The grandmother was sobbing as she came out with her hands in the air, crying to the boys, "What have you done? What have you dragged us into?"

The kid I saw through my lens looked ready to fill his pants. Though my heart went out to him, I was also thanking my lucky stars for my journalistic good fortune in being able to get such a good picture of the drama.

The police radio was squawking about a standoff with suspects from a robbery at an apartment complex. We don't send photographers to many SWAT situation because they have, frankly, become almost routine police actions. They can drag on endlessly, and we are just not staffed to camp out at them. The tone of these police transmissions, however, had an urgency to them that we could not ignore.

Reporter Sherri Jackson and I hopped in my car and headed for the scene. It's hard to get access to these situations, and I was tempted to park at an adjoining apartment complex and walk in the back way rather than drive in the front way and presumably be stopped far from the scene by police.

My first bit of journalistic luck was when I drove in the front way, anyway. We weren't there more than two minutes before I saw a police officer I knew and asked him if there weren't a better vantage point to be in. He looked to my right, and told Sherri and me to get behind the green van in the adjoining bowling alley parking lot. What did we see? Take a look at the photo.

Our next bit of journalistic luck was that the surrenders began about 10 minutes after our arrival. Usually these standoffs go on for hours before they are resolved.

I saw a 14-year-old boy stand in the doorway of an apartment, put his hands in the air, and slowly walk toward the police. He looked terribly frightened, as if he had mistakenly gotten wrapped up in a very bad situation with friends. He was staring down the barrels of some mighty big police weapons, and he did not at all look used to that.

It was a poignant scene, but I couldn't publish the photos because he was a juvenile. Then the police told him to turn around and slowly back toward them, so he couldn't try to rush at them. The photos could now be published. The scene was repeated with two other juveniles, who looked more hardened, including the one in this photo, and then with three adults. The adults were released as soon as police understood that their grandson, one of the juveniles, had come to their apartment as they fled the police. The grandparents and the other adult had unwittingly been drawn into this mess by the juveniles.

Sheriff's deputies train guns on a juvenile suspect arrested after the standoff in Racine, Wis. Thursday July 15, 1999. Each of three suspects was ordered to turn around when he approached the police car, and to walk slowly backwards toward the police. The youths were accused of stealing a car and using the stolen car to commit a robbery. (AP Photo/Journal Times, Mark Hertzberg)

It turned out that the boys had stolen a car in the city, and then drove to the country to a home that one of them had visited before, as a friend of that couple's granddaughter. They asked to use the bathroom...and stole a gun from the home. The police were called, and the chase was literally on, ending at the apartment complex.

I wish I could have shown the first boy's pudgy, innocent, frightened face, but I couldn't. I wish I could have shown the sobbing grandmother, but she was an unwitting part of the scene who didn't deserve to have her name or face splashed across the front page. Instead, our readers got this image of another kid gone bad, spending a summer day slowly walking toward a phalanx of weapons pointed at him, and headed for who-knows-what with the judicial system and the rest of his life.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
http://www.digitalstoryteller.com/YITL
This site is protected by United States Copyright Laws
Website Design Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 F.R."Fritz" Nordengren Digital Storyteller