The tough part about being a two-person, husband-and-wife news team when there’s breaking news: when one of you is scheduled for cancer surgery.
That means we were both sitting in waiting rooms at the UVA Medical Center, when the other wasn’t under the knife, as yesterday’s school shooting in Waynesboro was playing out.
Crystal and I both prepped for the possibility, dragging our laptops to the hospital for the 7 a.m. check-in for my first appointment of the day, for testing to track the possible spread of the superficial skin cancer discovered on my back in July.
I was back there for a while, had what seemed to be good news to share from the testing, returned to the waiting room bursting to want to share said good news, only to see Crystal with a look on her face like somebody had died, which, turns out, was the case.
“Bad news, really bad news. There was a school shooting in Waynesboro.”
Whuhhht?
ICYMI
- Breaking news: Major police presence at Westwood Hills Elementary School
- Waynesboro: Everything we know at this point about the Westwood Hills shooting
She was already on the story, having posted an update with what little we knew at the outset.
My email inbox was flooded, my phone was blowing up with texts, some with info, most seeking info.
We had to relocate from the radiology department to outpatient surgery, roughly a five-minute walk, to sign in a second time for the actual surgery part of the day, which was scheduled for 2 p.m., with a 12:15 p.m. check-in time.
The receptionist signing us in, just making small talk, asked what we do for a living, and we mentioned that we’re journalists, and eventually spilled that we were trying to track down the details on an awful breaking news story.
When we told her it was a school shooting in Waynesboro, she nearly broke down.
She lives in Waynesboro, knows people who have kids at Westwood Hills Elementary School.
Now I felt bad, because we couldn’t say with any reassuring authority what was going on, because the information was scarce.
Once we plopped down in the second waiting room and got our laptops out to get back to work, a nice woman with a concerned look on her face came up to us.
“Are you guys the Augusta Free Press?” she asked, and then told us that she’s from Waynesboro, and had heard about the shooting, and asked to know what we knew.
Overhearing us, a lady seated a few feet away suddenly perked up – she has grandchildren at Westwood.
Have to admit here, the thought very briefly crossed my mind – I could reschedule this surgery, surely the doctor would understand, right?
(Maybe, though his name is not Shirley.)
The urge was: gotta be on the scene.
I could be there in a half-hour.
The thought never got to the figure out a way to broach this to Crystal stage.
I only started to wake up out of the fog of surgery around 4:30 p.m.; as I was shaking off the cobwebs, a press conference on the shooting was wrapping up back over the mountain in Waynesboro.
We’re not done, by a long shot, reporting on the shooting, which, fortunately, didn’t turn out to be a mass shooting – one staff member was wounded, but was treated and released yesterday; the shooter, a young man named Anthony I. Ignatiadis-Isabelle, took his own life.
Still lots of questions about the young man, who school officials tried to intimate at the press conference had no touch with Waynesboro Public Schools, though we’ve since been able to establish that he was in Waynesboro at an age that would have corresponded with his early elementary years, at an address that would have been in the Westwood Hills school district.
If you can’t tell, I’m coming out of the fog of the surgery.
I think we all deserve to know more about the young man, how he gained entry into the school – the police chief, David Shaw, said Ignatiadis-Isabelle “forced entry into the school,” and later answered, in a follow-up question from a reporter at the press conference, that “this was not through means of, at least preliminarily, unlocked means to get in. This was forced into the school.”
Our police department doesn’t exactly have a good track record of being forthcoming on sharing uncomfortable details – see: our reporting on the break-ins involving police vehicles from earlier this summer, which they gave us the run-around on for a couple of months, before burying the matter behind the juvenile-and-domestic relations records exemption that means, we’ll never know.
The school system, similarly, man, they’re trying to covertly rush the hiring of a new superintendent to promote an internal candidate without any public input, and nobody is pushing back – aside from the husband-and-wife team that had to put in hard labor yesterday around one of them going under the knife, and the other worrying her pretty little head off as all of the cutting was going on.
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Chris Graham
