A Painful Task That Produces Moving Results

From the time my eye fell on Jarrett Meeker’s picture on the newspaper page, it took about two seconds for the lump to form in my throat. There was nothing extraordinary about the photo of the 8-year-old baseball player. We’ve all seen dozens like it, his new cap not yet broken in, his Rawlings glove covering him from waist to chin, his pride in his uniform undoubtedly eclipsing his ability on the field.

But the headline reminded me of a couple of other young ballplayers I had written about in the early days of my newspaper career.

Jarrett Meeker was a kid who loved to swing on a rope tied to a tree in his backyard near La Mesa. One day recently, he was doing just that when his mother went inside to answer the phone--it turned out there was no one there--and by the time she returned, Jarrett apparently had slipped and hanged himself. As a deputy coroner told a reporter for the San Diego Union, “It doesn’t take much to die by hanging.”

As I read about Jarrett’s death, it was as if I were seeing two stories at once, the one on the page in front of me and the one catalogued 16 years deep in my memory. I could not remember the names of the two boys involved in the earlier tragedy, but I remembered most of the details. I remembered the endless drive from the press room at the Houston Police Department to the little tract house in the suburb of Pasadena. And I remembered the stepfather of a dead 12-year-old holding the picture of a Little League team and telling me how baseball had brought the whole family together.

A librarian at the Houston Post was kind enough to dig out my old byline file and read the story to me over the phone. It had run on Page 1 on Jan. 14, 1971. The gist of it was that Travis Donald Stuckey, 12, and James Roland Miles, 11, had been found dead in the Stuckey boy’s backyard.

Their parents said that, for days, the two boys had been playing games tying each other up with a nylon rope. They had been warned to be careful. On this afternoon, apparently they flung the rope across a tree limb and each boy tied an end around his neck. When they were found, the rope was pulled taut on both of them, but neither boy’s feet were off the ground.

The police speculated that one of the boys had fallen, causing the other to lose his balance, and then neither could get back up.

One of the worst parts of being a reporter is having to interview the loved ones of those who have recently died. Although I was a young, green police reporter in 1971, I already had done it several times, and in the years that followed, I would do it many more. But somehow this time was the most difficult.

The drive from Houston to Pasadena took about half an hour, and there wasn’t a moment of it when I wasn’t hoping to somehow be delivered from this task. I knew the police and coroner’s officials would be gone by the time I arrived at the boys’ homes, and the families would be left to struggle with their grief and to try to sort out what had happened.

We never know how we’re going to be greeted at times like this. Although many people think us crass for intruding on the family’s privacy at all, often grieving people find it cathartic to talk with a writer who is interested and who will tell the public about the loved one who has died. That proved to be the case at the home of James Miles.

His stepfather, Noah Sanders, invited me in and introduced me to all the family members who had gathered. He said his wife, who was pregnant, had gone to spend the night with their minister’s family. It was clear that this was a home where people loved each other very much. Amid such an unthinkable tragedy, they somehow were managing to celebrate the joy of the precious life that had just been cruelly taken from them.

Patiently, Sanders explained what had happened as best he understood it. He told me how the two boys had been best friends for years, how his stepson had been a straight-A student, how he agreed with the police that it must have been an accident and that no one else was involved.

Then he picked up a framed photo of the Little League team and pointed out James. Sanders was the coach, and Travis Stuckey’s stepfather coached a rival team. Often, the kids would play ball together in their yards. But then not long ago they found this rope and started playing with it . . .

I then went across the street to the home of Travis Stuckey. The stepfather came to the door, and politely but firmly told me to leave them alone. I did.

I’ve never forgotten that evening. Often I’ve remembered it from the standpoint of the scared young journalist; today I still think of it when I see my own 11-year-old playing with a rope. And I thought of it again the other day when I read about Jarrett Meeker.

I was reminded that there is a good reason newspapers have to write these stories, as painful as they are. They serve, of course, to warn us of the dangers of some seemingly innocent child’s play. But they also connect us to one another and remind us that we’re all part of one human family. You can’t read these stories and not be at least a little moved by them.

Nor can you write them and ever be quite the same.