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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

The rest of the story

Here's one of those "shocking murder in a small town" stories, but not all the good information was supplied by the TV station. We learn from its story only that the man shot his wife dead then shot himself in the head when police approached him, that the two had been fighting "in the past several months" and that police had been called to control the situation "on many occasions," all of them ending "in a peaceful manner." The rest is mostly "Mayberry will never be the same" boilerplate:

The images aren't just sad, they're shocking. And they're the last thing neighbors like Bart Shank would ever expect to see in this small, quiet town.

“This is just the heart of America. You don't see things like this. You hear about them. You watch the news and think, man I'm glad I don't live there,” Shank told WSBT News.

But in the comments from readers, we learn that the couple had five children, the husband never provided financially for the family and never even picked his wife up at work, the husband had been in jail for battery and just got out on March 15, and a divorce was in the works. Useful information, I'd say. We'd better stop thinking we can just throw a sloppily reported story out there -- readers aren't going to keep letting us get away with it.

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