Why it’s tough to call after something bad happens

When a baby died after being left in a van by her foster father, Roger Ham, I didn’t have to look up his phone number. I know it by heart.

I met longtime foster parents Steven and Roger Ham in 2011 when I first wrote about their 12 children, all adopted through foster care.

People invite me into their homes and their lives to tell their stories. I spend time with them. I answer the phone when they call, and we talk for hours, sometimes late at night. Grief keeps odd hours.

“You’re better than counseling,” Roxanne Warneke told me after her husband, Billy, was killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013.

Not really. But I am a good listener, and patient.

Roxanna Green could only speak for a half hour when we first met in 2011. I couldn’t know what she was going through. Her 9-year-old daughter Christina-Taylor was shot and killed outside a Tucson-area grocery store.

Eight months later the first story I wrote about Roxanna and her family published.

I stay in touch with people I write about. But as I explained to Roxanna once, if something bad happened, say, money went missing from her foundation, I’d have to write about that.

“I’d want you to write that story,” Roxanna said.

Usually nothing goes wrong. When it does, it’s tough.

I wrote in 1997 about Elizabeth Whittle and Anthony Perez, of Avondale, and their quadruplets. Readers donated gifts and money.

Four months later, the quads were hospitalized with fractured skulls and broken bones caused by abuse. I covered the investigation, trial and sentencing.

More than 20 years later, I thought about that as I tapped in the Hams’ phone number and listened to it ring. It would be a tough call, but I made it, because that’s what we do.