Elongated yellow tape

OK, fine. I've complained about the infamous yellow crime scene tape before -- but if it's between another round of Elongated Yellow Tape and repeating the same old police-lights photo at the top of the page, I'll take the tape.

Of course, there's always the option of a map. Or, you know, a photo of the scene. Or almost anything.

Betcha can't eat just one

Nobody can resist a chunk of Elongated Yellow Fruit! Though you'd like to think that anyone who'd include "butt-shifted" in the report could have added the preferred additional modifier: "clutch-challenged ursine invader." And you have to appreciate the Boulder County cops for remembering that when perps exit the vehicle, it's always "in an unknown direction."

Thanks as always to the Bremner Center for the Popular Orange Vegetable.

Down with pronouns

Is it too much to ask? Let pronouns be pronouns, and let antecedents -- even the first-out-of-the-cliche-bag ones like "missing teen" and "abductor" -- do the heavy lifting in headlines? I know all the cool kids these days are writing deliberately vague heds, but come on. Even Fox (despite the adjective overload and the little oops with the "allegedly" thing; compare top and bottom) did better:

Back to CNN, though: Further points off for any headline that begins with "What we know about" or ends with "Here's what we know." Forbidden under all circumstances, at least until a neighbor has described the suspect as a quiet fella who kept to himself. And don't say "Here's a photo of ..." when what you have is a link, especially when it's a link to the same photo you've already shown.

Stunning and excessive restraint

So the local constabulary is being sued by a nearby-ish resident who contends that (a) he was unconstitutionally roughed up by the cops after he was thrown out of a sports bar on St. Patrick's Day and (b) he wasn't the guy who should have been thrown out in the first place. Our concern is with the second sentence here:

The lawsuit states that one officer used a Taser on (plaintiff) while multiple other officers tried to take him to the ground in a “horse-collar-type maneuver.” According to the lawsuit, the stunning and excessive restraint continued as officers pinned (plaintiff) on the ground.

The sentence at hand isn't in any way ungrammatical or wrong, Its problem, like many of the "wrong" sentences you'll encounter in daily life, is that it's right about several things at once. It doesn't exclusively mean that the restraint is considered both stunning and excessive, but that certainly is one of the things it means. And that's why we do editing: the art of asking "what did you say?" and "what did you mean?" by way of trying to reduce the dissonance between the two.

An editing textbook that claims to have "the" right answer, of course, is blowing smoke. There are a bunch of right answers. You could make clearer that "stunning" is a noun by flipping the subjects: "the excessive restraint and stunning continued." Or you could add another determiner: "The stunning and the excessive restraint continued." Or -- gasp! -- you could go ahead and admit that "taser" (or Taser, or taze) is a verb: "the tasing and excessive restraint continued." Which of those, if any, is the best answer is a matter of judgment. But all of them are less ambiguous than "stunning and excessive restraint."

That's a lot of space and time spent on a small sentence in a small paper. But editing, like baseball, is about a lot of small stuff done right over a long season. Most plays don't make the highlights on the evening news, because most plays involve moving your feet a few steps one way or the other; the batter is set down, all's right with the world, and your side goes into the dugout to try to score a few. Do small things right, and eventually big things will follow.

Hed of the (rapidly fading) month

Heds like this seem to call forth the literary analogies, but they're actually pretty common. "No beer" doesn't mean no individual, mortal beer; it means an absence of beer where beer could reasonably -- OK, this is the cop blotter, so a there's a limited range of values for "reasonably" -- have been expected to be:

South Carolina authorities say a 44-year-old woman angry at a man for returning home without beer on Christmas beat and stabbed him with a ceramic squirrel.

And that, alas, clears up the other ambiguity. She didn't take out to do violence to every ceramic squirrel on the block; she hit him upside the head with a handy one, then apparently kept going after it broke. Life only imitates Elmore Leonard because Elmore Leonard imitates life.

And it wouldn't be a four-graf AP national story about episodic holiday crime if it didn't add some value to the local report:

It wasn't known if she had a lawyer.

Because if it was known, the AP would have called the lawyer for a comment! Though if it really wanted to do her a favor, it could think about not naming either the victim or the perp (nobody's being nominated for a federal judgeship or anything here, after all) when it takes local crime worldwide just for laffs.

