Declined

Christopher Scott Emmett declined my request for an interview. No reason given. Today I'll work on getting in touch with the victim's family. People ask me why journalists do this - "invade" the privacy and painful times of families. Trust me, I spend many a night lying awake wondering that myself. I do it for several reasons:

Journalists are the historians. We document the events of our communities. We record the facts, the comments and the events of the day on a daily basis so there is an unbiased account of what has happened. That involves deaths, fires, accidents, who won the spelling bee, who graduated, who was promoted, who stole, who robbed, who was DUI. It's ugly sometimes, but it's the truth.

By contacting the family after a tragedy journalists get the facts and the information directly from the family. There's less likely to be gossip and conjecture - things that happen when no information is available. People who want to know what happened so they can help, or people who simply want to know what happened, won't swamp the family with phone calls that require the family to retell and retell the event. If the public gets the basic facts in the paper they can wait until later to call, or they can find out when the funeral is or other information without bothering the family.

Journalists are the eyes of the community. We see a lot and report on it. If it were up to the police and the politicians the fire department nothing would be reported. We would have a "secret society" in which corruption, scams and violence ruled. There's a reason the first ammendment is the FIRST ammendment.