The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News

By Tamara Cherry

A groundbreaking and thorough examination of the trauma caused by the media covering crimes, both to victims and journalists, from a respected journalist and victim advocate

In The Trauma Beat, an eye-opening combination of investigative journalism and memoir, former big-city crime reporter Tamara Cherry calls on her award-winning skills as a journalist to examine the impact of the media on trauma survivors and the impact of trauma on members of the media. As Tamara documents the experiences of those who were forced to suffer on the public stage, she is confronted by everything she got wrong on the crime beat.

Covering murders and traffic fatalities to sexual violence and mass violence, Cherry exposes a system set up to fail trauma survivors and journalists. Why do some families endure a swell of unwanted attention after the murder of a loved one, while others suffer from a lack of attention? What is it like to have a microphone shoved in your face seconds after escaping the latest mass shooting? What is the lasting impact on the reporter holding that microphone? The Trauma Beat explores these issues with the raw, reflective detail of a journalist moving from ignorance to understanding and shame to healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778521508

Book preview

Cover: The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News by Tamara Cherry.

The Trauma Beat

A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News

Tamara Cherry

Logo: E C W Press.

Contents

Praise for The Trauma Beat

Dedication

Introduction

Housekeeping

1. Widow Kim

2. Gregory Stewart’s Mother

3. The Scoop on Sensational Stories

4. Brains on Trauma

5. Overexposed

6. Bad, Ugly, Good, Repeat

7. A Morally Presumptive Chorus

8. Story Taking

9. Victims People

10. When the News Trucks Go Away

11. Red Flags

12. Informed Intentions

13. A Strange and Lonely Trauma

14. A Rational Human Being

15. A Classic Case

16. The Parking Lot

17. It’s Just Different

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

About the Author

Copyright

Praise for The Trauma Beat

"A talented reporter’s on-the-ground experience covering the heartbreaks of big-city crime is reassessed against a backdrop of original research that gnaws down on deeper truths about media coverage of violent crime. Tamara Cherry’s enlightening, gripping, and highly personal account reveals what happens after TV cameras and reporters leave, or when they never show up at all. The Trauma Beat is an original, important, and engrossing book that shows the best and the worst—the complexity of what is too much and when it’s not enough—and gives everyone plenty to think about."

—Adrian Humphreys, Senior Crime Reporter for the National Post and best-selling author of The Enforcer

"While we don’t always know the impact of our interactions with others, The Trauma Beat looks at hard lessons learned through the lens of a journalist. It is a rich and important read for anyone interacting with victims of trauma and crime. It shines a light on trauma-informed practices, allowing victims to tell the stories they want to share. This book is a gift."

—Elynne Greene, Manager of Victim Services and Human Trafficking, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department

Tamara is bringing humanity back to the beat! In this powerfully reflective and honest account of Tamara’s work as a former crime reporter, we learn about the detrimental impact that the media can have on both trauma survivors and the people reporting the news. Tamara is showing proof that a trauma-informed system is necessary and crucial to the wellbeing and mental health of all those involved. More importantly, we are moved by the heart and passion of a person shifting a system in a way that honours people first!

—Paula Rivero, Certified Trauma Specialist and author of My Name Is Trauma and I am Awesome!

"Those of us trauma survivors who’ve suffered retraumatization by media can breathe a sigh of relief. As the survivor stories in The Trauma Beat illustrate, trauma education for journalists can’t come soon enough. This revolutionary book challenges the field of journalism to do better."

—Louise Godbold, trauma expert, Silence Breaker

An urgent call for change and a testament to the power of responsible journalism, it is essential reading. There should be a copy in every newsroom.

—Wendy Gillis, Toronto Star crime reporter

Dedication

Para os meus quatro corações. Adoro, adoro, adoro vocês.

And for my sweet Aunty Lainey. All light, all love, always.

Introduction

I’m not sure I can pinpoint the moment, story, or even year I realized my job had deeply disturbed me. Was it in the beginning when I couldn’t stop thinking about all the ways my little brother would die? Or at a dinner party when I noticed the chatter had fallen silent around me, friends and acquaintances staring in disgust and bewilderment at my nonchalant offering of unreported details in some awful crime? Or could it really not have been until some months ago when I was stirring the pancake batter and the kids were watching cartoons and I became filled with such rage over my husband taking longer than expected to shop for my birthday present that tears began streaming down my cheeks?

