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Treated and Released

January 3, 2000, was an unusually hectic news night in Westchester County, New York. From the police scanner, which sat atop my desk at The Journal News, reports blared about gunshots being fired in a downtown White Plains shopping mall. I was the lone metro editor on duty when the night-shift reporter called in with the last name of the victim, a little boy. I scanned the phone book and found one match. It was 9:20 p.m. Deadline for the first edition was in 10 minutes.

A woman answered. I identified myself as a newspaper editor before asking, in the polite but persistent manner I reserved for worried or shaken mothers, for just a few minutes of her time. Then, with the compassion of every girl voted most likely to gossip in high school, I asked her to tell me what had happened.

As many sources do, she answered with reluctance that evolved into urgency. She had been walking from the main concourse into Macy’s to pay her bill. When she heard the first shot, she turned toward her 8-year-old son, who was holding her hand. She remembered shouting something in Spanish, which I didn’t understand. She couldn’t recall how many blasts she heard before her son fell. Then the police came. Wrong place at the wrong time, they told her. Something about a gang fight. Then they went to the hospital. The stray bullet, the doctors told her, would remain lodged in her third-grader’s leg forever. Something about him walking okay, but no chance of an operation. Then she started to tell me about having moved to this country from Colombia, and her accent shifted just a shade. Her voice cracked, and I found myself in the moment I had known was coming all along.

Every newspaper editor dreads this moment, when the crime victim on the other end of the phone crumbles from an unsteady but usable font of information into a collapsed pile of wails. It’s the moment when the floodwall of surging adrenaline gives way to plain old exhaustion, when tomorrow’s award-winning quotes slip from within the reach of the editor’s practiced, soothing voice and drown in an overwhelmed human being’s fright.

This is when an editor must decide, Should I push again before she snaps? It’s a nanosecond of judgment predicated solely on the need for more information. I blinked at the clock: 9:23 p.m. Seven minutes to press time.

Until that night, the only thought I’d ever had at such moments was, Do I have the quote, the one that will sell copies to the morning’s commuters? I scanned my computer screen as the mother sniffled.

Most editors wouldn’t have hesitated before climbing atop the verge of this woman’s tears, but I did. I’d like to think what gave me pause was the sound of her slipping into quiet sobs, and I’d like to say I took a second to consider my next move because I felt sorry for her as a person in crisis. But those altruisms aren’t the truth. What knocked me into neutral was pure self-involvement: the way my heart and hands began to tremble, like a building clap of thunder, when I looked at the words on my computer screen.

“Minor injuries,” I’d typed. “Treated and released.”

They’re the same words an editor had typed about me just three and a half years earlier, in the same kind of news story written on deadline around 9:30 at night, after a neighbor from my Connecticut apartment building beat me unconscious and stabbed me.

 

 

It happened on a sticky summer night in 1996, in the foyer at the Autumn Ridge apartments, a two-story building that stands a few blocks off Main Street and next to an elementary school in East Haven. The entryway is the size of a large elevator, with an unlocked glass door leading in from the sidewalk, a painted concrete-block wall on either side and a second, locked glass door that opens into the building. That’s where my key was at that moment, squeezed between my right thumb and index finger as I pushed it into the lock on my way home after a night of editing at the New Haven Register. The door behind me opened, and I saw a face before me in the glass door’s reflection. It was the familiar, clean-shaven face of a 38-year-old neighbor who, smelling faintly of smoke, had stopped me on occasion in a vain search for a cigarette. I didn’t know his name, but I thought of him as “The Pacer” because he had a habit of strolling outside the building and through the downtown streets, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, always hunched over with his belly straining the buttons on his shirt. He never seemed to bother anybody, save for that occasional nicotine fix.

At that moment, my 24-year-old mind was on the contents of my refrigerator. Crisp cucumbers. Moist tomatoes. Sweet red peppers. It had taken my entire half-year since moving to Connecticut to work off the 38 pounds that had come with the breakup, the returning of Waterford crystal and the cancellation of the wedding photographer. I was not about to let an unhealthy dinner spoil the thighs I had struggled so hard to thin to a size eight, the knees I was displaying between appropriate-length black shorts and sling-backed flats, or the calves The Pacer was about to turn into a carving board.

Since I recognized the reflection, I might have turned around to say, “Hello.” I’m fairly certain I turned around and said something. I do know I twisted my head to the right, my right hand still gripping my keys as I attempted to unlock the foyer’s inner door and go inside to my apartment. I hadn’t fully turned to meet The Pacer’s eyes when the prick of his warm breath moistened the nape of my neck in a calm, heavy sigh.

