'Post' Reporter King Searches for Answers in Rosenbaum Slay

By: Joe Strupp They were two veteran newspapermen with one thing in common: They both worked and lived in Washington, D.C. But beyond that, it's hard to find close similarities between David E. Rosenbaum and Colbert I. King.

One was a white Jewish guy from Florida with an Ivy League education, more than 30 years in reporting, and a long career at The New York Times. The other, a black man born and raised in D.C., educated at Howard University, and with more years in government than in journalism, doesn't even work in the newsroom, but on the editorial pages. What's more, he's employed by The Washington Post, the Times' longtime rival.

So how did these two unconnected lives become intertwined earlier this year? In a word: murder.

Rosenbaum, 63, a beloved fixture of the Times' Washington bureau, had taken a buyout and retired just weeks before he was brutally beaten Jan. 6 on a street corner in northwest Washington, just a stone's throw from his home.

The veteran reporter's career with the Times had spanned more than 35 years, most of it spent in the D.C. office where policy and insight had become his trademarks. "He had a rare interest in the kind of policy stories that reporters are not interested in," recalls Michael Janofsky, who sat near Rosenbaum in the Times' Washington bureau. "And he always had time for anyone with a question."

Rosenbaum, a married father of two, died two days after the assault -- prompting an outpouring of sorrow and accolades from Washington's news and political circles. More than 700 people attended a memorial service in a Senate office building, among them Sen. Arlen Specter and Sen. Edward Kennedy. David Pryor, a former Arkansas senator, said during the service, "The echo of his footsteps and the pounding of his noble heart will be heard for generations to come."

One person not at the service, however, was Colbert King. The 66-year-old Washington Post editorial writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning weekend columnist didn't even know Rosenbaum, and until the week of his death had never heard of him. But after the initial reports of his tragic end, King was one of the first to start asking the hard questions.

"I didn't hear about it until I read it in the paper," King admits. The crime report, he notes, quoted emergency responders saying they thought Rosenbaum was a John Doe who was drunk, and adds, "There was some confusion why it took so long for the ambulance to arrive."

King, a Saturday columnist for the Post since 1993, was known for hard-hitting stories about government mismanagement and carelessness, as well as the struggles of the less fortunate. He'd recently written pieces about everything from a quadriplegic who died in prison to a questionable suicide involving a woman who jumped off a balcony. To King, the official accounts of Rosenbaum's death offered few answers.

"The questions of performance by the government is what grabbed my attention," he explains. "That is what always grabs me, when government fails to do something or does something it shouldn't." So far, that interest has sparked an investigation by the D.C. Office of the Inspector General into the care Rosenbaum received that night, as well as official reviews within the D.C. Fire and EMS Department and Howard University Hospital, where he finally died on Jan. 8 from brain injuries.

The Inspector General released a stinging report on Friday that found massive problems with the care given to Rosenbaum from police, EMS crews, and hospital staffers. "These failures included incomplete patient assessments, poor communication between emergency responders, and inadequate evaluation and documentation of the incident," the report stated. "The result, significant and unnecessary delays in identifying and treating Mr. Rosenbaum?s injuries, hindered recognition that a crime had been committed."

While surprisingly few follow-ups to the attack have been written -- even in the New York Times -- King himself has devoted more than a half-dozen columns and two editorials to the case. Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor, says, "I think they are terrific columns -- and what makes them terrific is that he does a lot of reporting."

The two suspects, cousins Percy Jordan Jr. and Michael Hamlin, were arrested just days after the incident on felony charges and were indicted just last week. But while King praises the police work that snagged the alleged attackers so quickly, he believes the mounting evidence of careless response and service from medical and emergency staffs is perhaps even more important because it affects the entire city. "Behind this case are some systematic problems in the D.C. [emergency response] system," he adds. "They have to be addressed."

The Inspector General's report included numerous recommendations for improving policies and procedures, but no specific plan has been created to implement them. An EMS technician, however, has been fired since the report came out, while two police officers have been disciplined.


