At all of the major market newsrooms in which I’ve worked over the years, emailed “tips” from viewers come at the speed and volume of water from a firehose rather than a nice easy drip.
Step inside the KSTP newsroom in Minneapolis-St. Paul and you’ll hear the word “wufoo” a lot.
A wu… what?
It’s the email system that manages all of the tips that come in through our website and end up in all of our inboxes.
The problem is that we get so many “wufoos,” it’s easy to miss the promising tips among the dozens of others about someone’s dog communicating with aliens or the latest political conspiracy theory.
Enter the wufoo titled “George Floyd murder case” at 4:03 on Monday, April 8th, 2024.
Trust me when I say that most of the viewer tips with a title like that contain someone’s opinion on the case or a slur-laden tirade complaining about how we have covered the story in the past.
But this one was different.
I happened to be at my desk when it came in. The sender’s name was Sylvia Jackson.
Despite the fact that I have covered the police killing of George Floyd since the day it happened, her name did not immediately ring a bell.
Jackson was a friend and ex-coworker of Floyd’s and she had loaned her car to Floyd on the day he died.
“I’m in desperate need of help,” Jackson wrote in her email.
Investigators were holding her 2001 Mercedes SUV as evidence, but nearly four years later, after all of the trials and subsequent appeals, they still had not returned it.
I immediately called up Sylvia and she agreed to meet for an on camera interview by the end of the week. To my surprise, she had NEVER spoken on camera since Floyd was killed.
Not having reliable transportation had a big impact. Sylvia was struggling to find a job and was relying on help from friends to get her three daughters to and from school everyday.
When I first contacted the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) for information about why they were still holding Sylvia’s car, it set off a bizarre back and forth exchange that lasted several days.
First, a spokesperson indicated someone at the BCA would sit down for an interview with me.
Then they couldn’t.
Then the interview was back on.
Then they canceled.
On the morning of the day our story was to air, the BCA spokesperson sent me a written statement that somehow the death of George Floyd was still an “active criminal investigation” and that the state Attorney General’s Office had ordered them to continue to hold Sylvia’s car.
Of course, I sent that statement to my contact with the AG’s office to verify that it was accurate.
I gave them a deadline of noon.
At 11:59 AM, I got a call from my contact at the AG with a question: “Can I have more time?” he asked.
Given that my story was scheduled for the 6 o’clock news that night, I agreed to push our deadline.
Less than two hours until air, the AG’s office sent me its own on-the-record statement that it was now ordering investigators to return Sylvia’s car.
Just like that, everything had changed in a matter of eight hours.
Here’s what my story looked like that night.
Five days later, we were there when Sylvia actually got her car back.
That behind-the-scenes scramble may not have changed the world, but for Sylvia and her family, it did.