How we find our stories

Whether we're at the grocery store, at a dinner party, or at the pool, there's one question all reporters and editors get from regular newspaper and online readers: "How do you find your stories?"

Sometimes, they find us. Sometimes, we find them.

One case of reporter-as-investigator came last week, and it's a good example of a story that requires some creative digging and good sourcing by our reporting team to make the story come to life.

Early Tuesday morning, reporter Joe Macenka discovered an e-mail in his inbox sent to the media overnight from Richmond police about a fatal shooting late Monday night in Richmond's Whitcomb Court public-housing complex. It included the bare-bones details -- one dead around 11:30 p.m. in the 2200 block of Whitcomb Street.

Macenka, who is our first reporter in the newsroom at 5 a.m. weekdays, called the Richmond communications center twice to leave messages for the police commander on duty to call him back with more information. He didn't get a return call immediately.

But as the sun rose Tuesday, he kept working his sources.

"I began calling some of our other contacts in the law-enforcement community, and we were able to develop some reliable information," Macenka said.

"I eventually spoke to the Richmond police media relations staff about 8 a.m., and by that time, we were developing information from other sources -- information that the media relations staff said it was unable to confirm."

Specifically, Macenka was hearing that the victim was a food delivery driver who just had dropped off an order in Whitcomb Court. We also found out that police had given us the wrong address -- the shooting was in the 2400 block of Whitcomb.

Macenka, along with fellow reporters Wes Hester and Reed Williams, spent the rest of the day working sources on the phone and in person, heading to the shooting scene, and finally by late afternoon tracking down the location of the restaurant where the victim worked.

By the end of the day, we knew a lot more than police had told us officially. Here are a few pieces of the puzzle we put together:

• Several witnesses who live in Whitcomb Court told us that seven or eight shots were fired. They also pointed out the correct location of the shooting, two blocks away from where police told us it occurred.

• Law-enforcement sources gave us the location of the restaurant.

• The restaurant manager told us the driver wasn't a regular employee but was filling in for a friend.

As of late last week, Richmond police hadn't confirmed any of those details to us.

Homicide stories run in different places in the newspaper based on a number of factors -- including who the victim was, the circumstances, and the method and location of the killing.

Unfortunately, Whitcomb Court is no stranger to violence. Last week marked the second homicide in the neighborhood in four months, according to Richmond police's online searchable records, and police often are called to the area for assaults, drug crimes, and gun violations.

But what elevated this homicide story to the front page Wednesday was the fact that the victim was robbed and killed after delivering food to someone in Whitcomb Court. Also, he was the second Chinese-restaurant delivery driver killed in the Richmond area in recent months.

On Easter night April 12, Yong Sun, 36, died after making a delivery in the 500 block of Lowell Street in Henrico County for The Great Wall Chinese Restaurant. His shooting death remains unsolved, but police also believe that case was an attempted robbery.

As of Thursday, police still had not released any details about the Whitcomb Court victim. Richmond police officials said they were working with U.S. State Department officials to try to confirm the victim's identity.

It is unusual for police to need several days to identify a victim, and the fact that this victim likely is from China complicates that process.

As law enforcement tries to piece together a crime, they don't necessarily share every new twist or detail with us. That was the case in this Whitcomb Court homicide.

But we don't wait for them. When we don't get what we need through official channels, we keep looking elsewhere.

Paige Mudd is the local news editor for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. She can be reached at (804) 649-6671 or .