Today, Explained - What if we saw the gunshot wounds?

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

John Temple was the editor of Rocky Mountain News in April 1999, when two students committed mass murder at Columbine High School. The photos he published that day would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and enrage Daniel Rohrbough’s mom. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and edited and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Noelle, we've been doing guns all week on Today Explained, and we have one left to go, and it's a bit of a doozy. What's it about? It's about this debate that's taking place in the United States right now as to whether we need to take more drastic measures to prevent these mass shootings at schools, whether we need to show images of what's happening to these bodies when they're shot by assault rifles. Yes, I've read op-eds about this debate. Yeah, and we don't really want to entertain any hypotheticals today. This stuff is tough enough. We're actually going to talk to a guy who had to make a decision like this over 20 years ago during Columbine.

And what did he decide to do? He published a photo. He published a photo and he didn't know what the kid's name was, and he didn't ask the parents, but he published it anyway. The episode isn't for the faint of heart. I will say it's not very graphic. It's more just the decision he made and the repercussions. Okay, let's listen. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. My name is John Temple and I'm the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, which was a major metropolitan newspaper in Denver when the Columbine high school shooting occurred. It was totally shocking, largely because it was in our own backyard, and so unexpected, of course, because school shootings weren't as common at that time, but also because it lasted so long because police procedure hadn't changed at that time, so police did not go into the building immediately and try to stop the attack.

Deputy David, we're picking up snatches of information from a variety of sources. Let me play them to you and tell me if you can confirm or deny them. All right. That there are at least two gunmen in the building holding some students hostage. We feel that there are at least two gunmen. The hostages, I cannot confirm. I don't know that to be a fact. And you were at a high school, so you had high school students fleeing a high school best way they could, including dropping out of windows.

People were getting shot all around me. There was a guy at a table right next to me and her, and they just shot him, and then walked away, and then he was just sitting there in a pool of blood. You had parents converging on the schools, massive traffic jams. The only way we could get our photos out of that place, because we were still shooting film at that time, was to send a motorcycle in. One of our photo editors rode into the scene, picked up film from a photographer. It was the first film we got back to the newsroom, because even transmitting digital photos at that time from a remote location was slow and complicated.

And we brought the film back to the office. And this is sort of the start of the difficult decisions, because when we looked at the film, it was the triage scene on a suburban front lawn where medical practitioners were dealing with bloody scenes. And when we looked at the photos that we could put on the front page, we literally didn't have anything because they were so shocking in the sense of blood and we didn't know who the people were

and we didn't know if somebody was dying on this triage scene. And it was just very uncomfortable looking at these photos and seeing them and thinking about people, not what the ramifications of these photos were. I'm curious, John, it sounds like so many of the foremost questions you guys are asking yourselves on this day are about images instead of the story, instead of the text. Why was that? One reason is we were what's called a tabloid or magazine format newspaper, which meant there was one dominant image on the front page that

reflected the entire message of the front page. So that was super important to us as a publication. But the other is that I believe that people are very visual and they connect to seeing through the eyes of great photographers really dramatic news and it makes them feel part of it. It makes them connect to it. And one thing about photography versus reporting is you can only get the photo in real time. If you're not there, you'll never have that photo. So we were very aggressive in terms of seeking photos. I mean, we rented a helicopter as soon as we heard about Columbine, rented a helicopter, got up in the air, got over the school, which is amazing.

Like no one would expect you to get a helicopter over an airspace like that. And we took photos that to this day are historical photos of that event. But it was only because we were so aggressive. We had an approach. My approach is report aggressively, publish thoughtfully. But if you don't get the photo, you know, if you don't get the photo, you'll never get the photo. So tell me which photos you ultimately decided to share and which ones you didn't. I believe we shared all the difficult photos, even the triage photos, ultimately. I'm not sure whether we shared them immediately,

but what we did share immediately was once we had the photo from the helicopter of Danny Rohrbaugh, the young boy, the student who was dead on the sidewalk, although we didn't have a confirmation of his condition, we shared that on the Associated Press that very day, and papers around the world, including in other parts of the United States, ran the photo of a boy on the sidewalk, his body strewn on the sidewalk, a can of Dr. Pepper leaking out next to him

where he had collapsed. There was an officer with a gun pointed at the school, cowering behind a car. Cowering behind him were like five or six students trying to be protected by the car. So it's a very dramatic moment, which captured the terror of Columbine in one photo to me. And I should mention that the name of the photographer who shot the photo from the helicopter was Rodolfo Gonzalez, a very talented photographer who was on the staff of the Rocky Mountain News and did incredible work that day. I think we shared like 40 photos. We shared a tremendous amount of photos and

ultimately were recognized for the quality of the photo work and what we had done in terms of sharing with other news organizations. And eventually, ultimately, our staff was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for news photography for their work on Columbine. Did you have any misgivings in the moment before the accolades, before the Pulitzer Prize, before papers around the world picked up your work? Did you have any ambivalence about sharing a photo of a dead teenager? Very much so.

