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I never met Viktor Matthey.
I heard him cry himself to sleep in a log house in Busse in eastern Siberia.
I watched him climb into his bunk at the orphanage in Svobodniy. I saw him looking
around nervously at the little airport in Blagoveshchensk, about to board a
plane with two strangers from America on his way to a new home in a new land.
I saw him curled up on the cold concrete floor of a basement in that new home,
shivering and crying. I watched him in his hospital bed, no longer able to cry
or laugh or share a silly joke with his brothers or friends.
But I never met Viktor Matthey.
A year that changed my life
And though I never met him, he and I spent a remarkable year together.
It was a year that changed my life and I hope brought something of value to
his; maybe a little peace, maybe something approaching dignity.
For a year Viktor floated above my bed as I tried to fall asleep at night.
When I awoke each morning, he was sitting down at the foot of the bed. He would
not leave me alone until his story was told.
That story - Viktor's story - which was published at the end of October, is
the work for which you have graciously honored all of us at The Star-Ledger
here this evening.
On behalf of everyone at The Ledger who worked so hard to bring this story
to fruition, and on behalf of Viktor, please accept our thanks to everyone at
the Dart Center and to the judges of the Dart Award. We are humbled and deeply
honored by this recognition.
Many people contributed to this effort and I'd like to take just a moment to
mention a few of them.
Mark DiIonno, who assigned me the job of writing the story, and Pim Van Hemmen,
who assigned Saed Hindash to photograph it.
Editors Jim Willse and Fran Dauth, who dragged me across the finish line.
Linda Grinbergs, who designed the special section.
Seeking the answer to a tragic question
I also need to thank Nick Pokrovsky, an American businessman who helped us
negotiate with Russian officials and who introduced Saed and me to Boris Ivanovich
Morzhitsky, the best fixer any journalist could ask for.
Also Vera Ovchar, who helped me make contact with Elena Korotkova, the editor
of the newspaper Zeya Lights, and her wonderful staff of journalists and photojournalists.
I must thank my wife, Becky, and our son, Andy, who put up with my frequent
physical and mental absences while I worked on this story.
And I especially want to thank Saed for his beautiful photographs, which inspired
me as I began writing Viktor's story, for his passion and professionalism, and
most importantly, his friendship.
My investigation into the death of Viktor Alexander Matthey was a search for
an answer to this question:
How did a boy near death from starvation and exposure in eastern Siberia wind
up emaciated, battered and dead of hypothermia in the wealthiest county of the
wealthiest state of the wealthiest nation in the world?
No one wanted me to find out
Viktor was like a character out of a Russian novel, but unfortunately, his
brief life was real, not conjured.
His escape from neglectful, alcoholic parents and from an orphanage in Russia,
whose staff was caring but overworked and underfunded, was nothing short of
a miracle.
His life here in America ended in a way that is nothing less than a nightmare.
Those of you who have read the story know his adoptive parents, devout Christians
who believed they were called by God to adopt Viktor and his two brothers, are
charged with manslaughter in Viktor's death. They are still awaiting trial.
What I had envisioned as an assignment of no more than a few months turned into
the most difficult story of my career. It would take me halfway around the world
and back. When I started, every door I tried to open was shut in my face.
It seemed as if no one wanted me to find out how Viktor had lived and died;
not the local law enforcement officials who were alleging Viktor's adoptive
parents were responsible for his death, not the Russian government officials
who ran the orphanage system where he had lived for a time, not the American
adoption agencies that arranged for his new life with a family in New Jersey,
and certainly not the adoptive parents or the lawyers who represented them.
But I think my own outrage over this boy's death helped me tap into similar
feelings among people who were connected to his case, and eventually they started
talking to me.
Freedom of Information Act requests that were initially turned down were refiled,
ultimately producing hundreds of pages of useful documents.
For several weeks in a row I showed up at Sunday services at the Matthey's
church, finally convincing their pastor to speak with me.
If a parent can kill a child
Most stories reach a point where the reporting is essentially over and the
writing begins. But that never happened with Viktor's story. Even as we went
through some of the final drafts, I was still calling all my contacts, still
pursuing sources for new information. Some of the most powerful material in
the story didn't emerge until just weeks before publication.
Then, just as we were preparing the final version, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
on New York City and Washington, D.C., occurred. Viktor's story was suddenly
pushed to the back burner while the entire paper mobilized to cover the story
of a lifetime.
There was a time when we wondered if we could still publish Viktor's story,
given the way the world had changed following Sept. 11. Some of the same questions
we wrestled with then occurred to me again when I learned The Ledger had won
the Dart Award for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence.
How was it, in a year in which we all lived through unimaginable violence that
touched so many people, that a story about the death of one little boy even
mattered?
I think it might be that to come to grips with violence on the scale of Sept.
11 is just too much for most of us. It numbs us, overwhelms us.
Maybe to understand violence we have to reduce it to a level we can more easily
grasp.
Maybe we need to think about how the misguided application of strongly held
religious beliefs can cause one person to kill another, before we can begin
to understand widespread acts of violence and terror that are rooted in differences
in faith.
And if a parent can kill a child, is it really so hard to imagine someone flying
a plane into a building and killing thousands of strangers?
I said earlier that Viktoršs story began as a search for an answer to the question
of how he died. A year and a half later, I can't decide whether I was unable
to answer that question completely or I just find the answers unsatisfying and
disheartening.
I only know that as journalists, it's our job to keep seeking answers. We
do anything less at our own peril.
- Matthew Reilly
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