Sometimes it's good for a small town like Mesquite to make national headline news. Other times, maybe not so much.
A lengthy news article, "Deaths reveal a small town's mean streak,"posted on CNN.com, Sunday, Aug. 21, discusses the Jan. 25 murder-suicide of former Mesquite City Councilwoman Donna and her husband, Bill Fairchild.
An Editor's note included at the beginning of the story written by Ann O'Neill, explains that it was based on "two visits to Mesquite, Nevada, interviews with two dozen people and hundreds of pages of police and city documents obtained by CNN through a public records request."
O'Neill explains the allegations of wrongdoing from former Mesquite Mayor Susan Holecheck about a $94 travel voucher that Donna Fairchild had falsely submitted for a trip to Las Vegas to attend a meeting of the Nevada Development Authority that kicked off a series of events no one could possibly have foreseen.
"While she was at lunch, Fairchild had received an e-mail from the city, and the news wasn't what she'd hoped for. They were playing hardball: If Fairchild quit the City Council, she'd avoid a criminal investigation. But she could never again seek public office in Mesquite," the article said.
The article goes on to describe a phone call Fairchild received just before she took her husband's life and then her own. "'You know, you brought this on yourself,' the caller said," is how O'Neill quoted Bob Shively, "a retired medical sales executive from Rochester, Minnesota, [who] fancies himself a behind-the-scenes player."
O'Neill then states that "Shively admits making the phone call that had Fairchild so upset the day before she died. But he denies calling to taunt her, even if that is the way she took it."
Throughout the article, O'Neill explains Mesquite's long history of political firestorms that seem to erupt every two years during what some longtime residents call "the silly season," officially known as campaigns for municipal and general elections. She discusses the particularly brutal mayoral campaign in 2007 in which Holecheck won over incumbent Mayor Bill Nicholes by 200 votes.
She goes on to describe how the 2011 mayoral race was shaping up to be more of the same. "Mesquite has never re-elected an incumbent mayor, and Susan Holecheck was determined to change that in 2011. She faced three challengers - City Councilman Dave Bennett, political newcomer Mark Wier, who works for the phone company, and Fairchild."
"There are plenty of people in Mesquite who believe Fairchild was targeted for a 'political hit.' They include Nicholes, the mayor Holecheck ousted from office. Nicholes felt bullied during the 2007 race and believes Fairchild fell victim to the same political dirty tricks," is how O'Neill described the situation.
O'Neill says Holecheck "denies playing petty politics, explaining that she did what she had to as mayor. 'This idea that we were going to pound her into the sand isn't true,' she said. 'Unfortunately, I got blamed for it all.'"
The article goes on to trace the mayoral election through to Wier's election to the seat. It also mentions that one of the first actions Wier and the City Council took after they were sworn into office July 1 was to rescind the Mesquite Code of Conduct for Elected Officials. The Code is what Holecheck, City Attorney Cheryl Hunt, and the then-City Council used to charge Fairchild with wrongdoing.
The newly elected council also began allowing citizens to attend technical reviews meetings, previously closed to the public. The meetings are used by council members and City Staff to review agenda items for upcoming Council meetings. Many citizens felt they were used to manipulate the agenda and secure agreements on pending actions between council members ahead of time. All of the sitting council members and mayor denied those allegations during the spring election campaign.
Those two actions answered the call from many voters during the campaign season to change the way Mesquite elected officials responded to their constituents.
During the course of her investigation, O'Neill conducted several interviews with the previous editor of the Mesquite Local News, Morris Workman. O'Neill described an interview Workman had with Donna Fairchild just before she shot her husband while he slept and then killed herself. He added the interview to the online arm of the newspaper the Saturday before the tragic end of the Fairchilds' lives.
Workman mentioned to O'Neill that reader comments were divided between positive messages for Donna and negative ones calling for her ouster from City Council and the mayoral race.
Some local Mesquite residents later blamed Workman's articles and associated reader comments as causing, in part, the situation between Donna, Holecheck, and the City Council to escalate.
O'Neill quoted Workman as saying, "'We get blamed for being mean. What we're guilty of is trying to get to the truth.'"
O'Neill also pointed out that Workman, who was replaced as editor of the popular news source in June, felt that "he's now more aware of the impact his stories have on people."
O'Neill also points out that City Manager Tim Hacker was fired in May, and Police Chief Douglas Law, retired in April. While she doesn't directly relate all of the subsequent personnel actions to the Fairchild murder-suicide, she does say, "With a changing of the guard, the city built on the dreams of people from somewhere else will continue to grow and change long after the players in the Donna Fairchild tragedy move on."
The complete CNN.com article, "Deaths reveal a small town's mean streak," O'Neill, Ann, August 21, 2011 11:11 a.m. EDT is available through this Web link: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/21/mesquite.murder.suicide/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
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