I had the most amazing timing on this story.

It involved he murder and disposal of four-year-old Brendan Gonzalez by his father, Ivan Henk. That’s him bursting from a Cass County courtroom after blurting out in court, "The reason I killed Brendan is that he was the anti-Christ. He had 666 on his forehead."

  The first odd bit of timing was stumbling into the early stages of search for the little boy purely by accident. I was cruising for a feature at the time. Next came this courtroom shot. There had been several court appearances for Henk and in each case, he managed to cover his face as he traveled to and from the courtroom. When I got a run at him, I certainly didn’t expect anything so dramatic, I only wanted to be the first to get a frame of his face.

  I stood with tv and other still photographers outside the courtroom and made a lousy photo of Henk going in. I had a strobe on the camera, my shutter speed was around 1/125th and my f/stop I think around f/5.6 to give me a little depth of field. There is never time during a perp walk to get fancy with the light, I just set things up to maximize my chances of catching a good frame of a moving subject in light that goes from dim to bright as tv cameras turn on their lights.

  As we waited for Henk to exit, there was a commotion inside the courtroom. I was sure someone was attacking Henk. It all came bursting through the door and the scene fell into slow motion for me. I felt like I had all the time in the world to pick my frames even though the camera was firing at around eight frames a second. The first frame I thought, nope, not it. Second frame was YES! Third frame, face going down, not as good and I dropped to my haunches to shoot up then dropped my camera from my eye to shoot up from the floor. Then he was in the elevator and gone.

  We all looked at each other, stunned, and I looked at the images on my camera’s lcd, and made a phone call telling the desk I had something special. I hustled to the public library across the street to use their internet still in that awesome, picture of a lifetime fog. As I bent down to pull my computer from the bag, the crotch of my pants ripped from stem to stern. The reporter appeared with his laptop. His pen had exploded in the pocket of his new Land’s End oxford shirt. We joked at the thought of Ivan Henk and the Devil having a hand in our wardrobe malfunctions.

  Looking at the video of the incident on tv, I was stunned at how fast it all happened. How the two or three seconds of Henk and the deputies bursting through the door could seem like a leisurely stroll as I saw it through the viewfinder I do not know.

  The last bit of odd timing was what ended up being the final day of the search for Brendan’s body in a local landfill. I’d shot volunteers combing through the trash and was using a phone line in the landfill office to transmit when I saw a car fly by. Somehow I knew it was Brendan’s mom. I tore down quickly and drove back to the soybean field that offered us an angle on the search teams (we weren’t allowed in the landfill) and made frames of the Cass County sheriff and the search team comforting Rebecca Gonzalez amidst the heaping trash. Brendan’s body was never recovered, but Henk was convicted and is serving time for Brendan’s murder.