By Jessica Hamilton
For Reporting Texas and New Voices
HUNTSVILLE — Reporter Tori Brock races to finish a story for the next day’s Huntsville Item. In 20 minutes, she must be at the local prison to watch Timothy Adams die.
In 2002, Adams fatally shot his 19-month-old son twice in the chest and later said he had planned to kill himself as well. He pleaded guilty and begged for mercy, but a jury condemned him to death.
Brock arrives at the Walls Unit of Huntsville prison in time for the 6 p.m. execution. At the time, it was the fifth execution of the year and the 31st Brock had reported. She notices that Mike Graczyk, an Associated Press reporter who has covered more than 340 Texas executions, is on assignment elsewhere, so the wire service has sent a stand-in.
Like Graczyk, Brock has come to view executions as part of her job. Reporters regarded executions as plum assignments in the 1980s, when executions weren’t so frequent. In the 10 years after Texas began using lethal injections in 1982, there were just 43 executions.
“Reporters used to fight for those stories,” said Lisa Trow, managing editor of the Item. “They wanted in that gallery. It was something new and different for them. Those were the good ol’ reporting days when these things were still a big deal.”
Now executions have become so common that journalists don’t see them as the career-makers they used to be. For Brock and Graczyk, writing about state-sanctioned death is something their jobs require them to do. The trick is distancing themselves from the assignment, not glorying in it. Both reporters have developed their own ways of coping with so much death. Brock heads home to her family and finds catharsis in her personal journal. Graczyk has simply learned to stop keeping track of how many people he’s seen die. Neither reporter has sought counseling or felt the need to do so.
No state has executed more people than Texas over the past 30 years, and all of the 475 executions have taken place in Huntsville. All of them are local news for the Item, a daily with a 5,500 circulation.
Tonight the Adams family has forgotten tissues, so they use hands and forearms to wipe away tears as the metal door to the viewing room closes. Brock settles against the back wall, lifting her 5-foot-5-inch frame onto tiptoes to see around Columbus Adams, Timothy’s father. Out of respect, she doesn’t ask him to move.
Timothy’s mother, Wilma, huddles next to the glass at the front of the room, gripping the forearm of her daughter, Stacey, for support. With her hair in a bun, Wilma looks as if she were headed to Sunday church.
On the other side of the window, her son is wrapped in a white sheet and strapped to a gurney. His brown skin contrasts with the Ace bandages holding needles inserted into the veins of his hands. A chaplain stands to the right of Adams’ feet.
A microphone hovers over Adams’ head, and the sounds from the execution chamber are piped into the witness room. The administrator asks in a monotone if he has any final words. He doesn’t.
Adams can see windows on either side of him. Behind one is the “victim’s viewing gallery.” The mother of the murdered child is in that room, with a few of her relatives and friends. Brock is in the room with Adams’ family, maybe a dozen people. Adams locks eyes with his mother. He mouths something.
“We love you,” Wilma whispers.
Brock has her first quote of the night. She writes it in her reporter’s notebook. Cell phones and recorders aren’t allowed. The room smells of chemicals. The scent in the Home Depot’s garden center always causes Brock’s stomach to sink because it is almost identical to the gallery’s odor.
At 6:21 p.m., drugs enter the I.V. and begin spreading through Adams’ veins.
“You’re going to a better place,” his mother says. “No more worries. God’s got you now.”
A voice on the intercom says, “Six thirty-one p.m.”
The family watches his body as if expecting him to awaken. Three raps on the door signal that witnesses from the other viewing gallery have cleared the hallway. The Adams family shuffles out the door, passing Brock.
Brock is jotting notes and doesn’t watch. As she steps into the hallway, the prison’s public information officer hands her a press release. She takes the sheet without glancing at it.
As she leaves, the Adams’ family is loading into a car. She redirects her gaze to the sidewalk.
“I always feel blessed when I leave this place,” she says. “The minute I feel that breeze on my face, I just thank God, and I say a little prayer. I say a prayer for everyone -– me and my family, the prisoner’s family, the victim’s family -– everyone.”
Down the street, families enjoy dinner at a nearby restaurant, and students walk to their cars after class. Runners adjust their earphones as they run by protesters waving signs quoting Gandhi and execution statistics. Brock’s story will be on the front page the next morning, though some residents say they don’t want to read it. To them, if crime didn’t happen in Huntsville, it’s not local news.
Brock arrives back at the newsroom in her red Ford Explorer. She has a story to write and dinner waiting at home.
Scooping her short, blonde hair behind her ears, Brock gets to work. After a few keystrokes, she stops. “What was his name?” she mumbles. Sifting through the papers in her media kit, she finds his name. Timothy Adams.
