Alexis Wiley is a long way from her Los Angeles roots and that reality hit hard last week.
Alexis Wiley
A Feb. 27 interview with a Detroit youngster got under a minute and a half of airtime, but touched the 29-year-old Fox 2 newscaster in a way that's tough to shake -- as she describes in a highly personal commentary.
I found myself thinking about the 13-year-old who was robbed while waiting for the school bus long after the story was done and the show was over. . . .
The sixth grader, whose favorite subject is math, told me that he was standing on the corner of 7 Mile and Eureka all alone, in the early morning darkness, waiting for his school bus -- which he says was late, as usual.
He said a car circled twice and then a man got out. . . . He told me the strange man pulled out a gun and pointed it at him, demanding he give up his jacket, phones (yes, phones) and his brand new shoes. "When I saw the gun, I thought I'd been shot," the 13 year old quietly said. He gave the man what he wanted and ran home; grateful the gunman chose not to pull the trigger.
Wiley -- who came to Detroit in mid-2010 after jobs in Shreveport, La., and Columbus, Ohio -- had what sounds like a sunnier childhood than her pint-size interviewee on the east side. "I am a true California girl at heart," she says in her station bio. "I grew up just minutes from the Pacific Ocean and will always love it!"
Last week's experience leaves her "sad, angry frustrated," she tweets Monday morning. In the online essay, her first for Fox2, she shares emotions that linger:
I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. No child should close their eyes and picture being murdered. I wish I could make that nightmare go away.
Though the unidentified victim wasn't the first young crime victim speaking into Wiley's microphone, this one pushes her past journalism's objective detachment.
He was like a lot of the kids I meet in Detroit's neighborhoods. . . . Fear, violence and near-death experiences are just a part of the world in which they live. . . .
Nothing will change until people take responsibility for themselves and each other. . . . The only ones who can solve this are the people who are living through this.
Wiley expands on that last point in a discussion on her Facebpook page, where she comments:
"Police are part of the solution, but in a climate where public resources are dwindling, we've got to find ways to help ourselves."
-- Alan Stamm
