Going to the Media (When You Become the Lead Story, part 6)

On the evening of Saturday, Oct. 17, a little less than a week after the collision, I posted the following comment on Facebook: “So my wife has the dubious honor of being the first (so far as we know) to be struck and injured by a vehicle on the new Tilikum Crossing bridge, just under a month after it opened. Now that I’ve completed my personal, preliminary site investigation (since Portland Police did not respond to -- and probably were not notified of -- the 911 call last Sunday morning), I am surprised that it took that long. I predict there will be many more….”

Within ten minutes, a friend who works at a local radio station asked, “Want to talk to me about it for a news story?” I’d occasionally looked askance at the people who took their sob story about a dispute with a landlord, an obnoxious neighbor, or a government agency to the news media instead of “going through proper channels,” but in this case, the proper channels had utterly overlooked us.

I told my friend we were up for it. She referred me to a colleague and we set up an appointment for Carole and me to come to the radio station for an interview on the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 21. (I strongly hinted that it would be much better for us if the interviewer could come to our home, but this appeared to be one of those situations where “Mohammed gotta go to the mountain.”)

I wasn’t sure that Carole would be able to make the trip to the station on Wednesday. A week after the collision, she was trying to wean herself of pain medications, but still having to resort to a dose either just before bed or in the wee hours of the morning to suppress the pain in her shoulder, ribs, and neck in order to get some rest.

Shortly before we were about to board the streetcar outside our new home Wednesday morning, the radio news reporter sent an email to say a sister TV station wanted to send over a video camera to shoot the interview as well for potential broadcast on television. Carole had had a pain-filled and not-very-restful night, and wasn’t happy about the prospect of being videotaped.

I figured there was a strong probability that I’d end up going to the radio station alone to tell our story, but I gently urged Carole onward, saying the report would have more impact if she could talk about her experience in person and on camera. We made our slow, shuffling way to the station together.

Perhaps the biggest piece of luck (or perfect timing) of this entire saga was that another email arrived that morning from Trimet to inform me the agency had located the MAX platform video of the incident I had requested seven days before, and a copy would be mailed to me on disk. My guess had been correct: although the cameras closest to the collision site had been facing away from it, the ones at the far west end of the platform were pointed in the right direction to have picked up the incident.

Since Trimet was sending me the platform video in response to my Request for Inspection of Public Records, the agency also released copies to the local media. All this happened on the very Wednesday that Carole and I went in to be interviewed on KXL, with a KGW video camera looking on -- a full ten days after the collision. Suddenly, producers and reporters at all the local stations could see what had happened to my wife.

But Carole and I were still unaware of all this as we rode the elevator up to the offices of KXL in the PacWest Center building, huddled in a small sound room with the radio reporter and TV camera person, and chatted briefly about the collision and Carole’s physical condition, roughly between 10:15 and 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 21.

If you saw the subsequent reports on KGW, you know how Carole looked that day. She came through like a trouper: earnest, clear, and articulate. I was certain she would if I could just get her safely to the station. After the radio interview, the camera operator from KGW asked if we could go outside for some footage on the street. We walked slowly, arm-in-arm together, along Sixth Avenue toward the camera and away from it. (I wish I could have gotten that footage, which must have been sweet.). Then the camera person asked some further questions at the PSU Urban Center plaza, where the other clips of us that would appear on KGW’s report that evening were shot.

I was a little worried because by then (ten days after the incident, remember), Carole didn’t look like a badly injured person. The bloody gashes on the bridge of her nose and upper lip were gone, she wasn’t inclined to pull up her sleeves and trousers to show off the other scabs and bruises (nor did anyone ask her to), and we couldn’t show the camera her cracked ribs, separated shoulder, and chipped vertebra.

Trying to anticipate how the story might come across on the news, I imagined the average TV viewer scoffing, “she doesn’t look all that bad off; she’s just a publicity hound looking to score some money,” which I confess I’ve occasionally thought about people who take their tale to the television stations. And there was always a chance the producers would skip our story altogether if another gang shooting or brutal auto crash occurred that afternoon.

I think the most pointed lesson from the collision and its aftermath that I related to the press that day was:

You know how people complain about being “just a statistic”? Well, my wife isn’t even a statistic. As far as the Portland Police Bureau is concerned, as far as Trimet is concerned, as far as the Portland Bureau of Transportation is concerned, this injury incident never happened. Officially speaking, Tilikum Crossing bridge retains a clean safety record.

Since we had thus far failed to get the transportation and law enforcement authorities to acknowledge Carole’s misfortune in any official way, we were resorting to the media for assistance in getting the attention we needed to ensure our mounting medical bills might get paid, circulate the word about safety issues at the bridge, and perhaps in the long run, start a push to get the laws and regulations that govern bicycles as vehicles further clarified and made more consistent across all jurisdictions.

Read “When You Become the Lead Story, part 1” -- introduction

Read “When You Become the Lead Story, part 2” -- the setting and a bum steer

Read “When You Become the Lead Story, part 3” -- immediate aftermath

Read “Two-Plus Days in the Hospital (When You Become the Lead Story, part 4)”

Read “The Search for Official Evidence (When You Become the Lead Story, part 5)”