up to give him a hug. Instead, he stepped back and stuck out his hand.
"He was just so different, so different," she said. "He was just kind of cold. His eyes were cold. It just didn't seem like the same person to me - just distant and removed."
It was, she thinks, the last time she saw him.
But Andy Mickel would not stay long in Ohio or his old neighborhood. After being honorably discharged from the Army in 2001, he decided to head west for Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.
The distance between Andy Mickel and Dave Mobilio had shortened considerably.
Evergreen State College, a secluded campus set in a forest, was a long way from Springfield - not just geographically, but philosophically.
A left-leaning liberal arts school with about 4,400 students, it grabbed national headlines in 1999 by selecting convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal as a commencement speaker.
While students listened to a 13-minute taped speech from the former Black Panther on death row in Pennsylvania, angry protesters - including the victim's widow - stormed out of the event. Then-Gov. Gary Locke refused to attend and deliver his scheduled keynote address.
Mickel chose this school, with its main gathering area called "Red Square." He ostensibly came to study creative writing. The college was not as academically rigorous as his parents would have liked and, in his freshman year - when many new college students are confined to large lecture halls and tackling basic requirements - he was allowed to do independent study.
It was during this time that Mickel's personal politics got increasingly intense.
In December 2001, he went to Israel with a pro-Palestinian activist group pushing for an end to Israeli "occupation." The following summer, he went to Colombia, South America, to study nonviolent resistance, and to Northern Ireland, another global hot spot. In the Pacific Northwest, he joined protests against the World Trade Organization and was arrested in Seattle in April 2002 for interfering with a police officer.
Tehama County District Attorney Gregg Cohen would later say in court that Mickel had reached for an officer's gun during the Seattle arrest, though Mickel would staunchly deny that in his jailhouse interview with The Bee three days before his sentencing.
But there is no denying that Andy Mickel became more political at college. He began railing about social injustice and corporate irresponsibility and capitalism run amok.
Scott Dixon, his old tutor back in Springfield, saw Mickel on a Thanksgiving visit home and heard him talk about politics - about corporations, environmentalism and the like. To him, Mickel seemed no more strident than many politically minded college students.
Poston didn't talk much to Mickel during this period, but both he and Dixon wonder now whether the back-to-back cultures of the rigid Army followed by a freewheeling liberal arts college made for a volatile mix.
"He went from the Army, where they tell you exactly what to do, and you learn things and it's regimented. And he got out and he went to this radical liberal college, where they don't have grades and all that," said Poston. "He was kind of like a blank slate ...
"Put those together, and I guess it was a really bad combination."
Dixon suspects his former pupil "wasn't fully emotionally centered" when he left high school and zigged to the Army, then zagged to Evergreen State College.
"There were so many diametrically opposed influences coming at him, and he tried to make it all coalesce into a single idea," Dixon said. "And it's that single idea that's kind of led to his downfall."
* * *
Whatever the catalyst, by 2002, Mickel's audacious plan had begun to take shape: He was going to murder a cop to draw attention to his politics, and to incite citizens to rise up against their government.
It had to be a small town, he reasoned, one without too many security cameras - the kind of place he'd have a chance to get away, at least for a little while.
And it had to be in California, which Mickel had decided was a prime example of a state where gun laws were too strict.
Reflecting back on that time during his interview with The Bee, Mickel said: "It's a difficult thing to go through with. It's a very significant action to take ... Taking another person's life isn't something to take lightly."
Wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit and dingy white T-shirt, Mickel looked gawky and almost boyish - until his gaze settled on his visitors and fixed there, for long, uncomfortable moments. Jurors later would remark about "the stare," which so unnerved one female juror she began to fear for her safety.
"I know everyone thinks I'm the cold-blooded evil murderer," Mickel said, "but I didn't take this action lightly."
Indeed, he planned the killing meticulously. At one point, he told The Bee, he visited a prison near Seattle, taking a tour with a college class so he could get some sense of what prison life would be like.
He left little to chance.
In the summer of 2002, he drove his maroon Mustang from the Pacific Northwest to Yuma, Ariz., and back - a 23-day odyssey that would later be documented with colored pushpins on a map in the Tehama County District Attorney's Office.
This was the hunt, as he tried to find just the right spot in just the right town.
That spot, he ultimately determined, was Red Bluff.
Warner's Petroleum fueling station on Main Street had piqued his interest, with its steady stream of law enforcement officers filling their cars on the outskirts of town. The location was remote enough that he could drive up nearby Breckenridge Street, then slip undetected for 2,060 feet down a desolate dirt road alongside the railroad tracks. The unattended station lay up a short hill, where large metal bins would provide cover.
Mickel returned to Red Bluff on Nov. 17, a Sunday, his plan readied. Sometime after his arrival, a Tehama County sheriff's deputy spotted him, thought he looked out of place and ran his Washington license plate: 595NAB. When nothing came up, the deputy continued on his way.
By now, Andrew Mickel had legally changed his name to Andrew McCrae - a reference, he says, to a character he liked, Augustus "Gus" McCrae, in the Larry McMurtry novel "Lonesome Dove." The name change, he thought, might spare his family any harmful association with what he was about to do.
On the night of Nov. 17, he crept into the site and waited with his .40-caliber Sig Sauer automatic pistol, but he eventually "sort of lost heart," he would later tell investigators. Several officers came and went that night, but "I couldn't get myself to do it," he said.
He drove back to a rest area north of Red Bluff to sleep and regroup, then returned the following night, gassing up first in Redding. The bumpy dirt road he had planned to take into the area behind the gas station was now wet and soggy - it had been dry in September, when he'd first scoped out the site. He eased down the dirt road off Breckenridge Street as far as he could and waited for darkness.
Sometime between 10 and 11 p.m., he left his car and walked along the railroad tracks, then climbed the hill to Warner's. The station lighting was dim; the night was foggy.
This time there would be no turning back, no second thoughts. Only one piece of the plan - not that he really cared - remained uncertain: Who would die?
In the blackness, he slipped behind a metal bin and waited.

