One of the strange things about being in the news business is that you are constantly developing a personal relationship to stories that have nothing to do to you. You can talk about “objectivity” all you want—and even get close to that mythic ideal—but if you’re like most reporters I know you will be touched by everything. I still remember the mother of this one murder victim and the way she had picked at her hangnails until her entire nailbeds were bloody. I remember two murderers who I interviewed in a women’s prison. I didn’t have any connection to them before I walked in, but I still feel connected 20 years later.
On the other hand, there are stories where I get a teeny window onto a big story from some small, random connection.
There was a horrible murder-suicide last month where a man in California killed his five young children, his wife, and himself. He happened to have just lost his job at the Kaiser facility where I used to go for all my doctor’s visits. To quote the AP story:
But even more incomprehensible to some was the story that emerged after the bodies were found Tuesday: A father who, after he and his wife were fired from their jobs, killed all six family members before turning the gun on himself.
In a letter faxed to Los Angeles television station KABC before his suicide, Ervin Antonio Lupoe blamed his former employer for the deaths, detailing his grievance against Kaiser Permanente’s West Los Angeles Medical Center, where he and his wife Ana had worked as technicians.
Lupoe, 40, claimed the couple was being investigated for “misrepresentation of our employment to an outside agency for the benefit to ourselves’s [sic], childcare.” He said the initial interview was held on December 19, and when he reported for work on December 23, “I was told by my administrator … that ‘You should not even have bothered to come to work today. You should have blown your brains out.’”
“Oh lord, my God,” the letter concludes. “Is there no hope for a widow’s son?”
Kaiser Permanente said in a statement Tuesday night that while the company is “saddened by the despair in Mr. Lupoe’s letter faxed to the media … we are confident that no one told him to take his own life or the lives of his family.”
The Lupoes’ employment was terminated over a week ago “after an internal investigation,” the company said.
In a completely different intersection with the news, I found myself sleeping in the Detroit airport after an entire day of trying to get out of Louisville, Kentucky—where I was supposed to be giving a speech. I spent all day traveling there, and then the event AND my flights were canceled. Over the next few hours I got on and off planes and spent the night at the Detroit airport. In Louisville, they ran out of de-icing fluid TWICE. As one person said, that made it not an “act of god” but a mechanical error. But I’m back home. Here’s what’s going on in the ice belt.
Well over a million people shivered in ice-bound homes across the country Wednesday, waiting for warmer weather and for utility crews to restring power lines brought down by a storm that killed 23 as it took a snowy, icy journey from the Southern Plains to the East Coast. But with temperatures plunging, utility officials warned that it could be mid-February before electricity is restored to some of the hardest-hit places. The worst of the power failures were in Kentucky, Arkansas andOhio.
Just getting to their source was difficult for utility crews. Ice-encrusted tree limbs and power lines blocked glazed roads, and cracking limbs pierced the air like popping gunfire as they snapped.
Some of these folks could be without power for two weeks! And the weather is freezing!
I hope they get some relief soon.