Don't bogart that calculator

Copyeds, still searching for a last-minute New Year's resolution? You've come to the right place. Here are two:

1) Never put the alleged "street value" of naughty drugs in the hed
2) Never pass a story containing an estimated "street value" without making sure that the cops are placed on record for the rates they use in calculating "street value." (If there's a fivefold change, of course, you'll want to see that the cops also get to explain that.)

Here's why:

Police say officers confiscated more than 100 pounds of marijuana from two houses. ... Authorities say they found the marijuana -- which they say has a street value of more than $1 million -- along with heat lamps and other equipment used to grow pot.

Let's round down to an even $1 million and 100 pounds (contents may have settled during shipment, or whatever). A million divided by a hundred is $10,000 per pound, or $625 per ounce. In the "His Girl Friday" days, reporters would have had shady underworld acquaintances who could provide current market quotes on short notice, but failing that, we could look into the archives, where we'd find guesses of $1,100 to $2,000 a pound, depending on which agency did the speculating and where.

Breathless reporting of "street value" predates the War on Editing, true, but it's another chunk of evidence that journalism needs more layers of processing, not fewer.

How not to write ledes

Dogs flew spaceships! The Aztecs invented the vacation! And when it comes to lede writing, everything in your J-textbook is wrong!

The Oakland County Sheriff's Office said Thursday that police and U.S. marshals in St. Paul, Minn., arrested 34-year-old Darius M. McCrary, who is the suspect in the fatal shooting of his ex-girlfriend in front of her children last Thanksgiving.

Here are some mildly heretical suggestions to keep you from producing the same sort of thing:
1) The active voice is overrated
2) Outcome is more important than process
3) All facts are (ideally) true, but not all facts are equal

Notice how much active voice we have to wade through before anything interesting turns up. In the main clause, an office is saying something. Look at the size of the subject noun phrase in the complement clause: "Police and U.S. marshals in St. Paul, Minn." At last, we get to an interesting verb: "arrested." But its magic effects don't last long, because if you aren't keeping up with the daily doings of 34-year-old Darius M. McCrary, you aren't given much reason to read on.

Let's start with some basic assumptions. Sometimes it's more important to know who said something; sometimes it's more important to know what was said.  Most arrests are going to fall into the latter category. That's going to move the local constabulary to the far end of the lede. Second, your choice of verb voice should reflect what you want to emphasize. In most arrests, again, that's unlikely to be the agency doing the arresting. (Exceptions should be obvious: "A newly formed anti-cluelessness unit of the Grammar Police arrested three peevologists Thursday.") Third, your instincts about who qualifies as a "headline name" are probably better than you think. If you're thinking that most nonpublic people should be introduced by residence, occupation, the event that made them prominent, or something similar, rather than by name, you're right. Taken together, that points toward:

A man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend in front of her children on Thanksgiving has been arrested in Minnesota, police said Thursday.

Embrace the passive! Favor outcomes over procedures! You too can preserve all the pathos in barely half the space.

What ended when?

No peeking at the heds or anything: Who did what to whom, and which life of scams came to a bloody end when?

If you read Tuesday's paper, or if you hang on for the third graf, you have an important bit of knowledge: Alberta Easter died in prison at the weekend. She was 93 and serving a life sentence without parole for the murders in question. But I'm almost more confused than when I began. That case certainly wasn't a bloody end to her bizarre life, and the lives that did come to a bloody end weren't lives of "scams and schemes."

At the risk of indulging in rankest confirmation bias, this looks like another victim in the Global War on Editing. It wouldn't take much effort to rearrange the jumble of news cliches into something that said what it wanted to, but it would take some effort. Remind me again: Why are readers supposed to pay for this?

The strange syntax of news

We've talked about this before, right? The unholy collision of attribution -- which we like, because it helps keep us from being sued,  amen -- with time prepositions, in such a way that the attribution gets in the way of the action? Like these?

A would-be carjacker is dead after police said he was shot and killed by the person whose car he was trying to take on Detroit's west side.

A Canton man is facing charges after police said he fired two rounds from a high-powered rifle into a fireplace in his home in the 2300 block of Amber Street on Monday, prompting his two roommates to flee.

Two Detroit youths — one a student at Ferndale’s alternative high school for troubled youths — face preliminary exams Thursday after police said school officials followed them from campus to see them break into a home and steal two large televisions.

