The case of Gary Lenius

NBC News treated the strange death of Gary Lenius by toxic fish tank cleaner as yet another opportunity to bash President Trump. With two reporters on the story, NBC News delivered “Man dies after taking chloroquine in an attempt to prevent coronavirus.” Wanda Lenius “told NBC News she’d watched televised briefings during which President Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine,” and President Trump had touted the potential therapeutic effects of hydroxychloroquine at his press briefings. Mr. Lenius died on March 22 after downing a lethal cocktail of soda and fish tank cleaner with chloroquine phosphate prepared by Mrs. Lenius.

Were they fools for Trump? The Washington Free Beacon assigned reporter Alana Goodman to look into the story. Alana Goodman first went behind the headlines of the original story in “Woman Who Ingested Fish Tank Cleaner Is Prolific Donor to Democratic Causes.” Subhead: “Arizona woman who accidentally poisoned her husband donated to ‘pro-science resistance’ PAC, among others.”

“This raised some questions about her claim that she was going, you know, was she acting on Trump’s advice here,” Alana said in a brief appearance on The Ingraham Angle this week (video below, via NewsBusters).

Alana added that friends described Mr. Lenius’s ingestion of the fish tank cleaner as “out of character” for someone who was an engineer. “There were also court records that showed his wife had been previously charged with domestic violence against him,” Goodman said. A Mesa Police Department homicide detective gave Alana a call and asked her to send over her on-the-record interview with Mrs. Lenius.

Laura Ingraham’s interest in the story was prompted by Alana’s profile of Mr. Lenius in “Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer” and Alana’s follow-up in “Police Investigating Death of Arizona Man From Chloroquine Phosphate,” after she received the phone call from the Mesa Police detective investigating the case.

Alana also makes a cameo appearance in the Inside Edition segment devoted to the story (video below).

NBC News then elicited a statement from Mesa Police spokesman Jason Flam asserting that Alana’s report of a “homicide investigation” was “inaccurate.” Flam told NBC: “This investigation is not being treated as a homicide. The death of Gary Lenius has not been ruled a homicide at this time.” (Please note that Alana had not said Mr. Lenius’s death had been ruled a homicide.) More: “Flam said the department’s homicide unit is involved because it ‘investigates all reported deaths within the City of Mesa’ — from deaths related to car accidents to the elderly in hospice.”

“It’s still an active, ongoing investigation,” the Mesa PD spokesman said.

But wait! What did Alana get wrong? Alana reported that the Mesa Police homicide detective handling the case “confirmed the existence of an investigation after requesting a recording of the Free Beacon’s interviews with Mrs. Lenius.” Alana reported that Teresa Van Galder — the homicide detective who called to ask for her recording of the interview with Mrs. Lenius — “confirmed that the investigation is ongoing but declined to provide additional details.”

Alana quoted Van Galder herself: “As this is an active investigation, I cannot go into any details at this time regarding the case.” The Free Beacon sent Van Galder the recording of its interview with Mrs. Lenius last month. Alana didn’t get anything wrong.

Perhaps NBC News got the essence of the story right the first time around. Alana Goodman’s reporting nevertheless demonstrates that there is more to the story. It is certainly a sad story, but it is a sad story in more ways than one. The limitations of the reporting by NBC News provide something of a case study of the “legacy media” (as Laura Ingraham calls NBC News and its ilk) in the Trump era.