Huntersville - United States

I had the tables turned on me this week.

I had the tables turned on me this week.

This past Sunday, my daughter Mary and I were the subjects of a story in the Charlotte Observer. Folks in our business are supposed to report the news, not write it. But, even though I was uncomfortable with the role reversal, in this case I was more than willing to see it happen.

The Observer reporter, Michael Gordon, recounted how Mary’s powerful account of her own suicide attempt, published a year ago in The Citizen, helped reshape my own thinking about how to report on suicide and mental health. I’m grateful that our editor, Andrew Warfield, and publisher, Kim Clark, not only accepted this approach, but embraced it.

It’s when, as Gordon wrote so succinctly, the Citizen “started naming names.”

Suicide has long been taboo in newsrooms. The unwritten rule has long been that, except for situations involving very public figures, suicides went unreported. Exposing a death as being self-inflicted, the thinking goes, will heap shame upon the deceased and those close to them.

Trouble is, this approach both dehumanizes the person and reinforces the fallacy that mental illness is not a medical condition as surely as cancer, Parkinson’s or muscular sclerosis.

That’s not to say I believe every suicide should be reported as such. As Gordon notes in his story, when the Citizen has identified those who’ve committed suicide, we’ve done it only after discussing it with the families, either directly or through those close to them.

Maurice

The first example of our new approach came last September, after the puzzling suicide of a 16-year-old young man from Davidson. Here’s how I began the story:

We’ve all done it.

We’ve taken something just a little too far, to the point where we’re helpless to undo what we’ve done.

Maybe it happens during an argument with someone we love, when the objective becomes not just winning the quarrel, but inflicting emotional damage. So we unleash the ultimate insult, conscious of the fact that it will pierce the soul of this person we care for deeply and that the wound might never heal.

Even as the words leave our mouths, we know that we’re wrong to utter them. But we can’t take them back. The scars are proof of that. Grace becomes our only hope. Maybe, just maybe, the loved ones we’ve hurt will forgive us, even if they can’t forget how badly we’ve hurt them.

We don’t know what 16-year-old Maurice Van Hecke of Davidson was thinking last Friday afternoon, when he drove a beat-up Honda to the BB&T bank on Harris Road near Poplar Tent Road in Concord, just east of Huntersville. We don’t know what went through the Hough High School junior’s mind as he pulled a mask over his face and carried a handgun into the bank, where he demanded cash.

What we do know is that after ordering the bank’s employees to hand over money, Van Hecke realized that becoming an armed robber was going too far.

“He freaked out,” is the way one family friend put it this week, referring to what witnesses told police about the incident.

When police cornered Van Hecke in a nearby garage, he turned the gun on himself. The point of the story was not to sensationalize a tragedy, but rather to portray this young man as someone just like the rest of us, as someone who, sadly, felt he’d gone so far that there was no coming back.

Jocelyn

The next suicide story marked what would have been the 18th birthday of Jocelyn Desmond, whose death actually inspired Mary’s story. Here’s how that piece began:

I never met her, but I feel like I knew her. Lots of people did know Jocelyn Desmond, and that, quite simply, is because she was so easy to know.

Jocelyn was a portrait of the perfect suburban teenaged girl. She was smart. She was pretty. She was popular. That’s what seemed to make it all the more tragic last March when the news swept through the Hough High School community and across cyberspace like an Arctic wind. 

Jocelyn Desmond had taken her own life.

Jan. 27 was Jocelyn’s 18th birthday. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know her parents, Jaletta and Alan Desmond, and I know they struggled through the day that should have been reason for celebration, just as they struggled through the first holiday season without Jocelyn.

At least two other local teens — including another Hough student — took their own lives last year, and their families also will suffer through the series of “firsts” without their children.

Saying Jocelyn was special is like saying sweet tea goes down easy on a sweltering August afternoon. It’s like saying the house smells heavenly as the turkey cooks on Thanksgiving. It’s like saying a sunrise over the ocean is breathtaking.

It’s a given.

How can I know this if I never met her? 

I know it because of the outpouring of love that followed her death, a wave of warmth that continues as faithfully as the tides to this day from friends of Jocelyn and the Desmonds. I know it because of the postings on Facebook and other social media sites from teens who had never met Jocelyn, but saw her at school and other places and respected — and even admired — her because of the way she conducted herself.

And, tragically, I know it because of the pain I continue to see in those who were closest to her. 

“It was an obviously very sad and difficult day, a day that should’ve been a celebration but was a painful one without her,” Jeletta Desmond says of her daughter’s 18th birthday. “However, once again, we were wrapped up in the love and support of our community of friends and family, both near and far.”

Jocelyn Desmond was a person, not a suicide, and that was the point of the story.

As I told Michael Gordon, this is a close-knit community. When tragedies like these happen, the news spreads on its own. My job, at least as I see it, is to give that news some context, to remind people as they’re spinning the rumor mill that these are real people, people more like them than maybe they’d care to admit.

It’s the living

It’s easy to think of “the media” as a collection of callous cynics who like nothing better than exploiting tragedy. Nothing could be further from the truth at the Citizen. Writing about Maurice and Jocelyn, as well as the several personal pieces I’ve done about my own experiences with depression, was actually emotionally excruciating. Just ask my colleagues who watch me labor, who see me leave the building to collect myself, who see the tears in my eyes as I walk away from my desk.

Others here have had the same experiences. It’s what I love about them. It’s also what’s both wonderful and wearisome about community journalism. We’re writing about our neighbors, and that raises the emotional stakes. 

But I firmly believe we’re establishing a new model for community newspapers, one that treats our subjects as people first, one that acknowledges that how a person lives will always be more noteworthy than how he or she dies.

I pray that one day, we’ll all look at our neighbors the same way.

The package was innocuous enough, the plain brown envelope having been pulled out of the mailbox. The handwriting was recognizable and its contents known without opening.

It was a day 17 years in the making, starting at First Ward Accelerated Learning Academy in downtown Charlotte and continuing through Blythe Elementary, Bradley Middle and Hopewell High schools.

If you're the first to be wrong, what do you win?

It's a question worth asking, after the farcical "reporting" of certain broadcast news outlets on Tuesday's bomb threats at Hough High School.

The morning reports were sensational, especially in light of the Boston Marathon bombing, search and arrest. "Suspicious device found at Hough High School," radio and TV news stations blared.

A dog show ribbon, a magnet from Amsterdam, a yellowing Dennis the Menace comic strip clipped from the paper at least 10 years ago (he's been sent to the corner — again — and asks his long-suffering mom, "How come they call it a living room if a guy can't do any livin' in it?").

Things stuck on a family's refrigerator are a bit like relics unearthed from a domestic dig site — faces frozen in time, projects made out of glitter and glue by still-clumsy hands, a perpetually ignored chore list, last quarter's report card.

When his beloved Detroit Tigers beat the Minnesota Twins in the season opener last week, all was right with the world, at least for one day.

Baseball has always had a way of doing that for him, warming him like the first kiss of spring sunshine on his face. With the season's first pitch, the memories instantly coat his consciousness like pollen on his car. The diamond, whether real or imaginary, was always his escape.

He's transported back to the back yard of his boyhood home, built a year before Babe Ruth first took the field in the Major Leagues. At 10 years old, the boy was owner, manager and played every position for both teams that battled daily.

This week, I had the honor of participating in a fundraiser for a cause that shouldn't have to exist. But, in truth, I guess that's the way it is with most causes.

In this case, I was "arrested" as part of the Lock Up to Lock Out Domestic Violence event at Davidson College. The proceeds from the event go to Safe Alliance,  which provides assistance and guidance to domestic abuse victims in our area.