Wendi Winters was 65 years old. She was a veteran editor and reporter with four children and quick with a quip. On 28 June this year she was shot dead along with four others in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Maryland by a man with a grudge against the paper.
Winters, who wrote a column called Teen of the Week, was remembered in a moving thread on Twitter by one of her colleagues at the paper, photojournalist Joshua McKerrow.
1. Today I did the annual story on holiday decorations at the Governor's residence. I've done it every year, for years. A very light but very fun story. Every year my reporting partner was Wendi Winters. This year, it was Selene. Wendi was murdered in June. https://t.co/hDlixzieht
— Joshua McKerrow (@joshuamckerrow) December 7, 2018
Responding to a typically anti-media tweet from Donald Trump, McKerrow, a photographer who was on assignment covering the decorations at the governor’s mansion as he has every year with Winters, explained how visceral her absence felt.
“I really thought I could hold it together,” he wrote. “I moved through the rooms with my tripod, focusing on the trees and ornaments. All I could think about was Wendi. I felt like she was with me, that she was actually present.”
Not present in a ghostly sense, he said, joking that wherever she is he hopes it’s a better placed than having to work on stories like this. But he could hear her voice asking one of her favorite questions: “How many cookies are you making this year?”
McKerrow said he maintained his composure until the end, when he spoke to the butler.
“I really miss Wendi,” the butler told him. “Next year I’m going to name a cookie for her.”
That was his breaking point.
“The tears started, and I’m standing in the Maryland governor’s home weeping to myself about my dead friend. She died in the Capital newsroom on June 28th, shot by a man who wanted to kill every journalist he could,” he wrote.
They still don’t know what it was that pushed the killer to decide on that day that he finally wanted to murder a bunch of journalists, McKerrow wrote, his friends Rebecca, Wendi, Gerald, Rob, John, whose names he always writes in the order he thinks they were killed.
“I don’t have a wrap-up to this story,” McKerrow concluded. “I cried on and off all day. I miss her very much. I’m comforted that in a way she’s still with me, when I do the work that she loved to do. Journalism. Patriotic, truth telling, American. We’ll keep on doing the work.”
“And if we die for it, someone else will pick up the threads, and report on the holiday decorations at the Governor’s house. Its what we do. ”
McKerrow’s thread has been shared over 40,000 times with messages of love and support, but one of the first replies you might see if you click on it is from an account replying simply: “Fake news.” In that person’s Twitter bio there’s one word: “MAGA!”