I do not remember feeling his palms or his fists or his fingertips shove me forward, but the glass door rushed toward my face, and my forehead slammed into it. My head bounced back, as did the rest of my body. The small of my back landed hard against the hump of his stomach. I looked down and saw his right arm wrap around my waist. The silver, serrated edge of the kitchen knife glimmered as he thrust it toward my belly.

Then I was in the corner, somehow on the ground, lying face up with arms and legs outstretched. The Pacer’s 5-foot, 8-inch frame towered above me. He cackled as I scrambled to get my arms beneath me for support on the smooth, cool concrete. He lunged all of his 230 pounds toward my right side with the blade. I rolled to my left and shrieked.

And that, believe it or not, is when I saw Oprah Winfrey.

A good decade earlier, I had watched Oprah’s show after school with my mother. I hadn’t seen an episode in ages, but Scout’s honor, as The Pacer reared up to thrust his knife at me again on that day in 1996, my mind’s eye replayed an Oprah episode from the 1980s in which she learned to defend herself against “attackers” clad in baggy blue jumpsuits and padded, oversized helmets.

“Don’t just scream,” the instructor told Oprah as the “attacker” came at her on stage. “Scream ‘No!’”

So I did, just as she had done.

“Don’t be afraid if you’re on the ground,” I heard the instructor say. “He may hurt your feet, but he can’t get at your face and heart. Keep kicking!”

So I did, just as she had done.

In my shorts and sling-backed flats.

I rolled back against the concrete wall as The Pacer lunged toward my left side. I screamed “No!” and thrust my legs at his chest, still wrestling to plant my palms beneath me for support. He came at my right side again, cackling hysterically above my shrieks, demanding nothing but my continued participation. I rolled and kicked for several seconds, or maybe a minute, until our eyes met.

In an instant, everything stopped. The Pacer straightened himself in silence, looked down at my limp body and parted his lips into a grin. He maintained the pose for a few seconds, like a statue looking through me.

Without a word, he turned, opened the foyer’s outer door and lumbered up the street and out of sight, laughing all the way.

I looked around, dazed, and saw my bag on the ground to my right, my mail strewn about. I tried to collect my thoughts, along with my telephone and electricity bills.

The Pacer had run out, so I decided I had to run in. Screaming for help, I looked at the door that led inside, pulled myself up and yanked the handle.

It wouldn’t open.

My key, still attached to the key chain I had been holding when The Pacer entered behind me, was bent in the lock. I pulled violently at the door handle, shrieking to be let inside. I do not remember how the rest of the keys on my chain looked, dangling from the one jammed in the lock, but my mind collected the sound of them jingling, like slow-motion wind chimes, above my cries for help.

Trapped, I turned and leaned my shoulders and fingertips against the foyer’s inner door and looked through the outer glass door toward the parking lot. I inched a few cautious steps forward, realized The Pacer was long gone up the street and darted outside, still screaming for help.

I don’t remember hearing her voice, but a woman called me back toward the foyer. She was inside the building, holding the inner door open for me with her left hand. In her right, she gripped a black baseball bat.

There was a tickle in my right calf. Still standing on the sidewalk, I looked down. Blood was trickling to the ground.

I held my hands out, palms up, looked to the night sky and began to cry.

“Come in!” the woman shouted under the fluorescent lights. “Come in! Hurry!”

Then I was inside my apartment, somehow slamming and locking the door with no memory of walking, or running, or limping down the narrow hallways from the foyer, and no idea how my keys got out of the foyer’s lock and into my hand. I felt along my ribs and down my belly, where I thought I had been stabbed, and found nothing.

I grabbed some paper towels and held them to my leg, sat down and tried to keep from bleeding on my brand-new beige chair, and dialed 911.

The police caught The Pacer up the street, but not before he attacked again. Just a few minutes after turning on his heels in the foyer, just a few blocks away, he walked up to a woman leaning into her car to check the inserts she would deliver with the next morning’s New Haven Register. He feathered his fingertips, delicately, down the back of her spine. She turned and recognized him as a guy from the neighborhood who had asked her for a cigarette on occasion. She, like me, had told him she didn’t smoke.

Before she could ask what he wanted, he grabbed her wrist and turned it so that her forearm was a clean canvas in front of him. He lashed the blade across it.

