46 Time November 18, 2019
APPRECIATIONS
FROM TOP: MOISES SAMAN—MAGNUM FOR TIME; LEAH MILLIS—REUTERS
in the past year with my kids
and we’re playing in the leaves
and there’s shrieking of joy and
laughter, and I’m thinking about
the shooting and there’s a part of
me going, What the f-ck? This is
what you’re alive for, to experi-
ence these moments. Why are
you not experiencing this? Why
aren’t you feeling the joy of this
that you should? You’re alive.
You survived.
“I’d like the coffee to taste the
way it used to taste.”
Capital Gazette staffers have
learned all too many lessons
about grief. When people check in
on him, McKerrow often doesn’t
respond. Then people get mad at
him. There’s a reason, however,
for his silence. Lying—by telling
people he’s O.K.—saps his en-
ergy. But he doesn’t want to pass
on his pain to others. “If you know
someone going through trauma,
you can help them by reaching out
but letting them know it’s O.K. if
they don’t reach back,” McKerrow
advises. “They don’t know how to
talk to you. They don’t know how
to love you the way they did. They
don’t know how to laugh with you
the way they did.”
For some, antidepressants have
helped. So has the free therapy of-
fered by Tribune Publishing and
Baltimore Sun Media, owners
of the Capital, and local mental-
health providers. Hutzell is flex-
ible with time off. The journalists
are quick to point out their good
fortune, and wish others similarly
impacted by these incidents re-
ceived comparable support. “I’m
the most privileged shooting sur-
vivor in this state,” Pacella says.
Staffers also turned to all sorts of
distractions. Danielle Ohl, an investigative
reporter, cooks. McKerrow has taken up
production design for the Annapolis
Shakespeare Company. San Felice took
Wendi Winters’ ashes to Istanbul, where
the late journalist grew up. Winters’ son
spread them in a park there.
Pacella found pottery. Her projects
can take weeks to complete, which gives
her goals, something to look forward to.
In the weeks after the shootings, Pacellaitself that what happened to the
Capital won’t be in vain.
“With each [mass shooting],
we all become a little number.
Our souls are a little deader. What
it means to be American is a lit-
tle cheaper, a little less valuable,”
says Hutzell. “That’s why it’s up
to us as journalists to figure out
a way to make it matter for read-
ers... That’s our job. And if it’s
hard because we are becoming
numb to mass violence, too bad.
Figure it out.”
photographer Joshua Mc-
Kerrow wasn’t in the newsroom
that Thursday. But his survivor’s
guilt is still intense. McKerrow
arrived at the nearby U.S. Naval
Academy 15 minutes before sun-
rise on June 28, 2018, for one of
his favorite assignments: snap-
ping pictures of induction day
for incoming plebes. Afterward,
instead of returning to the office,
he made what was likely a lifesav-
ing decision: he drove toward Bal-
timore to pick up his daughter. He
planned to take her out for her
birthday.
Then he spotted a call from
Hutzell, the boss, on his cell
phone. Never good. “It means
something really bad happened
that you have to go cover,” he says,
“or you f-cked something up.”
The news proved worse than
McKerrow could ever imag-
ine: Hutzell said he’d heard
about a shooting at the news-
room. McKerrow turned his
car around and started driv-
ing toward the office. “I felt like
I was kind of just leaving the
vestiges of myself behind,” he says.
Through the afternoon and into the
evening, McKerrow toiled at the scene
of the crime, gathering photos of his
deceased friends from the Capital’s ar-
chives for the next day’s edition. He says
that working on the story worsened his
trauma but that he had no choice—there
was a kind of imperative. “I knew as
soon as I turned my car around that this
was going to be sticking my hand into
a fire,” McKerrow says. “And if you ask
me whether it was worth it, it was ab-
After the shooting, the Capital Gazette
newsroom was showered with supportive
letters; the paper’s front page on June 29,
2018, the day after the attackThe Guardians
solutely worth it. As hard as it is to live
with myself now, I don’t know if I could
have lived with myself at all if I’d done
the wrong thing.”
McKerrow opens up about his post-
traumatic stress to emphasize that these
shootings leave so many in their wake.
Survivors need to seek help. He’s still
seeing a therapist. He’s had suicidal
thoughts. “I don’t get the joy from a cup
of coffee that I used to,” says McKerrow.
“You don’t get the joy from anything
you taste, frankly. I’ve had moments