Aaron Besecker discusses the life of a crime reporter
Last July, Aaron Besecker interviewed the mother of a two-year-old victim of homicide.
The next day, he found out she had been charged with killing her own child.
For Besecker, who is a crime reporter for The Buffalo News, writing about such “morbid” encounters is nothing new.
He spoke to a class of journalism students at the University at Buffalo on Thursday night. Dressed in a yellow tie and light blue shirt with his sleeves rolled up, Besecker didn’t exactly look like someone who “writes about death and destruction.”
But the articles he writes routinely tell the darkest stories of the Buffalo area. Doctors facing felony sex charges, elderly women beaten nearly to death, high school students charged with choking police officers and fathers setting fires to their own homes and killing their own children.
“I’m pretty numb to a lot,” Besecker said. “There’s no way I would be able to have a normal life if I didn’t have some kind of distance.”
The shocking nature of stories isn’t the only challenge crime reporters face. According to Besecker, it’s not easy to find people who want to talk to reporters in the aftermath of a crime.
“Usually the people who were closest to the person who was killed are not willing to share information,” Besecker said.
He said people being unwilling to share information is the biggest obstacle of his job.
Legal institutions aren’t very helpful either. Besecker said he refrains from making “generalizations” about police officers as a large group but “is cognizant” of certain behaviours.
“Police can be secretive and cover for each other,” Besecker said.
Besecker files requests for information under the Freedom of Information Law “at least once a day,” as a part of his job, due to the lack of openly available information related the topics he reports on.
The stories Besecker writes regularly receive backlash too. Earlier this month, Besecker posted a heat map of areas in Buffalo with high rates of homicides, and was surprised when someone commented on it criticizing him for “tarnishing the name of Buffalo.”
“I was like, we do it because we’re trying to inform people where, you know, people get killed,” Besecker said. “
Besecker also discussed a recent story detailing the homicide of Frank Navaroli III, who was found shot to death in an allegedly stolen vehicle on Jan. 1.
Besecker said he reached out to Navaroli’s family for interviews, as he wanted to include their perspective of the situation alongside that of the police.
The day the story was printed, Besecker said Navaroli’s mother called him and told him he had “messed with the wrong mother,” much to the concern of his wife.
“I guess some people assume. . .that you’re just gonna write all the nice things,” Besecker said. “That’s not my job. My job is to write reality.”