Cheerleaders and AP Style review

2005-10-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.ejeanlive.com/spin-cheer.htm

AP Style Exam Hints:

Pope abbreviation, just lower case pope w/out name
Democratic Party- both caps
Rivers plural
God-pronoun capitalize- no
size 3 shoes
master's degree –lower case on both
Bible capitalized? yes
Capitalize Southern California? Yes.. my mom has a Southern Accent
7 p.m.
title of governor after name
democratic/ republican party-all caps
president
where to comma before quote … no comma before quote
Feb. 14
Know how to abbreviate states,
Mountain abbreviations.. .just right Mount
Road/ state route abbv.
Senator abreivations, political identify, abbb.
UFO
Military base abbreviation
how do you write out St. Louis?
State abbv.
IQ abb.
Remember driving south is not capitalized, Southern Mizzou is
Weight measurements – 8 pounds
Second Amendment written out and capitalized?
how do i write 9th Congressional District?
Space shuttle names
2 teaspoons of sugar
Street abb. – Ninth Street/ money
Fleet of ships – how?
How do you write out fractions?
Ages
Abbr. 1980s as ???

Images

2005-10-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=88166

http://www.lightstalkers.org/carriecochran

mizzoumethmadness.blogspot.com

AP Style quiz time

2005-10-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.ku.edu/~edit/ap15.htm

http://www.kcwriter.com/AP_Quiz.html

http://www.copydesk.org/quizzes/quiz4.htm

http://www.ablongman.com/stovall1e/chap11/apquiz02.html

http://school.discovery.com/quizzes21/cc_kblake/APStyleQuiz.html

AP Style Quiz 2

1. The merry go round was Joey’s favorite ride at the playground.
2. IBP has a plant in Pittsburgh, Kansas.
3. “When I was young, we ploughed with a horse,” Grandpa Milton said.
4. Friends is my favorite show on Television.
5. Gary’s teenaged son joined the marines last week.
6. The POW was released after six months in captivity.
7. The children’s taunting didn’t phase Karie.
8. Denise is going to Padre island in the Spring.
9. The policemen complained about her meeger wages.
10. The Ford SUV rolled 3 times after hitting the culvert.

AP Style Quiz 1

1. Michael received a good grade in his civil war class.
2. The jury was escorted out of the court room after the verdict was announced.
3. Cody moved to Midland, Tex. for his new job.
4. I have a dental appointment with Dr. Tist at 4:30 pm.
5. Melanie conducted research on quasi-stellar astronomical objects for her
dissertation.
6. Terry used a Quarter horse for the barrel competition. The horse is a gleding.
7. Spencer threw the ball out-of-bounds.
8. The River in our pasture is almost dry this summer.
9. Sergeant Benson’s chuaffer picked him up from the airport.
10. Bobby Little was the youngest player on the team. Little was 12 years old.

Grubisich's Citizen J Roundup on OJR

2005-10-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

I held back a bit to see where this discussion was going. But I think it is time to clear up a few misconceptions that may be leading to false impressions of MyMissourian and citizen journalism.

One of my continuing disappointments with our discussions (as I’ve said before) is the focus on what my British relatives call the “zero sum game.” Early in this Internet era, there was a dream that online communications would quickly wipe out all commercial “traditional” media. Everyone would get free information in unlimited quantities anytime they wanted with no regard to commercialism, advertising or anything that smelled of money or effort.

It was a pipe dream. And to date, we still have not figured out how to pay the piper.

I spent 25 years as a working journalist, but now I’m proud of my academic standing. It means I look at my world and yours with the cold, calculating eyes of a researcher. Then I explain them with the passion of a journalist.