No matter. Because this book isn’t about me—not really, anyway. It’s true that for someone who kept her private life very private while in the public realm, I will be sharing more personal details about myself than I ever could have imagined. But I do so with hopes that you will understand. Understand why reporters do the things they do when reporting on traumatic events. Understand the impact these things can have on traumatized people. And understand the impact traumatized people can have on reporters.

I thought I understood all this stuff before heading into this project. For nearly 15 years, after all, I had been immersed in the business of trauma. Homicides. Traffic fatalities. Sexual slavery. If it was news that could make you cry, I probably covered it. I read true-crime books and watched true-crime docs and, such is the job, increasingly surrounded myself with true-crime people: cops, lawyers, scanner-head camera ops, other crime reporters. I knew all the ways to find a recently bereaved family: scour social media, wait at the scene, call the funeral homes—so many ways you’ll no doubt be disgusted to hear. All the while, I prided myself on being one of the good ones. You know why I tell people to talk to you? a senior big-city cop once told me. Because you care about the victims. And I did. I really did. I held back tears during interviews, shook my head while taking notes in court, and cried for the victims and their families on my long drives home. Then I packed it all up and did it again the next day. Again, and again, and again.

I loved my job, in a weird, trauma-junkie sort of way, propelled toward crime scenes and courtrooms by the rush of scanner chatter, breaking news, and ever-present deadlines—the go-go-go that all came to a stop-stop-stop when someone who was experiencing the worst hours of their life agreed to share their nightmare with me. In the beginning, I wanted my reporting to make people feel something. In the end, I’ve come to realize, it became an outlet for my own feelings, my eyes cloudy with tears as I slammed out my scripts.

Turns out, there are all sorts of things I didn’t really understand. But I knew I wanted to do good in this world, and my job, I thought, was allowing me to do that.

Even so, there were parts of the business that made me uncomfortable, parts that made me think, There’s got to be a better way. Like when I had my story about the quadruple fatal collision in the bag by mid-afternoon—a compelling piece about an appeal from investigators for an unidentified driver to come forward—and a competitor-friend from another newsroom called to ask if I was heading over to the sisters’ house. The sisters. A young woman and her teenaged sister, their parents’ only children, were among the dead.

My competitor-friend was just as uncomfortable with door knocks as I was, so I guess that while maybe he was trying to help me out, also maybe he just didn’t want to be the only one there feeling like shit. He gave me the address and, with the knowledge that he (my competitor) might be getting the interview, and imagining my bosses’ reactions to that, I punched in the address and headed over. When I arrived, my competitor-friend was interviewing the grieving father on the side porch, the grieving father holding the framed picture of his daughters in his hands. My cameraguy colleague and I waited respectfully (yeah, I struggle with that word) at the sidewalk for our turn. As my competitor-friend walked away, I whispered my thanks and approached the father with the usual, I’m so sorry, I realize you’ve just gone over this, but would you mind … and we did the interview and he cried through the details once more. And as we turned to leave, another competitor-friend and his cameraguy colleague were standing on the sidewalk, genuinely sad, sympathetic smiles on their faces as they waited for us to pass and then walked toward the shattered man. I don’t know how many more showed up. I was rushing back to the scene to slam it together for the six o’clock show.

It was a classic, head-shaking example of what happens when an ordinary family is forced to grieve on the public stage. And it left me with a frustrated feeling that had become more and more difficult to shake.

A few years after that quadruple fatal, I left my journalism career, intent on doing something good with all the bad I’d seen. I launched Pickup Communications (pickup refers to the act of a journalist getting a photo of a deceased person, and ideally an interview with a family member), a public relations firm that evolved from supporting trauma survivors, to supporting trauma survivors and journalists, to attempting to change the system by which trauma survivors interact with and are impacted by the media. I tweeted and wrote op-eds and launched a research project that, like many chapters in my crime-reporting career, had a profound impact on my life. It also inspired this book.

More than one hundred trauma survivors from across North America were surveyed or interviewed for this project. Survivors of homicides and traffic fatalities. Sexual assault and human trafficking. Mass violence. They came from small towns and big cities, rich households and poor households and all the households in between. From crimes you’ll recognize simply by their date or place and crimes you’ve likely never heard of because an investigator or a journalist didn’t think you needed to.

