The Inside Story : Covering the Killing of a Colleague Tests the Mettle of Newspaper Staff

At 1:30 p.m. May 20, newspaper photographer Ron Dipping left his darkroom at the Californian at 1000 Pioneer Way in El Cajon to check on reports picked up on a police scanner that there had been a homicide about 10 blocks east of the newspaper.

The slaying had occurred at Hunter’s Run Apartments, 532 Broadway, a 218-unit complex that the 28-year-old Dipping had gone to many times before to visit his friend and co-worker Steve Petix.

Dipping, the first news person to arrive at the sprawling complex, saw three police cars in the street and five or six uniformed and plainclothes policemen moving around outside. Officers had taped off the main entrance, and, when the photographer tried to enter, he was turned back.

Departed on Assignment

Dipping, in his fifth year with the 23,000 circulation Californian, left for a 2 o’clock assignment in Santee. As he drove off, he later recalled, he thought about Petix and figured that, whatever happened at Hunter’s Run, he could get the real story from him later.

“I remember thinking, ‘What’s going on in there? I’ll have to ask Steve about it Monday morning,’ ” Dipping said. “It just never crossed my mind that it was in his apartment.”

Three hours later, Dipping met Californian reporter Joe Cabaniss at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new El Cajon Civic Center. Cabaniss assumed Dipping knew what had happened at Hunter’s Run and began rambling on about it. Dipping interrupted Cabaniss and said he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“(Cabaniss) took a deep breath,” Dipping recounted, “and said, ‘That homicide? It was Steve.’ It was really hard for me to go through that dedication ceremony. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. All I wanted to do was get back to the office and be with everybody.”

Stabbed by Intruder

By the time Dipping returned to the Californian, everyone knew the details. Petix, 31, had been stabbed to death in his apartment during a scuffle with a man police said Petix caught in the act of assaulting his 23-year-old wife, Vickie. In fact, Petix had been working at the paper that afternoon and had gone home for lunch just 30 minutes before the police scanner sent out the first signal of his death.

For the next two weeks, the apparent random killing of Petix put Dipping and many others in the Californian newsroom on the inside of a story that would consume them both professionally and personally.

Managing editor Jim Slusher said he suddenly found himself trying to lead a staff that was devastated in the midst of a major deadline story.

“They were angry, they were hurt, they were frustrated,” Slusher said. “There was absolutely nothing we could do. It was the most helpless feeling.”

But deadlines don’t wait for a healing period and the newspaper reacted reflexively to cover the story. Police reporter Jo Moreland wrote the Page 1 news story. County reporter Della Elliott was assigned to write a profile of the victim. Photographer Mike Darden developed the photos he had taken of Petix’s body being removed from Hunter’s Run. Slusher, associate editor Del Hood and copy chief Mary Kaye Ritz grappled with decisions about placement of the stories and whether or not to run features that Petix had filed on his education beat.

On May 23, Dipping found himself shooting photographs of David Alan Weeding, the Santee radiator repairman arrested and charged in the slaying. On May 25, Dipping was back at El Cajon’s Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, on the same grounds where he had photographed Steve and Vickie Petixes’ wedding 10 months earlier, attending his colleague’s funeral.

From the beginning of the ordeal, the editors and staff at the Californian found themselves of interest to other media.

Reporters openly discuss their “life in the fish bowl.” They’ve been interviewed, photographed and quoted. On the night of Petix’s death, television reporters filled the cramped office, taping stories for the 11 o’clock news. Newspaper reporters called to extract as many details as possible before their deadlines.

Not surprisingly, there was some early speculation by other media that Petix may have been working on a story that made him an assassination target. It is a macabre, romantic notion that journalists operate in a perpetual danger zone, and it must have seemed too bizarre a coincidence that a newsman would be the victim of a preposterously random killing.

Ritz said she was disgusted by the prying of one television reporter who seemed to relish the prospect that the slaying could have been planned. It was as if it would then have been an even greater story!

“I don’t think murder stories are ever good stories, like ‘Watergate’ was a great story,” Ritz said. “Where you can effect a change and do all those lovely journalistic things.”

Slusher had the difficult task of responding to legitimate questions from competing media without dispensing the research of his own staff. The queries about Petix’s job at the newspaper were reasonable, he said, but, in some instances, he felt the callers were asking the Californian to report the whole story for them.

