LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: TRAGEDY PRODUCES QUEST TO RECEIVE AND PROVIDE NEWS

Whenever tragic events occur, like the bombing in Oklahoma City, any news organization faces the immediate obligation to provide information in three crucial areas: What happened, who did it and why.

The overall thrust of the initial reporting effort is to find out what happened in some detail. In a situation like the Oklahoma City bombing, there are official sources (police, firefighters, agency officials) and unofficial sources (victims, eyewitnesses). Creating a cohesive account of events out of all this can be a trying experience. Recipients of news are often confused and perplexed by the differing reports they read, hear and see as more and more information, much of it conflicting, becomes available.

The focus quickly switches to the "who did it" and the "why" aspects of a tragedy. It only took hours for widespread suspicion to develop that Mideast terrorists were responsible. By Friday, however, as more and more information became available, it began to look like the bombers were involved in drugs.

A similar incident two years ago in Topeka provides a study in microcosm of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Topeka is basically a government town. In addition to being the state capital with some 20,000 state employees, the city of 125,000 population just an hour west of Kansas City is also the county seat. The county courthouse is across the street from City Hall. And just a couple of blocks away is the Frank Carlsen Federal Office Building, a structure that houses offices and courtrooms of many of the same federal agencies as the ones in Oklahoma City and Cape Girardeau.

On a rainy morning two years ago, a car exploded on a parking ramp attached to the federal building in Topeka. As emergency crews, police and security officers from the federal building rushed to respond to the explosion, a man with explosives taped to his body and armed with several weapons entered the federal building, walked through the lobby to the elevators and punched a button to go to one of the upper floors.

As the walking bomb got off the elevator, he turned to a security guard who was manning a check station, complete with X-ray equipment, and shot him dead. The armed man then began going from office to office, shooting randomly and wildly at anything and everything.

Terrified employees and visitors sought refuge anywhere they could. Some hid under desks. Others climbed into crawl spaces above ceiling tiles, some of them using articles of clothing to stop the bleeding from gunshot and shrapnel wounds so the blood wouldn't flow freely enough to attract the madman's attention.

It took law enforcement officers more than eight hours to comb the building from the ground floor up and reach the terrified, hiding occupants of the top floor. In addition to the wounded and dazed survivors, they found the gunman dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The explosives taped to his body hadn't detonated.

Who was he? Why did he do it?

The newspaper staff in Topeka marshalled its forces within minutes of the car explosion, which turned out to have been set off by the gunman, apparently as a diversion. Some 40 reporters, editors and photographers, including a blind reporting intern with a guide dog, spent nearly 15 hours gathering information for the next day's edition. Everybody worked without stopping, because everyone knew what the appetite for information would be.

Enterprising reporters learned the identity of the man hours before SWAT officers reached the dead gunman. They learned he had been arrrested on a relatively minor marijuana possession charge, and because of bungling both by his own attorney and by prosecutors, the case was moved from a state court, where he probably would have received a suspended sentence and probation, to a federal court, where sentences are mandatory. Instead of getting a slap on the hand, he was headed for a federal prison far from his job and wife. He was outraged by what had happened to him.

So he sought revenge.

The man went to the top floor of the federal building in Topeka, where federal judges held court and where the federal court clerk and other related operations were located. His target, investigators later guessed, was the U.S. attorney handling the drug case.

The U.S. attorney's office was on the floor below.

If and how the Oklahoma City bombing will ever be fully explained remains to be seen. But experience from similar tragedies, like the one in Topeka or the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, has shown that solid facts are difficult to come by. News gatherers do their work much like you and I put together a jigsaw puzzle. You get as many pieces as possible, and they you try to make them fit.

Along the way, some of the puzzle pieces get discarded or overlooked. Sometimes it takes a long time to make any sense of the bits and pieces.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.