About those journalists—I surveyed them, too. And while you may have some opinions about journalists who show up at the homes of the recently and unexpectedly bereaved—vultures, ambulance chasers, scum, I’m fairly certain I’ve heard them all—this book is not about blame. I truly believe that most journalists who tell stories of trauma are trying to do good.

The combined results of this project have been a reckoning for me personally and will, I hope, be a reckoning for the industry. Not just the reporters who are waiting on the sidewalk for their kick at the trauma can. I’m talking about the whole shebang. The execs. The investigators. The survivor support workers. The rubberneckers. You.

The system is not broken; it was built this way. The time has come to tear it down.

Now, I’ve tried really, really hard to practice what I preach here—that is, trauma-informed journalism—and I really hope I’ve gotten it right, or at least as close to right as is necessary to cause no further harm. But perhaps the most surprising takeaway from this journey has been how very much I had to learn. As such, I am sure there is more learning to come.

The vast majority of feedback I received from participants in this project—be they survivors, survivor support workers, or journalists—went something like: Finally, someone is talking about this! People need to know!

It is my hope that after reading this book, you will know.

Housekeeping

A few words about wording and other things in this book:

I refer to the bereaved next of kin as survivors not to decry their own victimization, but because this is how many of them self-identify: homicide survivors, traffic fatality survivors, and so on. They’re the ones left behind. There are some, however, who prefer the term victim. I hope my use of the term survivor throughout this book does not cause further harm.

The terms victim service providers and survivor support workers are used interchangeably. The former is the widely used term for those who support the suffering and bereaved; the latter is my preference, as per my previous paragraph.

I’ve left out the names of all perpetrators, because I want this book to be about survivors.

I’ve left out the names of journalists and newsroom managers who may have made mistakes that I’m now making examples of, because, as mentioned previously, I don’t want this book to be about blame.

I’ve left out the names of some of the survivors—including those who asked me to do so and those who were not directly part of my project and from whom I could not obtain informed consent. In cases where I could not make contact with or did not hear back from survivors, but felt the media treatment of their case merited discussion to illustrate a broader problem, I have included only details that I felt were necessary, so as to mitigate potentially negative impacts of survivors stumbling upon their stories unexpectedly. It is my sincere hope that by omitting the names of these survivors, I do not cause further harm. It is, however, important to note that some of these survivors will be identifiable through endnotes, particularly if they consented to being identified in the past. I hope these small identifiers will not cause further harm.

About those endnotes. You’ll notice a lot of them along the way. These are meant to illustrate the research behind some of the ideas being shared and to allow readers who feel so inclined to dig deeper into various cases. They are by no means necessary, however, and I invite you to enjoy the book without getting caught up with all those tiny numbers.

Sources of information have been cited wherever possible, but there are some personal recollections for which I could find no corroborating sources. As I’ve come to learn (and you will, too), memories can sometimes be tricky, so I have leaned on these uncorroborated recollections sparingly.

And finally, something you don’t usually see in North American journalism, I’ve used first names instead of last names once a person has been introduced. One of the surveys that was part of the research project I mentioned in the introduction was for homicide and traffic fatality survivors. And one of the questions in that survey was Do you recall experiencing or seeing anything that was particularly upsetting to you in the media coverage of your case? Cijay Morgan, who lost her mother, Agnes, to a drunk driving crash, responded, I didn’t like them calling her ‘Morgan.’ This isn’t the army. That has to stop with the press, calling people by their last name. It’s so cold.

It’s a sentiment I’ve since heard from other trauma survivors. I thought on this and thought on this and the only reason I could come up with for calling victims and survivors by their last names was, well, that’s the way it’s always been done. It’s the way we in North America refer to everyone in the news (except for pets and young children).

But in the words of journalist and mass violence survivor Selene San Felice, It’s just different when it comes to trauma.1 So I’ve made this book different, too.

1.

Widow Kim

If you were contacted by members of the media in the immediate aftermath (first 72 hours) of your loved one(s)’s death, how did this make you feel?

exposed, ambushed, intimidated, privacy invaded, overwhelmed, pressured, attacked.

