The Education of Giacomo Jones Ch. 07

"Well, when I thought back to your original strategy, I asked Caroline what it would take from us for her team to update and re-cut the interview and air it sooner rather than later. Do you think it would still have the same effect of sort of immunizing us from this media pack?" Gia asked.

"Well, I don't see why not, but the first question you have to ask is whether you're up for it at this time," the longtime sports media maven said. "I can't answer that part. Only you can. So why do you want to do it now?"

"Well, I was sitting by Rance's bed in the ICU talking to Caroline on the speakerphone and she voiced the concern about redoing the piece and then ... Rance doesn't make it," Gia said. "In that moment, I decided that if I give up, what's to keep Rance from giving up. And I told her that."

Glazer was silent for a moment.

"If you and Mr. and Mrs. Martin decide to proceed, call me right away. I will fly back to New Orleans that day to help any way I can," he said.

The part about not giving up on Rance as a way to help him keep fighting had moved his parents. When Gia hung up on Mitch Glazer, Ed and Lorrie were holding hands and had tears in their eyes. Lorrie's eyes looked squarely into Gia's, a fierce look of indefatigable determination now blazing in them.

"Honey, you get Miss Caroline on the phone. We're doing this!"

●●●

It was 6:45 a.m. on Thursday, January 5th, and a custodial services box was backing slowly into the sally port at the rear of the Sonesta ES Suites in New Orleans. In the bay, outside the chill wind of the gray morning, stood Mitch Glazer alongside Ed Martin and Calvita Jones. Two men in jeans and hooded sweatshirts exited the cab of the truck, alighted the steps to the loading dock and unlatched the cargo bay door. Inside were large, silvery boxes of expensive camera equipment, rigging for lights, long rolls of wiring, tripods and camera mounts. They nimbly secured them on dollies that they had brought with them and took them to Suite 333, the VIP room that CBS had leased the day before using an unknown CBS producer's name and a network credit card and where Caroline Agostinelli had slept in one of its two bedrooms. By 9:30 a.m. they had turned the elegant interior of Suite 333 into a perfectly lighted soundstage for the 10 a.m. interview.

Gia, Lorrie Martin and Caroline had arranged to enter the hospital at 6 a.m., before most media had reassembled outside the doors, and see Rance in the ICU. Neither the hospital nor the family would allow photos of Rance there, but then Caroline never asked. She just wanted to see him, to speak to him, to tell him she was praying for him. When they emerged, the cameras focused on Lorrie and Gia. Nobody in the press scrum noticed the woman several paces behind them. Even if they had, only those most intimate with the journalism scene in New York would have recognized her as that of a "60 Minutes" producer who was about to scoop them, making their editors angry and their lives miserable after the revised segment aired on Sunday night.

The taping lasted for two hours, all totaled. Caroline interviewed Gia, her mother and the Martins together in one part of the room set up around a table. She interviewed Rance's parents by themselves. And then she interviewed Gia, one-on-one. At noon, Caroline took all four of her interview subjects to lunch at Galatoire's - sneaking them out of the hotel and past the press contingent to a waiting limousine — as the crew finished dismantling the set in Suite 333 and loading back into the custodial services box truck for the trip back to New York.

As they parted after lunch, the limo took Caroline to a private jet to whisk her back to CBS headquarters in Manhattan for at least 72 hours of unbroken work rebuilding her segment and racing the clock to prepare it for broadcast. The rest headed once more to the hospital where, after five days, Rance remained in a coma.

A fever from the infection his wound caused seemed to come and go on a cycle - topping 102 degrees on odd days, dropping to just below 99 on even ones. Kidney function was improving, but still not where the doctors wanted it to be. There were no further signs of internal bleeding, indicating that Dr. DeFusco's intricate needlework was holding up. It wasn't unusual for someone who had suffered so grievous a wound and its associated complications to have an extended time of unconsciousness, so doctors weren't alarmed ... yet. But the longer a coma persists, as practitioners know, the longer the odds become that a patient will pull out of it soon. Or maybe ever.

