S29 Trailer | Embedded: Capital Gazette

This is a CBC podcast.

Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers from NPRs Embedded, and we are bringing you our series, Capital Gazette, on Uncover.

One day in the summer of 2018, at a small newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, the staff was doing what they do.

One reporter was writing the annual guide to local government agencies, another was putting out the results of a primary election.

And then,

right in the middle of the day, a man with a gun shot his way into their office and killed five people.

Hours later, one of the survivors, Celine Sanfelis, was on CNN.

Celine, where were you and what did you first hear?

I mean, I remember I was working at my desk when I heard the shots.

And it took a lot of time.

She tells Anderson Cooper her story.

But then at one point, she sort of interrupts herself and says this terrible truth about mass shootings.

This is going to be a story for how many days?

Less than a week.

People will forget about us after a week.

People will forget about us.

Celine was saying this nine months after the shooting at a concert in Las Vegas, four months after the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

She knew how this was going to go.

And

I just don't know what I want right now, right?

But I'm going to need more

than a couple days of news coverage and some thoughts and prayers because

it's

our whole lives have been shattered.

So what does happen to people like Celine after the news coverage ends?

To answer that, we spent two years reporting on the staff at her newspaper, the Capitol Gazette.

We wanted to know, what's it like to go back to work?

Chase asked me something like, we are putting out a paper tomorrow, right?

And I remember saying it like a little defensively and like just a little

angrily.

I was like, yes, we are putting out a paper tomorrow.

What if someone's sending us more death threats or what if somebody sends me a death threat and I don't see it and then somebody comes and kills all my friends and it's my fault because I didn't read the email.

What's it like to cover a story you were the subjects of?

You know, half the editorial staff died, or maybe a third.

And then who else could do it?

None of the reporters could because they're witnesses.

I can't think of another situation where journalists have covered an attack on their own newsroom.

How does it feel to sit in the same courtroom as the man accused of shooting your friends?

So it's not like I was afraid of him, but just kind of like,

you know, this is the person who has changed all our lives and so many other lives, you know, forever.

And he's going to be right there.

And how do you figure out how to keep going?

I think that a lot of it was about

looking each other in the eye and saying, it's okay that we're alive.

That's coming Thursday on Embedded from NPR.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.