—Kim Hancox, survey response, 09-03-2020

We are almost an hour into our conversation when I ask Kim Hancox the question I’ve posed countless times before to cops and lawyers and victims and survivors and just about anybody I’ve interviewed ever about anything. It’s the safety, the one you ask when you’ve gotten everything you need but know from enough experience that sometimes the best answer comes from a question you didn’t think to ask: Is there anything else that we haven’t discussed that you wanted to put out there?

There’s a pause on the other end of the line, then what I imagine to be her glancing out the window as she says, I don’t think so, and, If other things come to mind, I’ll send you off a quick email, and then her glancing at the notes she jotted down the night before, as I thank her and things begin to wind down, and then: Actually, you know what? The one other thing that has stayed in my mind and will forever is the day of our funeral.2

Their funeral. Their big cop funeral. She remembers it as being a week and a half or so after her husband was killed, as she tries to place what came before and what came after—when she prepared the statement for the media, when the coroner released the body. In reality, I will later find, the funeral was six days after Bill died, six days after Kim watched him dying on live television as their two-year-old daughter slept upstairs.

Some reporters would paint the funeral as the tale of two parking lots: there was the one at the strip mall in northeast Toronto, where Detective Constable William Billy Hancox was stabbed to death by a couple of women trying to steal his undercover van; and there was the stretch of cement about 15 minutes down the highway, where thousands of police officers stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind a church, streams of sweat soaking their dress uniforms in the sweltering August heat.3

Members of the community lined the streets and the overpasses, sometimes four people deep, to watch the procession pass. As high-profile deaths go, most were complete strangers, some with their children, there to pay respects to Billy Hancox, the trusted guardian they’d never met.4

But what has remained lodged in Kim’s mind for more than two decades from that funeral is not the strangers or the eulogy or the moment she broke her silence via a statement read out by a deputy chief (she did indeed prepare the statement before the funeral, and it was indeed read aloud after the funeral as a piper played Amazing Grace5). What remains lodged in Kim’s mind all these years later is the school next to the church—or, more specifically, the sounds that came from above it.

When I walked out of the church after the funeral, when they were putting the casket in the car, as soon as I walked out of the door, it was so quiet and it was so hot outside. All I could hear was camera clicks. She pauses. It was just like being on a red carpet for some function. It was just click-click-click-click-click-click-click. She recites the clicks in quick succession, like an area resident recalling the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop of rapid-fire gunshots heard overnight. "They were all standing on the roof of the public school—just, I don’t even know, a hundred reporters. I don’t know how many people were there. But it was just this massive click. I will remember that sound forever."

I can picture the scene perfectly. The crush of cameras, line of tripods, reporters scribbling notes, as if a wall of invisibility had been erected between the very private grief and the very public news media documenting it. I’ve never observed a casket out shot (as I would often write them into my scripts) from the rooftop of a school, but I’ve stood on many sidewalks, at the edges of many parking lots, and across the street from many funeral homes, jolted to my feet by a Here we go from a cameraman, as the double doors swing open and funeral workers emerge.

I think about how often triggers have come up during my surveys and interviews with trauma survivors. Sometimes it’s fireworks, other times the sound of an engine backfiring. A school shooting survivor told me her trauma is triggered by the sound of helicopters, because it brings her back to the hours she spent in hiding, waiting to die, while a news helicopter hovered above. So many seemingly insignificant sounds that can send trauma survivors into tailspins.

Now I consider the sound of cameras clicking. It’s not hard to come by, especially if you watch television news. I used to use those clicks all the time for blasts of sound in my stories. The click-click-click as the police chief steps to the microphones. The click-click-click as a detective walks toward a crime scene. The click-click-click of a bad guy being whisked away in the back of a police cruiser, camera lenses pressed firmly against the windows as photogs jog alongside and fire away. Soundup cameras, I would write into my scripts.

I ask Kim if the sound of cameras clicking is triggering for her.

Oh yeah. It’s one of those weird things, it just stuck with me, she says. "I will remember that feeling forever, walking out. It was so quiet and so surreal, and then just click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click. You could just hear them. I thought, Where is this coming from? And then I could see everybody on the roof of the school next door."

I ask her if she remembers how that clicking sound made her feel.

