What Makes a Homicide Newsworthy?

It's Friday. A 30-something-year-old female worker in Maryland goes to the store where she is employed and unlocks the door with her set of keys. Later, she is found lying on the floor of the store, unresponsive. She has been attacked and is later pronounced pronounced dead at the scene. Robbery is the suspected motive. Nearby businesses and the surrounding community express concern and are on edge. And this is in a part of Maryland where crimes like this are exceedingly rare.

By now, if you live in Maryland or anywhere else in the Washington area, you are probably all too familiar with the tragic story of Jayna Murray, the 30-year-old clerk at the Lululemon Athletica store in Bethesda who was found dead from a brutal attack inside the store that was initially thought to have been committed by "two masked men" who beat her to death and sexually assaulted her and a coworker. And by now you know about the shocking arrest of Brittany Norwood, the coworker who Montgomery County police now allege made up the story about the two masked men and actually killed Jayna Murray herself.

A tragic incident, yes. But that’s not actually what I'm describing here.

The story I'm referring to is actually that of Jacinta "Patty" Ayala, the 32-year-old mother of two who worked as a manager at a Burger King in Frederick. Frederick Police say that Ayala had just opened the restaurant on the morning of March 18 when she was attacked in an apparent robbery. She was discovered by a fellow employee and a bread delivery man. She had been shot.

It would be understandable if you missed the news about Patty Ayala, considering that so many in the Washington region were still in utter shock and grief over what had happened to Jayna Murray, who had been killed exactly one week earlier. And it just so happened that Ayala's murder took place on the same day that the Lululemon case took its shocking twist, culminating in the arrest of Brittany Norwood. The Lululemon case has attracted all kinds of media attention. The same cannot be said of Patty Ayala's murder. While The Gazette has paid some homage to Ayala's life, other than that, the Washington Post, a nationally recognized newspaper and the by far the biggest daily in the D.C. region, had only brief on the killing that was buried deep inside the Metro section of its March 19 edition (Norwood's arrest made the front page of the very same edition).

For days, a community and business district that had earned a well-deserved reputation for being one of the safest in the Washington area was on edge, wondering how their urban enclave suddenly became a target for what had appeared to be a random, vicious assault on two female employees. I myself was bracing for the possibility, even the likelihood, that two men were going to be arrested for the Lululemon assault, men who had violent criminal histories. That possibility was turning me inside out and keeping me up at night, just as Lindsay Harvey's murder had just three years ago. Could it be, I wondered, that yet another set of violent predators had benefited from the leniency of the Maryland criminal justice system and struck again when they should have been sitting in a jail cell?

My fears -- and everyone else's -- of course, turned out to be unfounded. Jayna Murray's murder was not in fact a random act of violence but one that was perpetrated by a known assailant (allegedly). Her accused killer has no prior criminal record and no known violent history, although she was apparently known to be something of a kleptomaniac. And that was certainly a relief.

But what about Jacinta Ayala's murder? Has it escaped everyone's attention that, as far as anyone knows, this probably was a random attack, by an unknown assailant, one who by the way hasn’t been caught yet as of this writing?

An astute reader of the Washington Post has wondered aloud about all this, noting that the local media have been all over the Jayna Murray story while virtually ignoring poor Patty Ayala. "I suppose the media found Murray’s slaying fascinating because it occurred at an upscale retailer in an upscale neighborhood. I’d like to think socioeconomic factors don’t influence the way you cover news."

Welcome to Journalism 101.

One of the first things they teach you in journalism school is that if it bleeds, it leads. And the second thing? Well, that’s a little more complicated. All homicides get news coverage of some kind when they occur. But the ones that get the most coverage and have staying power are the ones that the news media deems more fascinating.

There are many different things that factor into how much news coverage a violent crime receives, and it's not really an exact science. But among these factors are location, the nature of the crime, the ages of the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s), and the motive.

Anyone who's lived in the D.C. region for even a year knows where Bethesda Row is. It's one of the most lively urban areas of the Washington area. It's perenially bustling with activity. It's got bars, restaurants, and other upscale establishments galore. You see the Lululemon store on the news, and you say to yourself, "Oh my God! I go down that block all the time!" The Burger King in Frederick? Totally nondescript. It could be anywhere. I would be surprised if anyone living outside a two-mile radius of the restaurant even knows exactly where it is.

Even the nature of the Patty Ayala homicide probably seems rather pedestrian by comparison. A restaurant robbery? A shooting death? Happens all the time, right? But in addition to the location, Jayna Murray's murder fascinated people first because it was thought to be a double sexual assault and now because of the bizarre twist that made one of the supposed victims the alleged culprit.

Brittany Norwood's murder trial is almost guaranteed to attract a local media circus. The trial of Jacinta Ayala's killer, assuming it even comes to that, may only be a blip on the media's radar screen, assuming it gets covered at all.

The sad irony of all this is that it is the Ayala murder may well deserve more attention, because it may well have been the random act it appears to be and could once again bring to light the failings of the Maryland criminal justice system (I know, no arrests have been made yet, but then that didn’t stop people from speculating about what happened in the Lululemon case).

Jayna Murray's blond hair and bright smile have been all over the place for the past few weeks now. And her legend continues to grow in the form of numerous vigils, a memorial page on Facebook where more than 3,700 people and counting as of this writing have pressed the "like" button, and other expressions of sympathy and grief. Patty Ayala? All we really know about her is that she's dead, that she was a mother, and that she worked at Burger King. There's no Facebook page, no massive public outpouring of sympathy for her family, nothing like that.

But Patty Ayala was somebody, wasn’t she? She went to work in the morning just as so many of us do. And she paid for it with her life. Is her story not worthy of our attention or concern?

Please don’t misunderstand me. What happened to Jayna Murray was still a horrible tragedy, regardless of who did it and why.

But we shouldn’t let our guard down just because "two masked men" prowling around ritzy downtown Bethesda proved to be a hoax. The arrest of Brittany Norwood may have provided people with a collective sense of relief, but it may also be giving Marylanders a false sense of security. I hate to keep reminding people of this, but Maryland has been ranked as the 8th most violent state in the nation (2nd in homicides) and has a 51 percent recidivism rate among violent offenders. Jayna Murray's murder may not reinforce this reality anymore, but Patty Ayala's murder certainly should.