Staba on Phillips

The Niagara Falls Reporter’s David Staba has a great behind-the-scenes type piece about his experiences in Frewsburg on the night they caught Ralph Phillips. I especially like this bit:

The head of the New York State Police had just finished his second media briefing of the day, one with the same central theme as the first: Despite three close encounters with Ralph Phillips in about seven hours early that morning, hundreds of officers still hadn’t caught the fugitive known simply as Bucky.

After answering dozens of questions, many of them mind-numbing, repetitive or both, he patiently took a few more. On the story for The New York Times, I needed to clarify an answer I’d missed when he had turned the other way while giving it.

Earlier, Bennett had explained how troopers and officers from other agencies conducted the search by setting up a rectangular perimeter measuring roughly two miles on each side, then conducting a grid search of a smaller area of about one square mile. Three sides of the smaller perimeter remained static, he said, while the other moved, officers walking nearly shoulder to shoulder through the high grass and brush where they believed Phillips lay hiding.

I repeated the question from earlier: Did he expect to know by nightfall if the fugitive was in that smaller space or if he had somehow, impossibly, slipped away once again?

The superintendent pursed his lips, looked at the ground in front of him for a beat, looked at me and nodded.

“I do,” he said.

Good writing. Nice perspective.