[Times photo: Scott Keeler]
Carol Madura, Pinellas County School District crisis counselor, leaves a news conference Monday at the East Lake High School media center.

By ED QUIOCO, ROBERT FARLEY and RICHARD DANIELSON
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 13, 2002

It was a weird week under the media microscope in East Lake.

Virtually from the moment that 15-year-old Charles Bishop crashed a plane into a downtown Tampa office building, a tornado of journalistic interest, inquiry and intrusion descended on this suburb. It would touch down, churn things up, then skip miles away to someplace else.

Dealing with the media "was grueling," said Robert Cooper, who owns National Aviation Flight School, where Bishop took flight lessons. "I had little sleep. There was a lot of emotions. I was exhausted emotionally and I was exhausted physically."

For teachers, administrators and students at East Lake High School, the calls began Saturday after the crash. That night, principal Clayton Snare received inquiries from as far as Chicago.

It picked up steam from there.

Last Sunday morning, a journalistic siege developed at Bishop's apartment at the Centergate Lansbrook Village apartment complex.

Julia Bishop, Charles' mother, arrived home about 10:30 a.m. and went inside without talking. Soon officers from the FBI and Pinellas County Sheriff's Office entered the home, and journalists clustered around.

Along with Tampa Bay area journalists, the swarm included reporters from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel and a Japanese television crew. All they got to see was a victim's advocate from the Sheriff's Office emerging periodically to walk the

family dogs.

Two days after the crash, a mob of local, national and international reporters and camera crews converged on East Lake High School. As reporters gathered in the school's media center for an after-school news conference, others stalked a sidewalk next to the school parking lot, interviewing students

Inside the school, dozens of television cameras, photographers and reporters grilled Bishop's teachers. A web of blue, red, yellow and green cables covered the floor. When teachers cried at the memory of the smart, seemingly well-adjusted freshman, flashes from photographers' cameras strobed like fireworks.

After Monday's news conference, weary school officials declined to answer further questions.

Well-practiced begging

Meanwhile, the focus shifted.

When he came home from school Tuesday afternoon, East Lake High sophomore Emerson Favreau found a camera crew for Dateline NBC waiting at his Oldsmar apartment complex.

"Crazy," Favreau said of the attention.

A Newsweek reporter was the first to find Favreau, a close friend of Bishop's, by tracking down his America Online user profile. She posted a story quoting him on the magazine's Web site. That drew others.

Wednesday morning, a crew from the Today show picked him up about 6 a.m. and took him to film him with the school in the background.

"It's just been tiring," Favreau said. "It does get repetitive saying the same story to people, because, I mean, nothing really changes with the story."

He spoke to reporters from France, England and all over the United States, he said. A family friend who lives in Germany even called to say he saw Favreau on television there.

A similar scene developed at National Aviation, the school where Bishop took flight lessons. Sunday night, owner Robert Cooper managed to leave in time to make the Bucs-Eagles game.

He had no such luck on Monday, starting at 6:30 a.m. and ending with a Fox News producer begging him to do a radio interview about 10:30 p.m.

"Very pleasant begging," he said. "Good at it, as a matter of fact. I suspect, well-practiced."

'Opulent monotony'

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office received three distinct waves of calls from around the world, said sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Greg Tita.

The first came the night of the crash. The second followed the police announcement that Bishop had left a suicide note. The third came after reports about the discovery of a prescription for Accutane, an acne drug that some have linked to depression and suicide, in Bishop's home.

"I have never received that many phone calls over a 24-hour period in my 12 years as a public information officer," Tita said.

Perhaps the most peculiar request came from an astrologer who wanted to know Bishop's date of birth, Tita said. She said she wanted to feed that information into a computer to do an astrological evaluation of Bishop.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the frenzy produced a few less-than-flattering portraits of East Lake.

"The picture of the Tampa Bay area may not have been portrayed as we would have wanted it to," Tita said. "It's not like anything anyone would expect to see."

England's Guardian newspaper, for example, described "Palm Harbour" as a place of "opulent monotony." It is, the newspaper added, the kind of place where "it is all too easy" to keep to yourself.

"Charles Bishop, by all accounts, did not speak much to his fellow pupils, but when he did, the 15-year-old told them that what he wanted more than anything else in the world was a Honda Civic," the newspaper reported Wednesday.

"As a goal in life," the Guardian added, "it seems almost pathetically modest, but after a few hours in Palm Harbour you begin to see his point. For mile after mile, this wealthy suburb north of Tampa, Florida, consists of nothing but gated communities: clusters of detached, white-stucco homes in silent, palm-fringed, impeccably asphalted private cul-de-sacs, bisected by a six-lane highway. Anything that looks remotely like public green space is marked with a recurring sign: Registered Golfers Only. It is no place to be too young to drive."

'Isolated human tragedy'

Despite the repetition, a few of those who found themselves under the spotlight said they thought they could add something useful, even important, to the discussion of Charles Bishop's life.

At Dunedin Academy, where Bishop attended the eighth grade, headmaster Dale Porter spoke to MSNBC, Dateline, Newsweek, People and the New York Post. The Dateline interview kept him at school from 7 to 10:45 p.m. Monday.

Yet Porter said he didn't mind. He told everyone the same thing: Bishop was a good kid, a patriotic kid, sort of a "gentlemanly nerd."

The only interview that bothered him was one with a Los Angeles radio station. The interviewer pressed Porter to say negative things about his former student. He had none.

"There was nothing bad with this kid," he said.

At the flight school, Robert Cooper and his attorney decided early on that he would be as open as possible with the media and investigators, he said. Though he did not want the attention, it was something he felt he had to do.

"I'm not a publicity seeker," Cooper said. "I was resigned to the fact that this was news. This was important and I was involved, whether I liked it or not. Therefore, I had some weird obligation to do it so I did it. The American people wanted to know what was going on."

Cooper also had to defend his flight school, and in a larger sense, all flight schools around the state.

"Above and beyond everything . . . this is a single, isolated human tragedy," Cooper said. "The backdrop just so happens to be a plane and a building."

Moreover, Cooper observed, the media tornado seemed to disappear as abruptly as it arrived.

"The news media has a short memory," he said. "They're on to the next hot thing."

-- Staff writers Katherine Gazella and Curtis Krueger contributed to this report.

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