Final Post of the Day, Post #9~ A Blast From The Past

I was a hostage for John Mark Karr
By Steve Rose | Tuesday, July 10, 2007, 10:38 AM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

John Mark Karr was arrested this past weekend.

Unless you’re in a coma you should know this. This isn’t about him. It’s about everything that happened as a result.

I’m the public information officer for the Sandy Springs police department. I got a call from the lieutenant around 1:30 a.m. Saturday. He said John Mark Karr was arrested about midnight and I might get some media calls. I think that’s what he said. I don’t really know. I was in a deep sleep, dreaming something about me, a Viking ship, and a gnome, sitting at the Waffle House, telling me that my fonts were unsatisfactory. I think his name was Sven.

8:00 Saturday morning:

My cell phone starts ringing. I know the numbers of the regular press folks and sure enough, this is one of them. They ask me something about John Mark Karr. Now I remembered that I got a call about Karr and it wasn’t part of the dream—about the gnome—and why would he car eabout my fonts anyway?

I told them I’d get the particulars and get back. Look for an e-mailed press release shortly.

8:35, 37, 40, 45….more calls, all from media. Say goodbye to Saturday morning.

9:15-The press release is done. In an informative way, it says almost nothing. This report was classified as a domestic violence report meaning there isn’t much information that I can release so I made it a point to accentuate the obvious. For example, I confirmed that all parties were human beings.

Next come calls to confirm the information that I’m really not saying anything about in the press release, just in case I left something that says nothing, out of the document.

9:45 I have confirmed that the lack of information that I put in the original release, has enough nothing in it so that I don’t need to add zero information to what already contains very little.

Local reporters now have enough non-information to begin setting up for the noon news reports, trying to figure out how to report the nothing that they got from me. Fortunately, they have 30 hours of file footage to fall back on.

ROUND TWO National Media calls.

The national media calls. Sometimes they want live interviews. MSNBC wants a live interview so they call and ask me if I can stand by for a moment—meaning ten minutes. They put me on hold. This allows me an opportunity to listen to their program while it broadcasts, very loudly, in my phone. I’m in the car which is not the best time for me to talk to anyone much less do a live interview on a national news show but before I can pull over I’m talking to someone with a fabulous name, asking for the sequence of events. They ask me to describe what is happening right about the same time Detective Sandy tells me to turn left. This confused me so I said something like “The officers received a call at the home of I think I was supposed to turn left there.”

For the sake of the interview and trying not to sound like a goober, I drove in a straight line until the end of the interview. I told them nothing in various general descriptive terms, confirming what they already knew and adding things like “A hearing will be set and we’ll go from there” and “The parties involved will be summoned to a hearing on a future date” which tells you about as much as saying “the sun will be available until dark.” The interview went longer than I thought. When it was over I was in Gatlinburg.

After two days of providing an extensive amount of nothing to the national media, including ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and ‘Inside Edition’, who’s only interest was obtaining mug shots and 911-tape, the frenzy was just about over.

The last piece of this story was to provide nothing to the New York Post whose reporter was less than enthusiastic on the phone. I shared his less than excited attitude because after all, I spent most of my weekend on the phone trying to explain nothing in a new and exciting way for each interview all the while trying to get some chores in as well as a brief trip to the outlet mall. None of us really wanted to spend our weekend covering this because after all, it really was more of a non-press-event than news but when people demand to know the details of what I’m not going to tell them, I’m obligated to convey this lack of information to them—sort of.

I will also have you know that this was not done without sacrifice.

For those of you in a particular outlet store Saturday afternoon, I really was in the fitting room and I really was talking to ‘Entertainment Tonight’ on the phone and although I’m sorry I forgot what I was doing when I walked back out of the fitting room in my boxers, there was no need to have me escorted out by security.