My husband and dedicated journalist is gone when he deserved to be here
The following is the text of Andrea Chamblee’s prepared oral remarks for Tuesday’s sentencing hearing for the Capital Gazette shooter. Chamblee is the widow of John McNamara, who was one of the five Capital Gazette staff members murdered in the news organization’s office on June 28, 2018.
Thank you for having us here. I know all our stories will be different even though they have this common thread. I’ve told versions of my story many times, but I haven’t really opened up to talk about what this cruelty has done to me personally.
In my family, we had to go-to phrase: “perfectly adequate.” My car was and still is a 2003 Subaru, with almost 200,000 miles on it. It is perfectly adequate. John’s car was a 2001 Subaru with 440,000 miles on it. That was perfectly adequate. My salary wasn’t that great, my bosses often weren’t, and John was in the same boat. Our jobs were perfectly adequate. Our vacations to my parents’ shore condo weren’t expensive or luxurious but were perfectly adequate. We never “traded up” our 50-year-old house because the small kitchen and smaller closets were perfectly adequate.
I accept “perfectly adequate” as my fate in most things. But that phrase didn’t describe the thing in my life that exceeded all my expectations: John. Sometimes we argued over my trouble managing money in the 1980s; how he was so old-fashioned he still struggled with technology. I teased John that he was so old-fashioned, I was his first wife. We weren’t together nights or weekends because of his work, but he was handsome, smiling and a loyal friend. He was smart and funny and good at what he did. He was the kind of guy who made the shy person at a party or a game feel welcomed. And he was devoted to me. John was exceptional.
John’s co-workers told me he would never leave anyone alone at the office nights and weekends when his job was finished but he would stay with the last person, to help.
When we agreed it was time to have children, it wasn’t happening for me. John took all the jokes about his own fertility in stride. He never told anyone that it was me who was the reason we weren’t expecting. For a time, I went to the doctors every morning and got my dose allocation by phone in the afternoon. Sometimes I went to his office so he could give me the shot in my hip in the bathroom. He shrugged his shoulders when people asked why we went in there together. When even that didn’t work, he went with me to adoption and foster classes. When none of our efforts succeeded, he made it clear it didn’t matter as long as we were together. He made me feel unbroken again. He was completely unselfish. We had no time for a dog, so we got a cat and made a perfectly adequate family.
What surprised many people about John was not his command about sports he covered. Not even sports he did not cover. He never lost a question in Trivial Pursuit Baseball edition. Not one. He routinely bested a big-city radio personality at music trivia. He hung with sportswriters who easily tossed quotes from Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway.
All those years of “perfectly adequate” were just starting to pay off. His fourth book was almost finished; all the toil in libraries and in interviews was ending. We had money saved for vacations and saw Alaska and Paris to celebrate milestone anniversaries. Many mornings, we asked our smart speaker how many days until I turned 60, which would be the day we might be able to retire. The answer on June 28, 2018, was 1,008 days. It was in sight. It was in reach.
I pictured us sitting on a riverbank on a sunny day, watching the river flow by, watching the kids play, enjoying the picnic scene undisturbed. Like “Sunday in the Park with George.”
John went out the door that day to go to work, and I realized I hadn’t kissed him goodbye as usual, so I ran out to do that. The blue shirt he wore was the same shirt that was in his writer profile photo. That would be the shirt he would be murdered in.
It seemed like the ground under my feet, that riverbank, disappeared under me, dropping me head over heels into that murky water. I tried to find which way was up. I tried to see the sky, I tried to kick my feet until I realized I was kicking other people. I was surrounded by a river full of gasping, flailing people, destroyed by a gun violence, floundering until we each realized in our own time that the only way up and out was boosting everyone who was kicking and drowning to the top together.
His grieving family was distraught about the secular plans John had made years before when we wrote our last wishes. They planned a separate event. When I learned about it, it left my family in tatters.
While drowning in my own grief, I myself became a target for my advocacy for gun safety. Armed white supremacists and extremists tracked me down. They broke into my house. I received threatening letters, had to remove my name and address from mailing lists repeatedly, and even at the post office itself so it wasn’t publicly available to these terrorists.
The defendant did not succeed in his goal to destroy me. True, gun extremists know me now. But in the last three years I’ve tapped into a powerful network of friends and supporters that he will never know, or could ever imagine in his cowardly existence. With good deeds, I achieved an impact that he tried to achieve with evil. I discovered a superpower.
But please don’t tell me this is a sign of my “strength;” don’t tell me you “could never” do what I’m doing. You would. Because you’d have to. There is no choice. I don’t have a choice. My choices were stolen from me. I need this superpower to put one foot in front of another.
John has likewise received the renown he always deserved. The book I finished, his fourth, received raves in the Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Athletic, and around the world. He’s been inducted into the Hall of Fame at his beloved alma mater. His name is on an athletic shoe. There are books and novels dedicated to him. There is an endowed journalism scholarship in his name dedicated to future journalists who make sports accessible to fans, experts, and newcomers alike. His ashes are at Nationals Park. He has a chair devoted to him at a football stadium and in a basketball arena. He has his own documentary. John has a Superpower now, too. He has a legacy.
John created his own legacy tokens. They aren’t threatening letters or Tweets or DVDs, or grimy hair left behind in a filthy bathroom. They are — appropriately — people, like the 700 people who came to his memorial. His legacy is the readers who care about his work; the writers who benefited from his mentorship; the kids who he taught how to throw a ball and shoot a hook shot and go left; the exchange students who stayed with us, who understand only because of him why anyone would sit hours through a baseball game; people like me who saw humility in action and who loved him for it. His sister, who recovered from a traumatic brain injury in our home. Her son, his godson. Me.
John worked hard. He saved his money. He cared for his family. He helped people learn about sports, about music, about kindness. This was supposed to be his chance to continue spreading those good wishes without worrying about making money. Without worrying about interviewing somebody while running down quotes while running a tape recorder while taking an iPhone picture and getting back in time to design his own page and edit his own copy.
The real victim impact is that he’s gone when he deserved to be here. He deserved to enjoy seeing his recognition, to enjoy this time in his life, and I was so hoping to see it and experience it with him, and pay him back for all the kindnesses that he gave to me. Now I never will.