A year after reporter Claire Savage was part of a team of reporters reaching out to family members of the mass killing during the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, she embarked on a different kind of mass shooting story, that of the shooting survivors, which is always an overlooked aspect of gun violence.
She worked with survivor groups and lawyers to find victims to tell the stories of four people affected by the violence in different ways including a girl wounded at Uvalde, a woman wounded at Club Q and a woman whose mother was killed in Highland Park.
Photos were a challenge, but she worked with a photographer Eric Gay in Texas to get photos of the young Uvalde victim for the lead. The story moved the day before July Fourth, and Savage followed it up by covering Highland Park’s commemoration events the next day with Chicago-based photographer Nam Huh.
This was an exclusive effort by Savage and timed to move ahead of the Fourth of July. Among the online sites that played it prominently were MSN, ABC News, The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Las Vegas Sun, Sentinel Colorado and WGN-TV in Chicago.