March 2000 - August 2003

I was heard on hundreds of radio stations across the country, including some of the biggest news stations out there, while reporting for CBS News Radio and the Westwood One program America In The Morning. I primarily covered stories in the Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach areas, but also traveled to all other parts of the state, as well as the Bahamas to cover stories of national interest. I've included MP3 audio below for some of the bigger stories I covered during this time.

In the photos to the right and below, I'm outside the CBS News headquarters in New York during a visit in December 2002. I started working for the network in 2000 as the custody battle over Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was building. I had been filing reports for CBS seven years by then, starting in 1993 when I was working at KARN in Little Rock, Arkansas, which was then a CBS affiliate.

I worked as a stringer reporter, which means I didn't get a regular paycheck, but was paid per story. It was an interesting way to make a living. Admittedly, I would get nervous during down times when there were no big stories coming out of South Florida, but it was never quiet for too long. And some stories would stretch out for days, weeks and in some cases, even months.

That's how the Elian Gonzalez story was. The five-year-old boy was one of only three survivors of an accident, in which a boat carrying a group of Cubans trying to get to the U.S. capsized. He and the other two arrived in Florida aboard small rafts on Thanksgiving Day in 1999. I was anchoring that afternoon for WIOD. Elian would become an icon for Miami's exile community, which did not want him returned to the communist island, fearing that Fidel Castro would use him as propaganda and saying he would have a much better life growing up in the U.S. I spent months literally camped in front of the Little Havana home of his Miami relatives as Immigration and Naturalization officials tried in different ways to negotiate with the family. When that failed, heavily armed federal agents raided the home to return Elian to his father, the only surviving parent, who would eventually bring the boy back to Cuba. During the ensuing demonstrations, I would learn what tear gas felt like, as police tried to get a handle on the protests. It was a fascinating story, which taught me a great deal about South Florida's Cuban-American community and the history of Cuba.

Another huge story that would give me weeks of work was the 2000 presidential election. Problems with Florida's voting equipment would keep the nation waiting five weeks to learn whether Al Gore or George W. Bush would become President. I watched the incredible recount process as election officials in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties tried to determine the intent of voters by carefully looking at each of the notorious punch card ballots. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court would intervene, stopping the recount and declaring Mr. Bush the President.

Florida would go on to invest in high-tech, touch screen voting machines, though they proved to also be problematic, as was evident in the 2002 Democratic primary for Governor of Florida. It would take a week before Bill McBride emerged victorious. Even though Janet Reno was only a few thousand votes behind McBride and there were plenty of discrepancies that she could have objected to, she said she was conceding defeat to avoid further dividing the Democratic Party. But McBride lost that November, making Jeb Bush the first Republican Governor in Florida history to be re-elected. Within just a few years the expensive touch screen voting machines would also be scrapped in favor of optical scan equipment, in which a voter fills out a paper ballot which is scanned and provides a paper trail. In the photo to the right I was interviewing Governor Bush at an event in Homestead, Florida marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew.

On August 25, 2001, I got a call about the crash of a small plane in the Bahamas that killed R&B singer and actress Aaliyah. She had been there shooting a music video. CBS put me on the next fight to Abaco Island, arriving as wreckage from the small plane was still smoldering off to the side of a runway. I spent the next several days talking with paramedics who had responded to the crash, the production staff who had worked on the video shoot and Bahamian investigators who were looking into the cause of the crash. The key factor was determined to be that the small plane, which had nine people onboard, was overloaded by 700 pounds. It barely got off the ground before crashing about 200 feet from the runway. Investigators said pilot Luis Morales never should have allowed so much weight onboard the aircraft. In the weeks leading up to the crash he had been arrested for cocaine possession and an autopsy found he had cocaine in his system.

I also covered Florida's connections to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Many of the 19 hijackers had lived and received flight training in South Florida. People who lived next door to the hijackers were stunned. All told me the men seemed like friendly, normal people. I also included the accounts of a flight instructor who had given training to two of the men, as well as a waiter at a restaurant in Hollywood, Florida who had served a drunken Mohammed Atta and another hijacker the weekend before the terrorist attacks. All were overwhelmed to know they had come in contact with some of those responsible for such a horrific attack and felt extreme guilt, thinking they could have done something.

The photo to the right show me in the CBS News radio newsroom in January 2001. I covered plenty of other big stories beyond what I've detailed here. For months in the summer of 2000 I watched as the landmark Florida tobacco trial wrapped up. After two years, a jury decided that cigarette makers were liable for the diseases caused by smoking and awarded damages to a class of about a half-million sick Florida smokers. I also covered the school shooting in Lake Worth, near West Palm Beach, where a 7th grader shot and killed English teacher Barry Grunow. A year later I covered the trial of Nathaniel Brazil, who testified that he was only trying to intimidate the teacher when the gun, a cheap so-called Saturday Night Special, went off by accident. He was eventually convicted and is now serving a 28-year sentence. Another emotional story I covered was the crash that killed racing legend Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona International Speedway. That story interrupted my wife and I as we celebrated our one year wedding anniversary. We had just checked into a hotel on Fort Lauderdale beach and were on our second round of drinks when my cell phone rang and I had to hop in my car and start driving up to Daytona Beach. But that's the exciting life of a reporter, never knowing when a breaking story will interrupt your plans. Another story that put me on a another flight is below, when a shark attacked and nearly killed a young boy who splashing around at a beach in Pensacola, Florida. The shark ripped off an arm, which surgeons later reattached.

At that time, unless I was on an assignment out of town, I would work and broadcast from my home office in the city of Pembroke Pines, which is between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. I found there were advantages and disadvantages to working from home. It was peaceful and nice having my cats by me as I wrote, recorded and edited stories. I also appreciated not having to drive to an office everyday. But I also sometimes missed the excitement and camaraderie of working in a newsroom. About twice a year I would go up to New York and just spend a few days in the CBS newsroom with people I normally only communicated with by phone or online. Amazing what a little face time will do.

The build-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 severely cut into my freelance income, with stories from South Florida having a lot less national significance compared to that. So in August 2003 I was glad to get a job as a news anchor and reporter with the Miami Herald's radio department, which was going to launch the following month, providing local news for Miami NPR station WLRN. I'm glad to say I continue to file for CBS periodically, even after moving back to Little Rock, Arkansas in 2009.