The cameras, the lights, the incessant phones had their effect on the staff. From Slusher on down, they say the experience of covering the slaying of someone they knew has changed their views about their lives and their jobs.

“It’s made us all painfully aware of the importance of remaining professional but respectful of people you cover who are involved in a tragedy like this,” Dipping said. “I certainly know the pain and the vulnerability and the shock that they’re going through now.”

For most of the reporters and editors, it was the first time in their professional lives that they had been on the other side of a note pad. Like any cross-section of people facing the press, staff members have had mixed reactions to being the focus of a news story. They say they were shocked by some callous questions, surprised by the sensitivity of others.

In interviews, some reporters talked openly about their experiences and their emotions. Others reacted to questions the same way other people often react to theirs.

“I expect the same courtesy that I offer to the people I interview,” said police reporter Moreland, who declined to be interviewed. “And that’s, if you want to talk about it, fine, if you don’t, then I understand.”

Elliott said she found talking about the tragedy cathartic.

“This is the first time anyone close to me has died,” she said.

Elliott had worked with Petix since joining the Californian staff in 1984. “One of the first things I would see every morning when I looked over my partition was that curly head of hair,” she said.

The night of the slaying, Elliott was asked to put her personal feelings aside and write a feature obituary on Petix. Elliott is a reporter of “hard” news who rarely writes features, but, by her 9 o’clock deadline, eight hours after Petix had left for lunch, Elliott had interviewed almost 20 of Petix’s friends and had filed a 25-inch story.

“I think I made all those phone calls because I didn’t want to sit down to write,” Elliott said. “I knew that would be the hardest part.”

Her piece, paired on Page 1 with Moreland’s news story, was written in a conventional third-person voice. But Elliott acknowledged basing the lead on the thing she remembered most about Petix.

The first paragraph read: “His puns sometimes made people groan, but he seemed to find humor in everything.”

Elliott said she wanted the story to be human, not maudlin.

“I knew I could have easily projected my own feelings into it, but I didn’t think that was appropriate.”

Elliott had been covering a courtroom hearing that afternoon when another reporter beckoned her outside to convey the grim news.

“The hardest thing was to go back in that courtroom and do business as usual,” she said.

When she returned to the paper, there was no time to reflect or cry. An editor was waiting for her courthouse story. But, because she had less to do than other reporters, managing editor Jim Slusher asked her to write the profile on Petix first.

“In my mind I was saying, ‘No, I can’t do this,’ ” Elliott said. “But then I said, ‘Hey, this is a news story and, as difficult as it is, it has to be done.”

Late that night, after finishing her obituary, Elliott returned to her desk and wrote 12 inches about a lawsuit involving the expansion of the Las Colinas women’s jail. It appeared on the last page of the front section.

For Ritz, the long day began when she arrived at 3 p.m. Ritz was nine months pregnant and it was to be her last day before the start of a three-month maternity leave. She had heard the news about a homicide that had just taken place about a mile from the paper, but the victim had not been identified.

Ritz said she was actually looking for Steve, an education writer who did double duty as community editor, when she first got the word.

“Someone pulled me aside and said, ‘We think Steve may have been the one who was attacked.’ ”

Moments later, Slusher walked out of his office, visibly upset. He had just talked with Moreland, who was at the reporter’s apartment complex on Broadway.

“Before I tell you this, you better sit down,” Moreland had told her boss.

Now, Slusher was about to sit the staff down and tell them what most of them already suspected.

“Jim asked me to help get everyone in the conference room,” Ritz said. “I remember waiting in the hallway outside thinking, ‘Just don’t let him be dead.’ ”

When Slusher told his staff the news, a sob caught in his throat. Petix was dead, Vickie had been attacked and the killer had escaped.

“Everyone sat there very quietly for a minute before saying anything,” Ritz recalled. “I think it took that much time for the realization to sink in. The hardest thing I had to do was walk over to Steve’s desk and pick up the pages he was supposed to edit, knowing he wouldn’t be back to do them.”

Ritz automatically began working. When her eight-hour shift ended, she had not only edited Petix’s Sunday pages, but the newspaper’s two front-page stories about his death. She had also helped decide, along with Slusher and Hood, whether to run the stories Petix had written for the Saturday paper.

