On yesterday's WKBN morning news report in Youngstown, Ohio, the lead story was a fire that broke out in a local couple's garage and spread to nearby buildings in the middle of the night. The reporter, Derrick Lewis, probably expected to be doing one of those largely content-free eyewitness interviews where someone goes, "I was scared. I guess I'll be staying in a motel tonight."Instead, when Lewis stuck the microphone in the face of a victim named Heather Tenney, she gave him a solid lead on a suspect. That's at 1:50 in the video, just after Lewis asks, "Do you know how this fire started?""Yes, I do. It was 'cause of my cousin. And I don't want to mention no names."It's a dumbfounded position every reporter has been in: getting an actual answer to a question when you weren't expecting one. After a few bewildered seconds, Lewis cobbles together a decent follow-up "Do you know how? Or why?" Then it gets juicy."He's mad because he can't get with me," Tenney says. "I'm married to my husband, and it's a long story. Just to make it short, yeah, he already put him"—she points to her husband just behind her—"in the hospital once last month, and he figured he's gonna do something else to get back."At that point, Lewis gets all "back to you in the studio," and wraps up the interview. Presumably that was so he could rush home and write a Tracy Letts-style play about the Tenney family before someone else wins that Pulitzer prize.Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.
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