“What happened?” I ask.
"I was eating, then there was this bang, you know, because a person had hit the concrete and fucking exploded,” he answered.
The 'death knock' is one of journalism’s rites of passage.
Defiant or frightened journalists have been known to 'knock the grass'. This means they told their editor that they tried to get a comment but no one answered the knock at the door… really they just stayed in the car.
Readers hunger for the small details about crime and death — the dull thud of a body hitting concrete, the smell of hair burning in a fire. And until the public loses appetite for the lurid and gruesome, “knocking” in one form or another will always be something that is done often, and spoken about rarely.
I can argue strongly for the validity of the practice but, in truth, I am not convinced that we are doing anything more than stealing grief.
In a week-long course run by one of the largest news companies in the world, we actually practiced role playing these situations.
“You’d be surprised how many people invite you right in and make you a cup of tea,” the instructor said. “It’s a mistake to think they don’t want to talk. A lot of the time they do. It’s not fair to take that opportunity off them.”
This was the first justification I had heard and I found it compelling. I have since read studies which further support this idea including one where a mother stated that a lack of media interest left her feeling “as if my son’s death counted for nothing”.
But I am still not completely convinced. When I think of the death knocks I have done there is a dirty feeling and a sadness that always comes with it.
I can argue strongly for the validity of the practice but, in truth, I am not convinced that we are doing anything more than stealing grief.
The following are the experiences I most remember.
I have tried to keep the names and specifics of these events opaque as the families have endured enough from me already — but rest assured they are all true.
The light they paint me in is not flattering. This too is probably true and deserved.
***
My first death knock was on my very first day of as a reporter.
I was wearing a new suit and shoes. I had a new haircut, new notepad, new voice recorder. I was excited.
A man had thrown his wife off their balcony onto their neighbour’s concrete courtyard below. It was my job to interview the neighbour, which I did, only the story never made it to print.
“You wrote this up great but nobody cares about dreg on dreg violence,” I was told.
The woman’s death was rendered 'unreportable' because she died in government housing. She was middle-aged and possibly a drug addict. This made her 'unrelatable'. Journalists where I worked at the time tended to use the term 'relatable' as code for someone who is attractive.
When convicted killer Simon Gittany threw his fiancee Lisa Harnum from the balcony of their luxury high-rise apartment hundreds of stories and several books were written about the crime. The victim and killer were both said to be 'relatable'.
That same month — my first in the job — we also attended to the scene of a father stabbed to death by his son.
Despite the death also happening in a part of town which could mean another case of 'dreg on dreg', the emergency services radio had used a word that guaranteed the news desk would send us rushing — “Decapitation.”
We arrived to find the police had set up a good perimeter. This meant we couldn’t talk to our usual targets, so we walked across the highway to ask the owner of a two story house if we could use his balcony. My photographer took up position on the balcony with a telephoto lens about three times the size of his camera, squinted through it and whistled me over to look through his viewfinder.
Personally, I don’t care if you die, but someone might, so fuck off.
I saw a corpse blown up and grainy at the bottom of a foot of stairs.
“Not really decapitated, don’t you think?” spat out the hardened photographer. “His neck is just sawn up.”
He laughed. I recoiled.
On another occasion, my photographer and I asked residents one by one for permission to clamber over their backyard fences until we had penetrated a police cordon set up during an armed siege.
Eventually we got close enough to take pictures of armed police, only to be told by an officer in no uncertain terms that we were not wlecome.
"Personally, I don’t care if you die, but someone might, so fuck off." He spoke carefully to the man whose yard we were in. “I can’t tell you not to have them in there with you. But I’m asking you to send them away for everyone’s safety.” We were sent packing.
Back in the car, I filed my story, my photographer uploaded his pictures. Rinse. Repeat.
***
Death knocks give you a window into grief that feels undeserved.
You see people at their most vulnerable, when they are suffering and confused, anguished and full of rage.
It also teaches you that we all process our grief in different ways.
At first I wondered why people would talk to me at all. Then I wondered why some would and others wouldn’t. But these aren’t people behaving normally. You are meeting them on a day where their entire world is inside out.
I try to remind my armchair critic friends about this whenever they watch the relative of a crime victim on television and declare “something just seems off about them”.
Everything is off.
I’ve had a man tell me in a tone of voice more friendly and upbeat than most salesmen, “he was burning his mother with a cigarette lighter so my brother tried to stop him, the guy stabbed him, pushed him down and stabbed him some more”.
Another man told me about the death of his entire family in an affect so flat you could have skipped it across a pond. Then he came to life when describing in detail how the car accident that killed them had also burst open their suitcases.
“Their clothes spilled out everywhere,” he related with glee. “Some of the shirts were on the road. There were dresses on a hedge. It was really bad.”
***
When your world has been turned upside down, some people look for a friendly face. I’ve been told my face fits that bill.
I recall arriving at a crime scene where someone had emptied a gun into the house and garage of a suspected drug dealer.
I began talking to one of the girls in the crowd that had gathered but someone pushed themselves between us.
“Why are you talking to him,” she asked.
“I don’t know,” her friend replies. “He just seems nice.”
“Of course he does. That’s his job, you idiot. Don’t talk to him.”
She dragged her friend away while I was still mulling over why those things need to be mutually exclusive.
***
Once I was asked if I would be "up for" attending the funeral for the victim of a shooting. The wrinkle was that he had been a gang member who was killed while standing guard outside a block of flats, which meant there would be a lot of gang members at the funeral.
“Just go to the funeral, be quiet and respectful, sit up the back, don’t talk to anyone, listen to what they say and try to get one of the flyers,” were the directions I was given.
“You've done it before, Simon, you’ll be fine. But you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
I said I would be fine.
How can what people say at a funeral be in the public interest?
Everything went more or less as they told me it would. It was a bikie funeral so there were just as many police outside as there were big tattooed men inside.
I sat quietly, took my flyer and left.
Years later, I was challenged about this during a guest university lecture.
“How can what people say at a funeral be in the public interest?” a young man asked me. “The family aren’t criminals, they didn’t do anything to deserve you being there. What right do you have to take pictures of their son off social media even if he was a criminal?”
I was surprised by how quickly and smoothly my response came.
“Drug dealers and criminals are celebrated every day on television and film,” I say. “You get 90 per cent of the run time showing them being badasses and barely any time is spent on the consequences of their actions.”
“Anything I can do to show that side - the grief and cost to the people left behind - is time well spent.”
Insight wants to know what it’s really like for you at work. Do you work in a job that the public misunderstands? Is there something about your work that makes you want to blow the whistle? You can remain anonymous if you wish. Send an email to mystory@sbs.com.au
The author of this article, Simon Black, now works for a non-profit. In his spare time he blogs about communication, environmental protection, and politics. The story as it appears above has been abridged. You can read the original here.
