Quadruple Fatal Fire

What a way to start a Wednesday. I'm sent to Akron to cover a fire that was tipped to us. The caller stated that they were pulling bodies out of the house. I shot down to Akron and got to the scene. Not a whole lot of damage to the house on the outside but I guess it was enough to kill four people. But I learned THAT later..

I shot the scene and then looked for someone to talk to. No one and I mean absolutely no one would talk. No officials, no neighbors, not anyone. I left thinking it may have been a single fatal. I didn't know the extent of how bad it was until the coroner faxed over a report that four had died...

Man, that sucks. Four members of a family gone.

An Omen??

Ok, this is the sight that greeted me when I was putting gas into my live unit ths morning. I heard the telltale click of a fuel pump shutting off and turned to see the mark of the beast not once but twice, staring at me.

Bad ju-ju....baaaad ju-ju.

That Was An SUV

Had a busy night. The night started off with trying to find a car accident that the local police wouldn't fess up to. I spent a good 20 minutes driving around until I found it. Turned out not to be all that serious. It was an SUV on it's side. Two occupants were transported. Nothing major.

Then on the way into work, I get a call to check out a teen shot in the chest. He was shot in a robbery attempt. I get to the scene and find nothing. Either he wasn't shot, was shot and it wasn't that bad or it didn't happen.

Next, I had to go out and find baby formula with soy in it and buy it. Our EP is a great fan of reporters with props for live shots. So, I plopped down $25 bucks for baby formula. As I'm leaving the store, I get a phone call from the desk to head to a car crash involving a police chase.

This is what I came to find. It was an SUV at one time. It ran into a building, ending the chase. The rescue units are cutting the roof off of it, and off to the side, one person is being put onto a stretcher. Apparantly they were ejected about 15 feet out of the truck.

I get two other people being extracted from the vehicle. Then I run into the bitch cop from hell. She's a young cop and decided to use her super badge powers. I'm a good 50 feet from the scene, in no way interfering with the rescue. I get yelled at to get back...back....BACK!!!!! I point out to her that the public is walking up to the site and she proceeds to tell me to shut up and get BAAAAAACK!!!

So, I walked back another 50 feet and used my extender to get the rest of the extractions. The bitch cop from hell gets in her car and leaves. I look around to see her go and walk back to the original spot I was before.

I finish shooting the scene when the SIU guy comes over to me and tells me he's retiring in June. I'm heartbroken. This man is one of my best police informants. He's what a true media friendly police officer should be. He is also on the bomb squad and SWAT teams. I'm going to miss him. He's always been there for me and given me info that the other stations haven't had. Plus he's a really funny guy and makes some long scenes go faster.

Sorry for not blogging more recently but I've been kind of busy at home. Things should pick up again.

I've Dot Commed Myself

I went and became a dot-com. Newshutr.com. It still sends to this site. But I've been toying with the idea of just going the .com route. That way I can add porn and all kinds of stuff to the site.....


Ok, I didn't buy that when I typed it either.

But you can set your link to www.newshutr.com and it will forward here for now. The future, I'm not sure.

Ahhh..Vacation

Yep..nothing like a vacation. YAWN... I've done nothing but load up my iPod. and I still have 26GB left to fill....

Are there any photog related podcasts ??

Come Back Soon

Today we photographers that blog were sent an e-mail from Kerry "Kazz" DuPont who had set up Kazz's World (In Color). He informed us that he was told to take down his blog by his boss. I'm saddened by this becaue he always had something good to say and it was refreshing to read how things were done on the other side of the world.

I don't know what made Kazz's boss order the blog be stopped but I didn't see anything controversial in it whatsoever.

I hope that Kazz decides to talk to someone in a legal capacity and get his blog back again. It seems to me that he he might have a case. But, then again, I'm no lawyer.

Until then Kerry says he'll check in and comment when he can.

I'm pretty sure I can speak for the photog-blogging brothers and sisters when I say, "Hurry Back Kazz!!! We Miss You!!"

Vacation on tap..

I'm on vacation this upcoming week. I'll probably putz around here and post some things that I haven't had time to, but I'm out of the mix for a week...


Porchville, here I come.

Oooops....

Ooooops....

That's all you can say is ooops..

What else could you say if you were the bus driver picking up a returning professional hockey team and your spatial relationship between the front of the bus and the wing of the jet that said hockey team was on, was just a little bit off??



The Cleveland Barons of the American Hockey League were returning home from a road trip and their charter bus ran into the wing of the jet that was parked there.

Amazing how those jet airliners just leap out in front of you, isn't it??

