I do not know – and won’t guess at – the exact cause of the fire that killed Lisa McCarty, 24, and two of her children last week in Monticello. Authorities say the fire in the older home started in the electrical service.
Their graveside services are at 11 a.m. today at Concord Family Cemetery in Havana. Following the service, there will be a celebration of their lives at Old Bainbridge Park on Old Bainbridge Road in Tallahassee.
Lisa’s father, Kent Phillips, called the newspaper last week, saying he wanted to talk about the fire and his son-in-law, Mark McCarty, who dived through a window into the blazing fire to try to rescue his family. Mark survived and saved a son, Ashton, 4.
I asked Local Desk Editor Rebeccah Cantley to call Mr. Phillips and set up an interview for a reporter. Facing a tough schedule for the weekend, with seven graduation ceremonies and the Legislature somewhere in the still-wrapping-up stages, Cantley assigned the story to herself.
I knew there were other reasons, too. Just a couple days after the tragic fire, this would be a tough interview and hard story to write. After an initial telephone conversation with Mr. Phillips, she set up an interview for Saturday.
By the time our readers see our stories, they are ink on paper or different shades of digital lights. They read between the lines, seek hidden meanings or infer motive from every word. Although such assignment of ulterior motivations is nearly always way off base, I can live with that. What’s worse, especially on stories such as this one, is the belief we are indifferent.
Cantley was not indifferent. I don’t know how anyone could have been.
Before heading to Monticello for the interview, she picked up a card for the family and a teddy bear for Ashton.
We do our best to be fair in how we gather and report the news.
We do our best to be true to the story, not to force the facts to tell our vision of the reality.
We do our best to be balanced in presenting all sides.
But we can’t promise indifference, and when it comes to trying to portray a story like this one, we can’t promise objectivity.
I cried when editing Rebeccah’s story on this family. I had to do it in stages. Focus my attention in the first read through on the storytelling. Focus next on spelling and grammar. I had to keep going back and checking my work, even up until the story was physically on the page.
I want reporters and editors who care. I don’t want indifference. I want them to feel our sources' passion and emotions, and I want their writing to reflect that.
I had my ethics challenged by a reader because I accepted a hug from Margie Weiss and spent time talking with her. Weiss is the mother of Rachel Hoffman, the confidential informant who was brutally murdered a year ago.
Would I extend the same to the two men accused in her shooting? He asked.
An interview, yes. A hug, no. If it makes me unethical to accept a hug from a woman whose daughter was murdered, whatever you think of the woman or her daughter, so be it. Reporters and editors were people before they became journalists, and journalists who forget that aren’t worth a dime.
I remember being young and living in my hometown, having gotten my first full-time reporting job working at a newspaper that had published my high-school graduation picture on an inside page. My wife and I bought an old house across from the saw mill that had once produced the boards that built our place. We had two little ones then, more on the way, and we had bought the house as a fixer-upper when my weekly salary finally topped $250.
We worried constantly about the combination of the aging wood and out-of-date wiring, and we upgraded as we could – both the wood and the wiring – before moving to another house in a city far away.
I cried reading Cantley’s story as a father and husband, wondering if I would have had the strength and courage to dive through a window into that burning house.
There but for the grace of God, I thought.
No, I want journalists who can accept a hug from a still-grieving mother, who can cry and who bring teddy bears to 4-year-ol
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d little boys who survive such a hell.
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