So, by the numbers:

1. Don’t hold your breath looking for THE answer. We gave up on the magic bullet theory of communications long, long ago. We work in a field dominated by shades of gray.
2. As there is no “right” way to deliver information, a media system that offers multiple ways of getting the information out there is logically more likely to succeed than something else. History shows that types of media are never replaced, they are just increasingly supplemented.
3. That said, MyMissourian should be seen in conjunction with the Columbia Missourian, Vox, Adelante and the many other products we publish in the “real world” part of the Missouri School of Journalism. Our bilingual Adelante doesn’t focus on the same stories as does the daily Columbia Missourian. Neither does MyMissourian. But together we are one hell of a read.
4. We DO, however, share the same financial base. We long ago came to grips with the fact that a commercially successful product with disputable journalistic value can underwrite products filled with the journalism we came into this profession to do. Almost every paper in the country has a TMC or shopper for this reason. And most of us put out bridal sections, run crossword puzzles and pander to the public with often-inane circulation contests. The Pulitzer Committee never sees that, but it pays our salaries.
5. What we have stumbled upon at MyMissourian is a realistic revenue model that employs the online format. We use an admittedly simplistic and politically lightweight citizen journalism process to gather copy that we can place in a TMC that is overwhelmingly more popular with local advertisers than any online product dreamed of being. While we were not very good at selling online ads at the volume needed to sustain life, selling ads in a print TMC is easy — as long as people pick the TMC off the sidewalk.
6. In the eyes of Jane and Joe Reader, citizen journalism is a lot better than the warmed-over “junk” copy that previously filled our TMC and continues to fill others like it. Some, but not all, even like it better than our daily fare. The major point is they pick it up from the sidewalk.
7. The media system worked where the single medium did not. See No. 1.

I will make no excuses for prominently playing Pineapple Salsa nor for allowing a son to wax poetic about his dead 89-year-old mother. We don’t “miss” stories — they are just elsewhere. Yes, it would be nice to update MyMissourian more frequently with priceless prose, but my students — like you — are learning that persuading non-professional writers to contribute takes a lot more journalist skill than they assumed. It’s a work in progress. And always will be.

I am sure there will be several more “new” new media before I retire. Give them every bit of effort and enthusiasm you can, but please stop shooting for the moon.

The universe is a much better target.
--
Clyde H. Bentley, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Missouri School of Journalism
3 Neff Hall
Columbia, MO 65211-1200
(573) 884-9688 BentleyCl@missouri.edu
http://www.missouri.edu/~bentleyc

TV News story

2005-10-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

Things to think about for 2- to 3-minute TV News story:

1. Introduction stand up must be well-written and paint the picture for the viewer

2. Make sure the story flows well with voice overs and on-camera interviews

3. Be sure to introduce quotes with either a stand-up or voice-over footage.

4. Don't forget your tagline - outro/// this acts a conclusion or summary to the story - "This is Erin Rice reporting for J2100 News."

5. all technical questions should go to Mark Jarvis at jarvisma@missouri.edu

Great job on Ethics Case Study

2005-10-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

1. Fourteen of you wrote fine ledes that included: Two Seasons Hotel was sued "yesterday" for $5 million b/c Donna Dunnin bit down on what she thought were chocolate-covered coffee beans.

2. Edibles is not a word. food or candy would be better

3. make sure to put $5 million w/ the lawsuit in lede (there were a few that buried the dollar amount)

4. "I'm one cooky lady," Dunnin said.

5. I did penalize you for your ethical decisions, rather gave suggestions and things to watch out for -

- The quote from the Dunnin about the blood is OK to use, I would
- the quote from Dunnin about the lawsuit being bloated ("sue for a bundle") could - get you in trouble
- quote from hotel spokesperson Sue Short is one i would def. use as a reporter

6. Feb. 20//// don't write Feb. 20, 2005, or February 20 - what are the other months that are abbreviated?

7. don't write "A Columbia woman is suing , write A Columbia woman filed a lawsuit or sued the Two Seasons Hotel. remember, active is alwasys best

8. watch for long ledes/ shorter is almost always better (even when you are writing a narrative lede or trying to paint the picture)

9. use attorney in first references then legal counsel or lawyer

10. i know i forgot to give you a day of the week, but never write "today" b/c the newspaper won't come out until tomorrow (web and TV are exceptions)

11.talking about next court dates or a case settlement was key to story.

12. one person wrote "Dunnin, in a clear voice, said 'I never used to hesitate when I smiled, now i'm afraid to open my mouth."

reporter is insinuating that Dunnin is lying (BIG NO-NO)

13. Don't write corny headlines when writing about a $5 million lawsuit. it's not funny to the people involved.

14. Last time I will say this. Don't write - "When describing the pain Dunnin said "it really hurt."

15. Someone wrote "Donna Dunnin could not contain her excitement as she reached for a bowl of full of one of her favorite snacks - chocolate-covered coffee beans.

Issues with car accident stories

2005-10-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

- Drunk driver hit a MU professor should have been in everyone's lede or ex-convict
— Kudos to Sarah and Kyle for getting it in lede

- Never Quote someone from a secondhand source.. if you didn't hear the person say it or if it's not in a press release, you cannot quote someone

Example:

"A great Led Zepplin song distracted me," Byler told police. NO

- MU prof is newsier that Columbia resident, which is more of a generic ID

- white 2005 Ford Mustang doesn't matter if suspect has been arrested... only if he is on the run

- Lt. and Sgt. always abbreviated

- blood alcohol results were unavailable Friday

- Ninth Sreet spelled out... Columbia Avenue spelled out

- held on $17,700 bail

- misspelled names/ inaccuracies

- quote structure

- stuff about Byler visiting aunt was somewhat irrelevant, but the Led Zepplin thing is funny

- Smith was struck on Ninth Street north of Broadway Avenue intersection

Issues with fire stories

2005-09-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

1.a. Ledes were off-target

"Young boy dies in fire after helping grandparents escape" or "child killed in suspected arson" - Kudos to Shannon, Alex, Matt and Kyle

- you don't have to cram all the information in lede- just the most important

1b. use home or structure but avoid house

2. use precise langauge, not figures of speech — don't say "Perry Simpson walked away without injury." just write Perry Simpson was uninjured.

