“As the reporter who shadowed him closely from his release to his death, I was eventually confronted with a choice. I would have to choose between my own journalistic integrity and being there for a fellow human being when he needed it most.”
On shadowing Billy
The last time I spoke with William “Billy” Baggett was two days before he died. When I answered his call, he began in the usual way: “Emily, they’re after me! I’m halfway to Mexico in a stolen van. I had to do it. I robbed the 7-Eleven — oh they are after me. Please don’t be mad at me …”
In reality, Billy was lying in a bed on the fourth floor of Legacy’s Good Samaritan hospital, barely able to breathe or move. Social workers there had just talked to him about going into hospice care, but he said he wasn’t ready to do all that. He told me that once he got back home to his one-room apartment at the Bud Clark Commons, I needed to come visit and pick up the 6-foot teddy bear he had purchased for my infant son. This was his latest joke. After insisting repeatedly that he could not give me or my family presents or leave us all his belongings when he passed, this was his way of teasing me. But he would never make it back to the apartment.
After spending most of his life in prison, Billy Baggett was released into a world he no longer understood, contending with a lifetime of trauma and coming to terms with his imminent death.
We spoke for about a half-hour, mostly about what I was going to include and not include in the article I was writing, and then I told him I had to go. As I ended the call, he said, “Love ya!”
“All right, Billy. You take care,” I replied.
I could hear him begin to say something else, but I hung up. He never wanted to get off the phone, and there was always one more thing to discuss, so I became accustomed to having to just end our calls abruptly. His case manager at a local nonprofit told me it was because of Billy she discovered her voicemail had a five-minute limit. I found mine was three.
Billy had been at death’s door for months — there would be more calls, I thought. I pressed the red phone icon on my screen to terminate the call. I wish I’d known it would be the last call. Maybe I would have told him I loved him, too. Maybe a part of me did.
Billy was a twice-convicted killer who spent 50 of his 68 years inside juvenile and adult correctional facilities — he spent more time incarcerated than I have spent alive.
As the reporter who shadowed him closely from his release to his death, I was eventually confronted with a choice. I would have to choose between my own journalistic integrity and being there for a fellow human being when he needed it most.
I never met the 1974 version of Billy — the 23-year-old who drunkenly shot and killed two men within months of each other. The Billy I met was an old man with a friendly smile and generous heart, a man who had less than a year to live.
He was HIV positive, struggled to breathe through his COPD, was in the late stage of congestive heart failure and used a wheelchair. As he approached death, he mourned his life lost to confinement and struggled daily to process his trauma.
Despite this, Billy was determined to spend the time he had left living as richly as he could, but more than anything, he longed for real human connection. He wanted to find love, he wanted to reconnect with family, and he wanted desperately to have friends, people who loved him.
I learned of Billy before his release, when he wrote a lengthy letter to Street Roots from Two Rivers Correctional Institution, asking for a copy of our Rose City Resource guide and explaining his circumstances. I wrote him back, asking him if I could shadow him and document the challenges he faced as he acclimated to society.
Over the next nine months, I sat down for many long interviews with him. I got to know him well. This was unlike any other journalistic endeavor I’d ever undertaken. Immediately, my importance in Billy’s life became relevant. I was allowed to visit him at his reentry house because, I was told, a connection with someone outside of prison is important for a person’s success in society. This notion made me uncomfortable — I was there to report, not to connect.
But Billy had no one else. He had no family who would visit him; he had no friends — aside from social workers and medical professionals, many of whom grew fond of him; he was completely and utterly alone. This made my presence in his life significant to him. I was choosing to write about him. And by writing about him, listening to him recount his experiences, I think it validated for him, in some small way, his existence.
Five months into shadowing Billy, I went on maternity leave. I knew he didn’t have much time left, so while I set all other work-related tasks aside, I continued to talk to him on a regular basis. I visited him at the hospital a few times after he’d call me in the middle of the night professing that he was surely dying. One time it turned out that he was recovering but lonely. Another time, a couple days after Christmas, doctors told me when I arrived that they had rushed him to the ICU in the middle of the night and put him on a ventilator.
On Dec. 31, I received a call from a social worker at the hospital. He told me he was calling me because Billy wanted the hospital to list me as his emergency contact in the case that he could no longer make decisions regarding his care. Would I do it?
“He said you are the only person he trusts,” the social worker said.
I told him I’d have to consult with my editor.
Street Roots Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl told me she and the organization’s former director had both been listed as emergency contacts for vendors. Given the nature of the population we work with, sometimes we’re all a person has. She gave me the green light if I wanted to do it.
The problem was that if I did it, I would become part of the story I was covering, going against a foundational tenet of journalism. But the reality is that I was already a part of Billy’s story, whether I wanted to be or not. He considered me his friend. He called me nearly every day, and his caseworkers, nurses and others all told me when I reached out to them for interviews that they had heard all about me.
I’m writing this now as a disclosure for transparency — because I agreed to be Billy’s emergency contact.
I also agreed to help him with arrangements for the cremation and disposal of his remains upon his death.
There are journalists who would rightfully question this decision — myself included if roles were reversed. But when I reach the end of my own life, there will be decisions I look back on with deep regret, just as Billy did in the end, and I didn’t want this to be one of them.
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