"He's been having a fitful day," the ICU chief nurse informed the family after they arrived there. "He's making a sort of moaning sound. That could mean he's feeling some pain, or it could mean he's fighting through whatever keeps him from regaining consciousness. We have no indications of anything that would be an apparent source of pain. We checked him for bedsores and found none. So I don't know what it means."

Ed Martin was the first to sit with Rance. Other than holding his hand, saying "The Lord's Prayer" and telling him he loved him, Ed had saved several stories about the upcoming college football championship game between Georgia and Texas Christian University.

"Vegas favors Georgia by 12 points, the same Georgia whose ass y'all kicked a couple of months ago," he said.

Next at his bedside was Lorrie. She didn't believe in protracted vigils. She sat beside him for 20 minutes, read him verses from the Bible, said a prayer — all the while with her hand on his — and then kissed his forehead and was gone.

Gia's visits were the longest. She never sat. She would stand at his bedside, leaning over the railing. She took pains not to crimp the tubing or delicate electrical wires connected to various parts of Rance on one end.

She would speak as close to his ear as she could, softly in a register barely higher than a whisper, the hushed voices they used when they would talk, face-to-face just before dozing off or just after waking in each other's arms. She spoke of the times they've shared, of what they would have to do when they returned to Fulbright for the next semester, of places they should go together to relax, to enjoy some scenic splendor, to make love. Sometimes she was wistful, occasionally hopeful. Inevitably, she fought off crying at every visit, and she concluded each time by saying, "I love you, Rance Martin. You come back to me."

●●●

The television in Rance Martin's room in the Tulane Medical Center Intensive Care Unit had not been turned on in the week that he had been there. No one had even noticed it until Sunday morning when the family visited him, one at a time as was hospital protocol. That day, they had asked the hospital chaplain to join them and take a turn in the room with Rance to say a prayer in his presence. That he was a Roman Catholic priest rather than a pastor of the Martins' protestant denomination — Presbyterian — was of no matter to them. It was Sunday and Rance needed his moment with the Lord.

It was also Sunday, the day Caroline Agostinelli would make her on-screen debut for "60 Minutes" with the newly announced and much-anticipated segment scooping the world on the heroic and tragic saga of Gia Jones and Rance Martin.

Buzz about the segment had been immediate. It instantly began trending on all social media platforms when CBS began teasing it frequently on all its network programming, including a few excerpts on the CBS Evening News with Norah O'Donnell. It was big enough that it generated chatter on rival NBC's "Today" show and repeatedly on CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

In front of the hospital and surrounding the Sonesta ES Suites, the spurned rabble of media who had been encamped for days and come away with nothing turned surly and more aggressive. They were now desperate to provoke some reaction from the family and interject themselves into the narrative in the hours leading up to the scheduled airtime after Sunday's late NFL game. Mitch Glazer had seen it firsthand before, and he met with his counterpart at Tulane's athletics department and the university's top administrators to arrange for increased security for the family through the long weekend.

Only one person could sit with Rance during the telecast. The others would have to watch the program on a television that would be brought in for them into the ICU waiting room. Ed and Lorrie Martin discussed it in advance and both felt that Gia should be that person. They would watch in the waiting room along with Callie Jones and now Emmett Burson, who had flown into New Orleans to be with Callie over the weekend.

"Gia," Lorrie said over a late breakfast in the hospital commissary that morning, "we've spoken and we agree: we think it's best for you to be in the room with Rance when the segment airs tonight."

She was relieved at the decision, but the toll of worry and sleep loss was evident in the fatigue etched on her face. "Thank you. I always pictured all of us watching it together, back before ... when it would have been a much different story."

"You see — and I hope I am not being presumptuous here — but I think of us, I think of all of us these days. It feels right. And you've accepted me as family since the first, so ..." she said, joylessly picking at the eggs and sausage on the plastic plate before her. "I suppose being there with Rance for right now is as close as we get to ... family."

A phalanx of two dozen New Orleans police officers, some with nightsticks drawn, formed a wedge through which Gia, Ed and Lorrie Martin, Mitch Glazer, Callie Jones and Emmett Burson advanced, enduring the shoving, yelling, cursing mob of people with cameras and microphones. Once safely inside, hospital personnel escorted them to the ICU waiting room where a 52-inch TV that had been placed on two end tables and wired up during the afternoon was playing the fourth quarter of the season's final regular season NFL game between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Denver Broncos.

