Columbine: Reporter's Perspectives, Part I

They spend a lifetime covering city council meetings, working the police beat and sitting through school board meetings. From solid waste to sparkling rivers, they cover the news of their community - whether it is along the beaten path or a few steps into the road. But every now and then when their mind drifts away from the day's events, nearly all journalists wonder what it would be like if the big one ever came their way.

They spend a lifetime covering city council meetings, working the police beat and sitting through school board meetings. From solid waste to sparkling rivers, they cover the news of their community - whether it is along the beaten path or a few steps into the road. But every now and then when their mind drifts away from the day's events, nearly all journalists wonder what it would be like if the big one ever came their way.

Some experts say that the number of critical incidents - school shootings, hurricanes, bombings, floods - appears to be on the rise. As the number increases each year, more and more journalists are being dispatched to the scene of traumatic events. And, like the reporters who covered the worst school massacre in history at Columbine High School last year, they may sometimes find that the experience was more than they bargained for.

"It scorched your soul," said Ann Schrader, a medical/science reporter for The Denver Post who covered the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. "It made you really look down deep within yourself."

On one side, she said, it was heartbreaking but on the other, it was a huge news story.

"These were not just numbers, these were people," Schrader said. "You had to try to be as sensitive as you could but yet still be competitive and bring people the news."

After the first report of the shooting came across the newsroom, Schrader headed for Swedish Hospital. She was halfway there when she was rerouted to the triage site near the school. Later in the day, she would report to nearby Leawood Elementary School, where her daughter was a fourth-grade student at the time and families of Columbine students waited to be reunited.

Like many of her colleagues, Schrader said her feelings about the story changed over the course of the next year.

"It was tough," she said. "People in the community grew to hate us. At times they would slam the door in our face and say nasty things about us."

For Schrader, the constant intrusion into the lives of those connected to the Columbine story eventually crossed the line.

On Oct. 26, 1999, Schrader said The Denver Post received a tip that Carla Hochhalter, the mother of a Columbine student partially paralyzed in the school shooting, had committed suicide. An editor asked Schrader to go interview the woman's neighbors.

Ironically, Schrader was scheduled to attend a presentation at Leawood Elementary School that same day for Mrs. Hochhalter's daughter, Anne Marie. Instead of taking the editor's order, she drove to the school where students had raised nearly $13,000 for Anne Marie.

When Schrader reached the school, Anne Marie and her father were about to leave. She realized that they had not yet been notified of the suicide attempt. Minutes later, a call back to the newspaper office confirmed Mrs. Hochhalter's death.

"When I went home, I told my husband what had happened and I lost it," Schrader said.

Not long after arriving home, an editor at The Denver Post called and again asked Schrader to interview the Hockhalters' neighborhood and to get an accurate "picture" of the deceased woman.

"What are we going to get out of this?" an emotional Schrader asked her editor. "I don't know if I can do this."

Although Schrader left her home to cover the assignment, she never made it to the Hockhalters' neighborhood. Instead, she called the office and told them she could not do the assignment. In turn, she said editors assigned another reporter to the story, who unknowingly knocked on the door of one of Mrs. Hockhalter's best friends, who had not yet been notified of the death.

Back at the office, an emotionally charged Schrader asked the city editor to consider bringing in counselors to get a better understanding of what reporters were doing to members of the community and to themselves. As a result, mental health counselors who had been dealing with the victims' families were brought in to provide insight into what the families were experiencing.

"Covering Columbine [taught] me that I've got to rely on my own gut on what's right and what's wrong," she said.

Despite the physical and emotional strain of covering a traumatic event, Schrader believes such an experience helped to improve her skills as a journalist.

"I learned some things about approaching people and being sensitive to them that grew out of the Columbine experience," Schrader said. "When I was a young reporter, I always liked to have this line between me and my subjects. Then, as I grew the line started to be erased. I think that line has to be erased to be able to really talk to people on a human level."