Tears Of A Stranger

The following took place a few weeks prior to the date of this entry. I have withheld this story until now to avoid upstaging the mourning of the young woman who lost her life. But I feel ready to tell it, especially after seeing the movie Capote, so that you may know journalists -- including TV news producers -- are not without feeling for the people they encounter, even as others criticize us for having no soul, no shame, no honor in our profession.

I felt powerless. A story didn't roll correctly. A soundbite had no audio. And all I could do was kneel beside a monitor, one earpiece listening to the unfolding program, and keep people in front of the camera from looking silly by warning them when they were on. So much for field producing live shots at the Chrysler Classic of Tucson. Everybody was fine on my end. But gremlins were popping up back at the station during the Sunday 5:30 newscast.

I'd volunteered for the job hoping to help the sports crew avoid a repeat of last year, when the golf tournament went into extra holes. It led to a mad understaffed scramble to get the footage on the air. If anything, I could run tape back and forth should we bump up against a tight deadline, easing the tension. This year, it all ended on time, with plenty of minutes to catch our breaths, edit our tape, and set up our live shots. We were overstaffed.

But then I heard Andrew, one of our photographers, was on his way to another assignment. The family of an 18-year-old girl killed in a car accident just two days ago was going to talk to us. Andrew was to get the soundbites alone, without a reporter accompanying him. I didn't want him to do it by himself, so I dusted off my TV reporting expertise from long ago and hopped in the live truck with him.

We made a call to the assignment desk to get directions and some background. I dug through the back of the van for a pen. My hands waded through camera bags, empty pop bottles, discarded paper, trash, mystery wires, wrappers and filth, but located not a single pen. At work one hangs around my neck. All I had around my neck now was my press credentials. I desperately needed that pen to transcribe the details that were either going to keep me out of trouble or get me into more of it: Who was this girl? How did she live? How did she die? No way was I going into an interview with a grieving mother ignorant of the facts and bereft of a way to take them down in front of me.

Andrew stopped at a 99-cent store while I leaped out and ran for a cheap writing utensil. I snatched a pair of Scriptos and dashed for the checkout.

"Are you in a hurry?" a clerk asked in the middle of an order. She was rolling what looked like two dozen pop cans across the scanner, one at a time.

"Is there an Express Lane?" I queried.

"It's $1.07," she said, seizing the advantage of working at a fixed-price store: an ingrained knowledge of prices plus tax.

She generously took my money in the middle of the other order, and I was back in the truck in a flash, on the phone, and on my way to an interview that would wring my heart like a sponge.

All I knew about Elisa before I met her family was that she was an aspiring mariachi musician, one who had placed fifth in a national contest. I knew she had died in a head-on collision. And that was all.

Our live truck rolled into the dark cul-de-sac around 7:30, delayed by heavy traffic. Rows of parked cars lined the curb outside the family's home, occupying as much space as possible without blocking the center of the road. I worried how we would get our battleship of a vehicle out. The approaching deadline for the 10:00 newscast was working against us. We were to get enough material -- interviews and pictures -- for a "natsound" package, one where the interviewees do all the talking in the finished piece and the reporter does none.

Here I was, the reporter, wearing neither a suit nor tie but the aftermath of a day in the field assisting with golf coverage. A button-down brown-striped shirt hung loose around my waist, with brown shorts as base. Pulling cables left the pant legs marked with black streaks. My press badge with the four-year-old picture still hung around my neck, and a Chrysler Classic media access pin dangled from a pocket.

A relative serving as a liaison for the family met us shortly after we rolled up and graciously thanked us for coming. She led us inside.

Relatives filled the garage and every room of the home's lower floors, some hugging, some eating or sipping beverages, and nearly everyone talking. We made our way to the living room, where a crew from another station was wrapping up amongst the crowds. Their camera sat dismounted, tripod ready for folding. Andrew and I searched out a space for an interview.

"Wherever you want to do it," I said to him and the family. We decided on Elisa's room.

The door swung open and I stepped into a shrine. Pictures of the girl dotted the blue walls: her and her friends, her and her family, her as a mariachi singer, the feature article about her in the paper, all smiles. Ticket stubs for Spanish concerts protruded from the frames. My eyes scanned the room several times as Andrew set up the equipment.

I caught a quote on her bulletin board: "Wait for what you want and you'll get run over."

As the photographer took video of the photos, my eyes fixed on a silver microphone without a wire. It lay on her dresser like a hairbrush, and I asked about it.

Her father laughed. "She used that to practice her stage technique," he said. He didn't think that old mic, dented on the top, worked.

I saw the mirrored closet doors in front of me and knew it did. Every day, Elisa would stand in front of those doors, practicing to become a star, perfecting her voice and her rhythm. My mind flashed back to my high school days when I practiced for speech and debate competitions in front of my mirror-less closet door.

Elisa's mother and I sat down on the girl's bed. I asked her to face the camera and not me as the interview began.

"Tell me about her," I said, keeping my question vague and open-ended so she could proceed with the most striking thought that came to her mind.

"Elisa was a charismatic young lady," her mother said. "She just brought so much joy and happiness to everyone. Everyone she met, she touched in a positive way."

The mother painted me a picture of the daughter she had lost: a loving person, one driven by a love of music, one who brought joy to many others while determined to be the best.

