The discovery that Shawn Hornbeck lived among people for four years in the St. Louis area was amazing. He was literally hidden in plain sight. When he was found I was dumbstuck, as I live in the city he was found.

Kirkwood, MO is a nicer suburb of St. Louis where we all feel safe. This added to the shock, but also added to the guilt that maybe we should have seen him in Kirkwood. Heck, one of the main grocery stores in our town had a bench with his photo.

Still, I guess it can be expected that we wouldn't have noticed. What is sticking with me is the media's inability to get the story right when it broke.

There were a number of errors made. Usually, I wouldn't notice these things, but since I live in Kirkwood it was obvious.

Here are a few of the errors I noticed outright:

1) Found in a home owned by Devlin: A number of media outlets reported that Shawn was found in a house owned by Devlin. It was an apartment rented by Devlin.

2) The apartment complex was in a bad neighborhood. This wasn't true and was corrected eventually. The apartment complex is actually a group of apartments with different owners. The area isn't crime ridden, nor is it run down.

3) Devlin was a sex offender from Utah. This had legs early on, but when the video of Devlin walking from the police car to jail it was obvious it wasn't the same person.

These mistakes might have occurred in a rush to get the story out, but still, there should be fact checking.

I drove by the apartment complex yesterday. Since I used to live in the apartment across from Devlin's 20 years ago, I know the area well. The shocking thing was the number of people around. It was obvious many of them were reporters, so it's good to see feet on the ground verifying these things.

As blogs become more important when it comes to breaking news, what will the threshold for checking facts become?

Bookmark/Search this post with:
delicious | digg | reddit | furl | google | yahoo | technorati | icerocket