Tragedy led to hard decisions in the newsroom

Years ago, when I was a young reporter, I sat in a mother’s living room and wept as she recounted how she watched in unspeakable horror as her 2-year-old child — whom she had just removed from his car seat — ran out into the road and was hit and killed by a vehicle. My daughter at the time was the same age as that little boy.

Not long afterward, I read a police affidavit that spelled out, in grisly detail, how a large commercial truck had run over and killed a 5-year-old boy who was waiting for his school bus. Tears filled my eyes as I drove back to work from the courthouse, and some of what I read stays with me to this day.

Nobody who hasn’t lost a child can possibly understand the depth of grief a family struggling with such a loss has to endure, and that includes journalists like myself. I can't even begin to imagine the pain that accompanies the loss of a child.

When a fatal crash occurred on Route 107 in Belmont on Tuesday and we learned the victim was a 19-year-old man, my first reaction was genuine sadness that a promising life had been tragically cut short.

In the hours and days that followed, I was confronted with several difficult decisions about what to publish, and, indeed, whether to publish at all.

The first of those involved a photo of the crash site itself. It was sent to us by the Belmont Police Department, and showed two vehicles: one a badly damaged Honda CRV, and the other a Honda Civic.

Once we confirmed that the crash involved a fatality — about six hours after the incident — we put the story up on our website because readers count on us to post breaking news.

In doing so, we also included the photo of the crash.

We received two phone calls criticizing the decision to put up the photo. I spoke with both callers, and their message was the same: The family of the young man who was killed is devastated; please don’t add to their grief by publishing the photo of the cars.

One caller said it was just too soon to put the photo out there, while the other suggested we put the photo up to sensationalize the event. It’s true that we try to reach as many readers as possible, and one reason we add photos to stories — any story — is because people are more likely to read a story if it includes a photo. That’s true of the entire internet, and is regarded as a “best practice” in the world of web publishing.

More than that, though, photos can tell their own story, and the chaos of the Belmont wreckage informs the reader with a power that goes beyond mere words.

Still, I was not unsympathetic to the motivation behind the request. Indeed, one of the sentiments repeated throughout the newsroom that day by several of my colleagues was, “I can’t imagine what that poor family is going through.”

In the end, I decided to compromise: We left the photo up on our website, but did not include the photo when we published the story that day on our social media platforms.

We also made the decision to publish the photo on the front page of the paper the next day — a choice that, interestingly, yielded no critical calls.

The next decision we made was one for which we were roundly criticized, and understandably so.

We ran a followup story with the headline, “Chief: Seat belt would have saved life of motorist.”

It is understandable — and laudable, even — that people would criticize the decision to run that story two days after the crash, out of concern for the victim’s family. Personally, I want to live in a world where people rush to the defense of a family that is experiencing unimaginable grief, and I want people to criticize us when they think we’ve made a poor choice.

But the decision to run that story was not made lightly or haphazardly.

We considered, among other things, the source of the story. Belmont Police Chief Mark Lewandoski was on his way to work when he came upon the scene only about 30 seconds after the crash. As an experienced police officer who has responded to perhaps scores of accidents, including far too many fatal ones, we felt he was in an extraordinarily unique position to come to the conclusion he did.

Could we have waited to run the story? Of course. But we also knew that public interest in this tragedy was extremely high, not only because it involved a death, but also because both drivers were teenagers with deep roots in the community. Adding to the public interest was the fact that it happened on Route 107, not far from Route 106, a road that had seen eight fatalities from collisions in a year’s time. Both are two-lane, undivided highways.

We tried to weigh the impact publishing might have on those close to the victims, and balance that with the value the story might have for many other readers.

In the end, we felt that publishing it when we did would resonate with the public in a way that publishing it later would not. We discussed, for instance, whether the story might facilitate conversations about driver safety between teenage drivers and their parents.

In the end, the decision to publish was made with a heavy heart, because the women and men who have the privilege of putting out this paper are human. We are mothers and sisters and aunts, and fathers and brothers and uncles. We have sat in the living rooms of aggrieved families and read more affidavits than we care to remember, and we care deeply about how our decisions affect our readers.

And we respect it when some of them think we have made the wrong call.