Daniel Ray Aderhold was arraigned this afternoon in 19th District Court on the charge after police said he allegedly* fatally attacked Perry Lee Beaubien by beating him in the head after the two had an argument.

None of these things happened "after" the cops said something, strictly put. They happened after someone did something criminal, and "police said" is there because ... attribution! We're not reporting something we witnessed; we're reporting what we were told. Conveniently, if we note that "police said" it, we're also wrapping ourselves in the blanket of privilege, which allows us to repeat a defamatory statement with impunity, owing to the circumstances in which it was made. "Smith hit Jones upside the head with a 2x4, police said" is protected in a way that "Smith hit Jones, a perpetually irritated neighbor tells EyeWitlessNews."

So "after" and "police said" don't have the same sort of syntactic relationship that preposition and clause do in "after the ball was over" or "after you've gone." "After police said" is a craft routine. It's short for "something happened after something else in more or less the order we're telling you, but for safety's sake, we're going to stick the attribution** in the middle." It's pretty harmless when you get used to it, but every now and then you get one that's actually ambiguous:

A Melvindale teen said she consumed Four Loko*** before she said she was sexu­ally assaulted last month.

"She said" is there for a good reason. We weren't there, and we don't know what happened, so we're going to signal our uncertainty. But grammar has us in a bit of a trap here. "Before" could reasonably go with "said," suggesting that the accuser was drunk when she made the assertion, or with the sexual assault.

This would have been a nice chance for an editor to step in and untangle the robotic writing. We're asking a lot when we expect readers to infer all the coded signals we send.

* Sigh. As a rule, the cops don't say someone "allegedly" did it; they say he did it, leaving it to the reporters to throw in "allegedly" in the vain hope that it might guard them from a lawsuit or make them look old and wise.
** Why don't writers simply set the attribution off with commas? ("Smith was arrested after, police said, she emptied a magazine into her former employer's trailer"). Too much work, and it isn't the way we've always done it, so there.
*** It'd be more complete to note that the accuser testified that she had been mixing it first with rum and later with cognac, but that doesn't go as well with the narrative of this story.

Who did what to whom?

Diagramming party, stand by for surface action:

During a cross-country trip, Robbie Paul Howell repeatedly beat his wife while their 2-year-old watched and allegedly tried to suffocate her.

Here's a test. If the person sitting next to you can't tell who did what to whom, try another lede.

Mailbag: Don't do this either

Here's a query from distant climes: "Care for another lecture on 'arrested for' vs. 'charged with'?"

Yes, and it's a short one: Don't.

"Arrested for" is a gatekeeper question -- a way of telling whether you were paying attention back in your callow youth. I got the sermon on (literally) my first night on the job: Close on time and never say "arrested for." The AP's explanation suggests why, trivial as it might seem, we still like to be picky about the matter: "To avoid any suggestion that someone is being judged before a trial, do not use a phrase such as arrested for killing."

No, no one's saying you'll be hit in the face with a libel judgment the second you walk out the door. Paris Hilton doesn't read  your paper, she has better things to do than suing you, she's on the bubble of being an all-purpose public figure anyway, and if push came to shove, you could probably invoke "substantial truth" or something.* But we will judge you by how well you tie off your loose ends. Remember what Updike said about Ted Williams: "The classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill."

We'd rather you didn't say "Vegas" and "busted" in heds, sure. And it'd be nice if you gave your work at least the cursory read that would have caught the typo; in this font, you can't tell "HIlton" from "Hllton." That's your problem. "Busted for" means you don't respect the game, and that's our problem.**

* As in the Michigan Supreme Court's ruling that a report saying someone had been "charged," when he'd been arrested "on suspicion" though not charged, wasn't libelous. Here's the NYT's account.
** Quick, name the building behind the bull. What a great little park that was.

Never, ever do this

OK, kids, let's start the semester with a Rule of Journalism: Write what you know, not what you guess or speculate.

Writing Thursday for Friday's paper, then, you might know that X number of people "were" in jail at some point on Thursday. You do not know whether any or all of them "are" in jail. Plainly and simply, you are making stuff up, and that is not allowed. You have no idea what might have happened between when you made your last phone call and when the fishwrap hits the sidewalks.

