Colorado school shooting -- privacy issues

Both The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News have gone all-out in covering the tragic events this week at Platte Canyon High School in suburban Denver. I'll link to several stories in the next few days and pose some questions about them. See also the posts to my other blog www.comm207fall06.blogspot.com for other stories.

The Rocky Mountain News had an exclusive interview with one of the girls who was held hostage in the school. I thought it was as tastefully and compassionately reported as possible in circumstances like this. But I'm pretty hard-boiled because I used to cover police news myself. What do you think? How do you balance people's right to privacy with the public's right to know?

Here's the lede, bylined by reporter Fernando Quintero:

Lynna Long picked up her books and headed toward the door as her honors English class wound down.
She had nearly reached the hallway when a man wearing a blue hooded sweat shirt calmly walked into Room 206 of Platte Canyon High School, blocking her path.

In that split second, Lynna's world changed.

The girl who dreams of being a doctor became one of Duane Morrison's six hostages. Over the next hours, she was terrorized and she was molested. She thought she was going to die. And when he finally let her go, she felt guilty about the girls left behind.

Lynna, a 15-year-old sophomore, talked Thursday about what it was like inside that schoolroom-turned- chamber of horrors during an exclusive interview with the Rocky Mountain News.

She and her mother agreed to allow her identity to be revealed, but asked that her photo not be shown in the newspaper.

By the way, have you noticed how few pictures there have been, at least on the internet, of the kids at Platte Canyon High School? Partly that's because the community is clearly, and properly, protective of them. And partly, I'm sure, because the media have treated this story pretty carefully.

I'll skip over some of the details, other than to say it's a general principle that when you're describing sexual crimes, you keep the description to a minimum. And Quintero follows that principle. He continues telling the girl's story, partly in her words and partly in his own:

Meanwhile, Lynna also could hear the SWAT teams outside the classroom.

She thought about action movies.

"I imagined that a group of SWAT team guys would bust through the windows. Or that I could fight off the gunman with a kick in the groin. But that just happens in the movies. I guess it doesn't quite work that way in real life."

She also thought about the possibility her life was ending.

"I didn't want to die. I thought about my family. I'm the oldest of three kids. I thought about my 4- year-old brother without his big sister. And my other sister. And my parents and my friends."

Lynna paused at this point in the interview, looking out the window of her family's restaurant to the traffic whizzing by on U.S. 285. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

"I never had a really strong relationship with my mom. But I thought, 'I'll never get the chance to make things better with her.' "

She returned to the retelling of the nightmare.

Morrison began ordering the girls to leave, one by one. " When he was letting a girl go, he would grab one of us as a shield."

It's hard for her to estimate how long it took to be released.

"Time was so slow, and so fast."

Later on in the semester, at least in COMM 207, we'll talk about invasion-of-privacy issues. People like Lynna who are involuntarily caught up in a crime become "limited purpose public figures," because crime and the law are legitimate matters of public concern. That means they lose some of their right to privacy, but only to the extent it takes to tell the story.