It was a pretty impressive site in person. Thankfully no one was hurt but it did make you scratch your head and wonder what the hell the bus driver was paying attenton to.

Fire and Rain

Don't you just love busy mornings?? We were out doing traffic reporting because of supposed icy rain that would hamper morning rush hour traffic. It was supposed to hit and cause all kinds of calamity. Well, the freezing rain that was coming showed up around 10:30am which didn't hinder morning rush hour at all. Whenever we get warnings like this, panic ensues and I think of Chicken Little. Apparantly the sky falls a lot around here in winter.

Then right after the "ice storms" were to come through, my reporter and I get a call of a bad fire on the near west side of Cleveland. A boarding house is on fire and there may be people trapped inside. Turns out that we can see the smoke from the fire about 2 miles away. We get there to an inferno. A mentally disabled man died in the fire. The owner of the home, an 80 year old man, was burned over 50 percent of his body.

My day was a good 11 hour day and to quote James Taylor, "I've seen fire and I've seen rain...."

Oh Deer!!

Well, this morning I killed Bambi's mother. Yep. I hit a deer while I was going 65 m.p.h. Luckily I was in my work vehicle which was my 2002 Explorer. Thank God I was driving something substantial or I probably wouldn't be alive today. The doe came out of nowhere and I just caught a quick glance at her before the impact. It was a very hard hit. I hurt my wrist a little with the gripping of the steering wheel.

The whole of my front end is bashed in, my radiator was punctured and both headlights were knocked out. Both quarter panels are crumpled.





But at least I'm alive..

On The Desk

My morning is starting out kind of slow. Our regular desk person, Russ, called off this morning. Since there's no one to call in, I take it upon myself to sit and listen to scanners, lest we miss something overnight.

Soon, I'll be sending myself out to do a live shot about a 1st grader who may have died from meningitis. And the night is still young.

It's 8:15am on a Tuesday...

All apologies to Billy Joel but I couldn't think of a better header.

My cell phone goes off as I'm getting ready to log onto the computer at work . I hate when the phone goes off and I see it's from the desk so close to my shift ending. I answer it, knowing it can't be good.

"Brian, we have sort of a standoff situation going on. US Marshalls and the Joint Fugitive Task Force were serving a warrant. Guy is barricaded in his bathroom. Can you go scope it out?"

I grumble a half-hearted affirmative and head off to pee before leaving. You have to do that. Never know when you'll get the chance at a standoff. I head over to the scene, (first on scene, I may add!) thankfuly the scene is about five minutes away from the station. I see that it's not a full fledged standoff. The SWAT team hasn't brought out MOTHER, the armored vehicle that they use in standoff situations. Only a few members are around and the US Marshalls along with the Cleveland Police are not weapons ready.

And then the neighbrhood wakes up. They all come out and stand behind me asking all inds of questions. I feel like the Today show with all those idiots standing in back of Matt and Katie. I get all the angles from the people. Murder, drugs, it was a chase, etc. I finally turn around and tell the looky-lou's that it was a warrant being served for a Federal Weapons Charge.

After shutting the crowd up, I notice SWAT going heading into the house. They bring a woman out and then they start shaking hands.

The guy wasn't there. The woman that came out was his girfriend. She was asleep and didn't know what was going on until SWAT knocked on her door. Turns out the JFTF and the Marshalls got a tip from an informant and they called SWAT to get this guy. He's vowed not to surrender.

There was no man barricaded in a bathroom. It was all over in 45 minutes. I got a little OT and was able to get home quickly.

So endeth my day with a little excitement.

Happy Presidents Day

Another day of nothing happening. The courts are closed, it's about 9 degrees outside and no one wants to be outside in it. All the bad news, the 5 people shot at a bar, happened over the weekend when I don't work.


Even the fire I checked out today turned out to be nothing.

As Expected...Nothing Happened

Yep, as my last post about the wind warning coming in and battering the North Coast of Ohio said, plans were made for disaster.

And nothing happened. There were three wires down on my shift. Two cable lines and one electric line.

And the winds hit 56 m.p.h.

And as for chicken little, the sky didn't fall or blow away.

Panic Before The Storm

I had just come back from my live shot this morning when I'm accosted by our morning EP. "Hey..we're gonna be busy tomorrow morning. Run and gun..run and gun..we're going to be shooting and feeding. Moving from one place to another and feeding stuff back. " This is accompanied by wild arm gestures and faces. Hoo boy...here we go again.