Petix’s stories, one about the Mount Miguel High School marching band and another on a program that rewards good student attendance at Granite Hills High School, did appear, preceded by an editor’s note explaining the decision.

“With the knowledge that Steve Petix was a thoroughly professional journalist, editors chose to publish the last stories that he wrote in today’s edition. We felt that Steve, like the loyal trouper of the stage who knows the show must go on, would have wanted it that way. These stories, like so many others that he wrote, tell of students achieving success despite the obstacles they encountered.”

“I knew that he wouldn’t want them not there just because he was gone,” Ritz said. “Steve always was professional.”

Many of the Californian reporters described themselves as “going on auto pilot” or “cruise control” while doing their jobs that night. When the deadlines had passed, most of them, joined by people from the paper’s composing room, gathered at Mother Murphy’s, a nearby bar that has become a favorite hangout for the Californian staff.

They drank beer and talked about Petix, who probably would have joined them if it had been someone else. When the band started drowning out their voices, about 15 staffers regrouped at reporter Lori Arnold’s house and watched a taped news segment about the attack.

“We watched it over and over,” Elliott said. “And I had written this story and said a hundred times he was dead, but I really couldn’t believe it.”

Humor wasn’t totally absent that night. One newscast began with footage of Petix’s abandoned desk, with notebooks and papers neatly arranged on it. The broadcaster began saying, “Steve Petix’s desk is the way he left it . . . “

In fact, Petix was notoriously messy, his co-workers said. Someone had obviously cleaned up his desk, and when they saw it on television, the staff members broke up laughing.

“If Steve had been there, he would have laughed,” Ritz said.

For the Californian, Friday is always the busiest day of the week. After the staff puts out the Friday afternoon paper, it turns around to produce the Saturday morning edition and most of Sunday’s paper. The triple-duty day is trying enough without a breaking news story. Add to that the personal involvement of the staff and the commotion in the newsroom.

In his 12 years as a journalist, Slusher said, he has never encountered a situation that demanded so much professionalism. His staff was able to put its feelings on hold that night and work a difficult story in which they were personally involved while their peers in the media looked on.

“Hardship proves the mettle of a person, and I think the staff has shown its mettle,” he said.

To put Petix’s death in perspective, staff members will have to reevaluate many long-held beliefs, said psychologist Robert Baker, who heads the San Diego-based California Center for Victimology, a clinic that offers therapy to people involved in homicides or other tragic events.

Baker called the Californian after the death and volunteered to counsel members of the staff.

He said the most common reaction in these situations is a lost sense of security. Most of the Californian’s young staff had never gone through the death of a friend, let alone a violent one, and they can no longer say that the sort of tragedies they report “won’t happen to me.”

“When the beliefs and values you’ve had all your life are shattered, you have to reweave them into something you can believe in again,” Baker said.

While the breaking news is over, the ongoing story has just begun for the Californian. In the coming weeks and months, Slusher and his staff have a homicide investigation and presumably a trial to cover. The editors will be weighing decisions about how much coverage to give a story that continues to affect them personally.

Slusher said he intends to pursue the story as if the victim was unrelated to the paper and unknown to the staff. But it isn’t easy weighing all the elements.

The managing editor said he measures reader interest in this story by two factors. That Petix and his family are well-known in the community and that a high-profile institution in El Cajon--the Californian--is involved.

If anything, Slusher said, he believes he may have erred on the side of too little coverage during the past two weeks. He said he doesn’t want the paper to be beaten on a story in its own back yard, but neither does he want to over-dramatize it.

“Objectivity is certainly on everyone’s mind,” added Dipping. “We’re trying to cover something that is personal to all of us in a way that isn’t going to jeopardize anyone’s rights. At the same time, we have to do the best job we can as a news organization to get the facts across and tell people everything it’s necessary to know.”

For the Californian staff looking back, there is a moment of sublime irony to be found in the Saturday edition that carried news of Petix’s death. On the back of the second section of the paper, spread across six columns at the top of the page, above several ads for churches and a Silo “Super Saturday Sale,” was Ann Landers’ column.

The headline had been written before Petix’s death was reported, and no one noticed it until the next day.

It read: “Victims of Tragedy Have Rights When Dealing With the Media.”

From the way his co-workers have described him, it seems likely that Petix would have noticed the irony in the headline. And let it go.