3. Don't misspell names — Nalges was wrong in many papers, someone even misspelled it two different ways. Editors will not be impressed with this. You may have written the best story of your career, but a few careless mistakes will taint it.

4. Correct way to introduce and write quotes:

IF the first time quoting someone or the end of a story:

Nalges' grandfather said plans to rebuild the home in honor of boy's memory. (Introduction)
"We lost our beloved Billy, but not our spirit," Perry Simpson said (or said Perry Simpson, regional president of AARP.) "He was just a helluva kid."

2nd reference and beyond:

The crazy geezer had just soiled his pants.
"I meant to change my diapers earlier but I guess I forgot," Perry Simpson said. (name at end)

INCORRECT WAY:

Perry Simpson said, "I'm a crazy old guy." NO

5. Sequence: Time, date, place

6. If street or boulevard are not with address do not abbreviate

Back from Mississippi, Shellshocked

2005-09-09T13:30:00.001-07:00

The relief effort in southern Mississippi gave me a sense that a large portion of American citizens do live in poverty or very low income and literally have nothing. It's embarassing for us all that it takes a hurricane to realize this.

it was crazy to see ramshackle trailers completely destroyed and that's all a family of four had and now it's a heap of garbage. So much emotion and so much crying.

driving north to Mizzou i felt like i had the weight of the world on my shoulders. i've been feeling really depressed the past fews days or so. probably an extremely mild case of immersion shock. i'm sitting in a graduate seminar wondering how the theory of agenda setting or the four theories of the media is going to help a goddam person living in poverty in Miss.

the people are wonderful in Mississippi. i felt so much love and so much of neighbors helping each other, law enforcement stepping in to do anything they could, inmates helping out tremendously. the level of cooperation in our area seemed to be really strong.

This is the first i've written about it since coming back. shellshocked i guess. i just missed two classes b/c of labor day weekend. my mind is in Mississipppi and i can't stop thinking about those people.

i want to be able to sum up the situation and my experience in a coherent way, but my mind isn't capable of that right now.

Ben Poston

Last Night at Camp Jones

2005-09-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

9:20 p.m. Monday, September 5, 2005

My last night at Camp Jones and things seem to really be winding down. The air is finally cool and the power is back on at Gulf Coast Community College. It’s been a wild ride, these past four days.
Retired BCSO Capt. Mike Grimes (now a specialist) and Sgt. Jeff Reigert rolled in early this morning and have really lightened things up. The deputies all went swimming in a creek earlier this evening. It’s interesting to see that as the situation here improves, so do their spirits.
Today we rode with Fairfield Twp. Police Capt. Alan Laney and nurse Karen Hundley. We helped reunite a family in Mississippi and also linked up a frantic Hamilton, Ohio, mother with her daughter here.
There is so much heartbreak and suffering here that I still have a hard time comprehending it and try my best to not internalize all the hurt. I got choked up for my second day in a row when I saw the father and daughter embrace at McHenry Fire Department and then another family was reunited right after them. Many of these Stone County residents live near poverty but not poverty of the spirit. The courage of these people will stay with me for years.
The county fairgrounds today had more than 30 trucks roll in with ice, water and MREs so folks there were set. The Stone County Sheriff’s set up a free store at the prison to add another distribution point.
The level of cooperation here is amazing as is the hard work of the all the deputies here and even the inmates.
We’ve really established a good routine here and it will definitely be hard to leave tomorrow morning. I will attempt to send a blog tomorrow on my way back to Columbia, Missouri.
Like I said last night, Missouri feels as if it’s a million miles away. My students and classes at Mizzou are literally in a different dimension than Stone County, Miss.
I am truly grateful for this opportunity to volunteer my time and energy to helping people in dire need and being able to document it for readers in the Tri-State.

-Ben Poston

CARRIE’s BLOG

6:29 pm, central time 9/5/2005

I’m starting to feel the effects of sleep deprivation. Yesterday morning we woke up at 6:00 am, today Ben and I were able to sleep in until 7:30. The problem is that even though I’m exhausted, when I lay me head down on my rolled up jeans in the tent and close my eyes, all I can see is the destruction in the county, the forlorn and sometimes emotional expressions on peoples’ faces.

Yesterday Rick Jones, Jr. (Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones’ son), Fairfield Twp. Police Capt. Alan Laney and Fairfield Twp. resident and registered nurse Karen Hundley arrived. As the only female in the bunch down here, I was relieved to see Karen. Since the sheriff was adamant about ‘no women’ on the premises, I have been trying to stay out of the way at camp. I feel a lot more comfortable that she is here.