We debated it all through the evening. Even when I went home, which was probably like four in the morning, I was still suffering doubts. I mean, I knew as a parent, I have three children. They were in school. The photo haunted me. It concerned me. On the other hand, I felt that it was such an important photo about such an important event in our community and in our country. And I felt that it was the right thing to do, but I had doubt. And the director of photography and I and others were constantly talking about it, about where to play it in the newspaper so that it wouldn't be the first thing you saw. You were prepared to see it by the time you arrived at that page. But we ran it very large and in color, so it had an impact. John gets a phone call from Daniel Rohrbaugh's mother in a minute on Today Explained. Thank you. says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can

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Today Explained, Sean Romsferm here with John Temple, who is editor-in-chief of Denver's Rocky Mountain News in April 1999 when the Columbine shooting occurred. And John, it sounds like when you publish this image of Daniel Rohrbaugh's dead or dying body, it was widely circulated. People were affected by it. You want to pull it, sir. But I wonder, did you hear from Daniel's parents? Were they asked before you published it? No, the parents were never asked before I published it. I didn't know his name even when we published that photo. And as a parent, it weighed on me. But the next morning when that photo was distributed in the newspaper, it's been a while, but what I remember is getting a very angry phone call from, I believe it was Danny's mother. So my name is Sue Patron. I live in Littleton, Colorado, and I lost my son, Daniel Rohrbaugh, in the school shooting at

Columbine High School. And just outraged how I could have published that photo and demanding, like, just really unhappy with me. We did call the editor of the newspaper, John Temple, and voiced how we felt. We were very angry that it was insensitive, that really, how could you do that? And just, you know, make it on like page six in the newspaper and was a big picture. And yeah, so we did call him and he was apologetic, but yet not. You know what I mean? And we had a very good talk about that. You know, I was very sorry for her loss, and the terrible thing is she discovered or confirmed the death of her son through the newspaper. Her parents did confirm it through us because

authorities had not by that time, by the morning, told them that their son was dead. So Columbine happened on April 20th. That was a Tuesday. And we're scrambling around the whole time trying to find out what the status was of our son. We didn't hear from him or anything. And even into the night and the next day, we didn't really know what had happened because we haven't heard from him. And then when my husband opened up the newspaper, there was a photo of my son Danny laying on the sidewalk dead.

And that's how we learned that he had been killed in the shooting. It's been a long time, but let's just say that her voice was very angry. And essentially the message was, how could you? How could you run this photo? How could you show my son in this way? How could you be so cruel? This is just wrong.

You had no right to publish a photo of my son. And she asked a good question. We were angry about it because there was a photographer taking a photo of my son, but yet the sheriff's department hadn't told us that he had passed away. And he had all of his identification on him and everything. So that part was really, was very hurtful. And it just kept, like the picture of him just kept flashing on the TV for what seemed like days on end.

So it was, it was really hard to see that. And then just the kind of like the total disregard that, you know, they had left him there and he was still there the next day too. So it was hard, very hard. I understood how painful I thought it must be to see that picture in the newspaper, but that I felt that the community and the world needed to see the horror of that day and that the picture was not so close to Danny's face that it wasn't revealing of him as a person. He was revealing of a child dead on a sidewalk outside a school with an officer with a gun. This is madness. And if we don't show the world what really happened and the terror that was inflicted in that school on that day, how is it possible for people to make good decisions

about changing the world? And that I felt that it was important for people to see the truth. How did that conversation end? I know this is going to sound crazy, but the conversation ended in a really positive way. We both heard each other out, and I asked her, could I send a reporter to learn more about Danny, to tell his story, to make sure people knew who that person was and in life, not just in death. And she said, yes. Yeah, he sent someone

to our house. Who spent time with the mother at that time. And one thing that was just incredible was that when she arrived and met the mother, the mother had folded the photo and placed it in her shirt pocket next to her heart because she wanted Danny to be next to her heart. And she was carrying the photo that she hated because she did hate it. She was carrying that photo with her. So it was unbelievable.

