Reporters Who Died Tragically

"Highly pressurized" and "high-stakes" don't really do justice to the life of a journalist. Many in the profession, whether they work for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, or the internet, felt a calling to find the truth and share it with the world. They'll put themselves through all kinds of uncomfortable, dangerous, or unbelievable situations to get the story, and to get the story right. Reporters, anchors, photographers, and correspondents often discuss what it's really like being a journalist in a war zone, revealing that being a journalist is sometimes scary.

It can also be a deadly proposition, gathering information, assembling it into a story that resonates with a wide audience, and then sending it out for publication. Reporters have suffered medical emergencies while on the job, while so many others have been killed, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because their efforts to shed light on an issue or situation were viewed as unfair, unwelcome, or treasonous by the powers that be. Still others died of natural causes far too young, their lives undoubtedly cut short by an intense and all-encompassing profession. Here are some notable journalists of all stripes who died before their time, and in very sad ways.

In February 2022, 38-year-old Nathacha Augustin was shot and killed in Pine Hills, Florida, an area just outside of Orlando. About five hours later, a two-person contingent from local provider Spectrum News 13 traveled to Pine Hills to file a news report about the murder from near the scene of the crime. Dylan Lyons, a 24-year-old television reporter, and photojournalist Jesse Walden, were still in the process of getting out of their vehicle when they received gunfire. Walden was seriously injured but survived. Lyons did not. Sustaining multiple gunshots, he died at a hospital early the next morning.

That day, area police arrested chief person of interest Keith Melvin Moses. He was also the main suspect in the death of Augustin, and he'd returned to the spot where the first murder had occurred to shoot two more people. After taking aim at the news crew, Moses entered a nearby private home and shot its two residents, killing a 9-year-old girl. None of the three separate homicides were connected in any way.

Edward R. Murrow was dispatched to Europe in the late 1930s by CBS, and when World War II consumed the continent, Murrow delivered frequent, visceral reports to American listeners. Going beyond just the facts and describing the horrific events that transpired around him, Murrow provided mood and context, and helped to establish radio as a viable news delivery system. 

After the end of the war, Murrow returned to CBS and then developed the network's nascent television news operation. Through his series "See It Now," which aired from 1951 to 1958, Murrow took deep dives into complex issues of the day while offering comment, on the way creating the tropes of both television news and small-screen nonfiction programming.

The most famous TV news broadcaster of his era, Murrow remained in the employ of CBS until 1961, when President John F. Kennedy appointed him to head the U.S. Information Agency. He retired in January 1964 following the surgical extraction of his left lung, beset by a tumor. Murrow smoked as many as 70 cigarettes a day, often on air, and that contributed to the lung cancer diagnosis he'd received in 1963 and for which he was frequently hospitalized. He smoked as many as 70 cigarettes every day, often on air, which contributed to his death. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1963, and was frequently hospitalized. Three weeks after a discharge from New York Hospital in April 1965, Murrow died at home in Pawling, New York. He was 57.

In the mid-1970s, Christine Chubbuck landed a job as a reporter and an anchor at WXLT Channel 40, a small news-focused station in Sarasota, Florida. The station made do with dated equipment and low budgets until WXLT's owner thought he could boost ratings and revenues by embracing an approach gaining favor around the U.S. at the time: eyewitness news, or airing stories as salacious, visceral, and violent as broadcast television could allow. Chubbuck was disgusted by the switch, and after voicing her concerns with management, she continued to produce more thoughtful and sedate feature stories, many of which went unaired or pushed in favor of more shocking content.

During a daytime broadcast on July 15, 1974, Chubbuck decided to call out her station's suspect approach to news coverage by committing a shocking and deeply sad act of violence on live television. "In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first – an attempted suicide," Chubbuck said while staring into the camera (via The New Yorker). Chubbuck then removed a gun she'd hidden from under the desk and used it. The reporter didn't die, but slumped onto the desk, mortally wounded. Chubbuck died at a hospital 14 hours later. She was 29 years old.

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On June 28, 2018, an individual toting a large firearm stormed into the offices of the Capital Gazette, which publishes The Capital and Maryland Gazette newspapers in Annapolis, Maryland, and started firing. In the initial attack, five staff members were shot and killed: community reporter Wendi Winters, sales officer Rebecca Smith, sports reporter John McNamara, editorial editor Gerald Fischman, and assistant editor Rob Hiaasen. Several more employees were injured, and following the assault, police discovered the gunman, Jarrod Ramos, hiding under a desk.