Remembering their brother

The corner of 39th and Gramercy streets in Washington, D.C., is among the last places you'd expect a robbery and beating to occur. The quiet, residential neighborhood -- just blocks from the busy Friendship Heights Metro stop and not far from the Maryland state line -- boasts well-maintained lawns, expansive homes, and a sunny atmosphere any realtor would gladly exploit.

But in March, a chalk drawing of hearts in blue and pink on the sidewalk remained at the site where Rosenbaum was attacked. "Love is Eternal, David Lives In Love" declared a message written on the cement where he was left to die.

"We want the guys who did this in jail for the rest of their lives," says Marcus Rosenbaum, David's younger brother and a senior editor at National Public Radio. "We want to make sure it never happens again, and we want the people who screwed up held accountable." Since his sibling's death, he has served as a spokesman for the family. David's widow, Virginia, declined to discuss the incident with E&P.

Marcus Rosenbaum, who lives only two blocks from his late brother's house and the scene of the crime, says he rarely walks by that corner, adding that it stirs up bad feelings. He still recalls the phone ringing the night of the attack as David's wife called during dinner looking for her husband. Marcus caught up with them at the hospital, where family members waited through the night.

"This is a harrowing thing that happened," Marcus recalls during an interview in his third-floor office in northeast D.C. "Everything they could have screwed up, they screwed up." Leaning back in his office chair, the younger Rosenbaum rubs his graying beard and recalls life with his only brother. "He was like a second father to my children, I was like a second father to his children," he says, peering down at the Massachusetts Avenue traffic at twilight.

He remembered his brother's annual New Year's Eve parties, dominated by charades and opinionated talk. "David was such an ordinary guy," he says. "At the dinner table, he would make some big pronouncement, and we would argue all the time -- but it was great talk."

King, who has never met Rosenbaum's family, says knowing what he was like and the loss they suffer makes the drive for accountability even stronger: "A family that seems to be happy is pulled apart. They will never be the same. That is what bothers me and worries me and attracts me to this story."

In the Times Washington bureau, which takes up several floors of the brickfaced Army and Navy Club building, David Rosenbaum's cubicle sits empty on the 7th floor. During the first weeks after his death, flowers covered the desktop. Books ranging from "The Power of Babble" to "Federal Tax Policy" remain, along with a black-screened computer and an empty chair.

"It was just devastating. He was here the day he died," says Times White House Reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who sat across from Rosenbaum. "He was very cheerful. He had just taken the buyout, so he could work as little or as much as he wanted."

Like his brother, Times colleagues recall Rosenbaum's outspoken personality. But more than that, they reflect on his overall attitude, his offers of help and smaller tokens, such as buying cards for women in the bureau on Valentine's Day. "It was unbelievable. At some level it still is," says reporter Felicity Barringer, who spoke as she looked over Rosenbaum's former space. "For someone that alive not to be alive is just horrible."


The search for answers begins

That horror is among the things that drove Colbert King into action soon after the tragedy. His crusade began just a week following Rosenbaum's death, with a Jan. 16 editorial that praised the arrest of the first suspect in the case but offered a laundry list of unanswered questions. King asked why Rosenbaum was taken to a hospital four and-a-half miles away when two others were closer; why EMS workers found no signs of serious trauma when an autopsy revealed severe head injuries as a cause of death; and why he was left on a hospital gurney for an hour before being examined.

The editorial asked, "What was the exact exchange between the 911 dispatcher and Fire and EMS that led to the conclusion that an adult male in medical distress did not need an acute life support unit? Two life support ambulance units were a few blocks away, but a basic life support ambulance was dispatched from Providence Hospital five miles away -- a drive that took 22 minutes."

Soon after that editorial ran, King, who is deputy editorial page editor, held a routine meeting with local advocates of a proposed hospital project involving Howard University Hospital, where Rosenbaum died. After that, King asked one of those at the meeting, who happened to be a member of the D.C. EMS System, about Rosenbaum's death. "He said, 'I don't think that was handled properly'," King reveals. The EMS employee suggested King look at the Patient Care Report filled out on Rosenbaum by EMS responders after their initial assessment.

