Printed elsewhere on this page is a letter, emailed Thursday morning from county attorney Rik Stevens, expressing his strenuous objection to what he characterized as our “unempathetic” coverage of the 9-1-1 call that Hajar Hassib made on the night of Sunday, July 6, as Tropical Storm Chantal hammered Alamance County with record rainfall.
Ms. Hassib made a desperate plea for help as her car was apparently swept off of South Jim Minor Road near its intersection with Turner Road and into a roadside pond.
Stevens provided the transcript of the 9-1-1 call pursuant to a public records request from The Alamance News, which served as the basis for our front page story in last week’s edition.
First a word about the county attorney. We have generally given Stevens high marks – both for his legal advice to commissioners, at least the portions he has expressed publicly, and for his responsiveness to the newspaper’s public records and other news-related requests.
He was quite prompt last week, for instance, in providing the information about Ms. Hassib’s 9-1-1 call, as well as records in response to another inquiry on an unrelated subject involving county government.
But after publication, Stevens objected to our extensive use of quotes from Ms. Hassib’s call, and specifically the inclusion of her most urgent, and final, comments to the 9-1-1 operator which appeared in a “quote box” on the front page.
The publisher was unaware at the time that Stevens had included a several paragraphs-long account of his preference that the newspaper not quote much from Ms. Hassib’s call in an email prior to providing the transcript.
Stevens’ suggestions for limiting publication of the actual content of her 9-1-1 call was ostensibly made in order to spare the family from the trauma of reading her increasingly desperate words as the flood waters rose around her and she could not get out of the car. (As though they would not ultimately get the same statements themselves in response to their own inquiries to the county.)
Frankly, such attempts to “coach,” “lobby,” or otherwise try to influence how a story should be written are inappropriate and unprofessional. But they’re not that unusual – although they usually come from the PR hacks employed by various government agencies.
As noted above, the publisher didn’t even know about Stevens’ suggested directives at the time we sent last week’s edition to press. Yet, the temerity to request such glaring omissions was surprising and disappointing, especially from someone we had deemed a consummate professional; those suggestions would not have been heeded, but it was inappropriate for them to have been requested nonetheless.
Interestingly, Stevens’ strong reaction is the only negative response that the newspaper has received to the story. Granted, the story’s content was moving, emotional, and deeply sad, even heartbreaking – as it described what was truly a tragedy – one that arose from an almost unprecedented rainstorm that affected just about everyone in the county.
Stevens claimed that his adverse reaction is because of what he considered to be our “unempathetic” coverage. We suspect that at least a part of Stevens’ real underlying and visceral objection was to the inclusion of details of the 9-1-1 center’s handling of the call and/or the vagueness about what, if any, subsequent dispatch or other efforts had been made to find or assist Ms. Hassib Sunday night.
We confess that we do not know the protocols, or standards, that would typically apply to such an urgent call, but the other public records he provided do not demonstrate any immediate response to her dire predicament.
Twice during the 9-1-1 call, the operator assured the caller that “her partner” was sending help.
Yet the only documented response in the materials Stevens provided was an attempt several hours later to call Ms. Hassib on the phone she had used to call 9-1-1 – without success (reportedly going straight to voicemail).
But no actual search was made until Tuesday, July 8 – and only then in response to the family’s call to the Graham Police Department. (Ms. Hassib lived in Graham, and hence that department’s involvement.)
Inasmuch as Ms. Hassib’s situation appeared to have grown critical while she was on the four-minute call with 9-1-1, the reader could easily conclude that, even if law enforcement officers or EMS had been dispatched immediately during her call, they may not have been able to reach her in time to change the tragic outcome of her drowning death.
We quoted Stevens in last week’s edition as making a similar point: “The call volume was 400 percent of what we normally get, and from what I have heard, I don’t know if the result would have been any different under the circumstances.”
In the preliminary email he sent, before providing the transcript, Stevens said, “I would encourage you, however, to consider the vulnerable state of our community right now, the weight of this tragic loss on those who loved and cherished Ms. Hassib, as well as the dignity that each person ought be afforded in seeking assistance in a time of most desperate need. Let your criticism, if any, be aimed at the County and its staff, but please preserve the dignity of Ms. Hassib’s final moments.”
There are several fundamental misunderstandings that leap out from Stevens’ comments here and elsewhere in his communications about this case and our coverage of it.
The purpose of a news story is not to find fault or make a criticism of anyone, but simply to report the facts. (We’re the newspaper equivalent of detective Joe Friday in TV’s Dragnet, with his iconic tagline, “Just the facts, ma’am.”)
That’s what we asked the county attorney for: the text of the call itself, as well as related records on how it was handled. We reported on the documents he provided, and we continue to believe the newspaper and its reporter did so with the very compassion that Stevens claims is so lacking.
Tomas Murawski, our veteran reporter who handled the story, is a state and national prize-winning professional journalist, and we continue to believe he did an outstanding job in assembling the facts, all on deadline Wednesday afternoon for last week’s edition. And that his story was a masterful, compassionate, and compelling combination of facts in the midst of what became a tragedy.
The fact that Stevens, himself, suggests at one point that the county and/or its staff might be subject to criticism is probably an admission, of sorts, that not all was as it should have been in the way Ms. Hassib’s situation was handled.
But in what is clearly the greatest non sequitur in Stevens’ response is his cancellation of the legal department’s subscription and, even more so, his retaliatory action to stop using our newspaper for his office’s legal advertising – “we will be directing our advertising dollars elsewhere moving forward,” he concludes.
The newspaper’s publisher sought to set an appointment with Stevens after receipt of his emailed complaint, but Stevens would not agree to meet. “Upon reading the published article, I decided that we could no longer support your newspaper. My decision on our subscription and our advertising is final. There is no reason to discuss it further.”
While we are always grateful to our subscribers, advertisers, and the general public when they support our newspaper, whether someone subscribes in the first place or continues a subscription over short or long intervals is not a prerequisite for determining what should be published.
We no doubt have some subscribers and advertisers who rarely, if ever, agree with our editorial page views, who may not care for our selection of news articles, or who otherwise think we should include, or omit, certain categories of news. But they read the newspaper anyway for the information it contains. Local news is what we provide – and in larger doses than is available anywhere else locally. And more Alamance County families read our newspaper than any other local source.
We don’t expect anyone to “support” the newspaper – neither as a general rule, nor even “most of the time,” much less “all of the time.” We’re reminded of the late Sen. Jesse Helms’ response when constituents would apologetically say they disagreed with him on a particular issue. “That’s OK,” he would say to assuage them, “even Mrs. Helms doesn’t agree with me all the time.”
We believe the county attorney’s response on Thursday was very much an unwarranted overreaction, which apparently extends at least to this week’s refusal to meet to discuss the issues involved.
It is a regrettable blemish on what had heretofore been a rather strong tenure. And while he may be in charge of defending the county’s handling of the 9-1-1 call, he is not responsible for how other parts of county government handled the situation.