These people from Fairfield Twp. are a great group. They are renegades. They were totally up for any adventure and had a little more freedom than the other guys, being volunteers.

A woman from Hamilton, Kathy Eversole-Fields, responded to one of the blogs asking for any information on her daughter, Sophia “Sissy” Bryant. She left her number and I called her. She sounded so desperate. She hasn’t heard from her daughter since the storm. There was zero inflection in her voice – she was just completely spent. I told her I would do what I could.

She then told me that she was living in a trailer. My heart dropped and I started to teary-eyed. I have seen so many trailers exploded, shredded – uttlerly destroyed. And I knew that for the most part all of the evacuees have been shipped off to places where there is a way to contact family members.

I did not want to deliver bad news.

We told Laney and Hundley about the situation and they were down from the start. We filled their pick-up with supplies, hopped in and went on a mission. We drove about 70 miles and finally found her! It was very emotional and very gratifying. We let her use the cell phone to call her mother.

What a Day That Was

2005-09-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

8:47 p.m. Saturday, September 3, 2005

To quote The Talking Heads, “What a Day That Was.”

Having never been up close and personal with a national disaster, today I learned a lot about the resiliency of the human spirit.

After getting up at the crack of dawn, feeling like absolute filth, we were greeted with hundreds of blown down trees. We grabbed a granola bar or two, we followed the Butler County Sheriff’s deputies to the Stone County Correctional Facility in Wiggins, Miss., where the they were sworn in as Stone County officers at the request of Sheriff Mike Farmer.

It was a formality, yet it gave us a glimpse of life in rural Wiggins, where Sheriff Farmer has a picture of Andy Griffith adorning his desk, begging the question, “Are we really in Mayberry?” His scrolling screensaver said Mike “Taterbug” Farmer. He was a genial fellow, telling us about how he nearly was caught in the height of the hurricane after fielding a false call about a woman in labor.

From there we headed to the Stone County Fairgrounds where a free store was set up for anyone who needed assistance. One thing that struck me was the general cooperation among county jail inmates, police and volunteers to disperse as much food, water and ice as possible.

I tend to think of events in terms of emotion and expressions on people’s faces. Seeing thousands of young, elderly, black and white folks all struck with the same dilemma leaves a lasting imprint in your mind. I saw a lot tired, hungry, lost faces today. Everyone was so grateful for the water, food and ice, but I couldn’t help thinking that it’s going to take a long time before anything gets back to normal in southern Mississippi. I have met so many people who have literally lost everything that I am sort of numb to it.

We can see the Milky Way. I can’t say that I remember the last time I saw the galaxy. The crazy part is that we would never get a chance to see it if not for the rolling power outages. Not just a little bit, but it lights up the sky. I’ve sat on the Smoky Mountain ridge in the winter and been up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, but I’ll never forget sitting out on a moonless night in Wiggins, Miss., with nothing to look at but a million stars.

Carrie’s posting
carriejcochran@yahoo.com
7:21 pm, central time 9/3/2005 The sun is setting in Wiggins, Miss. and my eyes are getting heavy. Today the temperature was in the upper 90s and I was out in the sun for a good part of it. We mostly stayed at the Stone County Fairgrounds, where a relief center was set up to distribute ice, water and hygiene products. It was pretty incredible. Our Butler County guys were working like horses, running to and fro, dressed in black from head to toe, on top of their bullet-proof vests in the sweltering heat. They were loading thousands of bags of ice, jugs of water, and directing the swarm of cars. They are genuinely caring, giving men. The Butler County deputies and Prebble County volunteer usually managed to put a smile on their faces, not just by handing them items they desperately needed, but by also lightening the mood with a joke or a friendly comment. With the thousands of people they encountered in assembly line fashion, they didn't forget to ask the basic question, "How are you getting along?" After a while it was hard just to take photos. I put my camera down and joined in the effort, directing traffic and fielding questions. There's just so much work to be done and I feel a little inadequate for being here to document instead of do. Although many of the people that came through were pretty bad off, the fact that they made it to the relief center puts them in a different class than the rest of those stranded in the remote areas of the county. The gas crisis has left many people without options and the large portion of impoverished people down here in rural Miss. didn't have many options before Katrina. A group of our men went out, trying to find those people to get supplies out to them. Among them was a volunteer from Prebble County named Jared Holmes, who has an especially warm heart. He said that he found many elderly people who haven't seen things like ice and people other than their immediate neighbors in a week. Some had just a day's worth of food left and didn't want to take food that would last them longer than another day to be sure that there was enough to go around. -c
Ben:
7:15 a.m., Saturday, September 3, 2005

We arrived in Wiggins, Miss., last night around 11 p.m. and were escorted by a police officer to the edge of the Golf Coast Community College campus. We slept in a tent last night in a tent near the college’s stadium.

Trees are blown down everywhere. Roofs are ripped off of some of the student dorms here. We went to use the bathroom this morning and the door was blown off a concession stand. The damage seems fairly substantial here but I know just 30 miles south in Gulf Port, Miss., things are much worse.

