As news photographers, we take for granted the fact that we are regularly up-close witnesses to gruesome scenes: murders, car wrecks and the like. We see blood trailing down the pavement from a covered lifeless body, or staining the deployed airbags in mangled vehicles along side a road. And we go home and tell the unpublished or un-aired version of the story to the pristine ears of our “sheltered” spouses and friends, relishing their astonished reaction.

I was reminded during the investigation following the Maplewood ambush of firefighters and police that those who can tell the most gruesome tales are those who are even closer.

St. Louis County Forensic Anthropologist Gwen Haugen had to collect the charred remains and determine the identity of the suspected shooter in that case after a fire had destroyed the house in which he took refuge.

Seeing the tools she carried from her vehicle into the crime scene, a sifter and a box, I began a sequence of thoughts that made me grateful of how many degrees removed I am from the real dirty work of the unfortunate events of our society. I wonder, given the jobs that Haugen and her colleagues do, if they too tell those stories looking to set off those reactions from their spouses and friends.

If I worked one more degree closer to the carnage, I probably wouldn’t.