Erik Hansen, editor of this newspaper, received an upset phone call last week from an out-of-state relative of one of the four young men killed in the Sept. 30 car accident on Rainier Avenue South. She'd read the story on our website: Too much gory detail left in the story, she maintained.
Who could blame her? She spoke from the unimaginable depths of anguish, and yet what ended up in print reflected only a tiny shard of the horror.
Eyewitnesses figure the black BMW entered the 9500 block on a Saturday evening going between 80-100 mph. The debris field extended more than a block.
The 100 or so people who gathered around the crash know how little of what they saw made its way into the daily newspaper accounts. Reticence in such matters is the journalistic standard.
Erik and I talked about this, and we felt more of the accident's horror needed to be conveyed to our readers. Our account, it seemed to us, shouldn't be totally sanitized in the name of business-as-usual. People need to know what excessive speed can do to the human anatomy. If one person got the message about cars and speed it would be worth it.
Walt Whitman, writing of the Civil War, remarked that the real war would never make it into the history books. During World War II the American public remained shielded from images of dead GI's until late in the conflict. Even now we're treated to photos of flag-waving patriotism on Main Street while shots of flag draped coffins shipped home from the Middle East are verboten.
Society manufactures its own, convenient states of denial in order, we tell ourselves, to keep going. Too often, newspapers are no exception.
I remember one exception from 20 years ago.
I was working at the Port Orchard Independent, a community newspaper south of Bremerton. On a prom night in spring a high school senior, already loaded, left the dance alone in search of more alcohol. Rounding a curve on the approach to town he collided with a beater Toyota truck driven by a guy in his 30s.
The 18-year-old was lucky: He was killed outright.
The guy in the truck, on the other hand, pinned by the caved-in dashboard, remained conscious. A small fire started licking around his feet and then grew. The first aid crew and cops on the scene emptied their fire extinguishers as the flames retreated and flared up again.
The guy trapped inside started out imploring God and ended up crying out for his "mommy."
It was a pretty tough, Saturday night crowd that stood helplessly by. The police report said the cops, sensing what some in the crowd felt needed to happen, secured their own weapons.
The first fire truck to arrive put out the flames. The man, muttering incoherently, was extracted from the wreckage. Below the waist there was nothing but charred bone.
He died the next day in a hospital bed, his mother holding his hand.
Our editor, a bespectacled, kid-faced, 40-year-old bachelor who said things like "Golly," and "Gee," had no time for the standard denial mode.
His jaw set, his calm demeanor twitching with anger and disgust over what alcohol and driving and can do, he ran the entire police report verbatim, with all the detail; with all the cries for help. The owner of the paper made it a practice to never interfere with his pet editor.
The unfiltered account rocked the town.
I still think of it and shudder.
As my mother told me, when I got my driver's license at 16: "You have a right to kill yourself, I suppose, but nobody else."
When the time came I passed on that advice to my two sons, now in their early 20s - at the height of their immortality.
Like a lot of parents, I'm a hypocrite.
As an 18-year-old I was proud of my prowess at drinking and driving. My high school friends and I never went anywhere without a six-pack at our feet.
I could have easily been that 18-year old losing control on the curve outside Port Orchard.
It was a miracle the accident on Rainier Avenue South didn't wipe out a lot of innocent lives. My first reaction to the news was: Damn those guys. Most of me still feels that way.
Our society is already too rife with excuse making, with dodging accountability. Starting at the top. But in this case, as the anguished caller made clear, it's always more complicated than that. The four young men, inexcusably reckless, were somebody's sons, somebody's nephew.
But this was no time for the standard, journalistic treatment of an accident. Tasteful reticence, in a case like this, comes at a price.
The first people on the scene know what they saw. They will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.[[In-content Ad]]