"That was the tip," King remembers. "I obtained a copy within days." That report, also known as Form 151, included something known as a Glasgow Coma Score, which rates the consciousness of victims suffering head injuries, from 3 to 15.

Rosenbaum's GCS, he discovered, was 6, a sign of severe brain injury. King found that medical standards require such GCS levels to be labeled Priority 1, among the most severe and in need of emergency treatment. Further reporting found that Rosenbaum had been labeled Priority 3, a lesser assessment.

King also received a news release from the D.C. Fire and EMS Department on Rosenbaum's death, as well as a report from the department to Deputy Mayor Edward Reiskin explaining procedures that night. Both of those documents contend that proper care had been given. "That had me going," King said about the discovery that reports from the scene showed mishandling of the patient, while official responses from higher-ups claimed proper care had been given. "I started writing to say they treated this as a low priority, and how could they do that?"

The result was the first column on the incident, which ran Feb. 25 and essentially accused EMS leaders of ignoring proof of a careless response. It also pointed out that Rosenbaum was wrongly assumed to be intoxicated and that the ambulance called to the scene was less equipped and farther away than a unit that should have responded to someone in his condition.

"Did his treatment by the Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department meet a standard of care as outlined in the department's protocol, as the fire chief claimed?" the column asked. "Can a camel curtsy?"

After that column, public response began to snowball. Some e-mails and letters came in from EMS workers as far away as Texas and California, urging him to keep investigating, while others criticized him for supposedly focusing on Rosenbaum only because he was a fellow journalist. A handful of people even accused King of being a traitor to fellow blacks by "spending so much time on this white guy." Another asked if it "was a case of 'write white or lose job security.'"


Contradictions and a cover-up?

But King persevered, and continued to gather evidence. A week later, on March 4, he penned another column that looked at contradictions among the police, fire, EMS, and medical examiner reports. Fire and EMS reports found no sign of head trauma, while the police reported head trauma and bleeding, as well as vomiting. The medical examiner, meanwhile, found "extensive head trauma" in or near "critical regions of the brain incompatible with life."

Two weeks later, a column on March 18 cited information from Fire and EMS Department logs from the night of the attack that indicated a medical director of the department had ordered the ambulance crew that transported Rosenbaum to be taken out of service for "very poor judgement and treatment." King calls this "an internal document that shows the Fire and EMS medical director did not think it was handled correctly."

Soon after, King was contacted by another victim of poor EMS response, Monica Manchien Yin, who offered her story of falling on icy steps in February, hitting her head, and almost blacking out. The part that intrigued King was the poor care she received from EMS workers who were more interested in whether she had been drinking than taking her to a hospital. King made the story the focus of his next column, on March 25.

Four days later, he returned to Rosenbaum's case, penning an editorial that offered elements of a Health Department assessment of the treatment he received at the hospital. It indicated Rosenbaum had not been evaluated quickly enough, had been wrongly left unattended for more than an hour, and was never properly evaluated. Health Department officials also had ordered the hospital to provide an "acceptable plan of corrective action."

King says that's when the hospital began to "hunker down," spitting out a letter to him within days that basically blamed any poor treatment on the facility's overcrowding. "What happens in cases like this, lawsuits immediately come to mind," he adds. "They worry about liability." King used the letter for another column, which ran on April 1 and said, "There is enough blame to go around. At this stage, however, no one is being held accountable."

After that, he wrote even more columns related to the murder. One offered an update on the D.C. Inspector General's inquiry, noting that several firefighters and EMS workers will have to testify under oath in the Rosenbaum probe, while another updated Yin's case and cited contradictions in reports of her care. "I am trying to go beyond the individual, instead looking at the larger problem," King explains about his persistence on several such stories. "The Fire/EMS problem is a major issue."

King says he has visited the Rosenbaum crime scene only once, about a month after the attack, noting it is about three miles from his 16th Street home. He is still angry that such an event could occur in an otherwise safe area. "What strikes you is that you'd have to be looking for this street to find it," he notes. "It makes me wonder about the assailants, what put them on the block?"


Drawing on passion

King's background is hardly typical for a journalistic crusader, although he has more investigative experience than most.

