COMMENTARY: Five Dead in Iowa City: A Sad Ballad Repeats Itself

Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown
He lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children
And his cabin fallin’ down – Bob Dylan, 1964

Bob Dylan told today’s story, better than any journalist could, more than 40 years ago in “The Ballad of Hollis Brown.”  Five found dead in Iowa City home. Does this ever bring back a flood of memories.Seventeen years ago, I was in a radio booth wrapping up my 4 p.m. newscast on a snowy Friday afternoon. The station secretary poked her head in and said, “Did you hear about a shooting on campus?” I stuck my head out the window and heard the sirens coming. Then the phone started ringing.

That was November 1, 1991, and I was in the middle of the storm as the facts pieced together.

The mass killing is to journalists what a bright comet is to astronomers. Unpredictable, unexpected, spectacular, yet ultimately unrelated to the long-range work. You drop everything else to stop and look. Every class, every bit of training, every experience of a journalist, is designed to train you for this moment, when The Big Story happens on your turf, so you can put your head down and work on instinct and adrenaline when the deadline is NOW.

It’s meatball journalism, just like the meatball surgery Hawkeye Pierce used to talk about on “M*A*S*H.” You remember to measure your words carefully on a moment’s notice, parsing the equally cautious police statements. Accused. Alleged. Apparantly. May have. Holding back on writing the conclusions that you, and nearly everyone else, have already jumped to. Right now, I have to put in the disclaimer that “police have not yet confirmed that the body in the van is the adult male resident of the crime scene.”

Lightning isn’t supposed to strike twice in the same place, but here we are again, for the third time in my county. First there was the bank shooting by a struggling farmer in 1985 that became a symbol of the farm crisis. Then there was the campus shooting by a disgruntled student in 1991. That was always the word we used, “disgruntled.”  It was headline and sound bite shorthand for “the guy was pissed off because he thought he deserved The Big Award and the other guy got it.” 

Now today: The family of an indicted banker — cautious with the words here, remembering my training — is found dead. So much is different now — the blast phone calls and mass e-mails to warn the public didn’t happen or even exist in 1991. And even though it’s also “on the outside of town,” Bob Dylan’s crime scene on a bankrupt farm seems far away from 629 Barrington Road, in Iowa City’s high-end Windsor Ridge subdivision. But so much is the same.

You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
Your empty pockets tell yuh
That you ain’t a-got no friend

What can you really add?  A person under some sort of intense pressure decides there is no resolution but murder-suicide, ending it all and, facilitated by an easy to get gun, taking a predetermined list of lives with them.

You feel that same cold but exciting chill of danger, even though, as we found out later, the event was over and done with before we ever heard about it, even though the shooter had a specific plan and the public at large was never truly in danger.

Your babies are crying louder
It’s pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder
It’s pounding on your brain
Your wife’s screams are stabbin’ you
Like the dirty drivin’ rain

I remember breaking into “All Things Considered” with each bit of information, thinking “just deal with it like a tornado warning.”  I was live on the air repeating the story to radio stations all over the country, and even to one in Australia, I was top of the NPR national news for an hour. I remember the details of updating the body count. Four dead, two wounded