The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Annapolis mourns shooting victims: ‘They were part of us’
ANNAPOLIS, MD. — The crowd sang the last notes of “Amazing Grace,” and Pat Furgurson stepped to the microphone, a reporter’s notebook tucked into his back pocket.
“For a moment yesterday, the sword was mightier,” said Furgurson, a reporter for The Capital, where five people were killed in a shooting Thursday afternoon. “But this morning, we put out a newspaper. And we’ll put out a newspaper tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.”
Furgurson was standing in front of at least 150 people at a vigil in a mall parking lot Friday night. In front of him were five tall candles, one for each victim. Across the street, the building that houses the Capital Gazette office was still cordoned off with police tape.
“We’ll continue to do our bit to provide real news to better inform citizens in this republic,” Furgurson said. “We are not the enemy. We are you.”
In parks and on sports fields, from South Florida to Texas, Americans have gathered again and again this year to grieve in the wake of violent tragedies, and now it was Annapolis’ turn. The crowd held candles and passed around white flowers in the fading light and stifling heat, trying to make sense of a new front in mass shootings: an attack on a local newspaper.
The suspected gunman, who had railed against the paper online and in lawsuits, shot through the office’s glass doors Thursday, turning a quiet afternoon of filing stories into chaos. Five people were killed: Gerald Fischman, 61, the newsroom’s editorial page editor; Rob Hiaasen, 59, an editor and features columnist; John McNamara, 56, a sports reporter and editor for the local weekly papers; Wendi Winters, 65, a local news reporter and community columnist; and Rebecca Smith, 34, a sales assistant.
The shooting has shaken newsrooms around the country. Furgurson and the other speakers at the vigil, who included local religious and political leaders, emphasized their paper’s roots and its deep connection to the community it covers.
“They didn’t come from someplace else,” said Michael E. Busch, the Democratic speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates, who said his daughter had played soccer with a daughter of Winters. “They were part of us.”
The evening was interwoven with prayer, song and an appreciation of the work of the journalists killed.
“We’re here to celebrate the fact that we have a free press in the United States,” said Stephen Tillett, a pastor in Annapolis, near the beginning of the vigil. “That we have a paper that’s been carrying on its business since 1727.”
Some of those gathered were readers mourning the sudden loss of the journalists whose work they had read week after week.
“You feel like you know them,” Sandy Bartlett, 52, said.
Others were alumni of the newspaper company from decades past — reporters, photographers and editors — who had driven in from Washington and other cities for a reunion they never expected to have.
“Our identity is to be open and accessible and to listen, and it got five people killed,” said Ledyard King, 54, a reporter for USA Today who worked for The Capital from 1988 to 1994. In that time, he had worked with two of the victims, Fischman and McNamara.
King said he wished he could read what Fischman, the editorial editor, might have written about a moment as painful as this one. “He would have been the one helping us understand,” King said.
Instead, the editorial page was left mostly blank Friday. “Today,” it said, “we are speechless.”