Today’s newsletter is presented by Kaiser Permanente.
Hello, Navajo and College Area!
I must have driven by Boulder Lake a dozen times since the news that a father and husband shot his 13-year-old daughter and his wife before killing himself.
I watched residents cross Navajo from Pershing Middle with their tired dogs in tow, heading north on Boulder Lake toward the home.
I saw a dozen or so middle schoolers, my son included, walk into Pershing Middle wearing blue or teal shirts in honor of their classmate who died at the hands of her father.
I spoke to the neighbor who found what she described as her second family, dead inside the home she knew so well.
As journalists, we cover these tragedies. We crowd residential streets and search for neighbors, or position ourselves for live shots with the home behind us. We search for answers, for a day, possibly two. And then, onto the next.
But for a tight-knit community such as San Carlos— any community, for that matter— after the media’s day or two search for answers ends, we are all left with questions. And, with the knowledge that no answers could explain how something like a family getting erased from the map, from the street, from the middle school attendance rolls within seconds could happen.
I’ve thought hard about how to cover these tragedies. It bothers me to see the “story” disappear into the digital void while getting permanently stamped on a neighborhood, on neighbors who look at the home and shudder to think of the final moments. I’m bothered that we will likely never truly have an explanation for this, like so many others elsewhere. I’m bothered to think of the young girl’s friends at school who are left with far more questions than some neighborhood journalist who has covered tragedy countless times has.
Each week, I am tasked with writing this newsletter about the community that I live in and have lived in for ten years. The community where my two children were born into. I couldn’t bring myself to write anything else after watching the kids at Pershing and the adults walking their dogs and sensing those unanswerable questions, ones that media can’t answer in a day’s reporting.
Dorian Hargrove
Mission Times newsletter host
Navajo, College Area story spotlight
Five ‘connected’ cases of mumps reported on SDSU athletic team
By City News Service
“Importantly, the students are no longer considered contagious,” the school’s Student Health Services medical director said.
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