OMAHA MALL SHOOTINGS: POLICE AND REPORTING COMEDY OF (T)ERRORS

Field reporter (and honorary Utican) Dwight Ward took L.A. Times reporters Nicholas Riccardi and DeeDee Correll to task for their slovenly work. Do we smell a conspiracy? Naaah. Just the news biz as usual. As Dwight said,

It's early days with this yet but I should say that I'm leaning more towards this not being an engineered event. Both the police work and reporting were careless and incompetent, as was the entire system of juvenile care for Robert in the last decade.

Here's the exchange (used with permission) between Dwight and the L.A. Times:


To: nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com; deedee.correll@latimes.com
Sent: Fri Dec 07 06:58:30 2007
Subject: Omaha mall shooting

Mr. Riccardi and Ms. Correll,

My comments and questions refer to your article of December 7, 2007.

Mall victims were just ordinary folks

The suicidal killer, Robert Hawkins, stole his stepfather's rifle. The killing was over before police could arrive on the scene.

By Nicholas Riccardi and DeeDee Correll, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers December 7, 2007

In this article you state: "They and five others were killed Wednesday by a suicidal 19-year-old who sprayed the Von Maur department store with about 30 rounds from an AK-47 rifle he had stolen from his stepfather."

Your reporting is now consistent with other major news outlets, but this was not the case earlier on. Previous stories have Omaha police chief Thomas Warren stating confidently that authorities recovered an SKS assault rifle at the scene (see attached). No one reports that Hawkins carried multiple rifles.

Setting aside the issue that Warren mistakenly refers to the SKS carbine as an assault rifle, it seems highly unlikely that experienced police officers would mistake one type of firearm for the other, as any American adolescent boy knows what an AK-47 looks like, and, while the SKS is more obscure, it has no similarities to an AK-47. It is equally unlikely that the description of one could morph into the other as it passed from person to person. Both versions are too highly specific for any explanation of simple error to suffice.

I will just flatly state that it appears to me that this story is being 'managed' at the expense of the facts, for reasons unknown. Is this major discrepancy a concern to you on any level?

Thanks,
Dwight Ward

- - - - -

Subject: Re: Omaha mall shooting
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:22:14 -0800
From: Riccardi, Nicholas
To: Dwight Ward


You've hit upon something odd, which is that the police have referred to this as both an ak-47 and an sks. There hasn't been time to pin them down and they refer to an ak more often, so everyone has gone with that.


One final comment from Ang Riedel (of Think or Be Eaten; also an honorary Utican) on this exchange:

They 'went with it'? That's journalism? Going with it instead of finding out for sure? Sheesh.