You can take Your Editor's word for it in the abstract, or you could simply read your own deathless prose:

Agro and three other employees -- a manager and two people dispensing pot -- were arrested and released without charges later.

It doesn't matter whether they were released without charges, or whether they made bail, or whether Butch and Sundance busted 'em out while Andy and Barney were looking the other way. Your story is what you know -- not what you want to say because you want to spin your story forward. Same goes for "is in critical condition today"; if you can see into the medical future that well, you're in the wrong business. Make it "was in critical condition Thursday night."

The Quote of the Day, drawn from the story, suggests an equally serious offense somewhere:

"This is Michigan. This is not a Cheech and Chong movie," Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said.

Hee hee! Sheriff Mike ought to spend a little more time on the mean streets of Language Czarina's little hometown here. But somebody else needs to spend a little more time hunched over the tape recorder. Here's the other paper's take:

"This is Michigan, not some Cheech and Chong movie," Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said Thursday at a news conference.

The two stylebooks can mud-wrestle over Mike vs. Michael all they want, but quotes aren't optional. Quotes -- we like to claim -- represent the exact words of the speaker, and only one of these can qualify.

This isn't a big difference or a change in meaning; it isn't even really a change in tone. But it's a difference, and it means at least one of the papers at the press conference doesn't mind making stuff up. That's not good.

Break out the clue bazooka

This is neither an ungram- matical hed nor an ambiguous one. It is, however, a remarkably dumb one, because it's unambiguously grammatical about something that the story unambiguously says didn't happen:

The police officer was not struck by the gunfire, and the man got away.

Even if you didn't read that far, the lede might have been a bit of a clue:

Police say the man accused of shooting at a police officer last weekend is in jail today, after being caught following a brief pursuit Wednesday on an interstate highway in Charlotte.

Either the target or the projectile could be a fine direct object for "shoot":

Frankie shot Johnny
Frankie shot an arrow into the air, but it went through Johnny first

... but if the target is the direct object here, that means you hit it.

There's an outside chance that some overzealous editor was overextending some dimly misunderstood textbook rule about excessive prepositions: "serve up breakfast" vs. "serve breakfast," for example. Or it could be a particularly inelegant case of elegant variation: the fear of mimicking the lede too closely in the hed. Or it could be just a temporary case of clue fail. Whichever, the general reaction of the reading public isn't "oh, another story screwed up by the desk." The public at large doesn't know where heds come from, so the usual response is to blame the writer.

Thus the hed does double damage. It makes the paper look silly, but it also risks leaving the writer to explain to his sources why someone else's mistake isn't his. That doesn't help the cause.

Annals of 'after'

Diagramming party to action stations: Rock Hill sentence right ahead!

Drug agents arrested five York County residents after they say one of two meth labs found this weekend was in a pregnant woman's Rock Hill bedroom.

And for all the prepositional follies, we only get two arrests and one lab.

Time and a place

As long as we're sharing our strange beliefs here, I'll note that in general, I'm not terribly bothered by unnamed sources -- or at least that as source qualities go, I'm less bothered by anonymity than by dishonesty, malice or stupidity. With that out of the way, though, it's worth noting that some cases of naming are more important than others. Prosecutions, for example. Here's why:

A former contract worker for the CIA pleaded guilty Tuesday in Detroit to fabricating background checks of federal employees and potential employees. The suspected motive: laziness and greed.

Service journalism at its best! You didn't even know you needed a link to backgroundcheckgateway.com, did you? But there's something bigger to worry about here:

Two sources familiar with the case said Tuesday that Kerry Gerdes, 26, of Royal Oak simply avoided conducting the interviews as a fast track to getting paid.

Uh, no. If you're going to talk about the defendant's motives, you stand up and do it in an open court or you shut up. This is where the whole fair-trial thing is actually a complement to the whole free-press thing. Trials aren't open just so you can write down lots of lurid details and run big screaming heds with near-complete protection from libel claims. They're open so one side (usually the one with the power and resources; guess which?) doesn't get to make blind claims about the other.

..."The defendant was entrusted by the United States to conduct background investigations of applicants to sensitive positions," U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg said. "The false reports submitted by Gerdes were a betrayal of the trust placed in her."

Does he just talk like a press release, or are we, erm, quoting his press release? No law against that, but it doesn't make much of a case for the independence of your reporting.