A D.C. native and father of three, King grew up one of three kids in the Foggy Bottom and Georgetown areas, attending nearby Dunbar High School before entering Howard University, where he graduated in 1961 with a

bachelor's degree in government. After two years in the Army, he joined the U.S. Civil Service Commission as a background investigator, the first of several such jobs that included research for the State Department, in both Washington and Europe.

At the end of the 1960s, King returned to Washington for another year of State Department background work, left briefly for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then jumped to the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1970. He wrote an influential paper on sickle cell anemia that prompted Congress to step up funding for research, and followed that with jobs in the National Institute on Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse, and in the office of former Sen. Charles McC. Mathias (R-Md.).

In 1976, King joined the Potomac Electric Power Company as a government relations officer, switching occupations again a year later to become a deputy assistant secretary of the treasury under Jimmy Carter. In 1979, Carter appointed him again, this time as U.S. executive director to the World Bank. Washington's Riggs Bank came calling in 1981, making him vice president of international banking. He came to the Post as an editorial writer in 1990.

His column began three years later at the request of the late Meg Greenfield, the Post's legendary editorial page editor. "There was no place for shrinking violets under her," he says of Greenfield. "She was friend, mentor, critic, and advisor." King had written a number of Op-Ed pieces for the Post and became a permanent fixture there.

King's Saturday soapboxes on behalf of the poor, neglected, and often mistreated D.C. citizenry began long before Rosenbaum's tragic end. One victim was Hattie Purefoy, a New Yorker who came to town for a religious crusade in 2002 and was stabbed in the back and robbed. King focused not only on the care offered by strangers who helped Purefoy at the scene, but also the restrictive tactics used by the judge who tried her assailant and eventually sentenced him to only a halfway house. That story was one of many that year that earned King a Pulitzer.

"He's a winning example of what editors [and writers] could do with the Op-Ed form if they drew on their passion now and again," Slate.com's Jack Shafer wrote about King in 2003. "King takes names. He names names. And he calls people names."

And he doesn't let up. As in the Rosenbaum case, King makes a habit of returning to the same stories again and again with new information or just continued pressuring of powers that be. "I get my teeth in there and chaw and chaw and chaw on the ankles," King says. "Until someone says, 'Yelp!'"


How will it all end?

In the Rosenbaum story, that reaction appears to be a D.C. Inspector General's report that finds merit in King's work. With all of the columnist's attention to contradictions and incomplete facts, he believes the truth has come out and hopes changes can be made. "I don't think there will be a whitewash. I hope not," he says. "There is public interest in this, that's for sure."

One unspoken issue that surrounds all of King's work on this case is the effect it may have on the criminal prosecution. Could proof that Rosenbaum might have lived if not for poor EMS and hospital care actually help the defendants escape full culpability --and punishment? Marcus Rosenbaum declines to comment publicly, but King admits that is a question others have also raised.

"I know that it has crossed their minds," he says of Rosenbaum's family. "But that is a question that I have stayed away from. That is not the issue for me." King points to evidence that appeared in late April possibly linking the suspects to at least two previous robberies. "I don't think they will get off scot-free," he adds.

While King has gotten a number of good tips and information from sources, others are scared of the backlash and defensive stance those on the hot seat in this case have taken. "I had one source who was so scared to be seen on the street that we met in a Burger King," he recalls. "While we were in there, a fire truck pulled up and some firefighters came in to get some sandwiches. He got spooked." The duo later continued their meeting in an alley behind King's house, the better to avoid any possible listening devices.

"His reporting has kept the pressure on the fire service to make changes," says D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson, who oversees police and fire services and was among the first to call for an inquiry. "The more the fire department has to respond to this issue, the more they will have to offer improvements." Austin Andersen, a spokesman for the Inspector General's Office, declined to comment on the case or King's dogged reporting of Rosenbaum, saying only, "It is a front-burner issue with us."

As for King, Rosenbaum's fate, like other cases, "is very much on my mind. Unlike an editorial, where you put some attention on it and go on, this is like collecting string," he adds. "Collecting string, over time."