We're supposed to experience a huge drop in temperature overnight with winds becoming a steady 25 to 35 m.p.h. and possibly gusts up to 70 m.p.h. Today our temperature got up to 60 degrees but tomorrow it will only get to 29. Big temp change but what we'll be looking for is wind damage.

There's nothing worse than a producer that has been programmed to salivate live Pavlov's dog over weather. It's like someone rang a bell.

My fellow photog in the morning, Barry, told our EP that we won't be putting our masts up in high winds. And of course our EP asks, "Why?"

"Beacuse they will snap in the high winds.", said Barry.

"Well...we need to feed video back!!", whined the EP.

"Only way will have to be line of sight and then that's no guarantee either."

"But, we'll need to get video of all the damage.."

"I'm not losing a mast and my job because you want me to put a mast up in a high wind.", said Barry.

"I agree, " I said. "We'll go line of site unless the dish on the truck can't take the wind either." And we walked away.

So tomorrow we'll shoot, and drive to a LOS area and feed back, and then drive and shoot and feed, drive, shoot, feed, etc...

While a pool of saliva forms around our producer.

Testing mobile blogging.

Testing mobile blogging.

The National Media = Whining Brats

I'm actually embarassed about the way the the National Media has been acting over this whole Cheney shooting incident. The way they've been whining and bitching about the fact that they weren't alerted first about the incident.

For the love of all that is Holy, the National Media doesn't work for the White House. It's not the White House's responsibility to inform the media about what happened. Last time I checked, David Gregory and the rest of those idiots that sit there and ask the questions, are "journalists". They want information? Fine. Go do some investigating instead of having it spoon fed to you.

If I recall correctly, no one in the country is required to talk to or even report anything to the media. The media does the reporting and investigating. If Armstrong chose to talk to one little local paper and not the National Press, oh well, tough shit National Media. The police don't even have to tell the press anything.

The National Media is acting like a bunch of whining children that didn't get their way. They got scooped by a small town paper and they can't stand it.

This seems to show what the mentality is of the National Press. This exchange is from The Drudge Report. David Gregory acts like a spoiled child who doesn't get his way when he asks a question before the Press Conference had even started:

NBC REPORTER TO WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: 'DON'T BE A JERK'
Tue Feb 14 2006 08:54:18 ET

NBCNEWS chief White House correspondent David Gregory warned President Bush's spokesman on Monday not to be a "jerk!"

The heated exchange came during a press gathering at the White House.

Gregory asked White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan about the Cheney hunting accident.

'David, hold on, the cameras aren't on right now,' McClellan replied. 'You can do this later.'

'Don't accuse me of trying to pose to the cameras,' Gregory said, voice rising. 'Don't be a jerk to me personally when I'm asking you a serious question.'

'You don't have to yell,' McClellan said.

'I will yell,'' said Gregory, pointing a finger at McCellan at his dais. 'If you want to use that podium to try to take shots at me personally, which I don't appreciate, then I will raise my voice, because that's wrong.'

'Calm down, Dave, calm down,' said McClellan.

'I'll calm down when I feel like calming down,' Gregory said. 'You answer the question.'

'I have answered the question,' said McClellan, who had maintained that the vice president's office was in charge of getting the information out and worked with the ranch owner to do that. 'I'm sorry you're getting all riled up about.'

'I am riled up,' Gregory said, 'because you're not answering the question.'"

END



"You answer the question!!", says David Gregory. Who the hell does he think he is? If David can't play by the set rules of the White House Press Office and wait his turn then David should have his credentials revoked and get a time out.

Sucks To Be Sick

I had to call of work today because I can't keep anything down or anything inside me. In fact, my wife has what I had and ralphed all over the inside of the car this morning. Good thing it's a rental.

Hope to be back tonight for work.

What's That Smell??

Yesterday morning I go to a call of a body in a car. I get to the scene and the body was in the car but the car had caught on fire inside a garage. A windy day pushed the smell of the fire plus burned flesh into my nostrils. Not to mention that I caught a full view of the corpse when a fireman shone his light on the victim for the coroner to take pictures. Blecccch.

My stomach was upset the rest of the day. Put me off food totally.

The Stuff Of Life

It happens once in a lifetime. You meet someone on a story that changes your outlook on life. I met that someone today. His name is Art Goodman. He is small of stature. He is an octagenarian. He has also donated 40 gallons of blood in his life. That is 325 pints. He's saved over 1200 lives.

His first blood donation happened in 1944 on the battlefields of France. He did a direct donation to a fellow soldier whom was wounded very seriously.

He's kept on donating since then. Imagine 40, 1 gallon bottles of milk in your fridge.

That's amazing. And I'm donating tomorrow.