Casey Sherman - Bad Blood. Freedom and Death in the White Mountains

University Press of New England

Hanover and London

September 2, 1994

It was my first day on the job and I was completely overwhelmed. I had just been promoted from production assistant to news writer for the morning news at WHDH television in Boston. I was only a year removed from college and I was faced with one of the biggest stories of the year. Just a few hours into my shift, police scanners blasted an alert that a Massachusetts State Trooper had been shot on the job on Route 3 in Kingston, thirty-six miles south of Boston near Plymouth. We didn't have a name, and we didn't know the severity of the trooper's injuries, but we did know that we had to react immediately. The executive producer sat down with the assignment editor and formulated a plan; within minutes I saw reporters running through the newsroom with photographers lugging heavy equipment close behind. They all jumped into a fleet of news vehicles and satellite vans and spread out. Some correspondents headed directly to the scene, while others fanned out to area hospitals, making sure we would be covered in case either the unnamed trooper or the shooter was brought in for treatment. As the morning wore on, we continued to gather tidbits of information as to exactly what had happened on that stretch of highway south of Boston. The trooper we found out was thirty-one-year-old Mark S. Charbonnier, an eight-year veteran of the Massachusetts State Police. Trooper Charbonnier was newly married and working on his law degree at the New England School of Law. We also learned that Charbonnier and the suspect had each been shot four times during what was supposed to be a routine traffic stop. The gunman, David Clark had been carrying two pistols, two ski masks, a screwdriver, leather gloves, and a police badge in his red Chevy van. Clark was also a convicted killer out on parole who knew he'd be sent back to prison for the curious items in his van. Clark apparently figured it would be easier to murder a state trooper than to explain the burglary tools to a judge. David Clark survived the shooting, while Mark Charbonnier did not. At trial, Anne Marie Charbonnier, the trooper's widow, called Clark an untamed animal who needed to be put down. This case was considered cut-and-dried, black-and-white. Trooper Charbonnier was a called a hero for taking the bullets that eventually would have been fired at someone else, given Clark's violent history. David Clark was sent off to Walpole State Prison, never to be heard from again. The mad dog wasn't put down, but chances are that he'll never see the outside of a prison wall. Sadly, the story repeated itself again and again over the next several years. The lead characters had all changed, but the scenarios were mostly the same. In each instance, you had a courageous police officer shot down by one of the untamed animals of the world.

The script was dramatically altered on May 11, 2007, on a quiet country road in Franconia, New Hampshire. I was working at another television station, WBZ in Boston, when the call Officer down came screaming over the police scanners on the assignment desk, a glass-enclosed pod in the middle of the newsroom. The call kicked off a flurry of activity as the assignment editor quickly calculated the drive time between Boston and Franconia, while the producer got the graphics department working on a map of the shooting scene, in case we needed to get on the air immediately and break into prime-time programming. There is a shared sense of excitement and dread working in a newsroom in full crisis mode. The instant adrenaline rush allows you to focus on covering the story, while in the back of your mind, you're thinking about the Anne Marie Charbonniers of the world, wives and children whose lives had been torn apart by one man's cold, cruel decision to pull the trigger. From the untimely death of JFK, Jr., to the unspeakable horrors of 9/11, I'd found myself on the front lines of countless breaking news stories, but on this evening, I was more spectator than active participant. My shift had long been over, and I was hanging around the WBZ newsroom catching up on some paperwork. As my colleagues had things under control and didn't appear to need my help, I began thinking about what the next few days would bring. If the speculation was correct, and the officer had died in the line of duty, there would no doubt be a massive public funeral attended by fellow police officers from across the nation. I could visualize the dramatic scene of the flag-draped coffin and the tearful remembrances. As for the gunman, there were unconfirmed reports that he too had been killed. I was a bit relieved that his death would spare the officer's family the emotional burden of a long, drawn-out criminal trial. I was also somewhat confident the killer would eventually be forgotten as just one more untamed animal in a criminal subculture full of them. I was dead wrong.