The Teletype was king when I started reporting for the Hartford Times, the afternoon daily paper that like so many afternoon papers faded into the sunset. Even in the late 1960s the paper was starting to feel the squeeze, and the once pulsing Manchester bureau was reduced to two people. I was one of them.

The Teletype chattered incessantly, generating a blanket of paper that spread across the news bureau floor. That’s the way we transmitted our stories and the way we learned what was going on in the rest of the world.

It was how I learned of an industrial accident in the nearby town of Vernon. A worker had been buried alive when the sides of a trench collapsed. Somehow we hadn’t picked up the accident on the scanner and I had missed the story.

I knew my editor would want the story. I figured I’d talk to police and get the details, but that hardly seemed to do justice to the loss of a life.

I headed to the site hoping to talk to a co-worker. Maybe someone could provide insight to how this had happened, no less what the victim was like.

By the time I found the location, I was too late; everyone had left.

It was late afternoon. The shadows were long, giving an eerie feel to the place, like an empty stage with the curtain about to be drawn. Tire tracks weaved across the scarred earth. I left the car and walked to what I presumed was where the accident occurred. The ground was uneven. There was the semblance of a trench, but the mild depression hardly looked like it could claim a life. I tried to imagine what it was like just a few hours earlier as workers frantically dug to save one of their own. Heavy equipment wouldn’t have been used for fear of injuring the man who everyone hoped would still be alive. Police would have been there, and most likely area residents would have augmented the rescue effort. I knew I was close to where it happened when I looked down to see cigarette butts rubbed into the dirt. A crowd had been here. Perhaps they smoked between relieving those with the shovels, as hope was still alive, or maybe they stood here after the body was unearthed and taken from the scene.

I wrote about that place, adding in the details from the police reports. Like so many things, if the clock could only be turned back and we knew then what we know now, a life wouldn’t have been lost.

In the years that followed, I’ve covered numerous accidents and fires. They are hubs of activity with first responders intently doing their jobs as people are guided to safety and the injured are rushed from the scene. Rarely have I found myself alone as I did at that construction site.

The Monday following the drowning of six-year-old Jamir Stewart in City Park on Aug. 14, I visited the beach ostensibly to see if anyone was swimming and whether there were warning signs that a lifeguard wasn’t on duty. It was a beautiful summer day, the sun sparking off Brush Neck Cove and Greenwich Bay beyond. Three people walked the beach and a couple of young kids played in the knee-deep waters of low tide under the watchful eye of a woman sitting on a towel in the sand. The sign was up. The lifeguard chair was empty. I grabbed a couple of photographs for the story we would be running.

That feel of visiting a place where something horrific had happened and finding it strangely peaceful returned. When the full 133-page report of the incident was released last week, the same story was repeated by those on the beach that summer evening. A man who was there with his son and grandson remembered Jamir as an active kid who paddled out to him, although he was a total stranger. The same man later joined the human chain that found the boy in barely more than three feet of water. I got another picture of Jamir from his grandmother, Deirdre Isom, Thursday at police headquarters when the report was released and the mayor and police chief addressed the news media.

She was critical of how the city reacted to the tragedy and what she felt was a lack of compassion. But she also said Jamir “wanted to be a master builder for Legos.” He was Batman’s best friend, and he was so proud he could ride a “big boy’s bike.” Her anger was spent and the pain flooded in.

She couldn’t talk, turning away from the TV cameras focused on her. Tears rolled down her cheek. There was a stunned silence. Reporters put down their cameras. Two of us reached out and hugged her.

I can only imagine such a loss, but knowing the circumstances and the location of such tragedy has changed how I will always think of City Park.