Brent Renaud

War correspondent from Arkansas

Afriend likes to say that everybody has an Arkansas connection. Brent Renaud was a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. And a war correspondent. He grew up in Little Rock. Even as an adult, he worked out of Arkansas and New York — when he wasn’t in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti or Libya.

When the news came down Sunday morning, the smartphones of journalists all over Arkansas began going off. “Did you hear the news?” And the news wasn’t good. Not like a do-youhear-what-I-hear Christmas carol; more like an old Soviet funeral dirge. Sunday morning, the national websites began showing his face and putting his name in the headlines. Some of us recognized the name. Some of us recognized the face. Some of us knew both to be familiar — as when a brother’s name and face are familiar.

Local police in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, say Brent Renaud was killed over the weekend. Ukrainian officials blame Russian forces. So do eyewitnesses.

According to CNN, social media footage posted by journalist Juan Arredondo shows him talking about the shooting: “There was two of us,” he said. “My friend Brent Renaud. And he’s been shot and left behind … . We got split and I got pulled into the [points to a stretcher], an ambulance, I don’t know.”

There is lot a wounded man might not know in the fog of war. But what little he did know, he told. As a witness to a crime should.

According to dispatches, Brent was the first American journalist shot down covering the invasion. First reports came out that he was working for The New York Times, because he had before. But his brother told the papers that Brent was in Ukraine “working for MSNBC and the television and film division of Time magazine on one segment of a multi-part series about refugees.”

Mr. Arredondo “told an Italian journalist that they were trying to get from one bridge to another in Irpin to film refugees leaving when someone offered them a ride.” And when they crossed a checkpoint “they” started shooting. One guess who “they” is.

The news of the murder bounced around on TV networks and news websites all weekend. As it should have. Bill Bowden’s story in this paper said that world leaders expressed condolences. And his friends in Arkansas expressed shock. Somebody mentioned that he might have been the first American journalist killed on the job since Annapolis in 2018.

Brent Renaud grew up in Little Rock and graduated from Hall High. Just a few years ago, he was a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He had not only ties to family and friends in Arkansas, but professionally he and his brother, Craig, spent months in Iraq filming the Arkansas National Guard for a 10-part documentary titled “Off to War: From Rural Arkansas to Iraq.”

The Renaud brothers won a Peabody Award for “Last Chance High.” They started the Little Rock Film Festival. These aren’t amateurs. Brent Renaud was a real pro; he was there covering the story about how this war of (Russian) choice affected civilians in Ukraine. For the effort of bearing witness, he was killed.

It may have been easier, certainly safer, to pick another topic for a multi-part documentary. And ignore the danger in the world. Then again, some of us have our souls to think about. Brent Renaud was on the front line documenting this unfolding calamity. Some might say that now he’s been lost. But that’s too passive of a sentence.

The bad guys took him.