Hutzell: Eight years after the Annapolis newsroom shooting, a return to 888 Bestgate

Live with the memory of gun violence, and you learn to shield yourself from reminders of the day.

For eight years, I’ve avoided getting too close to 888 Bestgate, the building where five friends were murdered on June 28, 2018. It’s the dark point on my landscape of regrets, and it smacked me in the face as I waited to interview a public official in Annapolis.

“Follow us back to our office,” an aide said. “We’re at 888 Bestgate. Do you know where it is?”

The past week has been the first since the newsroom murders of Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters that I haven’t been in Annapolis in the days leading up to June 28.

I still talk with them in my waking dreams. I’ve changed in these eight years, I explain, altered by grief and love and life.

They grow no older, as the writer Wendell Berry observed, for the dead are changeless.

You’ve heard this story. The Capital was and remains the newspaper of Annapolis, although the owners changed its name to Capital Gazette.

In 2011, the paper’s best columnist wrote about a woman being harassed on the new frontier of Facebook by a high school classmate. She asked the courts for help.

And her harasser, whose name should be forgotten, turned the eye of his obsession toward the columnist and the newspaper. For years, he taunted them. He sued for libel and lost.

In 2015, one of the state’s top appellate judges declared that he had been wasting everyone’s time with frivolous claims. That’s when this man began to plot.

We were in new offices, one year after The Baltimore Sun bought The Capital and then made me the editor, capping a career at the paper.

We were smaller, leaner. With Rob’s help as assistant editor, we were less boring than community papers can be when they try to record everything. We supported reporters’ dreams and helped them write meaningfully.

I made Wendi, as unique a journalist as you’d ever meet, the editor of pretty much herself to raise her criminally low salary. I protected John from a layoff. Gerald’s quiet wisdom became a crucial part of how we worked.

All the while, the man was watching. He took pictures through the windowed walls of our first-floor newsroom. He bought a shotgun.

While I was on vacation, this man jammed the back door and blasted through the front at 2:33 p.m. on June 28. It was a Thursday. He killed Rebecca, still a new sales assistant, then Wendi as she confronted him.

Rob and Gerald came next. Two people ran through the front door. John fled to the back with four others, but couldn’t hide well enough to survive.

Arrested, tried and convicted, the gunman will spend the rest of his life in prison. He tried to murder The Capital because he didn’t like what it reported.

We beat him by going back to work. We covered the community and the trial. This was an Annapolis story. If we didn’t tell it, what was the purpose of surviving?

Time. It passes quick and slow, but always passes.

Few of the surviving staff remain. The others and the families of the dead are spread across the country.

I drive by 888 Bestgate occasionally, headed somewhere else. I try to avoid it, but Annapolis Mall and Trader Joe’s are across the street. My dog’s vet is around the corner.

My heart beats a little louder as I pass, and I try not to look. At least, I try not to look like I’m trying not to look.

When that government aide invited me to his office at 888 Bestgate, he didn’t know the connection. I mumbled that I knew the building well, and headed off — breathing fast, heart pounding.

It’s just a building, I told myself. It doesn’t hold any power. I called my wife as I sat in my car, tears clutching the back of my throat. It’s just a building, I told her. I can do this.

I parked opposite our old windows, the ones that framed the end of my five friends’ lives eight years ago, and the violence that altered others forever.

I could see the side door the gunman used, the one that should have been locked. It’s the same one I walked through when my kids dropped me off at work so they could borrow my car before school.

The landlord found tenants unbothered by the history of blood. A coffee shop occupies half the space. The shattered newsroom doors have been replaced.

Every day when I walk into The Banner’s Baltimore offices, I swipe a key card multiple times to reach our newsroom.

Every time I hold that card, it is a talisman of what-ifs? What if we’d been on the second floor? What if I’d been there that day?

What if. What if. What if.

I walked into 888 Bestgate and did the interview. I wrote the column. I moved on to the next thing.

That’s how a journalist lives. Ask questions. Make sense of the answers. Ask more. I’ve changed, but it’s still who I am.

I’m older now, slower. My emotions are closer to the surface, but my grief is no more than anyone’s who’s experienced gun violence in America. I love more deeply what time has left me: my wife, my family and my work.

Gerald, Rob, John, Rebecca and Wendi remain unchanged.

Today at 2:33 p.m., remember them. Remember their families’ loss. Remember the survivors who thwarted a murderous attempt to silence a free press. Remember how Annapolis responded.

888 Bestgate is just a place. The newsroom is gone, and I am changed.

The past has only the power we give it. Its landmarks have no power over me.