We will accompany a group of Butler County Sheriff’s deputies to the Stone County correctional facility where they will be sworn in as peace officers here to help assist a small county police force that is overburdened. Many of the authorities down here have been working non-stop since Katrina hit Monday. BCSO Sgt. Ken Hall told me last night that there have been a few incidents at gas stations near Wiggins where people will find out which gas station is to be refueled by a tanker. Folks around here listen to scanners and use CB radios to spread the word of a gas arrival. By then, the gas stations become chaotic as hundreds fight for gas.

After delivering two semi truckloads of food, water and supplies, Sgt. Hall said all the folks in Wiggins were understandably grateful for the help. He said there was some desperation among residents, but for the most part they remained calm.

katrina

2005-09-03T16:04:00.000-07:00

hjn0904katrina

By Benjamin Poston

For the JournalNews

Their faces sunburned and weary, thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors arrived from far and wide in search of life’s necessities.

People of all ages, races, income levels came Saturday to Stone County Fairgrounds in hurricane-ravaged Wiggins, Miss., where truckloads of ice, water, food and personal hygiene items awaited them.

Six members of Butler County Sheriff’s Office handed out Federal Emergency Management Agency-donated goods, delivered food to victims, patrolled the roads and kept the peace.

The six — deputies Morgan Dallman, Ron Owens, Reggie Bronnenberg, Daron Rhoads, Randy Lambert, and Sgt. Kent Hall — drove for 18 hours to get to the rural logging town of 5,000 people located 33 miles north of Gulf Port, Miss. Jared Holmes, a BCSO volunteer, also accompanied the task force.

With them they brought four semi trailers full of supplies for hurricane victims that were distributed Friday to people and warehouses.

“We are here to help them,” Hall said Saturday morning before his men were sworn in as Stone County Sheriff’s deputies to assist a county in “controlled chaos.” “Whatever they ask us to do, we will do it.”

Those who received aid gave a resounding “thank you.”

When asked how she would cope without the government assistance, Stone County resident Theresa Weathersby said, “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.”

“I feel blessed to be here and I’m just glad I’m alive,” she said.

Local law enforcement seemed to be as appreciative as the storm victims.

Wiggins Police Chief Buddy T. Bell expressed his gratitude, eventually getting choked up by the overwhelming support.

“When I saw the first truck of supplies, it was the happiest sight I’d ever seen,” Bell said. “I’m just so thankful. They came all the way from Ohio to help us. Words can’t describe how I feel right now.”

Winds in Wiggins, just east of where the eye of Katrina passed through, approached speeds of 130 miles per hour while Katrina pounded the county for about eight hours, Bell said.

“There isn’t a power line in this city that is not on the ground. I remember Camille in 1969, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen. You take everything for granted until its not here.”

The Mississippi native vowed to remain optimistic, even in the face of such widespread damage.

“We will rebuild. We are going to make it. Everyday is better than the last day,” Bell said.

The Butler County taskforce matches the number of full-time deputies on staff to patrol the county of 20,000 people, Stone County Sheriff Mike Farmer said. He said the relief effort wouldn’t be possible without the help of law enforcement from Ohio and Florida.

“It’s a blessing and I can’t thank them enough,” said Farmer, who nearly was stuck in harm’s way as Katrina rolled in after answering a false alarm of a woman in labor.

When Owens arrived to the fairgrounds Saturday morning, he said though it was his assignment to keep things in order, he felt compelled to do some heavy lifting of 42-pound bags of ice.

“I can’t stand around when these guys are working their butts off,” Owens said.

Dallman, an eight-year veteran of BCSO, said he felt honored to be chosen for the relief effort during a break from directing traffic into the fairgrounds.

“It gives you a good feeling to know you can help the people and it makes you think about how good we have it in Ohio,” Dallman said. “It gives you a different side of law enforcement. Instead of doing your basic road patrol, everything we are doing is really benefiting the people down here.”

A FEMA official, who asked not to be named, said he was dropped off 10 hours before Katrina’s landfall and was on the Gulf coast when the category-5 hurricane hit. He was on hand for the relief effort in Wiggins.

“The government has always told people that you’re on your own for 72 hours,” he said. “It’s going to take time to get help here.”

Survivor stories

Life will never be the same for Wiggins resident Cassandra McDonald who lost all her possessions and the home she rented in the hurricane. An insulin-dependent diabetic, she and her two daughters, ages 3 and 16, have no place to call home.

If it weren’t for the food and water available at the fairgrounds, “We would die,” McDonald said.

“It’s hard and it’s sad,” said McDonald, crying. “We have no water, no lights, no phone. We don’t have nowhere to go.”

Mike Schrewsbury, a Stone County resident, said the home that he rents outside of Wiggins was destroyed in the hurricane when a large pine tree fell on it, just missing his pickup truck.

“I just feel happy to be alive,” Schrewsbury said. “Everything else can be replaced.”

His son, Brandon Schrewsbury, is a 15-year-old who attends Stone High School, but for now school has been cancelled indefinitely.

A woman from Gulf Port, Miss., who asked not to be named, said she lost her home in the hurricane. She and her husband were stocking up on ice and water.

“I cried for two days but I said there’s nothing I can do about it now,” she said.

