RG: I think we relied very heavily on Facebook. In this and in other stories I’ve done, I find it incredibly useful for getting your hands on people that otherwise, even the fancy Accurint, pay money kind of services often will have a landline that’s dead for people but you can somehow find them — you can kind of combine forces where you can’t find them the first time you look on Facebook, but you can find a family member on Accurint and find that family member on Facebook and as you go through that family member’s friends, you can find them under a different name or you can find another family member who will talk to you. So that’s how we got a hold for example of the sister of Tonya Martin, who died. We got her name through an Accurint of Tonya, and we looked for her and Facebooked her. I think those new techniques — or not really techniques, just another place to look for people — but it’s definitely useful.
RL: To add to that, I remember that when I couldn’t find a specific person I would kind of blast all of their friends that I could see they had, if I didn’t know they were going to see the message, if they don’t go online that often, whatever. I would ask them — I would tell them flat out, “I’m a reporter; I’m trying to contact this person; do you have a cell phone for them, can you mention me?” That kind of thing, and that worked sometimes too.
QAO: You mentioned reaching out to the sister of Tonya Martin, who was a young woman who committed suicide, and you told a little bit about her story and her life in the article. So how did you approach talking to family members and friends of a young woman who had recently died?
RL: So I had to do that call, and that was probably one of the hardest calls, at least for this story but just in general also, because I’m calling not from Tennessee again. I’m calling to pry into someone’s life: that’s one way to look at it, that I’m opening this wound of a family that’s still grieving. She had died only a week or so before I had contacted the family, and when we, Rosie and I, first found out about the death we used Accurint and found all the family’s phone numbers. We tried leaving messages saying, “I’m very sorry to call you under these circumstances, and I understand this is a difficult time.” We tried to be as sympathetic as we could, but also letting them know why we wanted to talk with them. We didn’t get calls back for a few weeks I think, then I think I just started going on Facebook and trying to contact whoever I could within the family.
RG: The way we found out about it was we had Googled everyone’s names again and found an online memorial posted by a family member on a website, like a random website announcing the funeral, and it said who had officiated the funeral and that’s how we found [Vernon Webb].
RG: We were lucky because we had an amazing advisor, a guy named Jere Hester who’s at the grad school, who was an old-time Daily News city editor and was very used to advising you on doing hard things, like going to the houses of people whose family died. And you know, the Daily News does that all the time — the door knock on the family of the person who dies. So he was the one to tell us what is helpful to say, like first of all, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” which seems really obvious, but it’s the first thing you say and people are much more receptive after you say that.
RL: Right, I do remember that. I think we tried the immediate family first, including her sisters, and they didn’t get back to us for the first two weeks, and I knew we were on deadline at this point. The Nation had already scheduled the story, and Tonya’s story is something we actually found out like a week before, two weeks before going to press. So when I finally made that call, I tried to use every guideline that Jere Hester at CUNY had given me, just saying, “I’m so sorry for your loss, and this is why I’m reaching out to you.” And it turned out that he was actually — the man I spoke to, Vernon Webb — very kind, actually did want to talk with me and tell me a lot about Tonya’s life, what she was like, so we did spend a long time on that phone call, but it took me a long time for me to essentially fuel up the courage to ask exactly what happened during her death, because I didn’t know any of the details. We knew that she had died but we didn’t know it was a suicide; it wasn’t written in the obituary, for example. So that was the hardest detail for me personally to ask about. Socially, I would never ask about these things but as a journalist I had to ask it and so that’s how that came to be.
QAO: So in some of these situations, you don’t know your sources very well or there’s not a lot of documentation around events that are taking place or stories that are being told. So how did you back up some of the stories that you were telling or fact check any of the events or ideas that were being discussed?
RG: Everything was verified and fact-checked and, in fact, there were a number of things that did not make it into the story that we couldn’t verify, you know, exactly for that reason. Because the legal stuff is easier, all the arrest stuff is easier, because there’s a paper trail, there are criminal complaints. And when you’re talking to the police departments and detectives and judges, that’s all easy, you can use that and verify a lot of things that way. And then there are some things, like when a woman says that she tied herself to her bed and tried to detox for 15 hours that, unless she has a video of it or something, I mean there’s really nothing you’re gonna do but take her word for it and print it as her word. Certainly the theme of this whole piece, I think, is let’s see what these women’s word is, let’s take their word for it for a second and see what they think of it. So there were things that people told us happened that we could find no trace of, we could not find the people, and we had to let them go in terms of telling a story. Then there were other things that you know we figured out how to triangulate with law enforcement or legal or whatever and then the middle kind of area where people are talking about their own experience, that’s where we sort of let people speak for themselves.
QAO: So then on the enforcement side of the issue, you talked a little bit to law enforcement agencies and officials about this issue in Tennessee, so did you see and difficulty or any resistance from those officials and agencies when you were trying to find things out?
RG: It’s a lot better than it is in New York I’ll tell you that. I mean, New York everyone’s been — there’s like five public information officers for every office, and a lot of times it seems like their job is to keep the public from getting information. People are very, very scared to talked to the press here, and they’ve been scared out of talking to the press if they work for the government at all, in any way, everyone just can’t talk, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. And I think in Tennessee it wasn’t quite that way you know, especially in smaller places, people felt more authority to speak and that was good.
RL: I would say there was one prosecutor who hung up on me, but other than that it was very easy. I didn’t usually have to go through a public information officer, in some cases we just called straight through to the detective who arrested the woma,n and he would say very candidly what he thought. I thought — like Rosie said — it was a lot easier reporting in some ways in Tennessee than here in New York.
RG: And we generally wanted to know what they were hoping, what the policies were that they were implementing. At the same time we were also really glad to get the message of what we were hearing on the ground to them. It was like being a little conduit from like, “Okay, well, Jamillah’s telling me that the drug court program is really hard, and it’s your idea, and you’re saying that no one can take maintenance therapy and why do you think no one can take maintenance therapy?” To be able to be that conduit was very interesting, and then to be able to take his point of view back to her, even though they’re in Tennessee and I’m in New York — because of the power dynamics that conversation doesn’t really happen.