Yesterday, it had been exactly one year since Paul Reiter was here with us to manage the delivery of this newspaper to you. On May 9, 2011, Paul was shot and killed while interrupting the burglary of a neighbor. We have thought a lot about that fateful morning, a Monday morning, the only day of the week Paul did no work for the newspaper. We have thought a lot about his decision to interrupt the burglary, as opposed to the other things he might have done when he heard the commotion next door. He might have let the burglar proceed, but Paul respected his neighbors and their property too much for that. He might have called the police and let them arrest the youth, but we believe Paul respected the youth and his potential too much to simply cast him to the cops. We believe it’s precisely because Paul respected everyone and wanted what was best for everyone that he interrupted the burglary and gave the would-be thief an opportunity to get away before he had committed a more serious crime than breaking someone’s window. For this, Paul was shot dead. It was a senseless and tragic murder, and many of us continue to mourn his loss as if it were yesterday.
Knowing we could not replace Paul with anyone, we did not replace him with anyone. We replaced him with an entire company that took over the management of our delivery routes and that continues to employ many of the drivers Paul managed. The fact that you can still pick up a copy of our newspaper is perhaps the only thing that has not changed since then, because the loss of a committed, intelligent, generous and loving person like Paul leaves a loss that never goes away. All of us here continue to feel this loss in our own ways. Of course, his family – committed and impressive people, like Paul himself – struggle with these feelings even more than we do, and our thoughts remain with them on this tragic anniversary, particularly the memory of Paul’s mother, Agnes Veronica Reiter, and his son, Christopher Paul Reiter.
In our struggle to understand and cope with this devastating loss, perhaps the best we can do is emulate the man who respected everyone equally – the neighbors whose home should be protected and the young thief who deserved a chance to walk away from the scene of the crime before he committed it. Yes, Paul, we still wish you had been a little less respectful of others, a little more selfish – for once – on that Monday morning last year, but you remained true to yourself until the end. We promise we will continue to struggle to do the same.
City public schools: here to stay
Paul Reiter cherished the hard-hitting political coverage in the newspaper he delivered (and managed the delivery of) for 22 years, and in what would become the last years of his life he read the paper each week to see how we were holding Mayor Slay accountable for his actions. So in Paul’s name, we ask the mayor to take a good, long look at the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling on the Turner case and face the facts that he is going to have to learn to live and work with the St. Louis Public Schools. Last summer when the court first ruled that SLPS was required to pay the tuition of district students attending schools in accredited districts in the county, Slay seemed to fret over every negative ramification of this ruling except that it could very well bankrupt his city’s public school district. It appears to us that Slay would welcome a bankrupted city school district and the consequent “crisis economic” motive for starting from scratch. That is not happening, at least not from the Turner ruling. We hope the mayor realizes he is going to have to join forces with others who seek to improve the city public schools to benefit the district’s children, rather than cheerlead their destruction.