The suspect had long antagonized the Capital Gazette. In 2011, after the paper ran a story about his court proceedings over a criminal harassment charge, Ramos unsuccessfully sued the newspaper, alleging defamation. He also sent multiple threatening letters to the paper's office, including one on the day of the shooting. In 2021, a judge sentenced Ramos to five lifetime sentences, one for each reporter murder, without the possibility of parole.

On August 26, 2015, reporter Alison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward, both working for station WDBJ7's news team in Roanoke, Virginia, went to Bridgewater Plaza on Smith Mountain Lake in Moneta, Virginia. Just before 7 a.m., they began to broadcast live from the scene a morning broadcast piece about the 50th anniversary of the resort area. While interviewing Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce executive director Vicki Gardner, the news team and their subject were rushed on and then attacked by an assailant. Footage of the event captured the sound of eight gunshots fired before the camera tumbled to the ground, as Parker yelled out in terror and the live feed cut out.

Not only did WDBJ7 viewers see the violent crimes live on television, but so did Facebook users. Vester Lee Flanagan II admitted that he was the one who attacked Parker and Ward, and he uploaded his own body camera footage of the assault to his social media accounts. Flanagan, who once worked at WDBJ7, dispatched a letter to ABC News stating that the shooting had been done as an act of protest against the poor treatment he'd received as an LGBT person of color, and then he died by suicide later that day. Parker, 24, and Ward, 27, were pronounced dead at the site of the shooting.

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Ed Bradley is a major figure in the history of "60 Minutes," one of the longest-running and most acclaimed television news productions of all time. Assertive, persistent, and at times unabashedly emotionally-driven, Bradley was one of TV's most prominent and prolific journalists, reporting from the Vietnam War and a post-shooting Columbine High School, interviewing artists and terrorists, and filing provocative features and exposés. Across his decades at CBS, Bradley was awarded 19 News Emmys.

In November 2006, Bradley died from chronic lymphocytic leukemia at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He'd been diagnosed with the form of cancer several years earlier, but he hadn't disclosed his illness until just before his life ended; not even his long-standing "60 Minutes" collaborators knew that Bradley was sick. His condition wasn't considered terminal until after he contracted an infection that his body couldn't properly fight. The journalist kept working on open stories until days before his hospitalization and death, finishing 60 television news pieces between the time of a heart surgery in 2003 and his death. Bradley was 65.

American-born reporter Daniel Pearl worked for the Wall Street Journal overseas as the chief of the newspaper's Southeast Asia bureau. In the months after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, Pearl ventured into Pakistan to research and uncover potential ties between that country's officials and al-Qaeda, the terrorist group then led by Osama bin Laden that was believed to be responsible. On January 23, 2002, Pearl was en route to conduct an interview with a religious figure in Karachi, Pakistan, but a terrorist organization called the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty apprehended the journalist, labeling him a spy. 

Pearl was photographed under gunpoint and handcuffed holding a newspaper. Targeted for punishment because he was both American and Jewish, Pearl died on February 1, 2002, when his captors beheaded him. A video of the grisly act was sent to U.S. federal officials, and months after the murder, Pearl's brutally mutilated remains were discovered in a field in the town of Gadap. The reporter was 38 years old.

For 14 years, Don Bolles worked for Phoenix's Arizona Republic, rooting out government corruption, fraud, and organized crime. As he drove out of a parking spot at a Phoenix hotel in June 1976, Bolles' car exploded because of a remote-operated bomb. Bolles stayed conscious, and to authorities he uttered a handful of words as he lay on the ground, among them "John Adamson." Hospitalized and after enduring the loss of three limbs, Bolles died at the age of 47. President Gerald Ford said in a statement (via the Arizona Republic) that he was "distressed and outraged that a reporter in search of truth became an apparent victim of the underworld."

In between the bombing and Bolles' death, police tried to determine who planted the bomb. The reporter, a father of seven and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, had upset many high-profile and dangerous people in his 14 years of local journalism. Authorities focused on suspects seemingly named by Bolles after the attack: Emprise was a horse and dog racing outfit out of New York; John Adamson was a Phoenix figure arrested twice since the bombing on low-level business fraud charges. Hours after Bolles' death, he was apprehended and charged with murder. The killer later testified that he'd placed the bomb at the behest of a contractor associated with liquor distributor Kemper Marley Sr., about whom Bolles had written unflattering articles.

