Witness to a Shooting

By Courtney Lowery, 6-01-07

I see Amye Swartz everywhere I go.

She’s the girl in the mall, she’s the girl in the park, she’s the girl on campus. She’s the girl from my hometown I help with English 101 papers. She is one of my friends at age 20. She’s me at age 20.

She’s every small-town Montana girl at that age, a bright young woman working in the city for a while, making friends, dating, finding her way.

But, she also has a bullet wound in her chest, from a .357 revolver shot at close range in a parking lot in downtown Missoula.

In one night, she went from being that small-town girl you see around town to being a name, a news story, the girl who got shot.

The bullet came at the hands of her ex-boyfriend on a Friday night in May, a boy from another small Montana town, a boy who looks like he might be friends with your brother, or your son.

In one night, that boy became a criminal. This week I saw him, standing sheepishly in a courtroom in an orange jumpsuit and a chain around his waist.

Then there’s me, my fiancé and two of our closest friends. We were just another group of 20-somethings, downtown celebrating the successful defense of a master’s thesis defense and taking part in a peace banquet at the Elks Lodge.

On that same Friday night, we became witnesses. As a journalist, I’m supposed to be a witness – but not in this way, not this kind of witness. We’re always taught not to be a part of the story.

Amye’s story is the kind I used to write in my sleep, inverted pyramid-style:

A 20-year-old woman was shot in downtown Missoula Friday, apparently by her ex-boyfriend.

The victim is recovering at the intensive care unit of St. Pat’s hospital. Authorities have a 20-year-old male in custody, held on suspicion of attempted deliberate homicide.

Those 45 words—the classic lead into a news story—were supposed to sum up the whole incident. They used to. They didn’t this time.

As a reporter, news is something that happens to someone else. It’s someone else’s family, someone else’s pain, someone else’s joy. I’ve always been the kind of reporter who was innately affected by the stories I’ve written. I bond with the people in my stories and identify with their situations, but, even then, those stories have still been about someone else. After I filed the stories, I got to go home to my warm bed and talk about my day with my friends and family and within a few days, I was onto the next story, the next interview.

And then, it becomes just a job. It’s another brief, another news hole, another day.

I used to write accident report after accident report at the Associated Press and each one was another number. “Tuesday’s death is number 72 this year on Montana roadways as compared to 75 last year at this time.”

In Missoula, Amye Swartz and Dustin Dankers’ story would be just another small news clip and even here, on our NewWest.Net pages, a story written by me would only be 292 words.

In one local newscast, the anchor led into the story by reducing the shooting to “a lovers’ quarrel.”

Amye was a victim, shot by an ex-boyfriend, and we were the unnamed witnesses who administered aide and convinced the shooter to drop the weapon.

It was all that simple, laid out in black and white like any other news story.

But it wasn’t. It still isn’t.

First, there’s the story of Amye Swartz, a Phillipsburg High School graduate who hardly had room for family in her hospital room because it was overflowing with flowers and balloons from community members and friends and family. She had recently sung at the funeral of a high school friend who died in Iraq. She worked at a local Phillipsburg jewelry shop. She is pretty and kind and a bright light, even under the florescence of the hospital bulbs. She said Dustin was nice kid who had some problems she thought she could “fix”—a common theme in these kinds of stories and a disturbing one that Amye herself said she’d like to help other women work against.

Just a few days after the shooting, she told us once she got better, she was going to start talking to high school girls about her experience. She told us she didn’t believe it when others warned her about dangerous relationships and told her it could happen to her. She said she was going to make it a point to try to save a few young girls from not believing the same words of caution.

There are Amye’s friends, who we found in the emergency room waiting area that night, tired, scared and thankful she’s survived. They told us how Amye had struggled to get away from the relationship, how she was trying to move on. Amye was the kind of girl who tried to help people, who put other people first.

Then, there is the story of Dustin Dankers, with a history of mental instability and an obsessive love for a young Phillipsburg girl. His story is just beginning to surface, both for the public and for us witnesses. But for now, he’s just a young kid in a orange jumpsuit with a lawyer pushing for a “mental defect” defense.

There are the police officers and paramedics who came to the scene not knowing if they’d be facing a blazing gun or a young life extinguished. There is the 911 operator who took my call and listened to me scream about a gun and take off running. There are the detectives who meticulously waded through evidence and took the statements of and gave counsel to four freaked out witnesses, a wounded young girl and a scared young man facing life in prison.

And then, there is us, four witnesses, who inexplicably ran toward a gunshot in a dark parking lot. What Jacob Cowgill, my fiancé, and our two friends, Patrick Patterson and Abby Hood did that night was nothing short of heroism.

When we heard the gunshot and then a woman screaming for help, we took off running toward the parking lot. Patrick got to Amye first and had her lay down immediately. I called 911. Patrick knew to put pressure on her wounds to stop the bleeding first. He took off his fleece vest and held it to her chest as a makeshift bandage. Abby and Jacob joined him to help with first aide while I talked to the 911 operator. Only when all of that was done, did Patrick ask where the shooter was. His focus was completely on Amye—saving her.

Dustin, who had been walking around the parking lot, crouched down next to Amye and when Patrick asked where the shooter was, Dustin told him he was the shooter. Dustin walked back to a car and that’s when I heard Patrick yell that he had a gun and Patrick and I ran—me still on the phone to 911.