Again.

And again.

I met her later that night inside the Yale-New Haven Hospital Emergency Room. She approached me while I was on a gurney, awaiting stitches. She told me her name was Cathy, and that her cuts were shallow enough to heal with Band-Aids. She asked me if I had a job, and seemed relieved that we both worked for the local newspaper. She could tell I was in shock, but had another question. And so, with all the grace and respect she could muster, she asked me if I had AIDS. You see, she practically whispered, the man had attacked her with a bloody knife.

I reassured her and urged her to help me hobble to the nurses’ desk, to call the newsroom. An editor whom I had wished a good night just a few hours earlier spoke with us both and compiled what would become a three-paragraph news brief in the next morning’s edition. “Minor injuries,” it stated. “Treated and released.”

Cathy went home and tried to take a nap, but couldn’t overcome the restlessness before it was time for her route. She rose before the sun, walked back outside to her car and managed to deliver about 500 Sunday editions before her floodwall of emotions caved.

I received four stitches in my right calf and drove to my childhood home on the New Jersey shore. I pulled into the driveway around 3 a.m. My mother, father and younger sister had trouble letting go of me after an initial hug. They sat me at the kitchen table and asked me to tell them what had happened. They remember my answers as incoherent babbling.

Eventually, they helped me upstairs to my old room, still painted the lavender I had chosen as a kid, still with the Monet print I liked over the bed, still with the glow of the streetlight beaming though the window and across the foot of my bed as I climbed beneath the covers.

Eyes open, eyes closed, all I could see was The Pacer.

I awoke late the next morning, inexplicably, on the floor. I do not remember my mother entering the room or sitting on the edge of the bed to gently wake me, as she had done for two decades without incident, but I cannot forget looking up from the floor, half-dazed, my legs entangled in my sheets, and seeing her reaching out to me in horror, calling to me as if I had plunged down a well. I clambered desperately to get free, and to get away, for about a half-minute before I realized where I was.

Mom eventually helped me back up to the bed, and I tried to calm down. Dad and sister Michelle bolted down the hallway to help. “Easy,” my dad said. “Deep breaths,” Michelle chimed.

I sat like a statue and looked through them. Something inside me had a clamp on my attention.

Within weeks, the episodes became more intense, more inexplicable, more frequent. I was rummaging inside my drawers several times a day, searching for anyone who might be hiding amid my socks and underwear. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. It was hard to type at work. And to see. I was averaging about two hours of sleep each night, between summoning the bravery to lie down and let my eyelids droop and exploding them open to flee real and imagined sounds and smells and scary men.

One afternoon before my night shift at the Register, I painstakingly took off each piece of my clothing, stepped naked into my shower and turned the hot water on, shampooing feverishly and with my eyes open before tearing back the curtain so I could see any possible intruders. In the panic that had become my constant state, I grabbed my plastic hairbrush to use as a weapon. It snapped in half. This meant I would have to find the courage to drive to the store before work. I made it to the hairbrush aisle, but a sound or a smell or a scary man set me off. I remember putting my back to the row of barrettes and pulling my cart in front of me, as a shield against the other shoppers. One looked at me like I was a mental patient who had come out of her straitjacket.

And so it was that I finally allowed myself to get some help. Dr. Judy Finley is a slender blonde with a hint of a Southern accent. Thankfully, her psychology office in Cheshire, Connecticut, is arranged so patients don’t have to sit with their backs to the door. I sat on her couch that first day, rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I sat on my hands to hide their shaking. She asked me, in the practiced and soothing tone she probably reserves for worried patients, to tell her what had happened.

I described my lack of sleep, and she wrote “insomnia.” I told her about being afraid to close my eyes in the shower, and she wrote “hypervigilance.” I told her about the day in the hairbrush aisle, and she wrote “triggers.”

I told Dr. Finley I was losing my mind.

“No,” she said firmly. “You most certainly are not.”

She stood up, walked deliberately to her bookcase and pulled out a thick hardcover. She sat down across from me, flipped through until she found the correct page, and began reading a list of symptoms one by one. It was like a diary of my recent life. “Check,” I would say after each symptom. “I've got that one, too.”

I began to focus on what she was telling me instead of on whatever I was battling from within. “Check, check, check,” we went down her list. By the time she finished, I felt as though I were standing in my mother’s kitchen, having confirmed that we had all the ingredients called for in a recipe.

