The story of how a mass shooting’s Tragedy is as much About Accessibility as Humanity
As an avowed news nerd, particularly locally and on PBS, it was a huge, if bittersweet, thrill for me to be contacted late last year by folks associated with FRONTLINE—one of my favorite shows—to discuss their coverage of the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine. The event, which killed 18 people and wounded 13 more, is notable not merely because it was yet another mass shooting, but because it’s known to be the largest mass shooting involving members of the Deaf community in American history.
My pals at FRONTLINE ran a documentary back in December called Breakdown in Maine about the Lewiston shooting, perpetrated by a former Army Reservist, which examined not only the shooter’s brain injury that spurred the violence, but also the (in)accessibility of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community in the small New England town to receive crucial status updates on the incident. FRONTLINE joined journalistic forces with the Portland Press Herald and Maine Public to produce the 54-minute film.
Erin Texeira is the senior editor for FRONTLINE and leads its local journalism initiative. In an interview, she explained her team works with 3–5 local news outlets per year on “deep investigative projects” that otherwise wouldn’t be tackled due to a scarcity of resources. She reiterated the Lewiston shooting is regarded as the largest mass casualty event to hit the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community in American history, adding a large focus of the teams’ coverage centers on “the struggles for accessibility and emergency services and basic information and support in the aftermath of the shootings.” As everyone considered the content, Texeira said it became clear the reporters could do justice by the victims, and the audience, by thinking how “we could bring this work to the very community [Deaf people in Lewiston] we were reporting on.”
Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, told me in a concurrent interview to Texeira’s the Lewiston massacre coverage comes in two parts: the aforementioned film and a podcast. One of the most personally striking things about the shooting to Rath is learning from Deaf and hard-of hearing people in the community express exasperation and frustration over the aftermath, telling me their biggest beef was with how hard it was to communicate with first responders and other emergency personnel. Rath called this a critical part of the story; in the spirit of the press holding people accountable, she said it was imperative to find out what the “actual breakdowns” were in the shooting’s wake such that these disabled people couldn’t reliably get the information they needed and were entitled to know. In a show of empathy and earnestness for inclusivity, Rath said her team didn’t want to exclude the Deaf community as part of their reporting; in other words, they didn’t want to leave them hanging communicatively as they were the night of the incident. To that end, the FRONTLINE team enlisted Donna Danielewski and team at Boston-based GBH to help.
Danielewski, who serves as the station’s executive director of accessibility, said the Deaf community in Lewiston is relatively small and the journalists had to approach the interview process with delicacy because a bunch of strangers are essentially asking people to relive their trauma by retelling it. GBH, according to Danielewski, “has a strong history of media accessibility,” but they learned a lot through the process. She and her charges wanted to represent these people in a thoughtful way, which Danielewski said required overcoming some “new hurdles” along the way. Overall, though, Danielewski told me her team learned “a lot” during the production process.
Rath said the director of Breakdown in Maine, James Blue, spent time in Lewiston and with some of the victims’ families. Rath saw video of people talking, with ASL interpreters in tow, and approached Texeira with the idea that Lewiston could make for one of the local journalism projects. It represented a “powerful moment,” Rath said,” to expose the general public about a side of a mass shooting—disability and accessibility—that oftentimes isn’t told yet should be told. Texeira concurred, saying Rath “made a great case” and noted all the legwork came together “organically” to, in the end, produce something Texeira proudly called “a beautiful episode” of FRONTLINE.
As to the local boots on the ground, Maine Public deputy news director Susan Sharon told me she and her colleague in reporter Patty Wight, both based in Lewiston, attended shooting-related press conferences, known as “pressers” to those in the news business, and noted “early on” Deaf people were in the audience and tried to get others to interpret for them. Like the FRONTLINE crew, Sharon and Wight saw the parallels between the shooting itself and the collateral damage it did to a group of people normally overlooked. Sharon called it “a learning experience” for everyone involved in her newsroom, telling me Lewiston has a small but close-knit deaf community. The tragedy, horrific though it was, exposed another tragedy: the lack of access for Deaf people to get info in an accessible manner. Sharon called it “an education for us.”
For her part, Wight said four people from the town’s Deaf community were killed and said it stood out because it “seemed like a lot.” She recounted one press conference in particular during which an ASL interpreter had to stand atop a desk because officials showed maps of the search area for the shooter, and the interpreter was “frustrated” at trying so hard to get the information conveyed to the Deaf members of the audience. Wight talked to the person following the presser and was told the Deaf community was “desperate” to get any and all information from authorities. They felt left out, she added, which is what piqued Wight and team’s interest. There have long been systemic issues in effective communications between the predominantly hearing public and the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community and, according to Wight, the shooting exponentially magnified the issues that, despite festering for eons, have gone ignored.
