Jason Williams: My grief remains strong for Kyle Plush four years after his needless death

Saturday marked 10 years for me at The Enquirer and Cincinnati.com.

Colleague Sharon Coolidge suggested writing about it. And I immediately thought about the stories I’ve covered that made me cry in the past decade.

There have been two of them.

The homicide of a young man sometime in 2012 or 2013. And the April 2018 death of teenager Kyle Plush, who suffocated after being pinned under the backseat of his Honda Odyssey.

They still make me cry.

I’m sorry I don’t remember the kid’s name who was gunned down in the middle of an Evanston street. He had one and deserves the honor of me saying it. I don't remember his exact age, somewhere around 18 or 19. I can’t find a report on the incident in The Enquirer archives, on Cincinnati.com or anywhere else online.

I just remember him lying face down, lifeless, in the middle of Woodburn Avenue. It was around 11 on a Saturday night. The neighborhood was silent. Officers quietly went about doing their jobs processing the scene.

I was a business reporter then. But in my early years at The Enquirer, all reporters had to do a weekend breaking news shift once every few months. It was the first time I’d covered a homicide scene. It was also the last.

I gathered what little information was available and called it into the weekend editor, jumped in my truck to head home and just lost it. I recall almost having to pull over because I was crying so hard.

The emotions and questions were overwhelming. That was someone’s son. Someone’s grandson. Someone’s friend. Could he have gone to college if just one caring person had intervened? How could anyone have such a disregard for another man’s life? The dead young man’s life was way more than the two sentences I called into the editor.

It’s a story we’ve all read too often. We get numb to it. Seeing the guy’s body made those stories real. All of those young men and women dying in our streets are a Somebody.

That story also made me truly appreciate the jobs of news reporters, police officers, coroners, prosecutors and others who deal with death regularly. Seeing that stuff has to wear on their mental health. It’s something the rest of us don’t think enough about.

As for Plush’s death, it evoked a range of emotions that to this day still feel very personal.

I still tear up when I see the photo that accompanies this column – a smiling, baby-faced kid sitting in a pile of leaves. No other story in my two decades in the news business has stayed with me like this one. No other story has made me cry this much. No other story has pissed me off this much.

Why is that?

Maybe it's because government failed miserably in responding to Kyle's 911 cry for help. And maybe it's because I see myself in the story. That sounds weird. It’s not about me. I’ve never lost a child, and I don’t know the pain that Ron and Jill Plush have felt.

I have two young sons. I just know that how Ron Plush fought Cincinnati City Hall is exactly what I would’ve done for my boys. A week after finding his dead son in the back of that minivan, Ron showed up at City Hall demanding answers for why the 911 system and the police department failed in their response to 16-year-old Kyle’s emergency call.

Ron didn’t let up. He had to endure listening to horribly insensitive comments from then-Councilman Wendell Young, who wrongfully claimed Plush's demand for accountability was a witch hunt and about money.

I was at City Hall for the meeting. I had been a columnist for nearly a year. Regular readers know I write with emotion. I've never written a series of columns about one topic so angry.

It's the only time an editor has removed an entire sentence from one of my columns. The sentence was incredibly harsh. It was true, but I'm glad it was edited out. Sometimes one sentence or one word in a column can distract from the overall meaning. I want the added editing scrutiny when I write pissed off. I certainly needed it when writing about Kyle Plush.

I admired Ron for remaining calm as Young uttered those tone-deaf comments. I wouldn't have handled it with such grace. I saw Ron's crusade for accountability not just being about his son. He was a voice for so many other families who'd experienced tragedies partly because of a broken government – and the city's 911 system was a mess at the time.

I've never met Ron. We've emailed a few times. But during each of the four Father's Days since Kyle's death, I've thought of Ron for most of the day. I've thought of what him and Kyle would be doing that day.

I never met Kyle, either. But I've heard and read enough about him to know he was tender-hearted, intelligent, loved his family and classmates, small for his age, but he didn't let anything keep him from going for it. And by "it," I mean living life.

My older son is just like that.

It'd be an honor to work at The Enquirer for another 10 years. But I hope to God there's never another Kyle Plush story.

Contact columnist Jason Williams by email at jwilliams@enquirer.com and Twitter @jwilliamscincy.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Decade of journalism: I still cry about Cincinnati area teen Kyle Plush