Emergency calls test editors' judgment

Last week, in the latest of what seems an endless series of grisly murder tales from Johnston County, The N&O quoted a wife/mother calling the sheriff's office about her husband, "He's unbalanced. I'd like for someone to come and tell him to leave."

When deputies arrived, they found the husband and their two children dead in his car parked in her driveway. The deaths were ruled suicide/murders.

How does the newspaper get these frantic quotes uttered by emotional victims in the middle of crimes as they unfold? From tapes of 911 calls by distressed people seeking emergency help.

Those tapes are a standard tool of the police reporter's trade, along with search warrants and other records that officials are required by law to make public. The N&O uses them frequently: I counted 65 stories that used 911 references so far this year. Increasingly, as more news content moves online, recordings of a victim's anguished calls are ending up on The N&O's Web site, www.newsobserver.com, where they can be heard by anyone with a computer.

911 tapes often provide the drama that makes a story come alive, or the detail that helps readers better understand confusing facts. But they also can be the stuff of supermarket tabloids, providing a peek into grief that a suffering victim never intended to be shared with the public. Some examples:

• The Jan. 13 beheading of a 4-year-old girl, in another Johnston County case. Her father was charged. The tape caught her mother screaming to 911: "Her head's off. I can't do anything. She's dead. Don't you get it?"

• The call from a frantic resident of an apartment complex near WakeMed: "There's been an explosion under me," one resident told the 911 dispatcher. "Get here."

• The alleged love triangle slaying of Clayton Navy reservist Paul Berkley, just returned from the Middle East. "Hello, I've been shot and my husband, he's ... ," the wife, her voice trailing off, tells the dispatcher.

• The fatal drug overdose of Cary teenager Erica Hicks in 2005: "I think she's dead, to be honest with you," a neighbor tells 911. "She's absolutely lifeless, and a lot of fluid has just been flowing out of her mouth and nose."

Do we need all this melodrama? Depends on the context.

The tapes in the Hicks and Berkley cases came out of court proceedings and in those instances served, legitimately I think, as evidence that might help readers come to their own conclusions about the cases. In the Hicks story, the tapes showed that the teenage boy charged in her death had tried to mislead the 911 dispatcher. Ditto with Monique Berkley's 911 call after her husband's slaying. Police allege that she lured him to a park to be killed by her lover, then called 911 in a cover-up attempt. (The case is slated for trial in October.)

After the recent North Raleigh fires, The N&O published a lengthy transcript of a 911 call from a resident trying to spell Oneonta, the name of the street where the fire occurred. The three-minute exchange between the caller and the dispatcher would be comic, except for the seriousness of the event. The transcript illustrated for readers the problem of unfamiliar street names in a fast-growing city where new roads pop up regularly.

The story on the beheading call actually left out some of the more gruesome detail supplied by the mother. And The N&O, unlike at least one local television station, decided not to put the audio on its Web site. "There was nothing to educate the reader about the incident," said breaking news editor Richard Stradling. "It was just the woman's awful grief."

I'm not sure the "head's off" quote educated the readers much, either. Some called me to complain about that detail.

In the Clayton murder-suicide last week, The N&O published in print but not online the quote from the mother when she called 911 about her husband's car. That wasn't a conscious decision -- the reporter couldn't get the recording from the Johnston County Sheriff's Department in time to post it. Instead, an official read her the quote. Which was not particularly dramatic or revealing anyway.

It is a fine line, as Stradling acknowledges, between informative and gratuitous when choosing whether to publish 911 details. That quandary is amplified by the newspaper's ability to put the voice recording online, where readers can listen in on victims' anguish. The N&O is increasingly trying to bring more readers to its Web site, to increase readership there. Posting a dramatic victim's phone call is always a temptation, but I for one am glad to see that, for the most part, the editors have exercised good judgment in using 911 tapes online.

"It seems like there is an instinctive reflex to get the 911 tape," Stradling said. "It's incumbent upon us to talk about it and make a good decision about whether to put it online. It's not a matter of just because we have it, we should put it up."