By Anne Harpham

A shootout between police and the driver of a pickup truck on Oct. 4 generated headlines, not only because of the gunbattle that occurred in front of Kane'ohe District Park but because a toddler was in the truck.

Readers questioned our handling of the followup stories of Oct. 5 and last Tuesday. On Oct. 5, the headline said: "HPD unaware boy was in truck." The lead paragraph of the story said police were not aware a 22-month-old boy was in the truck during the gunbattle. But six inches into the story, there was an acknowledgement by police that plainclothes officers, who were not involved in the exchange of gunfire, had seen the child in the truck. The child's father also was in the truck. As it was later determined, both the child and his father had been kidnapped by Arnold Willets, who was later shot and killed by police.

Then on Tuesday, a Page One story focused on criticism by an attorney for the father of the young boy. The lawyer criticized police for shooting when some officers knew there was a child in the truck.

One caller said there was a discrepancy between the Sunday story and Tuesday's. Did police know or not know? And why didn't we highlight the difference in the two stories?

It's a fair point.

More thought should have gone into both the writing of the headline in the Sunday story and the followup story on Tuesday. The Sunday story indicated some police knew there was a boy in the truck, but the headline did not reflect that. On Tuesday, we did not reflect that earlier reports had focused on police not knowing the youngster was in the truck.

Some readers wondered why we were a day behind other media last week in running stories about biological and chemical tests conducted by the military in Hawai'i in the 1960s. It wasn't that we didn't think the story important, missed it or ignored it. In fact, we were years ahead of everyone else.

Advertiser reporter Sandra Oshiro, who is now our assistant managing editor for new media, broke this story locally in July 1984 after obtaining declassified documents from the military through a Freedom of Information request. Editors working Tuesday night looked up the old story and decided the AP report didn't contain anything new, so a decision was made not to run the story.

But, in fact, there were details in last week's release of information that we did not have in 1984. We followed up the next day with a report from our Washington correspondent, as well as some additional reporting here. Editors sometimes tend to think readers recall everything they've read, and we are trained to always favor "fresh" news over something previously reported. But 18 years is a long time, and I doubt there are a lot of readers who recall our original stories. For those reasons, we should have used the AP story when we received it and noted in it that we had reported much of the same information in 1984.

Senior Editor Anne Harpham is The Advertiser's reader representative. Reach her at 525-8033 or aharpham@honoluluadvertiser.com.