Deaf family members, already on pins and needles with anxiety, had to wait a long time to get any confirmation on a loved one’s status. Not only did the literal relay of information take time, but then it took time for logistics to happen to get an interpreter in place. And on top of that, the accuracy of everything had to be vetted to ensure everything was correct and nothing was lost in translation. Notably, English is not the primary language for the majority of Deaf people in this country, whether in Maine or Montana; American Sign Language is, yet ASL interpreters unfortunately and frustratingly “weren’t always visible” during the slew of news conferences, Wight said.
Captions, she added, “didn’t cut it” in terms of accuracy. These people needed ASL.
Accessibility-wise, Maine has a shortage of ASL interpreters. In general, it isn’t the Deaf or hard-of-hearing person’s responsibility to supply their interpreter; the onus should fall on the institution or agency. The problem is, of course, most people don’t realize this. Wight went on to tell me many of the Deaf people she interviewed in Lewiston lamented this issue, noting, again, English is decidedly not their native language. “I think people in the community are frustrated there’s so little knowledge about their needs,” Wight said. “These issues are not new. They’ve been going on for decades.”
There’s been a learning curve for news stations and officials at press conferences to, for instance, make concerted efforts to feature ASL interpreters prominently in camera shots so Deaf people can see them. The shooting, Wight and her colleagues told me, has had a byproduct of raising more awareness of the importance for accessibility—especially with more training of people staffing hospitals, law enforcement, and others. Rath told me many people used an iPad at hospitals in order to communicate with staff.
As I went through the interview process of my own, what struck me the most about the conversations I had with my media industry peers is the subtext behind Breakdown in Maine. To wit, of course there will be discussion of the shooter and their motivation(s), especially in terms of mental health. Of course there’s a story about equity of access for a group of disabled people. Even greater than that, however, is the story of awareness. These are a (admittedly small) sample of my peers, living 3,000 away from me, who learned a helluva lot themselves about a segment of the disability community and, consequently, of accessibility. This is notable because it means awareness goes both ways; holding truth to power is one thing, but the journalists here holding themselves to account by earnestly wanting to learn and do right by authenticity and empathy is quite another. As someone 12 years into this news racket, perpetually lamenting the lackluster treatment of the disability community by the mainstream media, to hear people of my own professional kind speak with such humility was damn refreshing. My beat may be technology, but it’s stories like Breakdown in Maine that give me hope that the able-bodied masses are—finally!—starting to give the people like me, who exist at at the margin’s margin, our overdue credit. “Nothing about us without us,” indeed.
The “ripple effects,” as Danielewski described them, are many—and benefit everyone.
"I think conversations that are now happening at FRONTLINE are different… that always happens [here],” Rath said of the many lessons learned by working on Breakdown in Maine. “The more we do and the more we innovate, the more we realize we need to do and innovate. It’s absolutely super inspiring doing this and the learning curve was steep for everybody who worked on it, other than probably [Danielewski] and her team, for those of us at FRONTLINE. It’s great for us as a national series, with so many people who watch us and see us, to be thinking actively [about communicative equality] like this.”
“It’s been an expansive thinking moment for us in public media around our reporting,” said Mark Simpson, Maine Public’s director of news and public affairs.
The efforts GBH, Maine Public Media, et al, did for their story, Danielewski told me, “builds on itself” until “our few snowflakes turn into a pretty impressive snowman.”
My conversations for this story occurred several months ago, ahead of Breakdown in Maine airing on TV. But today comes an announcement from FRONTLINE that it has released ASL-interpreted videos of the “Breakdown: Turning Anguish into Action” podcast series which complements the film. In its press release, FRONTLINE says it worked with captioning and signing language company Partners Interpreting on the project, noting record took place at GBH’s studios. At its core, the work makes what’s ostensibly an exclusionary medium for those with little-to-no hearing into something that’s accessible and inclusive—the last especially poignant given the immense popularity of podcasts nowadays. That “Breakdown” has an ASL component means, despite the emotional subject matter, nonetheless means everyone can enjoy it.
“Podcasts are a vital and growing part of the American news ecosystem, yet they remain mostly inaccessible to the millions of Americans who are deaf and hard of hearing,” Texeira said in a statement for the announcement. “We’re proud that, through innovative storytelling, we can now bring this important investigative project to all audiences. And we hope this inspires much more accessibility in journalism.”
It’s worth mentioning the reaction to the Lewiston shooting has parallels to the inaccessibility of California’s Text-to-911 service. My friend Candice Nguyen, an investigative reporter at NBC Bay Area, wrote about this issue in 2023. She wrote, in part, the ostensibly convenient service “disproportionately” impacts those in the Deaf community, as well as victims of violence. The fundamental issue is the 911 system is architected on voice calls—which are incongruent to the needs of many Deaf people. Both the Lewiston shooting and Text-to-911 are prime examples of the exclusionary machinations of the emergency response system. If you’re someone who can’t hear or speak—or, in my case, speaks with a speech disability like a stutter—emergencies are prone to be even more stressful because getting help is inaccessible. Put more cynically, the breakdowns in access highlight how society is unbuilt for the disabled.
Audio of “Breakdown” is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Video is on YouTube.