Home away from home

The Butler County taskforce, which plans to stay in Mississippi for seven to 10 days, has set up camp behind the football stadium of Golf Coast Community College near Wiggins. Their mobile post features two police cruisers, three motor homes and two crews of embedded reporters.

The campus of Golf Coast sustained heavy damage by Katrina as hundreds of trees were blown down and numerous dormitories lost roofs and bricks.

It’s an eerie setting for a camp, with the campus abandoned except for a few hundred utility workers that were camped near the stadium.

Bronnenberg said he is impressed at how law enforcement can work together in times of crisis.

“There’s no comparison when something like this happens,” Bronnenberg said. “We all come together. You wouldn’t find anyone from our force that wouldn’t want to come down.”

After catching only nine hours of sleep in two days, the deputies Saturday were exhausted but also had trouble getting to sleep. They were running on adrenaline and feeling anxious before another long day of lending a hand to anyone in need.

8:01 a.m. 9/3/2005

Woke up this morning groggy, with my eyes glued shut. Even though I was exhausted last night, I had trouble getting to sleep because of nerves. I was still worried about the gas station and being able to send photos. We’re just above a ½ tank and we guess we could be as far as 150 away from working stations. We can’t be certain though.

Today we’re following the Butler County Sheriff’s deputies. It’s a relief to finally meet up with them. The small town of Wiggins is in rural Miss. and from what we hear people there are grateful for the assistance. It should be much calmer than Gulf Port, which is where we were originally going to meet up with them.

9:27 pm, central time

It’s pitch black and we don’t see many people on the highway.

We made it to Interstate 10 in Miss., the main expressway that runs along the coast. The convoy decided to go to Wiggins, about 30 miles north of Gulf Port so that’s where we’re headed.

We’ll be driving through Gulf Port shortly, where Katrina’s eye ravaged the coast. I wish we could see it in daylight.

7:15 pm, central time

“You’re anxious and nervous,” Ben shouted.

That was after I yelled at him for not doing a U-turn on the interstate.

He said, “It’s unsafe!”

I said, “You need to think on your feet!”

We had just passed a gas station that actually had gas. We didn’t know when the next exit would be. He reassured me that there would be one soon at that we’d turn around and go back.

About ten miles later we did. We went to a BP where attendants were doubling as traffic controllers. There was a $35 limit. Gas was a surprising $2.52. That’s a lot cheaper than when I left Cincinnati Thurs. night. It was at $3.09 and $3.19

We met a man who had seven 55-gallon drums in the bed of his diesel pick-up. He said he’s gone through the line at this station six times. Someone else had around ten 1 and 5-gallon gas cans. I imagined myself plucking one of the cans when he wasn’t looking.

One of the station attendants said that in Mobile, a woman got punched after the station went dry. The man behind her screamed that she took the last of the gas.

Well, that’s where we’re headed. Mobile, 67 miles.

On the gate of his diesel pick-up truck, Joseph Kitchens of Collins, Miss. fills one of his seven 55-gallon drums Friday evening, Sept. 2, 2005, at a BP near Atmore, Ala. The whole state of Miss. is under a 20-gallon limit and the few stations in southern Ala. that still have gas have imposed their own rationing. Kitchens, who has family in Collins staying in travel trailers 175 miles away said, "I come all the way over here just for this. To feed the generators... I've been through this line six times."

6:52 pm, central time

Prius! Prius! Why didn’t I buy you a year ago instead of my ’98 Carolla?

Sure, it would’ve been a whole lot of money that I didn’t have, but I think it would’ve paid off in the end. I would feel like a better world citizen. And I’d be in a heck of a lot better shape now.

We’ve got ¾ of a tank. Just met a couple at a rest stop 80 miles north ofMobile who we observed filling their tank with a gas can. They had 20 gallons in cans in the trunk. So we decided we’d better stop to fill up in the next station.

There was nothing there. Not a drop at any of the four stations at that exit. SUVs and diesel pick-ups are flying by us and I’m wondering what their game plan is. Will we pass them by on the side of the road up ahead or do they have secret reserves like the couple we met?

6:02

We stopped at the Wal-Mart in Greenville to stock up. We got as much water as my little Carolla could hold, as well as some food. It’s not much, but every little bit counts.

3:50 pm central time

We stopped at a hotel about 160 miles north of Mobile. They were kind enough to let us use their internet.

Ross Baker at the front desk said that 80% of the people here are displaced.

Just heard from my mom. A life-long republican. She said that she's upset with Bush because she doesn't think he's been doing enough, and not being timely enough.

"It's like a third world country down there," she said. "I don't understand why they can't air-lift these people out. They are dying on their rooftops. And why are they just now sending buses down there to get people out of there."

This is the first time I've heard her say anything negative about Bush.

Also just got word that the Middletown National Guard is being deployed.

2:46 pm central time

I’m starting to get really nervous. My belly is churning. We’re 50 miles north of Montgomery.

Just got a call from Hamilton JournalNews chief photographer Greg Lynch. He says Butler County Sheriff Jones has left several messages with the paper, encouraging them to send us back. He said that the police, deputies and sergeants that we are following feel unsafe, even being armed law enforcement. Somehow we’re supposed to meet up with them, although cell service is down.