“These are the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she told me. “You are not losing your mind. You have an illness. Just like the flu has symptoms, this has symptoms. We can work on them.”

And so we did. We worked on identifying the sounds and sights and smells that acted as my triggers. These sent my body into a state of hypervigilance (like a constant “fight” instead of “flight”) and made it impossible for me to sleep, which in turn made me more prone to triggers and kept the cycle going. She discussed, even pushed me toward the option of medication, “just to take the edge off” my severe symptoms, but I refused, unwilling to give up control of any more of my mind.

We figured out that The Pacer had not walked or lunged but had shuffled into the foyer behind me, which was why I sometimes was triggered at work, by reporters shuffling up to my desk. We discovered that I wasn’t really afraid to walk my beagle outside, but that putting on his collar made his tags jingle, just like wind chimes, or keys dangling from a chain. Another trigger. We found more and more, which helped me get from good days and bad days to good weeks and bad weeks. My problem was no longer invisible and within. I could name it and identify it and battle it.

Eventually, I had good months that stretched almost into a year, and today, I get along just fine. I still have symptoms, of course, but for the most part, I can neutralize them before they overtake me.

I wish I could say the same for The Pacer.

His story is even scarier than mine.

As three years after the attack stretched toward four, the lawsuit I had filed came closer to trial and I gained access to limited records about The Pacer. They stated that he had schizophrenia, something I knew nothing about beyond what I saw on the nightly news when a “crazy person” attacked an innocent bystander. Like any victim of violence, I had a desire to understand “Why me?” (a question for which the courtroom held no answers in my case), but schizophrenia seemed to be one of the clues. I did a little research on the Web and learned about symptoms—particularly paranoia—that seemed dreadfully similar to the post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms Dr. Finley had read to me from her book. I wondered if my personal experience with mental illness might give me some perspective, any perspective, about why The Pacer had slashed into me and my mind.

And so I read some books of my own, fat ones written by neuroscientists and academics. I learned that most people who suffer from schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses are not at all violent. In Connecticut today, for instance, there are thought to be about 66,000 people suffering from severe mental illnesses—yet only a few dozen are considered worrisome in terms of violence, according to the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. This makes sense to me; in my worst fits of paranoia and insomnia, I would squat with my spine tucked into a corner of my living room walls and rock back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until I passed out. I had no desire to be around, let alone to harm, other human beings.

Better still, I learned there are signs doctors can note to take preventive action before a patient with a history of violence acts out again, just as Dr. Finley taught me that I could catch my triggers before they led to my own symptoms recurring. The three major signs that precede violence are having a patient with a history of violence who goes off his or her medication and begins taking street drugs, according to E. Fuller Torrey, a widely known expert in the field. These signs don’t always mean violence is imminent, but they’re apparently the best indicators doctors have.

I wondered about The Pacer, about whether he had a Dr. Finley of his own, about whether he had shown any of these signs before the night he attacked me.

My curiosity swelled until, one sunny afternoon, I walked into the New Haven courthouse complex. I went through the metal detector and into the clerk’s office, and then waited in line until the youngest-looking person behind the desk was free. I asked her to give me The Pacer’s file, which I knew included his medical history because of documents my attorney had obtained during the discovery phase of my case. The woman checked and, without looking up, told me she couldn’t give me the file.

I took a deep breath and waited for her gaze to meet mine. I leaned toward her face. In the tone I reserved for blustery politicians, I spoke just like one.

“Look,” I said. “I’m the woman this guy stabbed, and I know my rights as a victim to see that file. (I really wasn’t sure I had any.) I’m also an editor at the New Haven Register, and I know my rights under the state’s Sunshine Laws to see that file. (Also a question mark in my mind.) So, you can give me the file now and we can both go about our day, or we can get a bunch of lawyers and bosses involved and drag this out.”

She moseyed like a sheep to an older woman behind the desk, and I waited with my hands folded behind my back, to hide their shaking. After a few minutes, she returned and handed me a two-inch-thick file. It included medical documents stamped “confidential” in red letters, but that were now part of the court record.

 “Just don’t take it out of this room,” she said. “You can sit over there and read it.”

This is the story I found, combined with information from depositions taken later.