Per custom, Ed and Lorrie, in that order, would enter the room with their son first, spend perhaps five minutes with them and then yield to Gia. Ed made sure the television in the room was on and tuned to CBS where he watched a few moments of the game, commenting on the teams' strategy and talking football with his son. Lorrie came in, read a few verses from Psalms, told him that Gia would watch their "60 Minutes" segment with him and kissed his forehead.

Gia entered just as CBS was wrapping up its abbreviated postgame show. She grasped Rance's hand and sat beside him. A few minutes later, chills ran down her spine as the trademark stopwatch sound signaled the start of the CBS telecast. The first segment teased was theirs. Footage of herself and Rance, of the postgame Sugar Bowl celebration, of the pending interviews, of Geno and Duarte Mélancon raced by, but the voice narrating it was Caroline Agostinelli's.

Two other stories were previewed — one about the problems artificial intelligence presented for professions such as law, journalism, music and art and another about the extreme weather California was experiencing tied to climate change.

"Those stories and more tonight on '60 Minutes,'" said correspondent Scott Pelley.

Gia's grip on Rance's hand tightened. Maybe it was just a reflex. Maybe it was her imagination. But did his grip tighten almost imperceptibly in response? She looked at his face. Still blank. The moment passed.

"60 Minutes" saved the segment about Gia and Rance for the final 20 minutes of the program, the hook to keep viewers tuned in for the duration to see two preceding segments.

Finally, there it was. On camera, a perfectly coiffed Caroline Agostinelli sat on a stool in front of a screen designed to look like a magazine page. It showed a photo of Rance and Gia celebrating in each other's embrace as green and yellow confetti fell around, flush with the joy of winning the Sugar Bowl. Superimposed in white type over the top of the page was the title of the piece, "The Education of Giacomo Jones."

"When a multistate murder spree by a psychopath released without warning from a New Jersey juvenile lockup ended in his gruesome death on the campus of an elite southern university in October, it was already a huge story. That it involved an honors scholar and her new boyfriend, a player on Fulbright University's most successful team ever, it became a global sensation. Their perseverance and their romance became America's favorite love story. A week ago in New Orleans, just after Fulbright won its first Sugar Bowl, it took a dark and tragic turn. Now, with the player, Rance Martin, battles for his life in a hospital as we tell you about the education of Giacomo Jones."

The report began with a scene of Fulbright's campus, with footage from the Charlotte CBS affiliate of the Generals practicing in the dog days of summer and Gia nearly unrecognizable in her uniform, shades and visor. There was a clip of Stark Middleton instructing No. 74 on the fine points of offensive line footwork. There were brief clips of Rance playing against Wake Forest, Georgia, Tennessee and in the Sugar Bowl. Then suddenly — with jarring effect — still photos of Gennaro Millientello as a juvenile offender, news footage from murder scenes in Prince William County, Virginia, from North Carolina and from an apartment in Fallstrom, South Carolina barely an hour before the Millientello's fatal confrontation with police rifles in Fulbright's Honors College dorm.

Rather than risk confusing viewers, Caroline and the producers and editors of the piece chose to initially walk viewers through the story chronologically. There were interviews with Capt. Robert Blanding of the South Carolina State Police, with Perry Hemphill and Art and Vangie Overshaw. And of course, the interview with Gia and Rance in the president's residence when they spoke of now they had overcome the trauma of being at the center of such gothic violence and managed to balance their academic, athletic and romantic lives. Caroline explained that Gia's masculine given name was a tribute to her grandfather, a hero of the Italian resistance in World War II. There was a lengthy cutaway with the most memorable lines from Gia's valedictory address and her running into Rance's arms as she led the graduating class in its recessional off the coliseum floor.

Caroline explained how that horror could be traced back to a pattern of negligence and worse at the highest levels of New Jersey's juvenile justice and correctional system and how numerous examples, brought to the attention of the governor and the legislature, had fallen on deaf ears. It had emerged as the dominant issue in an upcoming election that would determine partisan control of the legislature, she said.