... Sources said she was paid per background check and simply didn't do the required work as a way to quickly move on to the next paycheck.

At the very least, tell me why these sources are credible enough to quote (and whether they're the same "two sources" you mentioned earlier). Is this assertion part of the record? If not, what's it doing in the plea story?

... Her attorney, Richard Helfrick of the Federal Defender's Office, did not return phone calls Tuesday.

So at this point, is it fair to conclude that we've covered a key moment in a fairly prominent case (in traditional terms, I'd call the story a second-front offlede) without bothering to attend it? That's too bad. Showing up in court is often a good way of finding out stuff that the prosecutor's office doesn't put in press releases -- or of actually finding the defendant's lawyer, should you want to compare his take with what "sources" say. That used to be a fairly good way of distinguishing journalism from PR.

Granted, the Freep has too few people covering too much frontage. (Gannett managers aren't the only ones who can count bylines.) And given their say, I expect some -- maybe most -- of them would rather cover the story from the courtroom than by phone and fax. Just a reminder that when we lose the routines of journalism, we're losing a lot of stuff that's less prominent, but not less important, than the big FOIA fights.

March of the pronouns

A 30-year-old Pontiac man is in the Oakland County Jail and facing felony charges after authorities said he rammed a man’s car after finding his wife in the backseat with him.

You almost need a scorecard (or some extra fingers) to figure out which "he" goes with which "man."

For you outsiders? "Authorities said" isn't really part of the subordinate clause. It's acting like the British "claim quotes" -- sort of a ghostly sentence adverb, reminding us that there's some sort of privileged source to which (or whom) the otherwise potentially libelous assertion can be pinned.

Gub control

The WashPost (shared by Strayhorn) reminds us that life imitates Woody:

According to 3rd District Police Cmdr. George Kucik, the robber handed an employee a note. When the employee had trouble reading the handwriting and sought help from a manager, the robber fled.

This station will now go into listen-only mode until the AEJ deadline. If you find yourself in the same situation, best of luck.

Tastes like a freight train, sounds like chicken

An old pal from down in hurricane country questions the NYT's lede on the Alabama shootings:

A gunman shot and killed at least 10 people, including several members of his family, on Tuesday afternoon in what officials said was the worst shooting in Alabama.

"Does this need a time qualifier," she asks, "like 'in Alabama history' or 'ever in Alabama' or 'in Alabama in the past week'? Or is this just the new way of writing such things?"

On reflection, I'm inclined to say yes and no. No, I expect it's a standard news lede that got left in the dryer at the NYT a little too long, and yes, it's missing a time limitation. I can't provide a rule,* but I'll try an analogy: "That was the best performance in the ACC tournament." The thought isn't closed** until I know how much tournament you mean: This year? Ever for all time amen? In the hubris-laden phrase of Mike O'Koren, "so far"?***

So this is probably just a one-off, but it's an interesting one-off -- not just because it's unusual for the heavily edited Times, but because cop coverage in general is so thoroughly built from off-the-shelf parts. Language Log readers have probably noticed this morning's comment on the Google frequency of the phrase "before turning the gun on himself." I'm not sure that suggests how thoroughly we've become inured to the frequency of shooting rampages (the technical journalistic term, of course, is "spree") as much as it indicates that everyone involved knows what the building blocks of that story look like, where to find them and how to put them together -- the way tornadoes sound like freight trains and slightly exotic foods actually taste like chicken. (I was going to point out unlike most such stories, no one had yet described the gunman as a quiet fella who kind of kept to himself, but I see from the latest AP update that he was "shy, quiet and laid-back.")

You've probably seen most of these in crime stories, of whatever scale:

You-are-there details: At the hardware store, yellow tape was strung across the front of the store where at least five bullet holes punctured the glass windows to the store, with its wheelbarrows and Adirondack lawn chairs on display. An orange-and-black sign to the store reading "Closed" lay on the ground outside the store atop the glass shards.

This just in: Police had hung white sheets to the entranceway to shield the scene where authorities said a black hearse that pulled away late Tuesday was transporting victims' bodies. ("Transport," in cop-blotter-speak, doesn't need the "to ..." argument; "two people were transported" means something on the order of "two people were taken to the hospital").