We had the photo there because I cut the picture out because that was the last photo that I had. And from that, I was trying to piece together what had happened that day because I had no idea. No idea of what happened because there was just so many rumors and stuff going on. So I had that picture in my hand when the reporter came to our house. And so it was just, it was with me all the time, that picture. I would look at it all the time.

It was the closest thing she could do to being close to her son because there's a whole medical process that occurs and there's a whole, you know, it's not West Side Story and you're holding the body. There's no connection. She needed something to feel connected to her son. I would feel sadness, but then a part of me, like as a mother thing, it doesn't make much sense, but then I would feel relief because I could tell from the photo that he didn't stop his fall when he landed. So his death was quick and he may not have known what was going on. And so that part gave me some peace, as twisted as that sounds, but you know what I mean. That was a little over 23 years ago. And the reason we're still talking about this is because people are so frustrated with the spate of these kinds of shootings, not even to mention rising mass shootings of a more everyday sort across this country, that there's this debate going on about releasing images like the one we're talking about from 1999, but perhaps even more graphic.

Should we force all Americans to see these images, or should we at least force our lawmakers to see these images, our lawmakers who perhaps don't want to do anything in a moment like this, who don't want to do anything in a moment like this, who don't want to change any laws. Has your thinking on this evolved as mass shootings have become a norm in this country? I feel the same frustration that many journalists feel, which is that we as journalists hope that our work makes people see the world as it is and gives them an idea of how they can make the world a better place. And it's been a source of pain to me and frustration and disappointment as a journalist that the work we have done has not had the impact I would have hoped it would have had. We spent years digging into Columbine.

I hoped that that would open eyes, open hearts, wake people up to that there are things that we could do. But nothing like that has happened. In fact, what's happened is that copycats want to do something similar. It's sort of like a terrible door was opened and you cannot shut the door and many people then want to charge through it. So I really understand the frustration and the reason why people think, oh, we need to do something even more outrageous. But there's a lot of factors that affect that decision. Number one to me is that it's extremely unlikely that that image of a child shot the way you describe would ever be seen by a journalist. In my experience, the police and law enforcement in general circle the wagons, keep everything secret, do not want to share any of these crime scene photos. But let's say a journalist arrived on the scene the way our photojournalists at the Rocky Mountain News did,

which is get there as quickly as possible. And if you had those photos, I think you as the editor have to make that decision yourself. If you can get others to join you, great. But if you still think it's right, you should publish it. And I'm sure that it will cause a furor and many other people in the social media age will share that photo.

The danger with thinking that this is the solution to me is that, one, it opens the door to a horrifying view that could actually encourage others the way the Columbine shooting did to see whether they could create something even uglier. And the other thing is we live in an era when you unleash a photo. I mean, people thought that Newtown was false flag, that it was a fake shooting

and that parents were attacked at Newtown. And so those photos could be used in the most hurtful, harmful, hateful way against not only against the surviving family members, but against others. Somebody could then take that photo and send it to a teacher and say, I'm going to do this to your class. So it opens a door that is extremely dangerous. I think it would be pretty scary if they started showing photos of dead children and dead people everywhere where you're not expecting it, where it just like pops up on a screen somewhere because you don't know if you

have kids with you and things like that. But it's, I don't know that that needs to be part of, I mean, if people aren't shocked that kids are getting shot without seeing a picture, that's a very sad state for our society. Could people have done things differently and change ourselves as a society so that we're more caring about the others and that we find ways to step in when we see somebody getting into a dangerous zone and not step in only with, you know, punishment, but step in with love and care so that we can bring a person back from the edge and avoid these kinds of, you know, mass shootings. I think there's just a total disregard for life and everybody wants to do whatever's best for themselves and not for being in touch with other people.

I mean, it just feels like we're just turning into a country that, you know, it's like the bad things get so promoted, like everything that's going on right now. I mean, it's like it's good to look to turn the other way and stuff. But I think people need to love their country. They need to love each other. That was Sue Patron and John Temple. John's the former editor-in-chief of the Rocky Mountain News. Sue is Daniel Rohrbaugh's mom. Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi,

fact-checked by Laura Bullard, mixed by Paul Mounsey, and edited by me. I'm Sean Ramos-Firum. Today Explained is off Monday for Juneteenth. We're back Tuesday. Take care. Thank you.