She talked of Elisa placing second -- not fifth as I had been told previously -- at the national mariachi contest last December, second out of 500 contestants.

"She did so well. We were so proud of her, and yet at the same time she was so disappointed that she didn't get first place because she thought she had let us down. And we said, oh no, you never let us down."

She talked of Elisa learning Spanish from scratch to master her craft.

"She had wisdom. She had a lot of wisdom in her age. And I don't know, maybe that's why the Lord took her from us at a young age."

And then came the night Elisa died.

Elisa was on her way to a party, one with traditional Mexican music, and she was to pick up a couple of friends on the way.

"She said, 'I'm on my way, I'll be there in a few minutes,' and then quickly she says, 'Oh no.' She hung up. And and at that time, they didn't hear from her again."

Nobody knew what caused her to veer into oncoming traffic. But her death was instantaneous.

The walls full of pictures, the memories, and the presence of her loving family seeped into me. My insides ached and my eyes watered.

"Excuse me, Chris, this battery's almost dead," my cameraman said. "I need to go get another one."

I needed the moment. I rubbed my eyes nonchalantly, as if my contact lenses were bothering me, composed myself and sat up. While Andrew fetched the battery, I made small talk with a comparison to the late pop star Selena, who also had to learn Spanish on her way to stardom.

I talked to her father, who admitted being hard on his daughter when it came to singing right. But she also made him proud, when she was on stage, performing for millions of people on the Univision TV network.

"I'm sure she's singing right now," I said.

"Yeah," her father smiled. "I guess the Good Lord wanted her in His choir of angels. Maybe they were all sopranos and they needed a mezzo soprano or something."

We needed video of her singing. A family member found the DVD, but it wouldn't play correctly on the DVD player in her room. Someone suggested bringing the DVD player from the living room up to the bedroom.

"It may be easier for us to just go downstairs," I said as Andrew grew nervous about the time slipping away from us.

We returned to the crowds below and Andrew set up the camera in front of the living-room TV while relatives fidgeted with the DVD player. What we were about to get wasn't going to look the best it could. We didn't have the proper equipment and cables to take the video straight from the disc. And worse, Andrew thought he only had 30 seconds of battery power left. But we had to make it work.

The family searched out the moment that brought pride to them. I held the microphone up to the stereo speaker.

Elisa stepped onto the stage, her off-white mariachi outfit glowing in the lights, earrings dangling in front of her tightly-ponytailed dark brown hair. She began to sing, and the passion of the music poured from her corazon as if she had been singing all her life. She missed not a note, flubbed not a phrase. Her beauty penetrated the screen. Again, my eyes watered.

"Muchos gracias!" Elisa called to the audience, taking her bows as the crowd on the disc cheered her.

A few people behind me applauded. I turned around and saw every face in the room staring silently at the screen, the pain evident in their eyes, their hearts longing for another song.

"Thank you," I said softly. "Thank you for talking to us."

Andrew loaded up the gear and I slipped into the front passenger seat of the live truck.

"This is killing me," I said to my colleague, my voice quivering. "I can't listen to somebody talk about this wonderful person who's gone and not be affected by it."

Tears flowed silently now in the privacy of the live truck. I tried to regain my composure, some modicum of professionalism, but my body shook with the chill of grief.

I felt so awkward and out of place. I had entered the home of a family in mourning for their daughter as a stranger, and yet the two people closest to her willingly shared the story of her life with me as they would to a friend, in her own room. Some might call it grief therapy, telling the story over and over again to keep her spirit alive within them.

The rule is you don't let yourself get emotionally involved with a story. You're a journalist, not a grief counselor. And I'd been down this road before, having run the camera a decade ago in college while a fellow reporter talked with the mother of a son who had just been murdered.

I cannot sit in front of somebody, eye to eye, and hear the story of someone like Elisa without it touching my heart, without it making me shed a tear. Perhaps it is because this person is so worthy of my respect, so worthy of honor in a time when many young adults do not make the right decisions. Elisa did not deserve to die. She deserved to live, using her love of music to bring joy and pride to all around her.

We arrived back at the station at 8:30 and quickly pieced together the story. I cut the basic soundbites in the computerized editor and Andrew hurriedly laid down the music and pictures from Elisa's performance to round it out. I was under double the pressure because Andrew had to edit another story and wouldn't be available to help until that task was done.

The finished product deserved five minutes. But we only had time for a minute and a half.

We saw Elisa singing, her mother talking about the "charismatic young lady." Her father talked about his proudest moment, "watching her sing at this competition she was in."

We heard about the night of her death, the "oh no" phone call. But we heard more about the life.

"We're going to miss her dearly," her father said in the final words of the piece, just before Elisa finished her song and said "Muchas Gracias."

I'm glad the piece contained only the words of Elisa's parents. Any words I would've added would have been tainted by emotion. This way, viewers heard the story I heard, although in a lot fewer sentences.

A wonderful young woman, one who had enriched the world around her was gone. The photographs in her room bore abundant proof of the many lives she touched. She was on her way to stardom. She was living a dream. But so many others were taking that journey with her. And now we'll never know how far she would have gone.

To deny my emotion is to deny my own humanity. And I feel no guilt in weeping for this person. She has earned every tear.