The Pacer’s name is John. He is the older of two children born to a custodian and a homemaker in New Haven, just a few miles from the Autumn Ridge apartments where I met him. They had worried about John since his childhood, when he started acting out, and had sent him to the nearby Beers Clinic. He had graduated from high school despite a growing interest in alcohol and marijuana. He had left Connecticut to attend Marquette University, but had quickly dropped out and returned home, where he began treatment with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

In 1987, the year John turned 29, he stabbed his younger sister in the arm with a knife. Someone, perhaps his family, reported the attack, and John received three years’ probation and began a one-year stay at Connecticut Valley Hospital. He was discharged in 1988 to a group home, which he eventually left. He also stopped taking his medication, as is his right. He survived on food stamps and appears to have used at least part of his federal disability checks to buy pot, sometimes a little cocaine. He remained a Knicks fan as his mind deteriorated for the next seven years.

Then, in June 1995, a police officer caught John panhandling outside an ATM in East Haven, a few blocks from the Autumn Ridge apartments, where he apparently had been living for at least a few years. According to police reports, the officer asked John to stop, and John threw what may have been a shove, or possibly a punch. He was charged with third-degree assault, jailed for several weeks and sent back to Connecticut Valley Hospital.

In late January or early February of 1996, about six months after the incident with the police officer, John was again released, this time into a partial hospital program run by Harbor Health Services Inc., a private, not-for-profit lead mental health agency in the part of Connecticut that includes the Autumn Ridge Apartments in East Haven. John was to receive a mandatory injection every two weeks of Haldol, a powerful drug that affects dopamine in the brain and is defined by experts with different agendas as a benign-sounding “antipsychotic,” an intellectual-sounding “neuroleptic” or a damaging “tranquilizer.” Along with his injections, John was given the responsibility of taking a daily medication to lessen Haldol’s sometimes severe side effects. One is called akathisia, a condition of extreme inner anxiety and restlessness that, in some cases, causes patients to pace endlessly, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The side effect can be so severe that sometimes constant movement is not enough to quell it, experts say. Some patients commit suicide.

For John, Haldol apparently was not the solution. The doctor who assessed him on February 1, 1996, noted John’s stable appetite and weight, but also his chronic insomnia. According to the doctor’s report, John told him “I’m not feeling too good. I’m a bit depressed.” The report goes on to state that John had a history of stopping his medication and slipping into recurrent psychotic episodes, including two “significant assaultive episodes.” It states that he appeared to be socially isolated.

John, at age 38 and entering his third decade with schizophrenia, was next assigned a case manager, a 20-something gentleman named Chris, who worked for Harbor Health. In February 1996, about two months after I had moved to town, Chris joined John, one of the 25 or so Harbor Health “clients” he was tasked with keeping track of, and John’s parents at the Autumn Ridge apartments, where he explained to the family that he would try to keep in touch with John once a week. He told them a case manager is not a doctor, but is trained to help John manage by doing everything from keeping in touch with his probation officer to attending appointments.

He explained that a condition of John’s probation was that he take his medication. Chris explained that it was John’s right to refuse his help through the case management program and to refuse compliance in the partial hospital program. However, if John chose not to comply, he would be in violation of his probation and would, alone, be held responsible for the consequences.

There is no way to know whether John understood a word of Chris’ speech, but John’s parents likely were thankful for the help. Chris remembers them as nice people, very concerned. They had told doctors before that they did not feel their son could live alone in the community, that they feared he might act out again.

Within weeks, though, Chris would find John in a dirty apartment at Autumn Ridge, watching television in his underwear, his apartment door wide open for anyone to enter. Chris said all John was interested in was smoking marijuana. Perhaps John felt it helped him tolerate a recurring vision he was wrestling with, of a woman lying in a pool of blood.

On March 14, 1996, about six weeks after John’s release into Harbor Health’s partial hospital program, he was discharged after he missed several appointments for treatment. Chris remained John’s case manager and worked for months to find another treatment program that John might be willing to try. Chris was with John on June 17, the day John’s probation officer gave him additional time to establish treatment and emphasized that doing so was the most important part of his probation compliance.

About two weeks later, Chris called that same officer and left a message stating that John was again failing to participate in treatment. The officer told my attorneys several years later that he was not sure what happened to that phone message.

Chris did not see or hear from John until July 9, 1996, less than a month after his call to the probation officer, when he received a call from a doctor at the Community Mental Health Center in New Haven. Apparently, John had been treated there in the late 1980s and had returned now, on foot, wandering his way from East Haven to New Haven, seeking some kind of care.

According to Chris, the doctor told John the center in New Haven could not treat him because it was not in the appropriate geographic treatment zone, as outlined by the state. He would have to go back to East Haven.

