Sep 7, 2005 3 min read

You know the type of phone call, the one that simultaneously makes your head feel hit with a 2-by-4 and your legs feel injected with Novocain. It’s the ultimate bad-news call, the one that leaves you reeling in shock and disbelief. So it was when my phone rang around noon on Labor Day, when I found out that a long-time friend and former newspaper colleague, Sherri Petrucci McGibbon, had died in an automobile accident while traveling home from Kennywood Park with her family. Sherri, whom I had known since shortly after her 1990 graduation from Penn State when she began working at the Herald-Standard, was only 37 years old.

She was in the front passenger seat of her 1991 Honda Civic, which was being driven by her husband Alister, when another car reportedly crossed the centerline and hit them head-on. Alister and their two children – Ashley, 12, and Andrew, 6 – were hospitalized in conditions ranging from good to serious.

Sherri and I went way back. She invited me to her wedding. Several years later, after she returned to the Herald-Standard after a brief stay in Connecticut and had established herself as a top-shelf reporter in our Connellsville office, we worked as a team from 1999 through 2002 covering county government. In 2000 we won a Keystone Press Award for Public Service/Investigative Reporting, for an expose on travel expenses at the Fayette County Redevelopment Authority, but in truth I played second fiddle on that project.

Sherri was my kind of newsperson: instinctive, determined and aggressive, with the writing ability to put words on paper in a way readers could understand, no matter how complex the issue. We had a few disagreements along the way, but that’s how it is with creative, confident, idealistic types, which is what each of us was. Those aren’t bad traits to possess in this field, and particularly in this county, so in Sherri I found a kindred spirit when it came to the pursuit of journalism for its own sake.

When she left the field to return to college to become a schoolteacher, she still sent me e-mails, most of them humorous in nature, as a means of staying in touch. We sometimes got together for lunch or talked on the phone, with each of us lamenting our lack of spare time and the demands of our respective educational ventures.

One day, we promised, we would get together again. Sometime soon. Just the two of us, or maybe we’d meet with a mutual friend. But we were going to do it, as soon as our respective schedules permitted. That day was going to come, and war stories only we would understand were going to be swapped once again. Guaranteed.

Except that there are no guarantees in life, as I was brutally reminded by that awful Labor Day phone call. A tragic accident has taken that option off the table. I’ve lost a friend and a fellow journalist who wasn’t afraid to get in the trenches where the real gritty work is done. Her family has lost even more: an irreplaceable daughter, wife and mother.

Take it easy, Sherri. Some day we’ll collaborate again. But if there’s any nepotism or corruption or rule-breaking in the afterlife, I know you’ll uncover it all on your own.

Paul Sunyak is editorial page editor of the Herald-Standard. He can be reached at (724) 439-7577 or at begin psunyak@heraldstandard.com psunyak@heraldstandard.com end