The Meaning of Witnessing

It was June 22nd, early morning Tuesday. I was assigned to find a feature story about the family of one of the victims of the massacre, at the doors of forensics. It was me as the reporter for the web, a paper edition reporter and my camera man. We were already half our way to the place when our boss paged the videographer’s radio. Change of plans. Two women had just been murdered in the other side of the city, and there was no other team available to cover the happening, but us. Double murder at one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the capital city it is!
We got to the spot only 45 minutes after the happening. Policemen had just arrived and were starting to close the perimeter. The crime scene was completely exposed to the eyes of the neighbors, the mute witnesses whose doors were locked up for both the police and the press. The smell of blood was in the air. A sense of disconcertment was evenly shared. Then silence.
Different TV station logos started to show up and each would stare at the scene for a couple minutes before starting to take shots at it. As it is for the reporters, we were all waiting for the fiscal of the case to examine the bodies, so we could get the official information. And while we were waiting, we stared. What else could we do?
Forensics got the scene around 10 a.m. That is an hour and a half after the shootings. They were driving a pick-up truck, in the back of which laid a black bag. The distinctive, pervasive aroma coming from it could not be confused with anything else. It was no secret a corpse was hidden under that black plastic.
Still we wait, still we stare. We knew that trying to get any interviews from the habitants of the area was not viable. Their fear manifested in their horrified eyes and their only words out of their mouths: “We just heard the gunshots,” “we thought it was fireworks,” “I did not see anything.”
The bodies were finally removed from the crime scene at noon, and taken to forensics. Yet the fiscal of the case would not come out of the cordoned area to give official declarations. We had to get in and practically dance in between the evidence to get to him, and get our interview.
At the end of the day, I realized a one-minute-long news package could not completely absorb and project the intensity of such an episode. Since our experience is not to be taken as official information source, sticking to the fiscal declarations was all we got: very simple formulated sentences with very general information about two bodies, rather than two persons.