The Lebanese Civil War began in 1975, and rule of the Middle Eastern nation was contested by several groups; the upstart Lebanese Front and the formerly ruling class; the Lebanese National Movement made up of left-wingers, Sunni Muslims, and Arab nationalists; Shi'i Muslims, and Palestinian refugees. Also involving the neighboring nations of Israel and Syria, the war waged until 1990, and it claimed its first fatal journalist casualty in 1983.

Clark Todd was the head of the London bureau of CTV Television Network, Canada's state broadcaster. A veteran of covering wars who delivered reports from disputed areas in the midst of combat, Todd had been sent by his employer to the mountainous Chouf region of Lebanon to cover the war. On September 4, heavy militia fighting generated considerable debris, and some of it flew off and powerfully struck Todd in the chest. Likely mortally wounded, Red Cross officials discovered and transported Todd to Sidon, an Israel-controlled port in Lebanon. About a week after sustaining the injury, Todd died from his wounds in the village of Kafr Matta. The final act of the lifelong journalist was to write a final goodbye message to his family on a pillowcase. He was 38 years old.

An investigative reporter with the Tampa Tribune, Todd C. Smith specialized in Latin American stories. Following a 10-week period in which he was embedded with the rebel Contras in Nicaragua in 1987, with his articles being syndicated across American newspapers, Smith used his vacation time in November 1989 to research cocaine trafficking in Upper Huallaga, the northern jungles of Peru. Cocaine is made by chemically processing the leaves of coca, which grows abundantly in that region, and was controlled by the leftist revolutionary group called Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path.

Smith evidently ran afoul of the organization, described by some as a terrorist group. No one in Tampa had heard from Smith after November 15, and nobody from the U.S. Embassy where he'd been regularly checking in had seen him since November 17. Days later, a body was discovered next to a highway, adorned with a piece of wood upon which Shining Path personnel had allegedly written, "Death to the North American imperialism. Long live the Communist Party." Embassy workers confirmed that the body was that of Smith, 28 years old at the time. "He had a taxi receipt in his pocket with his name on it. He'd been tortured and beaten," Tribune editor Carl Crothers told UPI. Investigators say he'd also been shot, either by the Shining Path or hired contract killers.

An accomplished journalist and a would-be superstar of television news, Jessica Savitch joined NBC News in 1977. She quickly ascended through the ranks and attained the position of weekend anchor of "The NBC Nightly News" while also appearing as the on-air talent in "NBC News Digest," one-minute briefs that aired between prime-time shows. After covering the 1980 presidential election as a political correspondent and serving as the anchor of PBS's documentary anthology "Frontline," Savitch also contributed to "Meet the Press" and "Today." The reporter won four News Emmy Awards and commanded a salary from NBC of $500,000 a year, an astronomical sum at the time for a television journalist.

On the stormy evening of October 23, 1983, Savitch left a restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with her fiancé, New York Post vice president Martin Fischbein. According to investigators, it would seem that the driver, Fischbein, wasn't able to properly see through the rain; the car drove over gravel, past two caution signs, and down a wall bordering the Delaware Canal. The station wagon plunged into the water and turned over on its top in five feet of water. Savitch and Fischbein became trapped inside and drowned. Savitch was 35 years old.

Taking issue with the military-backed government that had controlled Thailand since 1992, a group called the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, also known as Red Shirts, took their cause to the streets. Between March and May of 2010, protests turned into demonstrations, which turned into riots, and that generated casualties. Armed authorities acting on behalf of the Thai government used heavy weaponry to quell the Red Shirts, who responded to the troops' firing with homemade gas bombs, slingshots, and small fire. During a particularly violent days-long skirmish in mid-April 2010, more than 120 people were injured.

The fighting claimed lives, too, including that of Hiroyuki Muramoto. As Red Shirts and soldiers shot at each other, the TV camera operator became caught up in the chaos. Muramoto, who had worked for NBC and Australia's ABC, was employed by the Japanese branch of Reuters. He'd helped produce news stories from war zones and demonstrations before, such as in North Korea and the Philippines. A bullet intended for someone else struck Muramoto in the chest, and he was pronounced dead on arrival after being rushed to Klang Hospital in Bangkok. The photojournalist was 43.

In 1983, a political fringe group that called itself "The Order" was created, with a mission to eliminate whoever it thought were the enemies of the United States at the time. To the organization, that encompassed the LGBT community, people of color, feminists, and Jewish people. The first individual that The Order aimed to silence, by way of murder or assassination, was controversial Denver talk radio host Alan Berg. He self-identified as a Jewish person, and he hosted a popular call-in show on local radio station KOA where he opened up discussions on racial issues, religion, and any other potentially touchy topic. He was known for a confrontational approach and putting those with opposite viewpoints on the spot.

