Back before the big corporate buyout, before reporters thought they should make a union, before home delivery stopped, we were a family.
Old, young, married, single, liberal, conservative, and as it turns out gay and straight, we were a family at the Casper Star-Tribune.
In the fall of 1998, our politics reporter was a string bean of a kid from Sheridan named Jason Marsden.
He liked Tootsie Rolls and cats.
He had a great giggle and was the life of the party.
Ivy League-educated, he was incredibly smart and had a way about him that made everyone tell him everything.
Turns out, he was gay, which made him the first gay person I knew that I knew.
I didn’t know that, though, until Matthew Shepard died in October 1998, robbed, beaten and left for dead at the base of a buck rail fence on the outskirts of Laramie.
Matthew, a Casper kid, also was gay and a University of Wyoming student.
Twenty seven years later, with 9/11 and COVID since, I still think his death is the most impactful news event in Wyoming.
It took away our innocence.
Jason wrote a column, “Hatred will always target light,” the day Matthew died.
He came out in the column.
A week later, we had a big staff lunch at Botticelli’s downtown, the place that gave you little saucers of balsamic vinegar and olive oil to dip bread.
At lunch, looking out on a busy Second Street at noon time, Jason told us that he was leaving, that it was clear he could not stay in Wyoming.
He moved to Denver and was the executive director of The Matthew Shepard Foundation, working alongside Matthew’s parents, for decades.
Recently, he left the foundation and moved to Salida, Colorado, where he was the executive director of the Greater Arkansas River Nature Association.
Twenty years after Matthew’s death, in October 2018, the Star-Tribune produced a fabulous commemorative piece marking the two decades since that fateful day.
Jason wrote a guest column, proclaiming that not much had changed in Wyoming and there was still so much left to be done to change hatred into light.
As the only newsroom person still at the CST after 20 years, I was honored to write a column as well. It mostly focused on my kids, who were 14 and 8 when Matthew was killed.
In my column, I said, “We were horrified then and we are horrified now, bound by sorrow that we expect will dull but in some ways has sharpened over two decades.”
Jason Marsden died of natural causes at home on February 25. He was 52.
Services will be held at 1 p.m., Saturday, March 15, at Salida United Methodist Church.
Yes, the sorrow has sharpened.
