Reporting tragedy at a university newspaper

It was the evening of Sept. 26, 2005, and Brooke Edwards was sitting outside on a curb on campus. Though she doesn’t remember what function she was at that night or where exactly she sat with friends, she remembers looking over to see her phone ringing. It was Jay Wamsley, the then-advisor for the Utah Statesman. She was the new editor-in-chief for that year.

She could have never expected what he told her.

“He let me know that this tragic event had happened and was giving me a heads-up,” Edwards said, “and was telling me how we could handle this, letting me know what the administrators’ plans were. I was very new, and he wanted me to know how the process worked.”

A van crash had happened a few hours earlier near Tremonton, as 10 students and a faculty member in the College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences were returning from a field trip. A tire blew out, and none of the men were wearing seat belts. Eight of the students and the faculty member died either on the scene or during the following day while in the hospital.

“Even in the few years I had been there, nothing this tragic had happened,” Edwards said. The night of the accident, (the night she got the call) there had been a “festive event celebrating the beginning of the year.” After word spread of what happened, however, the feeling on campus changed due to loss for so many people, she said.

The next few weeks were filled with stories about the accident, policy changes for university travel and the on-going police and university investigations about what had happened, Edwards said.

“The most important thing we wanted to do was get a reporter to the meeting with the administration,” Edwards said. Statesman reporters were invited to sit in when administrators first started to field the questions of what happened and what was going to change. Being able to let students know about those things was most important.

However, since none of the staff had heard about the crash in time to make it to the scene or have much to write first-hand about the accident, they followed what was found from other news sources in Utah and mostly covered the memorials and things done campus to remember the victims.

But it wasn’t just assigned reporters and photographers going to events and memorials after the accident, said Edwards.

“A lot of times you just went to the things you were assigned to because you didn’t have time to go to anything else, but I remember they held a candlelight vigil shortly after, and a lot of our staff went,” Edwards said. “While that wasn’t a surprise to me, that was sort of unusual to have so many of our staff there attending something they weren’t assigned to because, just like every other student, we had been impacted by this.”

For Michael Sharp, the photo editor of the paper at the time, there isn’t much he remembers besides, fittingly, the photographs that came in from other sources of the accident wreck.

“That’s basically the only memory I have. I guess that makes sense, being the photo editor, taking pictures all day and saying ‘How will we show this?’ That’s kind of more what I looked at, more than the words — my understanding of how things played out was more visual,” he said.

Though he doesn’t remember every detail of the coverage and every photo they chose to use, he remembers the struggle between covering it all and letting people know what happened and what was coming from investigations, and also the sensitivity of the situation.

“It was a really big story. There were a lot of questions, and I think, in a lot of ways, that was the role that we took — how do we answer those questions that are going to be asked and need to be asked, and what’s important to talk about in keeping in step for those individuals who lost their lives in the accident,” Sharp said.

Though the feeling didn’t ever completely lift the entire year, Utah States was truly brought together by the tragedy of losing some of their own, Edwards said. And the staff of the Statesman did what they could, and she was proud of how everything turned out in such a difficult situation.

Now, 10 years later, with many changes having been made, but people in the accident never forgotten, the Statesman has reached back to talk to some involved about what it means 10 years later.

Morgan Pratt Robinson, a staff reporter at the Statesman, had the chance to speak to Robbie Petersen, one of the survivors of the 2005 accident.

“I wanted to be delicate,” Robinson said. “If you listen to the audio, he’s really hesitant and somber. His attitude is somber.”

Robinson also took time on Friday to attend the tractor parade on campus as part of CAAS week, something done every year to honor those in the accident.

“I might have been one of the only ones who really understood what it was for,” Robinson said. “There’s a wreath up by one of the tractors with all of the victim’s names, and I took a few moments this morning, and I stopped there and paid my respects.”

Covering tragedy is something that often comes with a reporting job, but the students at the Statesman then and now hope they have done the job deserved to remember those affected by the 2005 van crash.

An audio recording can be found online with Robinson’s article at the Statesman website.

— mandy.m.morgan@aggiemail.usu.edu