I felt super, super vulnerable. And super exposed. It was just the worst day ever. You just think about the worst possible day ever, multiply it by a hundred, and then have a million people watching you.

How do we fix that? I wonder aloud, repeating what has become a familiar refrain since embarking on this research project four months earlier. I’m trying to find ways for journalists to tell important, compelling stories without causing further harm to victims and survivors. I know the media will want the shot of the casket being carried to the hearse. It’s the final goodbye. It illustrates the pain of the loss. It is one of those powerful, relatable images that needs no words.

The journalists on the rooftop weren’t on church property. There’s no way to silence those shutters. And with such silence around the church, would it have even made a difference if they had been farther away? Perhaps the lesson here is just to be aware how something so routine can have such a profound impact, and if there is another, less intrusive way to get the shot, to choose the other way. I will sit on this one and circle back to it later. Because beyond the rooftop of the school next door, there were so, so many things that went badly for Kim Hancox.

---

A review of dozens of academic papers on the topic of death notifications points to a handful of key themes in examining the impact of such notifications on the people receiving them, in particular when the death is unexpected. The words and expressions that are used to give the tragic news, the characteristics of who communicates it (doctor, policeman, nurse), the physical setting in which the notification is given (home, hospital, patrol car, offices of the police, etc.), the means used (in person, via phone calls, telegram, mail, or instant messaging) are just some of the factors that can influence the way survivors face one of the most difficult moments in their lives.6

When it comes to protocols, it has been repeatedly stressed that notifications should be performed by trained professionals—coroners, police officers, nurses, social workers, etc.—and that they should, whenever possible, be done in person. And yet, that review of studies shows that telephone death notifications remain widely used, in particular with police officers informing survivors of traffic fatalities, homicides, and/or suicides. In the particular case of deaths resulting from a murder, it would be appropriate to inform the deceased’s partner or family members of the possibility that the media can contact them. It would be also useful to provide them with suggestions on how to manage various aspects, including those related to the protection of privacy.7 Missouri death investigator Darren Dake stresses the importance of in-person notifications because you can have the presence of compassion when you’re there in person.8

Having to look at somebody and tell them that their loved one has died is an extremely hard thing, the death investigator says. The moment the notification is made, that very moment will be very vivid in their life forever.9

In the course of my reporting, I’ve had the unintended, and indeed unfortunate, experience of informing the family member of a homicide victim that their loved one was dead. I will expand on this in a later chapter, but suffice to say, since that experience, I have been acutely aware of the mad dash by investigators to track down family members of traffic fatality or homicide victims before, god forbid, they find out through social media, a call from a journalist, or a traffic report detailing their loved one’s unique vehicle, on their loved one’s unique route to work.

Kim would later hear that a senior officer was parked on her street for quite some time before Toronto’s police chief arrived at her door with the official notification that her husband was dead.10 But her unofficial notification came hours earlier as she sat alone, eight months pregnant and watching TV.

Bill had come home for dinner around seven o’clock, before heading back out for some overtime. He told Kim he’d be doing a surveillance detail by Centenary hospital in Toronto’s east end. Kim settled in for the night and, being the newshound that she was, did what she always did: turned on the news.

"Then that evening, on CP24 at 10 o’clock, there was a break in the news where they said that there had been an incident with an officer at Ellesmere and whatever—Morningside, generally—and so right away I thought, Okay, that’s where Bill was going."

Longtime crime reporter and anchor Mark Dailey was on-screen, his baritone voice delivering the play-by-play into Kim’s family room for CablePulse24, a 24-hour news station that had launched earlier that year. Years later, he and Kim would meet and discuss the moments that unfolded next.11

They were showing footage of everything that was going on, she recalls. Emergency crews trying to save the officer’s life. The departure for the trauma hospital 12 miles away, vital signs absent. With CP24 on her screen and 680 News on her radio, Kim called whomever she could think of—her husband’s colleagues, his bosses, the hospital. No one would talk to me. So she kept on watching, kept on listening. In the parking lot where the wounded officer had been, she spotted what appeared to be Bill’s van, the one he used for surveillance. Kim called her mother.

