Jeff Cole: Reporting on death and guns
The call came on a Friday evening around 11 into the emergency room at Saint Francis Hospital in Connecticut’s capital, Hartford.
We were on a grim watch.
Gunfire was common on the streets of this city of 130,000 in the early 1990s. Often, the attacks were drive-by shootings by gang members firing wildly from the open windows of cars careening along city streets. Rival gang members were shot as were the innocent, including children, cut down in what the Hartford Courant reported were 58 homicides in 1994.
The killings were happening despite Connecticut having some of the toughest gun laws in the country. Laws destined to become tighter years later after the massacre of 26, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
Reporting for a CBS television station in Hartford, I approached management at Saint Francis to allow me and my photographer into their ER to tell the story of gun violence through an ER doctor fighting to keep victims alive. Seeing the value of the approach, they said yes.
The late-night call was an alert for an incoming shooting victim shot point-blank in the head by an attacker standing close by. Within minutes, the doors to the ER burst open by a stretcher, pushed by ambulance staff, with a young man sprawled on top, his head wrapped in white stained by darkening, spreading blood. Rushed into treatment, the young ER doctor who had signed off on our visit and greeted us warmly earlier in the evening, fought to save yet another life only to see the victim quickly slip away.
Angered by the persistent gun violence in the capital of what was then the nation’s wealthiest state, the ER doctor asked if we wanted to see what a bullet fired at close range would do to the human skull. Placing his hands behind the victim’s head, he raised it to reveal the large section of the skull torn away by the force of the blast.
That searing experience stuck with me as I continued to report in Southern New England and later moved to Philadelphia where the flow of illegal firearms and the resulting homicides are major concerns.
My introduction to Philadelphia gun violence came with the so-called Lex Street murders three days after Christmas in 2000 in which ten people were shot, killing seven of them. Investigators reported the victims were forced to lay facedown on the floor before the gunfire. According to the New York Times, the killing pushed murders in Philadelphia to 317 that year, a sharp increase from the year before.
The gun debate in Philadelphia has long centered around the city’s inability to set its own gun laws. That power is reserved for the state legislature where a majority of members have been unwilling to enact stricter laws despite the pleas of mayors who’ve continually trekked to Harrisburg to make their case. The opposition, many Republicans and politically active gun rights groups, argue Philadelphia has failed to enforce the gun laws already on the books and often heaped blame on the city’s progressive District Attorney, Larry Kranser.
Krasner’s response, in frequent press conferences in his offices near City Hall, was to point to arrests made in gun and gang cases by calling the head of his gun task force to the podium to offer details. He frequently complained about low bail amounts set by the courts putting suspects back on the street awaiting trial and able to offend again.
For their part, Philadelphia Police were pulling six thousand firearms off the streets yearly while raising concerns about how quickly new weapons would replace them. In 2021, homicides spiked in Philadelphia at 562 while dramatically falling off to 222 last year.
Covering street crime is a gritty, solemn affair, far from the bloodless debate over gun laws. To arrive at a shooting scene was to find a pool of blood, even human tissue, drying in the sun on the street where victims fell. Scattered nearby, blue, blood-stained rubber gloves tossed by the responding EMTs hustling the wounded to the hospital. Yellow police tape was stretched across the street barring the curious from chalk circles on the pavement marking bullet casings from the gunplay.
It was mid-afternoon on a late September day in 2022 when the gunfire erupted outside Roxborough High School in Philadelphia. Fourteen-year-old Nicholas Elizalde and four others were set upon by gun-toting attackers lying in wait after a football scrimmage in a case of mistaken identity. I was working with a photographer a few miles away on the story ironically of a break in at a gun shop. We raced to the school to find the murder scene blocked by police cars with investigators swarming and bullet casings everywhere.
Police eventually arrested the shooters who were convicted and sent to prison, but the lasting memory came from Nicholas’s mother, Meredith. She said she was waiting to pick up her only child after practice when she heard the crack of the weapons and ran to him. Holding Nicholas in her arms she said, “I felt him pass. I felt him leave.”
Jeff Cole was an investigative, politics and policy reporter at Fox 29 in Philadelphia for 25 years. He is a two-time winner of the Weiss Award for Investigative Reporting, as well as the recipient of a series of Edward R. Murrow Awards and Associated Press Awards and four New England Emmy Awards for his investigative reporting.