"Two weeks after we taped our first interview with the couple, Rance was gravely wounded in a knife attack on Bourbon Street after celebrating for a while with their teammates," Caroline said. "A Gulf of Mexico oil rig worker and career criminal named Duarte Mélancon, allegedly stabbed Rance after he refused to give Mélancon money. Mélancon died two days ago from a fractured skull he received when, ironically, a Notre Dame football player who had just played against Rance captured him and slammed him to the pavement after he allegedly tried to steal that player's girlfriend's purse. The Notre Dame player was unaware that Rance had been stabbed moments earlier less than 100 feet away. He has not been charged in the incident."

Gia braced herself for what Caroline and her team had selected for broadcast from her emotional interview three days earlier. The camera was focused tightly on Gia, perfectly lighted, in the darkened set of the VIP suite in her New Orleans hotel.

After all she and Rance had endured together, in a moment of triumph, for this to strike suddenly, Caroline asked her, "where do you find the strength now to regroup?"

Gia began the interview determined to be reasoned and cerebral in her responses. She had focused her awesome intellectual might on forcing emotion deep down and bottling it up during this interview. She did not want the world to see her as a weepy, hopeless mess. She did not want to give the criminal element that had tormented her mercilessly for the last four months confirmation that it had any quarter in her soul.

But the camera captured everything — the tiny facial expressions, the tightening of her lips, her eyelids batting during the pause after Caroline's questions to frame her most cogent answer.

"It is difficult. I can't allow the more negative prognoses to override the hopeful signs I see every day. It's gradual, it's slow and it's incremental, but there are data that point us toward hope, not despair," Gia said. "It also helps that Rance's mom and dad have been at my side in full support the whole way. And my own mother flew in the very next day to be with me. Fulbright has gone above and beyond the whole way, and I have always felt that the university has had my back all the way to the highest levels."

Next came an establishing shot back on the Fulbright campus: the building housing the university's music department, then a woman playing the piano in a room that looked like a recording studio. It was Susan Morton. The camera focused on Susan and her fingers as they played a soft, haunting melody. Caroline, in voice-over, introduced her as the young woman Geno Millions had held at knifepoint in his desperate attempt to reach Gia in the Honors College.

"I would not be talking to you right now if it weren't for Gia Jones," Morton told Caroline. "Had she decided to play it safe that morning and not come downstairs to help the police and effectively turn herself into a human shield ... for me, I would be dead. Simple as that."

Caroline picked up the narrative again: "So Susan, an Honors College student who, like Gia, lived one floor below in the dormitory, chose to use her gift to thank Gia. She wrote this in Gia's honor and played publicly for the first time for us."

Titled "A Higher Call," it never mentions Gia by name but, rather, heroes who offer up their own lives for the sake of others. It salutes firefighters, police officers, everyday bystanders who instinctively come to the aid of others when they see them in distress. And troops who advance into gunfire for their buddies and their country. In a low, smoky voice with a trace of her soulful Kentucky drawl, Susan Morton moved gracefully through her chorus, her piano her only accompaniment.

"She didn't know me, could have kept herself safe,

but with my life in danger, she rushed into place,

to barter her own life by risking it all,

an everyday woman meets life's higher call.

The heart of a hero, and life's higher call."

Both of Gia's hands clasped Rance's right hand as she began softly weeping, struggling not to progress into full-blown sobbing that might trouble Rance, alarm the nurses watching the same telecast at the duty station and so she could hear what was next.

The camera returned to her Thursday interview in the hotel.

"Gia, your IQ is off the charts. You were the valedictorian of the graduating class last month and are supposed to be entering your first semester as a graduate student in microbiology. You've seen more in just — well, almost — 20 years than most people see in a lifetime. What have the past few months taught you?"

With the camera focused tightly again on Gia's face, she swallowed hard in a clear attempt to compose herself. She fixed her eyes on Caroline's for strength.

"I learned that you never let a day go by without telling those you love that you love them," she said, a slight falter creeping into her voice.