When I worked weekends for News Four El Paso, one of my duties was dropping by the police department in the morning to see if any juicy homicides or traffic fatalities had transpired overnight. One such morning, when I checked in with the weekend assignments editor, he told me to get my butt over to the station, pronto.
“We’ll have the camera and deck waiting in the car for you,” he said. “Get on down to the levee by the border highway; we’ve got a call on a floater.”
So I dropped by, picked up my car and my gear, and headed for the levee. It only took me a few minutes to spot a parked patrol car and a cop standing by the side of the water looking upstream expectantly. I pulled off the highway and drove over to his side.
“Here he comes,” he told me, pointing upstream.
I got out my primitive, manually-color-balanced vidcam, got down to the edge of the water, and set up to grab video of our catch of the day. He came by floating face down in the water, not much really visible except for the back of a largely submerged head, and a blue shirt stretched so taut by the swelling of its contents that it resembled a blue vinyl backpack.
”What’s going to be done with this guy?” I asked the officer.
“They’re waiting downriver at the Zaragosa bridge,” he said. “No one’s sure which bank he’s going to drift closest to at that point, so our folks and the Juarez fire department have their people standing by on each side.”
After he drifted by, I ran back to the car, grabbed a quick shot of the cop and his car for a cutaway, then hopped in and drove off in the direction of my quarry. When I got downstream of him, I stopped, got out with my gear, and grabbed another shot of him floating past.
I spent the rest of a good chunk of beautiful spring morning driving downstream, hopping out of the car, grabbing another shot of the victim, then hopping back in and driving off to grab more footage for as long as the guy stayed in the water.
After a while I started trying for more cinematic effects, framing the shot with foliage in the foreground slightly out of focus.
I finally got to the bridge and set up to wait. Unlike the elaborate border crossings in the center of town with their arrays of inspection stations, Zaragosa is a sleepy rural crossing whose bridge is barely more than a trestle. Custody of the body in question had been left to the Juarez bomberias, who had one fireman waiting under the bridge with some kind of jerry-rigged rope harness to secure the cargo.
The fireman was in the shade of the bridge, the body floating towards him on the brightly sunlit waters, yet I caught in one shot the body darting out of the sun and into the waiting arms of the firefighter, the entire sequence perfectly exposed. All told, the entire episode was the camera work of which I was most proud in five years in TV news.
The body was then lifted out of the water and carried into the high weeds along the bank, evincing a gray pallor and sodden condition which I tastefully covered for the viewing audience with a cutaway of passengers craning their rubber necks out of car windows overhead for a better look.
One of our more bilingual reporters called the Juarez police to see when they’d have an ID on the body. Turned out it was a guard in the Juarez jail.
“There’s a story we’ll never get to the bottom of,” I opined sagely.
Floaters are not uncommon in El Paso. Much of the year, the Rio Grande is so low that the commuter traffic can wade across without getting their cuffs wet. But once the spring irrigation hits, many crossers are unprepared for either the depth or swiftness of the waters.
One of the first bodies I ever saw was a floater, a sweet young thing who had been pulled over to the cement bank of the Franklin Canal. The EMTs were applying their fibrillator paddles to either side of the victim’s chest, just over the brassiere.
Of course, in an ironic twist foreshadowed by anyone who’s read Ray Bradbury’s “Long After Midnight,” the victim turned out to be a he and not a she. Accident or swan dive, anybody’s guess.
Once you make it across the river, of course, you still have that Border Highway to contend with. Pedestrian fatalities were common along that stretch of road. Day and night, the traffic was usually speeding by at a pretty clip. The police report on one such mentioned the victim was thrown sixty feet from the point of impact, and then described the state of the body in some detail.
You know that expression, “My heart was in my throat”?
It’s tough to avoid becoming jaded in the news racket. For one thing, you tend to hear the tacky jokes that accompany any public tragedy while they’re still raw, fresh and steaming.
I remember Marge Althof coming back from a story on an amusement park which had been opened by a couple of sleazy local entrepreneurs, and where a young maintenance crewman had just been run over while walking the roller coaster.
“Hey, you heard the latest?” Marge asked.
“No, Marge, tell us.”
“Sheriff says the kid was a junkie.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. There were track marks all over his arms.”
“Uh huh.”
“You know, I hate to go to that place anyway.”
“Uh huh. Why’s that, Marge?”
“Costs you an arm and a leg.”
One time, the ambulance showed up to cart off a woman’s body from the local Y, and the officer in charge was a Lieutenant John Lanahan, notoriously tight-lipped in passing any details to the press. However, I talked to a reporter from the El Paso Times and discovered an old urban legend had, so to speak, resurfaced.
“I heard the victim got a vibrator lodged in the rectum,” she said, “and it set off a nervous seizure so bad it killed her.”
“Aha,” I said. “I knew Lanahan was sitting on something.”
In my experience, by the time we got to the scene, any really grisly details had been covered up, at least with a sheet. In fact, the only time I felt queasy covering a story was when I attended a slide show by a surgeon with the British Army in Northern Ireland, a seemingly endless parade of exit wounds and bodies turned to well-done hamburger by car bombs. Bodies we saw up close tended to be either pristine or, even if turned to jelly like the private plane crash victim, well covered.
The odd trivial detail could still hit you like a thunderbolt, though. Even if I showed up after the fact, as I did at the scene where a boy had turned his bicycle into the path of a pickup truck.
The boy was gone, but the bike was still there, looking a little the worse for wear. So I went over to examine the truck.
You ever drive through a mud puddle at a pretty good clip? And later when you get out and look at the spots on your car, you can see where the droplets started off with a nice round head as they hit and then left a little trail behind them, that’s how fast you were driving through the spray you kicked up?
That’s what the little spots on the side of the driver’s pickup resembled.
I guess the worst accident I ever covered was a two-car head-on collision at the intersection of Loop 375 and North Loop Road, way the heck out to the lower valley. An eighty-year-old man driving his wife somewhere or other turned into the path of a carload of teenagers. His visibility certainly wasn’t limited; aside from the stop signs at each corner, nothing but cotton and chile fields stretched out in all directions. Just another old guy who should have turned in his keys a decade or two earlier, probably.
When we got to the scene, the victims were still being loaded into their transports. One of the young guys was screaming his head off in pain from inside an ambulance. After a while of on-again, off-again moaning and shrieking, I found myself thinking, Christ, can’t they at least give him something to shut him up?
The old woman had already been put into an ambulance—“She’s a goner,” one of the EMTs confided to me—but the old man was still lying on the gurney. One harried EMT, sweat beading his brow and his sandy mustache, looking desperately for a pair of idle hands, spotted me standing by.
“Hey,” he said, “give me a hand with this one?”
So I closed my note pad, put it in my pocket, and lifted one end of the gurney and helped carry it to the back of a waiting ambulance and load it in.
The old guy had a respirator over the lower half of his face, so he wasn’t being very talkative. His eyes could have told you about a world of pain and guilt, though, if they’d a mind to.