When Tragedy Hits Home   

Their friends, their sources, their family. Their city. Reporters weren't just chronicling other peoples' losses in Oklahoma City. They were feeling it too.

"I saw it in their faces," says Joyce Reed, news director of KWTV in Oklahoma City, referring to local reporters covering the bombing. "There were occasions when I saw it on the air. Most of the people on the staff are from here. This is their home."

But the story came first. And, again, the pack had to be there.

"You have to put a face on something like this," Reed says. "Otherwise, what you would see is a bombed building with a lot of steel and concrete. That's not what this story is about at all. It's about the people who were affected. There is no way to comprehend the toll of human life if you can't connect with another person."

The station immediately arranged crisis counseling for reporters, but few took advantage of it because they were so busy covering the devastation.

"There is so little time to think about it when you are working, working, working," Reed says. "When it really affects you is when you get in the car and you drive home and you start thinking about it on a personal level. Then you get home and turn the television on because you can't sleep and you just stare at the images. It starts to become real. It starts to hit you as a person."

Many reporters say they cried, either at the scene or when they got home at night.

"Yesterday afternoon I talked to the family of these two little boys who had been in the day care center," says Amanda Davis of the Associated Press. "They were still holding out hope. But a few hours later I called the funeral home and I learned those little boys had died. It was hard. You step into these people's lives for a few hours in crisis, but you think about them long after the fact."

"I don't have children," says Diana Baldwin of the Daily Oklahoman. "I was a police reporter for 12 years, so I was hardened to a number of things. But this was pretty eerie.

"On one side of the scene there would be dead babies, and on the other there would be mothers screaming for their children. I'll never forget that."

Baldwin recorded a woman who was covered in blood who exclaimed before CNN cameras that she didn't know if her husband or two children were alive, and that she hoped whoever had bombed the building was happy.

"When I went back later and played the tape, it was much more vivid than I remembered," she says. "When you are doing your story, everything is moving very, very fast and you are trying to get as much as you can. You don't have time to think about your own feelings. It didn't sink in until I came back and listened to the tape. It was horrible."

Randy Ellis, who works with Baldwin on the paper's investigative team, says he and others experienced the same awakening as others across the country.

"It has changed our own sense of time and family," he says. "People left that morning not knowing they were in any danger and in a matter of two seconds they no longer had a mom or dad or sister or child. To suddenly know that can happen, you realize how every moment is as precious as it can be.

"This affected everybody," he adds. "Just the massiveness of it, and the fact that most people knew somebody who was missing or dead or survived. In other stories, there may be a sense that the media are intruding. But here I think we are a part of it. We're going through it together. I know some who are dead and I know some who survived. So because it has affected all of us, people are bringing things to us, like food, and calling to thank us."

The journalists experienced the same stress of waiting for the news of who lived and who died. But they weren't waiting to hear about one or two people. They were waiting to hear what happened to dozens of people.

Associated Press reporter Judy Gibbs describes the father who came forward with a snapshot of his two sons who had been in the day care center. The boys were looking in the mirror, and the way the flash bounced, they had halos over their heads.

"Just waiting to hear was hard," she says. "The bodies were identified yesterday and it hit me really hard."

The first name released from the list of confirmed dead was that of Pam Argo, reporter Ed Godfrey's second cousin.

Godfrey, of the Daily Oklahoman, had been waiting for the confirmation. He didn't know Argo well, but shared the loss with his extended family.

Reporters often tell grieving relatives that they want to profile the victims so their names won't blend into the roster of the dead.

That's how Godfrey felt when Argo's name was released. Her name should have a face, he said. He did the story.

"I don't know if that's easier to do with strangers or relatives," he says. "I wanted to tell who Pam was, what kind of person she was so it would bring home the enormous tragedy of this whole thing and how innocent these people were."