Four people. All dead.
Later we would find out they were all family.
A father, Greg Byrd. Two of his sons, Phillip and Christopher Byrd. His future daughter-in-law, Jackie Kulzer.
We know now that the four had happy business to attend on Saturday. To get there, two of them hopped into a Piper 32R-300, a small passenger plane, in Asheville, N.C. They stopped in Atlanta for fuel and to pick up the other two. The four were were headed to Ole Miss. Saturday was graduation day for another son, Robert Byrd.
It would be hours before we would fully realize the human toll of Friday’s small-engine plane crash on I-285. Hours more before we knew anything about the Byrd family and before we could reconstruct this basic timeline of what happened.
I’ve been in newspapers for 20 years, most of it as a newspaper editor. I’ve seen more than my share of horrific accidents, violent crimes, deadly weather.
I’ve come to understand reader expectations on a high-interest story such as this typically break down along two lines of reporting. Readers want to know about the victims. And readers want to know how an accident such as this affects the community at large.
This started as a traffic story.
Here, we had a plane crash on one of the busiest interstates in America. On a Friday. The prospect of I-285 being shutdown for hours meant that virtually every major traffic artery in metro Atlanta would possibly feel the impact, as motorists began to navigate the metro area around the accident site.
So our first reporting was about the traffic tie-up. Transportation reporter Andria Simmons, who oversees the newspaper’s traffic blog, took to AJC.com to provide minute-by-minute details on traffic conditions.
Any motorist north of the city was likely to experience some gridlock. As the morning wore on, the reach of the accident had worked its way downtown and along vast stretches east and west. Google traffic maps were bright red along swaths of interstate which were at a standstill.
The 5 million-resident metro Atlanta region struggles with transportation on any given day. Shutting down a major interstate had the prospect of stranding motorists, perhaps even on the scale of the 2014 snowstorm that left motorists sitting in traffic for 20 hours.
The newsroom began asking questions about how school children would get home and what rush-hour might look like if I-285 remained closed for hours.
Photojournalist John Spink was one of the first journalists on the scene.
He immediately began dispatching photos from the scene that posted on AJC.com: of the traffic backing up farther and farther; of the police and firefighters trying to tame a fiery crash scene; of the wreckage, which told its own story. There was no way anyone could have survived this crash.
That raised a thorny issue for us. Some of the photos were graphic. There were several that we decided to withhold from publication. News value drives every decision we make here at the AJC and there are defensible news reasons to run pictures that depict violence. But we also understand that everyone has a family. And there are common standards of taste that we never want to violate.
At some point, details began emerging about the pilot and passengers on the ill-fated flight. We got first wind that it could be a family when AJC business reporter Russell Grantham, who is a pilot, called a fuel provider he knew at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. The fuel provider told Russell the folks on the plane were heading to a graduation at Ole Miss.
The digital age we live in nowadays can provide almost immediate insight on anyone with a social media profile. Shortly thereafter we found out the plane’s owner was Greg Byrd.
Facebook and Twitter told us more about the passengers. We found lives being lived in full and connections with people who loved them.
We reached out to friends and family.
We would later find out that we had identified Jackie Kulzer, of Atlanta, before authorities could notify her family. So we withheld her from our coverage until police could notify her next of kin.
More reporters got involved and through more digging a portrait of a family began to emerge.
Some time after noon we found out that an Ole Miss senior set to celebrate a watershed moment in his life was now facing what was surely the worst day of his life, losing his dad and two brothers. And we found out an Atlanta family had also lost a young daughter.
Readers want to know about the victims. And readers want to know how an accident such as this affects the community at large.
After some debate over whether one story should play more prominently in the paper, we decided each story held equal weight.
Our Saturday front page reflected that. We ran a story about how metro Atlanta’s tenuous interstate highway system was again under duress and the costs we all pay when that happens. And we told the world about a family tragedy.
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