A frequent recipient of death threats even before The Order got involved, Berg was shot down and died on the spot in the driveway outside of his home, in Denver's Congress Park area, on June 18, 1984. Of the four people involved in the murder of the 50-year-old radio journalist, one was shot in a confrontation with the FBI, and three others were arrested and given long prison sentences. Berg's life and death served as the inspiration for Oliver Stone's 1988 movie "Talk Radio."

Before he became the editor of the Oakland Post, Chauncey Bailey served as a foreign correspondent stationed in Haiti and Vietnam and was a reporter for the Detroit News and the Oakland Tribune. A journalist of the crusading sort, Bailey asked tough and loaded questions of city officials in his coverage of complicated and controversial subjects, usually as they pertained to the lives of the San Francisco Bay Area's Black community, such as the spread of AIDS, prison sentencing issues, and education.

At about 7:30 a.m. on August 2, 2007, Bailey was shot on a street in downtown Oakland during his walk to work. According to witnesses, an unidentified assailant walked up to Bailey and fired multiple shots — including one in the head — then quickly fled. He was dead by the time authorities arrived; he was 57 years old. Yusuf Bey IV was later arrested and sentenced to prison on a charge of first-degree murder. It emerged that Bailey had once uncovered some of the Bey family's questionable business dealings, as well as a fall from grace as a community leader and an arrest on sexual assault charges. In return, Bey hired a contract killer, Devaughndre Broussard, to murder Bailey.

On the morning of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew two passenger jets into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, photographer Bill Biggart departed his apartment in Manhattan about 2 miles away from the site of impact and started capturing images. A freelance photojournalist, Biggart had spent time documenting disputed areas and places of war, such as Israel and Palestine, and he favored close-up imagery because he felt such photographs told better stories than those taken from a safe distance. Biggart took upwards of 300 photographs after the first plane made contact, and he captured the immediate moments of chaos, confusion, despair, and destruction. Then the second plane struck the other tower, directly above where Biggart was working at the time.

He was struck by falling detritus from the skyscraper and died, buried under a sizable amount of rubble. The 54-year-old Biggart was the only news photographer to die during the events of 9/11. His body was recovered, and so was his camera equipment. Newspapers and magazines around the U.S. published Biggart's photos, which provided a tragically up-close view of the terrorist attacks as they occurred.

On August 19, 1997, police in Colebrook, New Hampshire, pulled over Carl Drega in the parking lot of a grocery store. Immediately after state trooper Scott Phillips exited his vehicle, Drega presented an assault rifle and started shooting at the officer. At that time, another trooper, Les Lord, arrived on the scene; Drega shot him, too. Both state police officers died as a result of their close-range gunshot wounds.

Drega then absconded with Phillips' police car and drove himself to a nearby building that housed the offices of Judge Vickie Bunnel and the Colebrook News and Sentinel. The assailant had intended to kill Bunnell, and as he approached, she fled the building on foot. As she cried out warnings to staff members on the premises, Colebrook News and Sentinel editor Dennis Joos tried to get between the shooter and his target. "Dennis Joos very heroically tried to intervene," Lieutenant Chuck West of the New Hampshire State Police told WMUR-9 of Manchester. "He grabbed Drega, got into a physical altercation, and subsequently was shot and killed right there on the lawn." Drega fired a shot that killed Bunnel, too, and after driving away, tried to shoot and kill a Fish and Game Department officer and another state trooper. Lieutenant West delivered the shot that permanently dispatched Drega, who killed four people that day, including Joos, the 51-year-old editor of the small town's tiny newspaper.

A reporter and investigative journalist, Nicholas Tomalin wrote on a variety of domestic and international topics for The Sunday Times out of London, and also co-wrote the 1970 nonfiction bestseller "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" (pictured). He thrived as a war correspondent, filing stories from the combat in Vietnam and in 1973, the Sunday Times dispatched Tomalin to Syria to cover the unfolding Yom Kippur War. The U.K.-based Press Gazette would later name Tomalin one of the 40 best journalists of the modern era.

Syria and Egypt had both attacked the Jewish state of Israel at the same time, deliberately over the Jewish holy period of Yom Kippur. Israel had held control of the Sinai Peninsula since the Six-Day War of 1967, and during the later conflict, Egyptian forces invaded the region while an attack came from Syrian soldiers. One of those strikes was delivered to an Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights, where Tomalin was told he'd be safely headquartered while he filed stories. One of those rockets sent by Syria made contact with Tomalin's area and he was killed in the blast. He was 41 years old.