Brock and husband Joe have been married for nine years, the same length of time she’s worked as a reporter. Joe makes dinner and puts their children, Shelby and Jackson, to bed whenever Brock is on deadline. Tonight he’s made spaghetti.
She pulls into the driveway at 8 p.m. The kids are asleep. As she and her husband swirl spaghetti onto their forks, they discuss the day. Joe tells her about a customer he encountered at work. Brock tells him about the 30-something assignments she loaded onto the paper’s only photographer and how she feels bad that the work will take up much of his weekend.
Before turning in, Brock writes a short entry in her journal.
“It helps to get everything out on paper,” Brock says. “I’ve been keeping a journal for years, but it’s after stories like these that I realize what a release it is.”
Toward the front of the worn journal is an entry that takes up a lot of space. It’s dated Nov. 20, 2003, the first day Brock saw someone die.
“I’m not going to lie. I was a little excited at first, but the night before the execution, it really started sinking in,” she says. “I had a hard time sleeping that night and especially the night after. I just kept thinking about the look in his eyes.”
Matthew Jackson, the Item’s other reporter, doesn’t cover executions. It’s not something he wants to do, and the editors respect his wishes.
‘I Just Report What Happens Around Me’
It takes about seven minutes to die by lethal injection. That means Mike Graczyk has spent nearly three days watching executions at the Walls Unit. Based in Houston, Mike has made the hour-long trip to Huntsville hundreds of times.
“I know other people look at my job as a horrible thing, but executions are just one of the many, many stories I do,” Graczyk says. “I’m a reporter. I just report what happens around me.”
Graczyk is a tall, mild-mannered man with salt-and-pepper hair. He’s seen more executions than any other reporter in the country. At first he kept a mental tally of his execution assignments. One day he stopped. He didn’t lose count. He just didn’t want to know.
Graczyk has become such a regular part of the execution process that other journalists interview him. Mostly they’re respectful. But once a couple of French reporters seized the moral high ground by casting Graczyk as an accomplice to official murder.
“They thought he was a monster. They told him that,” recalls Trow, the Item’s managing editor. “They asked how he could live with himself and said he was just doing these stories to keep adding them to his resume. They thought Mike saw it as something he ‘got’ to do.”
At first, he did. Mike entered the chamber for the first time on March 13, 1984. James Autry was strapped to the gurney for killing a female store clerk over a six-pack. He shot her between the eyes and killed a customer as well.
Graczyk says he will always remember the first one. It’s the details of the other 300-plus that can grow cloudy. Final statements stick with you, he says, the prayers, poems and pleas that let the condemned make an impression. Sometimes they cuss at the chaplain, family members, the system. Sometimes they have nothing to say.
Jonathan Nobles pops into Graczyk’s head at least once a year, he says. Nobles sang “Silent Night” as his last statement.
“Now, whenever I go to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas, I remember Jonathan Nobles’ voice,” Graczyk says. “It just kind of resides up there and comes back to haunt me sometimes.”
The job hasn’t landed Graczyk on a therapist’s couch yet. Despite his boss’s efforts to send him to counseling, he doesn’t see the need. He once told CNN, “To see someone go to sleep, not to sound insensitive, but the carnage at the murder scene is harder than what you see in the death house in Huntsville.”
Another Tuesday rolls around, and Brock stands with her back against the witness gallery wall watching another execution. The story for this execution is already half-written, minus a few quotes and reactions. Three hundred and seventy-two words later, the story is at the copy desk, and Brock is at dinner with her husband, Joe. The kids are in bed.
This was the first execution in Texas using a new cocktail of lethal drugs. Joe asks how it went. “It was just like all the others,” she says. “I still got out of there in time.”
‘I Stepped Back’
Since the Item expanded its staff, Brock has moved onto other duties at the Item, focusing more on city and county government.
“We got a couple of new reporters who wanted to experience death penalty reporting,” she wrote in a recent e-mail, referring to Brandon Scott and Cody Stark. “I stepped back to allow them to take over.”
“They’ve both been an excellent addition to our news staff. Brandon Scott recently traveled down to Jasper County to interview James Byrd Jr.’s family before the man who killed him was put to death.”
But while she has new duties, she still does some crime reporting.
“I’m more interested in seeing what happens with a case while it’s still in the trial and punishment phase,” she writes. “I’ll still do executions when someone can’t — or when these guys move on to bigger and better things. That’s one aspect of this job that I imagine will always be here, complete with a revolving door of reporters to tell the story of what goes on inside the Huntsville ‘Walls’ Unit.”