Deirdre Stoelzle (Dart Fellow 1999) remembers coming back to her newsroom at the Casper Star-Tribune with a pile of domestic violence reports that conjured up plenty of visuals.

Typically, she imagined the beatings three times — first on hearing the detective describe the case; second, writing them up; and third, reading them afterward in the paper.

Sometimes the victims would die from beatings, and she'd sit outside their homes for hours, waiting for the coroners to bring the bodies out, trying to imagine what they must've felt before they died.

She wasn't sure this pursuit of understanding was healthy, especially after being criticized by photographers who waited with her through those long, cold hours in the car.

The details of the killings were revulsive, they said. The victims and perpetrators weren't like the rest of us, they seemed to infer — they hardly warranted anyone's empathy — and besides, they don't pay us enough to care.

There were times the burnout was pretty bad. Then there was anxiety from relating a little too much. The last straw came during a federal trial of a man who'd killed his wife, brother, and best friend.

A neurosurgeon took the stand and described brain damage in such scary detail she had the panic attack of a lifetime, ran blind to the women's room and put her head between her knees, wondering how she could keep doing this job.

But she kept at it, no small thanks to Prozac first and later, the Dart Fellowship.

Stoelzle was among the first group of Dart Fellows in 1999, learning about trauma from the world's top PTSD theorists. She heard sad stories from her fellows and from others, like genocide author Samantha Powers and writer Rick Bragg, who also saw bad things, and reminded her to keep trying to relate to victims.

She also found a friend in Frank Ochberg, M.D., who made himself available for further understanding of victim's needs and those of journalists.

In 2000, Stoelzle accompanied Ochberg to a series of meeting at Boulder, Colo., where Ochberg and professors at the University of Colorado conducted a "detente" with journalists who had covered the Columbine massacre and staff from the Jefferson County School District. Those meetings led to a documentary, "Covering Columbine."

In the summer of 2002, Stoelzle was sent to Rwanda with Liisa Hyvarinen (Dart Fellow 2001) to assist trauma experts Laurie Pearlman and her partner, Ervin Staub, in training Rwandese journalists in their coverage of the aftermath of the country's 1994 genocide.