Photography was still a limited medium when the Civil War developed in the United States in the 1860s. Journalists who covered the destructive battles had to rely on their words to describe a scene, or they could draw or paint the horrors around them. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper promised original imagery for its Civil War reporting, and that coverage made much use of the talents of James R. O'Neill.

Prior to the war, he made his living as a stage painter, conjuring murals for musical productions in Wisconsin until Harper's Weekly hired him to contribute illustrations of battles being fought in the vast American West. In 1862, O'Neill, as a noncombatant, was allowed to join the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry under the direction of General James G. Blunt. At the Battle of Honey Springs, O'Neill drew elaborate scenic depictions of the fighting, one of which was published in 1863 alongside a written account in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Then O'Neill's group moved on to fight in the Battle of Baxter Springs in Kansas. While he was a noncombatant, the reporter and illustrator was killed. He was 30 years old.

A journalist and diarist, Thomas William Bowlby was among the first war correspondents ever employed by The Times, the London-based newspaper and dominant mass-media source in 19th-century Western Europe. Having made a name for himself with reports sent in from Berlin in 1848 covering social revolutions, Bowlby also delivered a dramatic account of the sinking of the SS Malabar in Sri Lanka in May 1860 — because he'd been on board the vessel. 

The Taiping Rebellion unleashed a deadly civil war and predated the drug trade-oriented Opium Wars in China. In 1860, The Times sent Bowlby to China to cover what would be the final days of the Second Opium War, fought by English and French troops against the ruling Qing empire. Bowlby's unflinching accounts detailed the horrors of war, including French troops' deadly bayonet attacks and British soldiers slaughtering innocents.

Sometime after September 16, 1860, Bowlby traveled with two representatives of the British crown to cover their peace talks with a Qing official. The meeting went badly; negotiations descended to the point where Bowlby and both envoys were apprehended, imprisoned, and subjected to torture. Among the punishments suffered were being tied up with ever-tautening constraints, and after they grew dehydrated, their mouths were filled with dirt. Qing agents killed the 42-year-old Bowlby in Beijing on September 22. As revenge, British military leader Lord Elgin directed his troops to burn down the Qing emperor's estate, the Old Summer Palace.

A civil war in Yemen began in March 2015, waged by the Ansar Allah sect — identified by some authorities as a terrorist organization – against the established government, backed by Middle Eastern neighbors including Saudi Arabia. In the first nine months of fighting, 5,800 citizens had died as a result of the fighting, and freelance print journalist and television reporter Almigdad Mojalli considered getting out of his home country because the situation had grown so frightening. He opted to remain in Yemen to write and report on the war, in particular crafting features about the war's effect on regular people. Mojalli contributed to the U.S.-based outlet Voice of America as well as the United Nations' media arm IRIN, and The Telegraph.

On the morning of January 17, 2016, Mojalli accompanied Yemen Digital Media reporter Bahir al-Sharabi to Sana'a, where Ansar Allah kept its headquarters, to investigate and report on a recent round of Saudi-led airstrikes which had left 15 residents of the area dead. About 20 minutes after arrival, both reporters were bombarded with falling explosives. Al-Sharabi briefly lost consciousness and when he awoke, he discovered Mojalli extremely injured. He and others in the area got Mojalli into a car, where he died before they could get him to a hospital. The journalist was 34 years old.

Sympathetic to left-wing and socialist causes, and an avowed communist, Oregon-born journalist John Reed covered the unionized labor movement, the Mexican Revolution, and World War I. As his passion was with communist movements, Reed arrived in Russia in 1917, just before the Bolshevik Revolution, when rebels took over the country and instituted communist rule. A lot of messed-up things happened during the Russian Revolution, but Reed, passionate for the cause, served as a field reporter, detailing the historical events as they happened. He collected it all for his internationally successful 1919 book "Ten Days That Shook the World," viewed as an objective and favorable account by the newly installed communist government.

Shortly after he finished his book, Reed noticed that the communist government had grown less than firm with its leaders moving their focus away from empowering the masses and instead toward punishing its enemies. Reed left Russia, but was arrested and sent to prison in Finland. He went back to Russia and tried to probe communist leaders about economic issues, but he soon fell too ill to work. Generally unhealthy after prison and diagnosed with kidney disease, Reed contracted typhus and died in a Moscow hospital in October 1920. Named a "Hero of the Revolution" by the Soviet government, Reed was buried in the national state cemetery at the Kremlin Wall.