Poynter on the Record

When Robert Lutner saw on the news that two close friends, Brenda Groene and her boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, had been bound and bludgeoned to death along with Groene's 13-year-old son, Slade, he broke down and wept... Who could have done such a thing? And where were two other Groene children — Shasta, 8, and Dylan, 9 — both reported missing?

Lutner, who had been at Groene's Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, home on May 15, 2005, the day before the bodies were found, called the hotline set up by the local sheriff to offer any information he could. He says no one called him back...

Shocked and emotionally drained ...he went home and did something he knew he shouldn't: He got drunk. Lutner, 33, is on probation for unemployment fraud and is forbidden to drink. So when his probation officer called that evening and said he needed to see him immediately, Lutner ignored him and turned off his phone.

"The next thing I know, I turn on the TV and see that I'm a 'person of interest,'" says Lutner, a concrete worker and father of two. "It was like I was in a dream world."

Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute and a former Spokesman-Review staffer, says that given the grisly facts of the Groene crimes, this "might be one of the cases that passes the extenuating-circumstances test." With three people dead and two children missing, it made sense for reporters to use the information on Lutner, says McBride, who used to live in Coeur D'Alene.

At the same time, she says, reporters need to make sure they are using "person of interest" with some context, keeping in mind that police and journalists "have a different mission and purpose and set of obligations..."
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