Why We Named A Witness

Aug 31, 2015 by winjaw

(A recent column explaining why we ran the name of a 16-year-old witness)

There has been a lot of outrage and indignation over our publishing the name of a high school student who notified authorities that another student had carried a gun on campus.

Here’s a sampling of online comments: “NTH you are simply pathetic”; “Who was the stupid person that felt like including names …”; “you need to think before you do any more STUPID stuff”; “This is careless and reckless”; “Way to go NTH! You just completely screwed this kid that did the right thing”; “You care nothing for the innocent people you hurt”; “Mr John….your paper screwed up BIG TIME on this one”; “NTH you did wrong on this one!!!!!!!!!!!”

Those were among the first comments. Then it just got downright ugly. I have been surprised at the pure hatred and vitriol in the comments, especially by those who have no understanding of the First Amendment, the law, or public records.

More importantly, not one commenter has any knowledge of what transpired to lead us to what we published. Not one.

But on the Internet, everyone is an expert as facts and reality go out the window. It’s like a feeding frenzy on “The Walking Dead.” The commenters started tripping over each other in an effort to out-righteous the comment before.

That’s fine. We are fair game. But I would like to explain why we did what we did – and what really transpired – because this was a very unique situation.

First a quick recap – Alex Jordan, 14, took a Beretta handgun to Newnan High School. Another student, Ryan Cook, 16, notified school officials that Jordan told him he had a gun. Upon a search, law enforcement officers found the gun, as well as five rounds of .380 ammunition. That ammunition did not match the gun.

Jordan was arrested and later transferred to a youth detention center to serve a six-month sentence following a hearing in juvenile court.

Initially, authorities would not release Jordan’s name. We then filed a Freedom of Information request for the unredacted police report with the city of Newnan. On Wednesday, we ran an updated story on the incident, including both Jordan’s name and Cook’s name.

Why Cook’s? Because up until we got the actual unredacted police report, we were fairly certain Cook was the one with the gun. Multiple social media posts pointed to Cook as the suspect. Many of us here have kids at NHS. They were saying the same thing.

The generic name for the drug is not a branded version but on line cialis the effects are desired. Your positivity towards negative emotions will put your brain on ease. http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/monkey/ levitra free shipping Only a man can understand his sexual status and identify order generic levitra his impotency symptoms. Learn more about this relatively uncommon occurrence and what it can mean for penis health buy cheap cialis cute-n-tiny.com for men who are experiencing balding and hair loss. However, we held off until we had the official report. And the reason we decided to run Cook’s name was because the rumors were becoming so rampant we believed it necessary to quash them and publish the correct information.

And that leads to a second point. There is the assumption we “outed” Cook. How so? As I mentioned above, we – and thousands of others – had Cook’s name for several days. The incident happened Aug. 13. We printed the students’ names Aug. 26, nearly two weeks later. It was already out there. We ran it solely to correct an error.

Anyone could have gotten Cook’s name. We filed a Freedom of Information request to get the police incident report, which is public record.

Finally, many are chastising us for creating this so-called “chilling effect” – that students now won’t report illegal activity over fears their name will be published.

Seriously? How disappointing.

I would prefer to believe we have raised our kids to have enough common sense and character to immediately report a gun on campus to authorities without regard to this newspaper’s potential actions.

It seems in all this “go after the messenger” mentality we forget there was a gun and ammunition involved at a local high school. We don’t know why Jordan had different ammunition, maybe he didn’t know the right type. It doesn’t matter.

But something tells me if that gun had been loaded, Cook’s yearbook photo – at the very least – would have been plastered over every Atlanta television news station and with him being praised as a hero who potentially saved fellow students’ lives. And that’s even if he wanted to remain anonymous.

And that’s what Cook is, a hero, whether the gun was loaded or not. Cook manned up, something sorely missing in today’s society, as exhibited by many of the baseless comments regarding this story.

It is one thing to disagree and have a civil discourse on the issue, but the pure animosity shown here before all the facts were laid out is beyond disheartening.