Syntax that doesn't quite logically mesh with the data:

The bloodshed began when McLendon burned down his mother's house in Kinston, according to Coffee County Coroner Robert Preachers. Authorities found Lisa McLendon's body inside, but they had not determined how she died or whether she was a 10th victim of her son's spree. (If we aren't sure if she was a victim of the spree, are we sure that's where the bloodshed began? And if that's where it began, how could she be the 10th victim?)

Once investigators got a look at the ammunition he was carrying, they feared the bloodshed could have been worse. (They might have "realized" it at this point, but it's unlikely they "feared" it.)

The witnesses know their parts too:

"We could have been caught up in it just as well as anyone else," he said.

"I first thought it was somebody playing," McCullough said.

The value of novelty moves stuff to the top, even if its relevance isn't known. As best I can tell, these are sequential updates:

Tuesday's shootings in a mostly rural area near the Florida border were believed to be the work of Michael McLendon, who lived with his mother and once worked at a local metal plant.

The man believed responsible for gunning down 10 in rural Alabama quit his job at a sausage plant days before the deadly spree.

Authorities say an Alabama gunman who killed 10 people and himself in a rampage had once trained as a police officer.

A man who killed 10 people in two rural Alabama counties before committing suicide had been keeping a list of those "who done him wrong," a district attorney said Wednesday.

That last one is actually pretty striking, but not for the appearance of the grudge list. If the fuller quote in the third graf -- "We found a list of people he worked with, people who had done him wrong" -- is correct, the lede is an unusually direct violation of standard news practice and AP's specific stylebook entry: Never alter quotations even to correct minor grammatical errors or word usage.**** Here, though, the lede isn't even cleaning the DA up; it's making him sound like a freaking country song. Inferences may be drawn about your local news outfit's remaining interest in the craft of editing by that quote's appearance tomorrow. [UPDATE: The AP appears to have written the story through, correcting the lede to conform with the 3rd graf, half an hour after this version moved. It's worth noting that USAT is using a staff-written version, with a hed based on the "done him wrong" quote from the AP.]

News is (generally, hopefully, probably) about what's new. But it's also about what's familiar about what's new. When somebody says the tornado sounded like a chicken or the rattlesnake souffle tasted like a freight train, the world is off its axis.

* You Real Language People out there are welcome to jump in whenever you wish.
** Does that make it one of those Steven Pinker excuse-me-but-your-parser-is-open things?
*** No doubt Jane is among many of you loyalists out there who remember the matchup in question.
**** If you have worked in the sausage factory, you already take that with the appropriate amount of salt.

Lyrics contest

Property crime: It's a laff riot!

2 suspects nabbed ... up on the roof
"On the roof, it's peaceful as can be, And there the world below don't bother me."

Well, Carole King's lyrics didn't exactly describe life for a pair of burglary suspects who were caught overnight on the roof of a north Charlotte business.

Once upon a time, kiddies, ledes like that were quietly taken out and put to sleep. But maybe a few more lyrical twists in cop coverage would be just the thing to help us all through These Tough Times. Thus, you are all invited to submit your favorite (or least favorite) lyrical cop/crime/fire/rescue/whatever ledes. Titles, first lines, choruses: If you can write a lede from it, send it in. Here are a few to get you started:

Under the boardwalk. That's where Jimmy Hoffa wasn't Tuesday, but that wasn't the fault of FBI agents who spent three hours looking for him.

In the ghetto: This homicide is four grafs on 3B and the one in Myers Park is on the front page.

I can't quit you, baby. That's what a naked man waving a fire extinguisher and a dozen long-stemmed roses must have been thinking when police found him in the parking lot of his ex-girlfriend's apartment late Wednesday.

The evening breeze/caressed the trees/tenderly. Seconds later, it turned into a howling F4 tornado, uprooting trees, downing power lines and killing at least 13 in this tiny Texas hamlet.

Who's next?

Pronouns gone wild

Looks like a case of Man Bites Man -- or, as the hed puts it:

Man charged in killing of man at his front door
Whose front door? Maybe the lede will help:
Police say a man shot and killed his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend after the man answered the door of his North Charleston home.

Great. Now we not only don't know whose door, we don't know which man. Could we try to be a little clearer on the crime news, please?

An area man was charged late Friday with murder after killing someone in an alcohol-related crash.

On second thought, let's not. But thanks again for sparing us the expense of a trial, Judge Observer!