By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

UMass rallies for Jill Carroll

Here is how the Daily Collegian of UMass Amherst covered yesterday’s rally in support of kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll, a UMass alumnus. The rally, which drew more than 100 people, was sponsored by the Collegian, where Carroll was a reporter during her student days.

On the Christian Science Monitor’s Carroll weblog, you can watch the one of the public-service announcements being shown on Iraqi television that urges Carroll’s release.

Finally, while searching for something else, I came across a tribute that Carroll wrote in 2004 about a classmate named Casey Kane, who had died. Here is part of what Carroll wrote:

I spent the “greatest day ever” with her playing softball and eating hotdogs in my backyard at the one-time-only Collegian picnic. Years later she sent me a picture of all of us from that day, festooned in the rhinestones and glitter she knows I love. She came in the beautiful green dress she wore in Holyoke’s Irish festival pagent in (whose name escapes me) to the Collegian formal at my house—an event she conceived. We danced so hard the floorboards flexed and pictures were knocked off my neighbors’ walls.

In honoring her classmate, Carroll showed herself to be a compassionate and devoted friend, full of life, a keen observer of the world around her. With luck, Carroll will be coming home soon.

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5 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Here is to that hope!!She is the brand of journalist we need and have to get back.The long delay in anything being carried out on her is very very positive. They must be very hesitant to kill a person who has had only a positive young career so far and the many personalities and friends that have come out in support of her release must be making it very hard for these idiots to do the deed. I think they just trying to stretch their leverage and try to extract more for her release.I hope she comes back home very soon.

  2. Anonymous

    N.

  3. Jeanie

    What appears to be muddling here is that no one in Baghdad seems to know who the kidnappers are.

  4. Michael Corcoran

    The image of the young Jill Carroll crying while held prisoner has been one of the more heartwrenching images I have seen in some time.I hope — and hope and hope — that she will be back home and safe sometime very soon.

  5. Anonymous

    The video of Carroll crying is the most harrowing thing I’ve seen in years. How the hostage takers think this can win favor for their cause is beyond me. There are humans who live in a different universe than I, that baffles me. I’ll never understand.

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