19 producer

Have you ever heard of something happening in your neck of the woods, turned on the TV and not seen anything on the news about it? This might be why:

Tonight, our traffic reporter gets word of a trucker getting shot in the neck in Blount County. Blount is not in our viewing area, but we were under the impression it had happened just over the line from Marshall County, which is in our area. So we went, thinking maybe the guy had been shot in our area and made it there before pulling over.

We sent a reporter, photog, and our satellite truck operator toward Blount County. In the meantime, Carson Clark lives closer than we were, so I called him and got him to head out there with some gear to grab video before backup could arrive.

More than two hours later, we've got nothing. I called someone at WBRC, who knew a state trooper that could help. The trooper said Blount County was working it, but Blount County said they weren't.

It turns out, from what I've been able to gather, Blount County was working it. It had been cleaned up, and we missed it. And we weren't able to get any official information out of anyone on what had happened. To make matters worse, it wasn't anywhere near where we initially thought it had been -- it was way out of our coverage area, and if we had known, we probably would never have gone on it.

So instead of staying in Huntsville and working on another story, we wasted time and people looking for a story that we weren't able to get, outside of our coverage area. But it was a good idea at the time, and we had to roll the dice and go on what we knew.

So if you wondered about some trucker getting shot in Blount County Monday night, all I can tell you is he didn't die. I don't know who to ask to get anything else.