I said, ‘I think there’s something going on. Turn the news on.’ So she called me right back and she said, ‘Kim, I’m coming over.’ I said, ‘Why? What did you see?’ She said, ‘I’m pretty sure that was him that they wheeled into the hospital because I recognized his shoes.’

Most homicide survivors experience the blast of their sudden and unexpected loss in one fell swoop, when an officer knocks at their door or arrives at their workplace or calls them and asks them where they are now. Their lives were full and purposeful one minute, then broken and seemingly meaningless the next. Kim Hancox experienced that very powerful blast as if it were happening several miles away, the force of it rippling in slow motion toward her, increasing in strength with every passing minute until it finally arrived at her door.

Kim doesn’t know why the staff inspector parked on her street didn’t come to her door as she watched the events unfold on TV, as she listened to them on the radio, as she made all those phone calls. But by the time the police chief arrived, sometime around midnight as Kim recalls it, she all but knew. And before the police chief stepped in front of the cameras shortly thereafter, the public all but knew as well.

In the haze of that life explosion, Kim can’t say for certain whether the crowd outside her house began gathering before the chief’s arrival or after. But it was like the middle of the night and there were people, probably 50 people, just gathered on my front lawn and out in front of my house. And that’s when the reporters and whatnot were all starting to show up as well.

I ask Kim when reporters first tried to speak with her. Was it that night? Early the next morning?

It was that evening. I would say it was after midnight, she says.

In the coming hours and days, reporters would call her home, knock at her door, and canvass her neighbors for information. Kim didn’t want to speak publicly, but the reporters persisted. They likely didn’t know what to make of this woman who was so intensely private that she wouldn’t submit to even a single interview, when there were so many others—police officers, strangers, even someone Bill had arrested—who had so many nice things to say about her husband.

As I listen to Kim’s story, I am reminded of another very high-profile Toronto homicide, one that happened a few months before I moved to Toronto. A 15-year-old girl had been killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout while out shopping. As I followed the story through the headlines (and on a couple occasions through court), it always fascinated me that despite the intense media scrutiny, the girl’s family never spoke publicly. Indeed, not until three years later did her parents break that silence, as the Globe and Mail put it, with a four-paragraph victim impact statement read out by an assistant Crown attorney in a near-empty downtown courtroom.12 Years ago, I asked a TV colleague about his experience covering the homicide in its immediate aftermath. He said he was directed by a newsroom manager to knock on the grieving family’s door every day after the homicide for the first several weeks. Obediently, he did just that—for the first week or so. Then, with enough years on the job to know when a family just wouldn’t budge, but wary of the GPS tracking device in his company-issued vehicle, he began driving to the family’s street, parking for a few minutes, then driving away, before telling his manager the family was still requesting privacy.

It’s not that there was nothing. Kim did—on the advice of the police service, she says—release the statement that was read out after the funeral. She thought it would make the media leave her alone. But there was always something that left them wanting more. Things would die down in a frenzied sense, but I still had people knocking on my neighbors’ doors and trying to follow up on this and that, she tells me.

Her son was born three weeks after his dad was killed, and even with a police officer sitting outside her hospital room, a reporter posing as a family friend arrived with a bouquet of flowers and walked into her room. (Word soon spread through media circles that this had greatly offended the Hancox family.13) When she was discharged from hospital, Kim left via an undercover police van in the middle of the night, so that they could get me home without people badgering me, she says.

Because there were reporters waiting outside the hospital? I ask.

Yeah.

Even without Kim’s participation, the story remained in the headlines. There was the public commentary on the value of Bill’s life, his case having received far more attention than that of a young woman who was killed by her ex-boyfriend on the very same day.14 And there were stories about Bill’s colleagues who had been drinking on the job the night he was killed. There was also the story about the cop who performed CPR, and the after-the-fact play-by-plays of what happened at the scene, at the hospital, and even the moment the police chief delivered the news to Bill’s widow—Kim.

I just felt like my privacy was being invaded. I learned very quickly to not lift my head up. I just kept my head down wherever I went. I felt very vulnerable. I just stayed in the house as much as I could, she says.

And of course, there was the arrest of Bill’s killers—two women, contrary to the first newspaper report, which described Bill’s attacker as a tall guy in baggy clothes15—which was sure to attract media attention with each of the court dates that followed. Kim attended the downtown courthouse about six weeks