We got to the corner of the block and Patrick ran back for Jacob and Abby and I followed. That’s when I saw a man pull out a shotgun. Not knowing if the man with the shotgun was somehow involved, or even the shooter himself, I ran the other way, around the block. Standing on Higgins Ave., several people asked me if I was OK and I could only stammer out that there was a woman shot and I couldn’t find my friends. Once I saw the police car coming in through the alley and had finally gotten through to Patrick on his cell phone, I ran back to the scene. (The man with the gun was actually a 17-year-old kid who heard a gunshot and pulled the shotgun out of his pickup.)

I was only away from the scene for a few minutes, but it seemed like hours—both for me and for Patrick, Jacob and Abby on the other side of the block. Abby and Jacob had stayed with Amye, even when Dustin picked the gun back up. Neither remember seeing the gun until Dustin held it to his head, saying something about going to jail and really screwing up. 

Abby, a special education teacher at Lowell School, convinced him that the only way to help was to drop the gun and help put pressure on Amye’s wound to stop the bleeding. He did. Jacob put his hands on top of Dustin’s to hold him there and try to keep him calm until the police arrived.

Amye screamed to not let Dustin touch her, but Jacob and Abby told her she would be safe, she’d be OK. Later, Amye told Abby that she knows now that that was an important thing to have him do, she understood. Then she apologized for “being mean” about it at the scene.

Patrick, Jacob and Abby are all humble about what they did. Jacob says it was just what he felt he could do, and that really, he didn’t do much. Abby says it was second nature— part of her “de-escalation” training with emotionally disturbed kids.

But all three of them, Patrick included, are underestimating what courage it took to do what they did.

And it made a difference to Amye. We later found out that she told detectives that she remembers people running away from her as she was screaming for help, and then some “nice” people ran toward her and took care of her until the ambulance and police arrived.

The detectives told me Jacob stayed with Amye, holding her hand and face and telling her everything was going to be OK.

Amye remembers that too.

It’s taken me a month to write all of this down and even now, this is only small part of what we all experienced.

At first, I couldn’t write about all of this because I didn’t feel it was my place, either as a witness or a journalist. Both are intended to be positions of the outsider—the people who aren’t recognized as people who would be affected by such a trauma. 

And so, my 292 words the morning after the shooting were pure instinct. I wrote it like I’d written just about every other breaking news story I’d ever written only my sources were myself, my fiancé and my friends.

It’s a necessary detachment, I suppose. I didn’t think I knew any more than the “officials,” even though I was there. And even now, it’s impossible to try to piece together what happened. Just among the four of us witnesses, there are vast differences in what we saw, heard and felt. I didn’t think I could get things straight. In some way, I didn’t trust my own information.

I felt strange being a journalist in the hospital room with Amye a few days after the shooting. I still feel awkward writing it about it now. Even this week, at the arraignment, I picked up my notebook and put it back down, feeling embarrassed to be taking notes, embarrassed to be the one probing and questioning while simultaneously feeling some intense emotions when the defendant entered the room.

That’s why I’ve sent other reporters to cover the court hearings. It didn’t feel right to pretend to be an impartial journalist when I was part of the story and I didn’t want to cheapen the story by being part of it. And in some way, I felt what we had experienced with Amye was too intimate for public consumption – another thing that journalists are not supposed to think about. It’s not our job to judge these things.

I look back at the 292 words I wrote that first day on NewWest.Net, and it seems dishonest. The detachment was warranted at the time, but I knew there was so much more to this story—information that only I could share.

And in reviewing our coverage, something dawned on me. The comments and the traffic on our NewWest.Net stories are still going to my original story, not the two stories on the court hearings, the ones with all of the official details and “court records say.” The comments, from readers, friends and acquaintances continue to refer to that first story.

People were shocked by the news, yes, but they also shocked, affected by the news because I was there. They knew someone at the scene and that made the story real to them.

In a small community, you’re often involved in the stories you’re writing about. Sometimes, there’s no getting around it, and in those cases it does your community a disservice to not share what you know, what you’ve experienced. When you’re able to step outside of those traditional confines some of the most honest stories emerge.

A few weeks after the Missoula shooting, another harrowing piece of news came out of Moscow, Idaho, where 37-year-old Jason Hamilton took four lives, including his wife’s and his own in a shooting rampage.

I watched some of the news coming out of Moscow on national stations and then checked into NewWest.Net from the road. There, our senior columnist Joan Opyr had covered the shootings from an intimate vantage point—that of a community member. Joan, although an accomplished author and essayist, is not a trained journalist. Yet, her coverage was everything that journalism should be while simultaneously being something it traditionally “shouldn’t” be.

As a member of the Moscow community, Joan, her family and her friends were part of the story. And because she approached the story with that connection in full view, she was able to turn the story from just another national news story into something readers could feel, something they could identify with and something that could help them understand the tragedy a little better.

That’s what community journalism is all about.

In this particular case, I hope that by reluctantly sharing my part of this story, I can help this community see Jacob, Abby and Patrick as more than just unnamed witnesses, Dustin as more than just another young criminal and most of all, Amye Swartz as more than just another victim.