The names float in and out of my consciousness, carried on a wind of remorse.

Gerald. Rob. John. Rebecca. Wendi.

My friends, murdered seven years ago in the Capital Gazette newsroom shooting, find me where they do every morning, shortly after I wake and remember to be grateful that I’m alive.

I have my wife, my kids, my work to live for, and most days I do.

Sometimes my friends find me where I least expect them, too, like a weekly list of things to do in Annapolis.

“At 2:30 pm,” the organizers of Eastport a Rockin’ wrote on Instagram, “the festival will go silent for a moment to commemorate these five martyrs to a free press and the survivors and all those who loved all of them. Special performances honoring them and the survivors are planned as well.”

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Pat Furgurson, a journalist who reported on his colleagues’ murders, dies

Nov 30, 2024

I’m not fragile or damaged. I don’t have nightmares or depression or PTSD.

I have ... I’m not sure what to call it. Lingering sadness.

I grew tired of weeping years ago. I’d rather write than cry, suspecting that words are more productive for me than tears.

My old newspaper, The Capital, published a column in 2011 by a colleague about a man convicted of harassing a former high school classmate. It was truthful. It was fair.

The man sued for libel and lost, appealed and lost again. He threatened. He cyberstalked. It reached a final verdict in 2015, when an appeals court judge wrote that this angry man should stop wasting everyone’s time.

So he began to plot. By the time he shot his way through the glass doors of the first-floor newsroom on June 28, 2018, few in the office knew his name. Now, I hope no one does.

I was on vacation that week, retreating with family to an Ocean City condo that my wife and I purchased at a charity auction.

At 2:33 p.m., this angry man shattered the twin glass doors of our office with a shotgun. Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters died. Six others in the newsroom survived.

I lived. It took time to forgive myself.

The thing that sets this story apart from all the other American mass shootings is that it was an attempt to silence a free press.

My surviving colleagues, both in Annapolis and Baltimore, put out the paper the next day. Over the next few years, we covered lives lost, families shattered, a community shaken, an evil man tried, convicted and sentenced to multiple lifetimes in prison.

Journalists around the nation, those who knew us and those who did not, saw an inspiring story at a time when the profession is threatened. We won a Pulitzer Prize. There is a monument in Annapolis and another under development in D.C.

Gun violence activists saw us as a reminder that there are just too many guns in America and not enough guardrails.

Seven years is an epoch of news. The world moves on and forgets. If sleep is the great unspooling of the human mind, time is the slow surrender of collective memory.

There’s no public memorial ceremony this year, only private remembrances.

Those names — Gerald, Rob, John, Rebecca, Wendi — they still come on a wind of chance, whispering not to forget them.

When people figure out who I am, what my survival represents, they often explain where they were that day and what those deaths and our perseverance meant to them.

I’ve learned to say thank you, grateful for their empathy and generosity in remembering. I write down their stories and add them to mine.

Halfway through an Atlantic magazine profile on Carl Hiaasen, king of Florida weird, I had to breathe in deeply, then let it out slowly through my lips.

“Hiaasen’s humor remains sharp and outlandish, but some of the darker currents of contemporary American life — the guns, the anger, the conspiracy theories — have become painfully personal. In 2018, his younger brother, Rob, was murdered in the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was an editor and a columnist. Hiaasen still finds it difficult to talk about his brother’s death."

“The only way he knows how to process it all, he says, is to keep working.”

Yeah, I feel the same.

I work in Baltimore a few days a week, writing a column for The Banner. It’s motivated me to know more about my second city, and I’ve started reading Baltimore authors.

“In Memory of: Rob Hiaasen Gerald Fischman John McNamara Rebecca Smith Wendi Winters,” Laura Lippman wrote in the dedication of her 2019 book, “Lady in the Lake.”

Rob was her friend. Though I never expect to meet her, she’s now mine.

The interview requests have slowed, and I refused most of them anyway.

I said no to my old boss, the one who hired me in Annapolis a lifetime ago. He wrote a book on the shooting, though he was long retired by the time it happened. I didn’t think it was his story to tell.

A friend who covered mass shootings and their aftermath tells me that’s a common feeling. I want people to remember Gerald, Rob, John, Rebecca and Wendi, but it feels wrong to hear others tell this story.

Feeling this way doesn’t make sense, particularly coming from someone who does the same thing for a living. It doesn’t have to.

Instead, I write about other people’s gun violence and the Chesapeake Bay, history and knuckleheads, Annapolis, its people and the world around them.

I do it because journalism turned out to be something I’m good at but also because, as long as I practice the craft of telling truths, people won’t forget.

Take a moment at 2:33 p.m. Saturday to recall my friends in silence.

Listen for their names on a wind of regret — Gerald, Rob, John, Rebecca and Wendi.

And remember.