Four days later, in the heart of East Haven, John shuffled into the foyer behind me at Autumn Ridge.

In an interview after his capture, John told those working on his case, “I’m not trying to defend myself. I’m saying I’m guilty and I want to go to” the hospital.

John ended up going to jail for a fraction of the 13 years he faced for the attacks on Cathy and me (insanity cases are tough to win, the prosecutor told me), and he eventually committed himself voluntarily to the state’s Whiting Institute. Two years after the attacks, the New Haven Superior Court formally committed John to the jurisdiction of the state Psychiatric Security Review Board, which continues to follow his treatment at Whiting.

The last memorandum I received from the board stated that John was doing better. He was on a combination of newer medications. He had shown no evidence of violence and was considered “a very easily managed patient, no trouble to us.” He had—six years after that night in the foyer at Autumn Ridge—stopped crawling on the floor, stopped repeating himself and speaking in three’s, stopped talking about lying lips and stopped refusing to talk to his doctors because he believed God told him not to. He had recently earned the privilege of moving from maximum security to “a medium-security lifestyle,” where he is due to celebrate his 45th birthday this year.

Cathy, the woman John slashed by her car, told me about a year after the attacks that she, too, had suffered some of the symptoms I did. Showering alone in the house, for one, was difficult. “I do have scars,” she said. “They are small, and nobody would know they’re there, but they are.”

Still, she said she had no interest in following John’s case. She chalked her whole experience up to bad luck and simply moved on. Strong as a statue, she is.

It has taken me nearly seven years to find that kind of strength, the kind that will help me keep my symptoms and nightmares under control for the rest of my days. I used most of my $150,000 lawsuit settlement as a down payment on a fixer-upper townhouse in one of Fairfield County’s wealthiest—and, more important, most crime-free—towns, and I take every chance I get to enjoy a long, peaceful walk through the local park with my beagle and 6-foot-2 boyfriend.

I spend a lot of time thinking about John, about how unfair and perhaps cruel it was that I, having been diagnosed with a problem in my brain, was given so much empathy and care while he, having been diagnosed with a much more severe problem in his brain, ended up being treated and released until he acted out violently. I also think a lot about the hundreds of Harbor Health clients and the thousands of people under the care of similar agencies, people who suffer from unfair stigma after the relatively few Johns in the world attack strangers like me. I wonder whether people are getting the help they need, particularly when I read stories like the ones in the newspaper these past few weeks, about the state’s budget problems and how nonprofit agencies like Harbor Health may need to lay off workers or close down entirely.

I understand more and more every day that I was not John’s victim. He and I were both victims of the same mental health system, a system that, at least in this case, seemed to have put an awful lot of things in the way of a human being’s needs.

 

The people working within that system are well-intentioned, I think, just as I was the night I did my job by trying to get the mall-shooting story into the newspaper before deadline. I remember scanning my computer screen as the mother sniffled on the other end of the phone. It was seven minutes to press time. “Minor injuries,” I’d typed. “Treated and released.”

I wished the mother well and hung up. She had already been made a victim that day by forces beyond her control, and I didn’t want her to feel victimized again by forces within mine. I could only imagine the nightmares, the fear of going shopping, the stream of symptoms that awaited her and her 8-year-old boy, and I didn’t want to add to them. I acted like a human being, not an editor.

The next day, my bosses gave me hell. The managing editor seemed particularly angry that I hadn’t sent a photographer with a telephoto lens to the street outside the family’s home for an exclusive front-page shot.

That’s when my floodwalls finally shattered. I became hysterical, right there under the police scanner, and stormed out of the newsroom. When I got home, I wiped my eyes on my shirtsleeves, picked up a copy of Editor & Publisher and scanned the classifieds. There was an ad for an outdoor magazine editor in Fairfield County.

“Hello,” the editor in chief said. “Yachting magazine.”

“Hello,” I answered. “My name is Kim Kavin, and I’m a newspaper editor in Westchester County. I am calling about your staff position. I’ve never been on a yacht, but I know a great deal about making good stories. Would you even consider interviewing someone like me?”

“You know,” he said, “I have a room full of people who know everything there is to know about boats. What I need is someone who knows about writing and editing.”

He barely hesitated before lifting me from the verge of my tears.

“When can you come in?”

Kim Kavin was the executive editor of Yachting for three years.

How I tried to find humanity in a true story of violence and insanity.