Jones also is anxious about having a female on the trip and is displeased that I am going. But I knew that before we left. He wouldn’t allow any women law enforcement to be a part of the trip.

We brought camping supplies and the plan is to stay on site with their convoy once we reach them.

Stopped to get gas and a few miles back in a station that had 20-gallon limits imposed. Gas was still only $2.99 for regular. I saw ‘only’ with a hint of irony. It’s all relative I guess. I just figured it would cost more by now.

We have 2 five-gallon gas cans filled. We tried to buy another at that station but they were sold out. I imagine that we won’t find one from here on out. So we’ll have to deal with 10-gallon reserves Just before that we passed an army convoy with soldiers in a covered truck. I took their photo and they waved.

1:15 pm central time

We stopped to eat at Denny’s, just south of Birmingham. Something quick, but a chance to stretch our legs. The sign on the door said, “Sorry. Due to the storm we do not accept credit cards.”

Called some family friends who live in Birmingham and they said that they were out of power for three days, but that it was just restored last night.

“We had a lot of candlelight dinners,” he said.

“How romantic,” I said.

By the looks of this map, Birmingham is something like 250 miles north of the coast.

10:46 am central time

Just left the Hampton Inn in Columbia, Tenn., which is about an hour south of Nasheville. Didn’t get much sleep.

Apparently there are two people staying in the hotel who are fleeing from the storm. Libby Hallmark, the person at the front desk, said they have had about 10 total from Katrina. We weren't able to speak to the two before we left. She said that when Ivan came through, it was crazy. The Hampton Inn was giving $20 discounts to victims and to relief workers going down.

"Some hotels try to take advantage of these people and price-gouge them."

Libby was bummed because she had planned to leave for Memphis tomorrow for American Idol try-outs, but because of the relief efforts, the try-outs have been cancelled.

On the Road

2005-09-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

After four hours of sleep, Carrie and I are getting back on the road — I-65 south to Birmingham, Montgomery and eventually Gulf Port, Miss. Beyond the fatigue, the heat and allergies are making me feel less than whole. I'm at about 40 percent.

It should take us 2.5 hours to Birmingham and after that I'm not sure — I think another five or six hours down to the Gulf coast. We are extremely worried about gas supplies and will be carrying 10 gallons of gas in the trunk. In Carrie's Toyota Corolla, that should get us about 300 miles or more. I figure that will save us from being stranded somewhere in Alabama. We have about 8 gallons of water and a healthy supply of food — pretty much all backpacking food out of habit.

We have a tent and sleeping bags for stealth camping. I'm sure those will come in handy. Sleeping in your car is not for me.

I just realized that I've never been to Alabama, Mississippi or Lousiana. This will certainly not be the best time to visit the deep south.

I had trouble falling asleep last nite as thoughts of chaos, looting, starvation and loss of life flooded our brains. I think the most devastating thing about Katrina is the breadth of its wrath and the chilling thought that this problem won't go away for weeks, months or even years. Like so many Americans, the thought of losing your home and livelihood all in one day is staggering. I would have no idea how to rebuild your life after that.

Watching President Bush on MSNBC with FEMA Director and Alabama Governor looking at the damage and relief efforts. Roughly 5,000 aerial rescues so far, according to the U.S. Coast Guard official.

The New York Times said this will be Bush's toughest test since 9/11 and I think in a lot of ways it will be more difficult because of the widespread nature of the disaster and the number of people affected.

More later when we find an Internet cafe of library in Alabama.

Ben Poston

South of Nashville-Day 1

2005-09-02T05:03:00.000-07:00

It's 5 a.m. and we just pulled into a Hampton Inn off Interstate 65 just south of Nashville, Tenn. Carrie Cochran, a photographer for the Hamilton JournalNews (owned by Cox News), and I are completely exhausted, therefore this posting will be short. We met around 3 a.m. in Nashville, consolidated our gear, parked my car in a safe spot near Vanderbilt University and headed south.

Gas seems to be steady at around $3 a gallon. We talked to the hotel concierge and she said there are a few hurricane evacuees staying at this hotel, but's it's a ghost town right now.

Made contact with Butler County Sheriff's Sgt. Ken Hall on his cell. His crew of four semi trailers went straight through tonight to Gulf Port, Miss. Had hoped they would stop farther north. We are trying to catch up with Sgt. Hall and embedded Local 12 WKRC reporters as they give supplies to folks on the coast.

We will sleep for four or five hours and hit the road later this morning. The initial anxiousness of the trip has worn off and now a more ominous feeling is setting in.

Ben Poston

Heading down to Katrina

2005-09-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

I've never felt this anxious before.

I'm all packed up and ready to leave Missouri for Alabama and eventually down to Mississippi or Lousiana. We are to meet up with a relief crew from Butler County, Ohio. They will be delivering food to refugees and survivors of the hurricane. I will be freelancing for Cox Ohio News and the Hamilton JournalNews with my girlfriend and photographer Carrie Cochran.

There are so many emotions swirling right now...but there is no time!

I will be writing a newsblog for MyMissourian.com and possibly for the JournalNews.

Please pray for all the victims of Katrina and for Carrie and myself.

Ben Poston