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City bathed in unpleasant international limelight
Monday, May 01, 2000 By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
About 2 p.m. Saturday in New York City, Sabine Beckert got a call from her bosses telling her to get on a plane going to Pittsburgh. Five people had been shot to death and she had a job to do: report the news.
Beckert is a producer for the third-largest privately owned national television network in Germany. That's right, Germany. ProSieben Television is based in Munich and its broadcasts can be seen throughout Europe, she said.
Tomorrow, people in Germany, England, Spain and other European countries might tune into ProSieben's popular hour-long newsmagazine program, similar to "20 /20," to watch a five-minute story about the tragedy that unfolded here on Friday.
"If there is a rampage killer in America, everybody is interested in that," Beckert said.
For many in the European audience, these will be their first glimpses of Pittsburgh.
They will see flowers and teddy bears at doorways through which a killer nonchalantly walked and they will gaze upon wood boards covering the shot-up entrances of houses of worship.
They will study images of Richard Baumhammers, the 34-year-old immigration lawyer from Mt. Lebanon who authorities suspect of murdering his Jewish neighbor, an Indian man, a Chinese restaurant manager and his Vietnamese co-worker, and an African-American karate student during a two-hour rampage. An Indian grocer was seriously wounded also.
And the world will see grieving Pittsburghers struggle, for the second time in slightly more than eight weeks, to understand how racial and ethnic differences can inspire murderous rage.
The last time was in the wake of shootings in Wilkinsburg on March 1, when three people were killed and two seriously wounded. Ronald Taylor, who is black, has been charged with the crimes and is being treated for mental illness at Mayview State Hospital. All of his victims were white.
Beckert learned of the Wilkinsburg tragedy only after she arrived here late Saturday night. Her television company was particularly interested in the recent shootings because the suspect, who is of Latvian descent, has a German surname and was targeting, as her cameraman put it, anyone "who wasn't like him."
Edgar Payne, a free-lance cameraman from Shaler, and Beckert discussed gun control laws, access to mental health services and racial prejudice as they drove through Pittsburgh's suburbs yesterday, re-tracing the killer's path.
"It's very odd that it happened in such a peaceful place," said Beckert, who has never been here before.
At Scott Towne Center, she interviewed Kent Kretzler, owner of Travel Connections, a business next door to the Indian grocery store where one man was killed and another wounded. But she wasn't the first to talk with him.
"I've been interviewed by the [British Broadcasting Corp.], The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer," as well as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, other local media outlets and "CBS Morning News," Kretzler said after the segment with Beckert was taped. "Pittsburgh is a great town. It's bad that we're getting a black eye because of two nut cases who have gone and just randomly selected people to kill."
A Scott police cruiser inched by his storefront and that of the grocery store. Within a half-hour, two families -- one Indian, one white -- went into India Grocers to leave flowers and share sorrow.
At Beth El Congregation of the South Hills, Beckert looked behind the tarp just to the left of the boarded up entrance. News reports said that the gunman spray-painted swastikas on the brick wall beside the glass doors he shattered with bullets. The hate symbols were no longer there.
The Holocaust was not so long ago to most Germans, so the Nazi signature still provokes anger and fear in them, Beckert said.
The next stop was Robinson Town Centre's Ya-Fe Chinese Cuisine. The locked entrance was adorned with flowers, teddy bears and a poster of an outstretched palm among the words: "I will never leave you nor forsake you. Joshua 1:5."
Beckert sprinted to the door when it opened to allow a familiar face inside, but it was closed too quickly for her to voice a request for an interview.
As they videotaped images of the restaurant, cars slowed and their occupants stared at it as they passed by, many pointing and shaking their heads in dismay. A Robinson police car drove slowly by. A white couple pulled up and added more flowers to the growing garden.
Megan Schulmeister strolled up to drop off a card.
The young woman works at the Dollar Tree, several stores away from the restaurant in the strip mall, and had been heading to have her usual lunch at the restaurant on Friday when stopped by police at a nearby store, yelling, "Go back!"
She, too, talked to Beckert on camera. The day of the shootings, Schulmeister did phone interviews with CNN and a local television station.
"There's a lot more media down here today than there was on Friday," she said. "Like with the Columbine shootings, you want to know what's going on. And you don't feel safe anywhere anymore."
Beckert decided to return to the Mt. Lebanon home of the Gordons, neighbors to the Baumhammers. Nicki Gordon was the first to be killed in the shooting spree. Beckert had spoken briefly to her husband earlier in the day, but he told her he was too upset to speak. She had to try to talk with him again, though, so she could show her audience how the family was doing.
"They want a personal touch to the story," Beckert explained.
The lovely, stately neighborhood appeared to be quiet and serene once more. Cameraman Payne gathered his gear from the car and followed Beckert up the steps to the Gordons' door.
"This is the part of the job I hate," he said.
Neither he nor Beckert was surprised that no one answered the knock at the door.
They decided to go back to KDKA's studios, Downtown, and look at the footage the CBS-affiliate was willing to provide to them as part of an information exchange. Then they would attend some of the prayer services being held for the shooting victims, as would reporters from all the local news media.
On Saturday, stories about what had happened here appeared in newspapers and on television news programs across the country and internationally.
"Gunman in Rampage Kills 5 Near Pittsburgh," was the headline of a story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. The Boston Globe's front page story added to their headline "Police Say the Killings Were Racially Motivated." Similar articles appeared in the pages of newspapers in Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver, among others.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the L.A. Times and the Toronto Star had stories in their Sunday papers with the dateline Mt. Lebanon or Pittsburgh, meaning they had reporters here to watch events unfold and to do as the German news producer did, namely retrace the killer's steps.
Beckert, who had worked for the television company for six years in Germany, moved to New York three months ago for a change of pace. She has traveled to Salt Lake City for a story about a man who hired a hit man to kill his wife and to Jacksonville, Fla., for one about a man who killed his ex-wife, boss and girlfriend before killing himself.
She has not found explanations for the bouts of rage and violence she has already chronicled for her European audience.
As she puts it: "I always go to these nice places and make sad stories."
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