1999 Battalion staff remembers covering tragic event

Hundreds of articles and thousands of pictures were taken of the Aggie Bonfire collapse at 2:42 a.m., Nov. 18, 1999, many by students on The Battalion staff - who could not put emotions aside, yet still had to report on one of the greatest tragedies in Texas A&M University history.

Battalion photographer JP Beato III completed one assignment that night, a volleyball game, when he decided to go back to the office parking lot with some friends and watch a meteor shower. While the group was standing there, they heard "a really loud rumble."

"My roommate at the time had just left and he came driving back and said 'Bonfire just collapsed,'" Beato said. "So we ran to our cars, drove to the site."

Battalion editor-in-chief Sallie Turner was home and finished writing in her journal when she heard sirens outside. She received a call from the sports editor, who told her Bonfire had fallen. After she grabbed her camera, she rushed to Stack. On the way, Turner called the newsroom.

"We all just went to the site. That was the only thing we knew to do at that point in time," Turner said.

It was a typical Wednesday night for managing editor Marium Mohiuddin. At 3 a.m., she was leaving the newsroom. Mohiuddin, Turner and other editors would sometimes stay in the newsroom doing homework or talking, waiting for a phone call from the press room in Huntsville to tell them the paper was finished. As Mohiuddin was leaving, the phone rang.

It was not the press room. It was Turner.

"Bonfire has fallen. Scrap the front page, send some reporters and wait."

Mohiuddin hurried to the site, dropped off the page designer who was with her, returned to the office to redesign the page, then called the press room to say, "Stop the presses."

"As a journalist, that's a moment you wait for, to call and say, 'Stop the presses,'" Mohiuddin said. "But it was such an unfortunate time to say that."

As she settled back into the newsroom to redesign the front page, Mohiuddin cleared half of it.

"No one knew the severity of anything," Mohiuddin said. "Bonfire had fallen before and no one was injured then, so I thought the same thing. 'They'll fix it, and we'll go on.'"

At the scene of the fallen Stack

When Beato arrived on the scene, notions that this was just another event vanished.

"We knew from just driving up, this was something major," Beato said. "It was hard to determine what we needed to do as far as covering it."

Beato and his roommate, also a photographer, decided to park on opposite sides of the perimeter and meet in the middle. As Beato rushed inward, he saw people lying inert on the ground, others searching for friends and many standing in shock. One person who caught his eye was Timothy Kerlee Jr.

Kerlee stood out to him because his body was partially trapped within the fallen Stack. Underneath Kerlee, a rescue crew was attending to an injured Aggie. Unknown to Beato, the crew went to aid Kerlee first. However, upon Kerlee's request, they moved to the next victim. Kerlee died in the hospital the follow morning.

The photo Beato took of Kerlee in the logs was on the front page of countless newspapers across the nation and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

"I think it just defined what the Bonfire collapse was in one picture," Beato said.

While Beato was taking pictures, Turner arrived at the site. Mohiuddin was in the newsroom, waiting. What Turner saw when she stepped out of her car was beyond her imagination.

"I remember being out there and seeing the Stack just incredibly twisted and contorted in a way that I had never seen before. I remember hearing people say, 'Where's Jerry? Where's Jerry?'

"I remember being incredibly sad, but at the same time in shock, like it wasn't even real," Turner said. "The people didn't even look real. Everyone looked totally overwhelmed by what they were seeing."

The first 30 minutes she was on the scene, Turner tried to capture the sights of Stack's collapse. Her attempt was met with much animosity; the students were angry, and a journalist poking around with a camera did not help.

Turner was pushed down and hit by several Aggies, and her camera was knocked to the ground.

"One thing I learned from being out there right after it happened was the raw emotion of the student body," Turner said. "The one thing we wanted to do was be respectful."

Making sense of chaos

Once the shock passed and she grasped the situation, Turner became the leader of the campus newspaper and organized the coverage.

"I just told the staff, everyone at the scene, to gather as much information as they could and we would go from there," Turner said.

Mohiuddin realized that this was not like the other collapses when four photographers came in and said: "No, scrap the entire front page." They described the horror just out the door and across the field.

Then, the photos started coming in.

"I was in the newsroom by myself, just waiting, then it became total chaos," Mohiuddin said. "Nothing made sense, but we were just in 'go-mode.' We had to get the story out." The front page included a report that was an accumulation of information gathered by the staff and several photos, including the photo of Kerlee.

