Thursday, September 24, 2009, 8:47 pm

A rush to judgment, a rush on deadline

Attorneys, bailiffs, the alleged victim and her family scrambled around the courtroom, and I was shooed into the hall, the courtroom locked, and no one told me what was happening. But from what I overheard and observed, I knew something Shakespearean had just happened. And I knew I had a Shakespearean story to write. I couldn’t do much but wait in the courthouse hallway, so I took a beat, looked out the third-floor window and thought something like, Oh, my god. This is the craziest shit I’ve ever covered.

The defendant in the sexual battery trial I had been covering all that week, William Telano Evans, had not shown up after the jury announced it reached a verdict. He wasn’t in court 20 minutes later when the judge decided to have the verdict read anyway. And he wasn’t there to hear the words jury foremen rarely utter in St. Johns County: “not guilty.”

At some point during the roughly 130 minutes it took the jury to deliberate, Evans got into his truck, drove home and shot himself. He was found dead a matter of minutes after the verdict was read.

After it was halfway confirmed and I realized his attorney had left, I ran to my car and drove a few miles north to the house. There were already some two dozen police vehicles lining the street. Deputies, detectives and crime scene technicians were all over the yard. His attorney was there, teary-eyed. The last thing he wanted to do, probably, was talk with me, but he did.

In my young career, I can’t remember anything more difficult to write because of the many facets: the fact that the case was decades old, the disturbing closing argument from the prosecution, the technicalities of statutes of limitation, the rare acquittal, the suicide, the irony of it all.

In the end, after the hours going back and forth with my editor, I was OK with the end product, which was easily the most widely read thing I’ve written yet. The Associated Press, the Drudge Report and the St. Petersburg Times linked to it, and both The Record and its sister paper The Florida Times-Union published it on the front page. The story got so much traffic on The Record’s site that the photographs had to be stripped from it to save bandwidth. That was validating enough. But in my inbox, among the not-so-nice e-mails saying the story was too flowery or the “article was very poorly written and it’s quite obvious that you have no talent for it,” I received a note that was even more reassuring: “You’re one badass writer.”

It’s a common occurrence that when I tell friends what I did on a given day — cover a trial, go to the scene of a stabbing, interview a mother about her teenage daughter who was killed in a fiery crash — they quip that I really revel in people’s misery. That just comes with the police beat.

When I figured out that Evans was dead I thought I had a great story and thought it could be a landmark day in my 15-month-old career. Both were true. I didn’t want it to happen, of course. I didn’t want to be in the courtroom as a woman described how a man repeatedly molested her when she was a child. I didn’t want to talk to a lawyer with tears in his eyes who had just found out his client killed himself. I didn’t want to call the alleged victim the next day to ask how she felt.

But shitty things happen in this world. They don’t always happen in St. Johns County, but when they do, I’m there with my notebook because it’s my job. When they happen in St. Johns County and they’re riveting, could-be-made-for-TV-movies, well, I guess that’s just a perk of being a wallflower with an audio recorder.

Tags: journalism, Record