Sometimes it can feel like a curse, this sense of idealism that pervades the newsroom of the Waco Tribune-Herald .

But occasionally it can feel like the ultimate blessing — such a blessing, in fact, that it’s a big reason many in my profession stay in my profession.

It’s the idealism that reporters, photographers and editors feel that our journalism can make a difference, have an impact.

Some of us have visions of exposing government corruption or perhaps toppling an unsavory character or exposing some dangerous business practice that is doing others harm.

There’s a maxim in journalism that many of us love: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

This idealism is based on a fundamental belief that the more we as a society know, the better off we are.

While some may quibble with that philosophy, sometimes out of the blue, we as a newspaper play such an integral and unquestioned role in affecting events, that we can’t help but feel blessed.

Important story idea

Such was the case recently when veteran reporter Tommy Witherspoon came into the office with a story idea.

Tommy has been covering the courts in McLennan County for so long that I sometimes wonder if he might have been there when they laid the cornerstone to that historic building.

He’s one of the best-connected reporters that I have every worked with and chances are pretty good that if something is going on at the courthouse, Tommy will eventually learn about it.

It was during an interview with the region’s newly appointed U.S. marshal that had Tommy recently looking at a list of that office’s most wanted fugitives.

It was a motley collection of mostly jailhouse mug shots of people you wouldn’t want to run into on the streets.

“This guy doesn’t look so dangerous,” Tommy told some courthouse regulars.

He was looking at a two-decades-old photo of a man named Stephen Palacios Jr.

Palacios, a former teacher at Vanguard College Preparatory School, vanished with his then 3-year-old son from Waco nearly 17 years ago after a divorce in which he shared joint custody of the toddler with his former wife.

Tommy decided to write an update on this case and his story ran in the Trib on Aug. 29.

He never was able to reach the mother, who has since moved to the Dallas area. But he spun off a compelling narrative of a boy who has been missing for a decade-and-a-half.

Then Sept.16, Tommy started getting a slew of telephone calls. One tipster said that Palacios had just turned himself in somewhere in South Texas.

Then a Houston TV station called to ask Tommy about the case and they confirmed that Palacios had gone to a Houston attorney to arrange his surrender.

Tommy, it turned out, knew the attorney and quickly got him on the phone and ferreted out more details about this amazing development.

Then the phone started ringing. Tommy was able to reach Dee Ann Adams, the mother whose son had been taken away from her 17 years ago and hasn’t seen him since.

From these calls, Tommy learned that authorities had told the mother that the now 21-year-old son had read Tommy’s story online, provoking the son to convince his father to turn himself in to authorities; the son reportedly told his father that he wanted to meet his mother.

We have yet to hear whether a reunion has occurred. But the thought of a mother being reunited with her son after 17 years makes us happy.

And the thought that the Trib helped play a role in that reunion makes us especially proud.

csanchez@wacotrib.com

757-5703

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