The issue of gun violence hit a lot closer to home with the shocking death of Christine Moyer, who was allegedly killed by her father-in-law at a family wedding on Friday, July 25, in Schaumburg.
Certainly it hit closer to the workplace.
Christine was a former reporter for The Beacon-News and Courier-News, who is being remembered as much for her kindness as for her award-winning talents as a journalist.
Unlike a lot of outsized personalities who tend to roll through newsrooms, Christine was low-key and unassuming. But “young and spunky” is how former Beacon reporter Tim Wagner described her.
Man charged with killing daughter-in-law outside Schaumburg wedding
And indeed, while Christine may have had a soft demeanor, she was also a lot of fun. And she would toughen up when needed, noted several former colleagues from both newspapers who are trying to process the details of her killing that occurred in the parking lot of the Marriott Hotel in Schaumburg.
According to police, Roland Schmidt, 76, was upset with Christine for filing divorce paperwork against his son Michael Schmidt, who had been a photographer at the Courier-News when the couple met in 2005.
“To say all this is heartbreaking is such a cliche … this is really throwing me,” said Northwest Herald reporter Janelle Walker, who was working at the Courier when she introduced the couple on Christine’s first day in the Elgin newsroom in January of 2005.
“This isn’t supposed to happen to someone you know,” Walker said.
Former Beacon-News reporter Steve Lord recalls Christine and Mike, who became engaged after she’d moved to Aurora – and he was with the Herald-News in Joliet – working on a huge story that broke around midnight just miles from the Beacon-News office on Aurora’s far East Side on Oct. 15, 2008.
Christine was on a late shift when a medical transport helicopter crashed off Eola Road and Liberty Street in Aurora, killing the 14-month-old girl aboard, as well as three members of the Air Angels crew working to save her life. And she worked nonstop through the night on this story, said Lord, adding that he witnessed that same work ethic on other beats, other projects over the years.
Christine was a beautiful person, inside and out, noted Walker, with a curiosity about life and a fun personality. And she was always available when news broke. That became more evident when I went through our archive system and saw the huge variety of stories that contained her byline.
Christine could handle anything that came her way. She covered school boards and municipalities, she reported on policies and personalities. She wrote stories that impacted teens, the homeless, veterans and families in general. At one time she paired up with CBS2 on an important series about toxic baby formula, and used her investigative skills when covering the Prairie Parkway brouhaha as well as a Yorkville landfill controversy that dominated headlines.
Christine wrote about police and about politics and about personalities all over the Fox Valley. And she did so in such a conversational voice, with a writing style that not only made her copy easy to edit but a pleasure to read.
Still, I could tell that the stories Christine gravitated toward were those with heart.
For more than a year she and photographer Heather Eidson followed a single mom of three kids from Hesed House in Aurora as she struggled to care for her family, train for a job and find a permanent place to call home.
“She felt so much for that family, for those kids,” recalled Eidson, also noting that story won first place in feature writing in 2009 from the Illinois Press Association.
Christine put that same amount of time into another award-winning story that chronicled the arduous physical journey of a survivor of the 2007 crash that killed five Oswego teenagers and sent the driver to prison for over a decade.
In this narrative titled “The Comeback Kid,” Christine placed readers into the high school bleachers the night that plucky teen, who fought back through 20 months of grueling rehabilitation, joined his teammates again on the gridiron.
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“The number 72 bounced on Josh Dillon’s back as he jogged across the Oswego High School football field,” she wrote. “Stadium lights bathed his stiff steps. His cleats pounded the 50-yard line, then 30, and then 10. Josh ran until the white number on his back faded into the huddle of blue jerseys in the end zone.”
“He is only 16 years old,” she continued in an accompanying column. “I repeated those words to myself every time I met with Josh Dillon … this boy’s body has been pushed harder and tested more than mine ever has in 27 years of life.”
Then she added, “Sometimes I caught myself thinking, this isn’t fair.”
That thought raced through my own head when I ran across her stories about the grief and shock left behind after a gunman opened fire and killed five innocent victims at Northern Illinois University on Valentine’s Day of 2008.
Not only was Christine there to cover the campus reaction in the wake of that mass shooting, she attended one of the victim’s funerals, using words that were not only compelling but tragically prophetic.
“The silence of Northern Illinois University the day after a gunman killed five students was chilling,” she wrote. “But it was the organ’s booming chords of ‘Amazing Grace’ at 19-year-old Ryanne Mace’s funeral Monday in St. Charles that left me fighting for tears.
“There is so much love for a young woman whose life brutally ended decades too soon … this is why I cried.”