Community Corner
Westport Native Was With Times Journalist Who Died in Syria
Shadid and Hicks had been covering the conflict in Syria for about a week without the knowledge of the Syrian government, the Times said in a report.
Westport native and New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks reportedly carried the body of his colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid, over the Syria border into Turkey after Shadid died from an apparent asthma attack on Thursday.
Shadid and Hicks had been covering the present conflict in Syria for about a week without the knowledge of the Syrian government, the Times said in a report.
Shadid and Hicks, both veteran journalists, have been dropping over international borders to cover war and civil strife for a number of years: The two survived a harrowing ordeal in early 2011 after they were captured by soldiers loyal to Muammar Gaddafi while covering the uprising in Libya. Along with them were Times journalists Lynsey Addario — also a Westport native and graduate of Staples High School — and Stephen Farrell. All four were safely released.
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Hicks also covered the war in Afghanistan in 2006, developing a close relationship with Creek Company of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division.
“This may sound trivial but Tyler collected all the cigarettes from the unit that was leaving and passed them out to the smokers of my platoon,” Jason Schlesinger, a member of the company, told Patch’s Anthony Karge in an email in March 2011. "So, not only did he stay with our unit with very minimal supplies, he came back from what could have been his ride home, but he came back bearing gifts.”
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Schlesinger told Karge when his company heard about Hicks’ capture by Libyan forces, “we all believed that if there was any one person who was tough enough to cope and get through that kind of ordeal it would be Tyler.”
"RIP Anthony Shadid, a truly great journalist and a great colleague," Farrell said in a message on Twitter on Thursday.
"Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces," Executive Editor Jill Abramson wrote to Times staff in an internal e-mail Thursday, according to the Hartford Courant.