Reporters were divided into teams and sent to find out stories about specific Aggies. The Battalion was the only newspaper in the world to print Bonfire news on day one. At 11:30 a.m., the paper was sent to press. It hit the newsstands at 1:45 p.m. Shortly after the photographers came back to the office and Mohiuddin began designing the pages, an Aggie working in Dallas received a phone call.

Dallas Morning News coverage

Michael Mulvey, Class of 1990, was a staff photographer for The Dallas Morning News. He said the assignment was not one he would have requested.

"As an Aggie, I was pretty freaked out," Mulvey said. "It was about 5 or 5:30 a.m. when I got the call and at that point, they didn't really know how many were in there or how many were living. So at that point, your mind kind of runs, you know? Could it be a few or, like, 30? I mean, it's a big pile of logs, so I knew it was bad."

As a professional photographer, Mulvey was ready to go. After briefly checking CNN to get a sense of the scene, he jumped in his car and drove to College Station.

When he arrived at Stack, rescue efforts were in full swing and everyone was being kept at a distance. After shooting photos for about an hour, Mulvey saw that the world needed another angle to understand.

He called his editors and was teamed with an ABC affiliate in Houston to go up in a helicopter.

"It was pretty obvious you needed another perspective on what it looked like," Mulvey said. "An above angle was going to be important."

Mulvey was in the air for several hours as he looked down at the sight.

"[It was] totally a national story and not the national story you wanted for your alma mater," Mulvey said, "especially knowing that there would be so many people who wouldn't understand, who wouldn't comprehend."

About two hours before Mulvey arrived, the sun began to shed its light on the magnitude of the collapse.

Dawn breaks

"It wasn't until light broke that you could kind of see the whole scale and massiveness of what had just taken place," Beato said. One of the reporting teams searched for who was in Beato's photograph, and other staff members were running back and forth from the office to the field, taking film from the photographers to be developed and returning with more film, supplies and snacks.

Beato did not leave the area for three days, going without showering and a change of clothes for the entire duration.

"There was so much going on constantly that I felt I could not leave. I had to be out here and continue following this story," Beato said.

Aggies all around

As soon as the first issue hit the stands, The Battalion became a source of news in the nation for the collapse. However, this media outlet was not completely objective.

"Outside news sources called us and said, 'You're biased.' Of course we're biased! This is our school and our students," Mohiuddin said. "We wanted to provide a voice for the students, and we knew we could do it. Other journalists did the job and told the facts, but we needed to tell the students' feelings, what they were going through and what they were doing."

With an event as colossal as Bonfire's collapse and The Battalion's role as the students' voice, everything the paper did, said or thought centered on the tragedy.

"Everything in the community stopped at that point in time, everything on campus stopped. Bonfire fell and nothing else mattered," Turner said.

Turner woke up for classes Wednesday and did not go back to sleep until early Saturday. Bonfire dominated her life for the next month, changing her perspective forever.

"My classes were put on a backburner. I think I made an Incomplete and a 'D,' my lowest grade to date," Turner said. "I wanted to just be a goofy college kid and in the face of this event, I didn't get to be that anymore."

The Battalion staff's emotional attachment to the tragedy on their campus set apart their coverage from the rest of the world, Turner said.

"Our staff cried...They cried a lot. I think that's what made the story so powerful, and I think that's why we can look back 10 years later and know we fulfilled our duty first to our Aggie community."

Mohiuddin said the emotions and memories from the night Bonfire fell are forever engrained in her mind, as is the complete feeling of disbelief. Later in her career, Mohiuddin would experience the numbness again.

"When 9/11 happened, being at the [Austin-American] Statesman, it was like Bonfire all over again," Mohiuddin said.

"When things happen, journalists just have to go. Then they get to step back to soak it all in, and it's hard." The first member of the 1999 Battalion staff to arrive on the scene said he thinks of Bonfire every week.

"Every Thursday for the last 10 years around 2:40, it's always kind-of been a noted thing," Beato said. "I would always be up at that time. I'd always be thinking about it in some way."

As he looks out across the memorial, the life-changing event is still on his mind.

"It's definitely a part of my life, a part of my career, and I don't think it will ever go away. It's just something that will be a part of me."