May 2010, I met Zahra at Charlotte Motor Speedway and interviewed her about getting a free hearing aid from @starkeyhearing and @scc_nc
I’d fought to cover that hearing aid event because my mom suffered severe hearing loss and so did one of my partners who had a cochlear ear implant. Hearing loss affected my life many times and I saw first-hand how it often leads to shame, depression, and social isolation in many people who experience hearing loss.
A Starkey rep told me I should interview the little Australian girl who lost her leg to cancer and when kids made fun of her. She was from Hickory, we didn’t even cover that area and I’d never been there, but I interviewed her and her stepmother anyway.
Five months later, an AMBER Alert in The Charlotte Observer caught my attention, the name was so familiar. I searched it on my station’s website and it was Zahra Baker. I contacted @called2connect immediately and told her to run my interview from May. I cried all day that Sunday and posted my news story on every Facebook page I could.
I’d cover the search, the discovery, the plea agreement with @randomsoleil and others. I helped organize her birthday vigil but wasn’t permitted to speak. The man who would become my future business partner put me on Nancy Grace. I cried a lot. And in 2021, HLN profiled her story.
Zahra fell through the system. So many teachers knew she was abused her family moved her from school to school eventually things she was homeschooled.
Her body was dismembered by her stepmother Elisa Baker, the woman I interviewed at the hearing aid event. There’s now a law in North Carolina, named for Zahra making that a crime.
My life is forever changed by Zahra Baker and there’s so much to her story still for me to tell because the system is still broken.
📸 @jamesnixphoto
#DamagedPetals #EndangeredChildren #PreventChildAbuse #ZahraBaker
5 days agoracheltblack
Oh my gosh, I remember watching coverage of this on TV when I was just a kid myself, around her age. It’s crazy to think about how I was possibly watching your reporting on TV and even crazier to think about how long it’s been and where she might be now if she was alive. Hard to believe… and still as gut wrenching
5 days agorandomsoleil
10 years removed as a journalist and this story still sticks with me. When people ask about like time working in TV news, they asked what is the one story that stuck with you. This story is always my answer.
5 days agocoreyschmidt
Maybe 3-4 times as a journalist out and about covering news I’ve been struck by an overwhelming weight that something wasn’t right or that something terrible happened in that space. We got tipped off that police were going to search a wooded area for Zahra’s remains. I was walking through the general area pretty aimlessly, then wham, I knew I was in the spot. Later that day crime scene crews dug up the spot and found her remains. Hunters used that spot to dress deer and discard the viscera.
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