Sometimes the mind is the last part of you to retire, and depending on what it holds on to, that can be a good thing and a bad thing.
This week makes 37 years since they died and yet the memory of their young faces — of the first responders who worked so desperately to save them but could not — still haunts me.
Four children … the oldest of them 3 … gone.
That August morning in 1987, photographer Russ Bauman and I, working out of the WFAA-TV newsroom in Fort Worth, already had an assignment. I cannot now remember it. I do remember we were driving east on Interstate 30 in Arlington, and I recollect a two-way radio call around 10:30 a.m., which diverted us to an apartment fire on Maple Street. We headed south on Center Street into central Arlington. We could not see the smoke, but the sirens of approaching fire trucks were unmistakable.
Turning onto Maple, we watched the first truck pull up to a two-story, light-colored building. Very thick, very dark smoke belched from a second-floor window. Firefighters had already positioned a ladder beneath the window. One of them wasted no time racing up and disappearing inside.
Around us, neighbors started to gather as more fire and rescue equipment arrived. From amid the murky fumes still spitting from that window, the arm of that firefighter’s protective jacket emerged. In his hand, an exceedingly small child, head back, clearly unconscious, clothes covered with what looked to be soot. At the top of the ladder, a second firefighter snatched the child from the first and handed the youngster, not yet school age, down to the urgently awaiting arms of would-be rescuers.
They wasted no time laying the child, who appeared to be a young boy, on the ground attempting to revive him.
It was hectic. Lifesaving equipment was everywhere, and more arrived each moment. That is when I looked up and saw a second unconscious child pulled from the inferno.
Then a third.
And a fourth.
The thick smoke was unrelenting. Fire and rescue crews were working feverishly on the children all over the yard, one using his two fingers as a chest massage, others crowded around him.
They did all they could but despite their efforts that morning, four youngsters perished: a 6-month-old, a 17-month-old toddler, and a pair of 3-year-olds. Three other children and their teenaged babysitter were injured but survived. Fire investigators suspected the children had gotten hold of matches when the babysitter went to the restroom. She later told them the bathroom door had become stuck and she had had trouble getting out.
Our arrival within a couple of minutes of the first responders meant we had captured the brave actions of firefighters and the frantic attempts by rescue crews to bring those children back to life. Our competition had still not arrived to cover the story. But there is an important line between getting the necessary pictures to tell a story, even a tragic one like this one, and using the pictures.
In some countries, that line does not exist and the most gruesome images make it to television screens and newspaper front pages. Even here in America, that delineation can waiver from newsroom to newsroom.
That night on the news, we chose not to show most of the video shot that morning. The scale of the calamity could be told without subjecting the audience to images that would be forever embedded in their memories and those of rescuers.
Two families had lost their children. Four innocent youngsters would never see kindergarten.
The final expressions on the faces of those young children — the prayers and crushed appearances of the firefighters who could not save them — still haunt me, as well they should.
Some might say ignore it. I have always believed it a necessary cost of holding on to my humanity — a vital prerequisite for being a journalist.
To a far greater degree, first responders lug the same kind of internal heartache with them every day, standing in the gap between danger and the rest of us. For many, the weight stays with them for the rest of their lives. In fact, it quite likely contributes to the higher rate of suicide among law enforcement officers, firefighters, EMS providers and others documented in a 2023 study by the Journal of Safety Research.
I worked more than four decades as a broadcast journalist, most of it in the Dallas-Fort Worth television market. Every news crew every day wants to break news — to be first on the scene of a story. Rarely does it happen. When it does, with children among the victims, you walk away carrying permanent scars.
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