After a sentence was finally handed down in the big murder trial I was covering, things returned to normal a little bit at work during the second half of this week.
Although as I have learned far too well in the news game, normal doesn’t always mean… “normal.”
There are tons of stories out there. We are a fairly small market with limited resources, and it’s impossible to be on top of every single arrest, crime, and court proceeding. It’s a numbers game. So it’s a fairly regular occurrence for our news director to send a link to a new story from another outlet and simply ask “Do we have this?” I like to think that I keep on top of a lot of cases, but as I said, I can’t be aware of all of them.
This week one of those involved a woman signing a plea deal in a case with multiple charges. Like…double-digits worth. I began by reading the arrest report from a couple of years ago, and it immediately made me think of Stefon from his appearances on the Saturday Night Live Weekend Update desk.
“This case has EVERYTHING. Police K9s…a Krav Maga elbow strike…meth…”
The level of detail in this particular report was just spectacular. If you are at all interested, please read my story below before continuing on with this post.
Rogers woman sentenced to 22 years after fleeing police
Okay. So…most of the arrest report and the court documents were self-explanatory. HOWEVER, there was one charge that was a little too vague for me: injuring *or killing* an animal used by a law enforcement agency. Nope. I needed more information, so I tracked down the contact info for the arresting agency’s public information officer and reached out, because I really needed to hear that the dog survived after what the poor pooch went through in the line of duty.
“Thank you for your interest in our officers,” he replied. “K9 Officer Bico did survive the incident. Both K9 Officer Bico and Cpl. Smith recovered from their injuries and returned to work.”
First off…phew. Secondly, I love that they refer to the dogs as “officer.” Just fantastic. We sometimes talk about adding a human element to a story but in this case, I thought it was both relevant and a nice touch to add an additional canine element to the article.
And I mean…just look at this guy. What a good boy.