Editor at N.H. weekly recalls fatal ’97 attack
Fears it will happen again
The deadly attack on a newsroom in Maryland yesterday called up dark memories for the editor of a New Hampshire paper of the day two decades ago when her managing editor was one of five people killed in an embittered man’s rampage.
“We just did what we had to do,” Karen Harrigan, editor and publisher of the weekly News and Sentinel of Colebrook, N.H., said about moving forward and putting out the newspaper. “It was very hard.”
Yesterday, journalists at the Capital Gazette in Maryland faced a similar task: reporting the awful news about their own publication, where authorities told The Associated Press Jarrod W. Ramos opened fire with a shotgun, killing five and leaving others gravely injured.
Harrigan said she thinks about the Aug. 20, 1997, attack every day.
“I try not to talk about it, but sometimes it’s necessary,” Harrigan said.
While the motivation of the Maryland shooter was not immediately released yesterday, Harrigan said she worries about increasingly violent rhetoric and bitter partisanship in America today, and fears more attacks.
“The discourse — there’s just so much vitriol,” Harrigan said. “I just worry it’ll happen more and more.”
In Colebrook in August 1997, loner Carl Drega’s feud with town officials erupted as the 67-year-old began a killing spree that left five dead, including managing editor Dennis Joos. Joos had run out to try to help one of Drega’s targets, a lawyer and local politician who worked in the same building, and Drega fatally shot them both before dying in a shootout with police.
Then a 27-year-old correspondent for the Union-Leader, Harrigan jumped in her car and headed back home when she found out about the Colebrook killings. Her father owned the newspaper. She found the area around the office a crime scene, with reporters from a range of media outlets camped out front. Inside, the staff of the News and Sentinel was hard at work.
“It was about getting the day’s paper out,” Harrigan said.
Harrigan remembers knocking on the window of her father’s office, where he was typing up coverage of the event. John Dennis Harrigan was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting for his work that day.
Karen Harrigan said there’s no right way to recover from this. One of the paper’s editors took a long break from work before returning. Harrigan herself stuck around and wrote for the weekly, helping make sure the small paper had news stories in it.
“We were grieving like everyone else was in the community,” she said.