If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened

In the Preface, journalist Justin Glawe frames his memoir not as a conventional reporter's story but as the account of a self-described regular guy from the Midwest whose battle with alcoholism unfolded against the backdrop of a country tearing itself apart. He acknowledges the many experiences left out of the book, focusing instead on the events that defined both his personal collapse and the national fractures he covered.

The narrative begins in August 2014 when Glawe drove from Peoria, Illinois, to Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown. That first night, he sat near heavily armored police with a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP), a military-grade armored truck, while a sniper pointed a laser scope at civilians. He met Bill Kotsatos, a photojournalist who had covered conflict from Lebanon to Iraq. They drank at Bill's motel, and Glawe drove off drunk, waking at a rest stop. He returned as a full riot erupted and felt an immediate sense of belonging in the chaos. Over the following weeks, he appeared on national television and discovered the ritual of drinking at the boarded-up Delwood Lounge. In November, a grand jury declined to charge Officer Darren Wilson, and the crowd erupted into rioting. A woman near a burning auto parts store told Glawe, "This is just the beginning" (14), a statement he treats as prophetic throughout the book.

Glawe flashes back to his mid-twenties in Peoria, where he worked on a lawn crew before returning to community college, discovering journalism, and landing an internship at the Peoria Journal Star. During a summer of record homicides, he began spending less time in what he calls "straight life" and more in "real life," the violence after dark. When the paper declined to hire him, he moved to Bemidji, Minnesota, a small town surrounded by three Native American reservations. He clashed with police and began drinking with a group of homeless Native Americans whose lives he documented. One, Butch, died after being found face-down in a lake; no one investigated. Glawe published a series about another, Andy, but on the day the final story ran, an op-ed revealed Andy had killed a man and served prison time. That morning, Andy was struck and killed by a car, and Glawe was tormented by the possibility that Andy had walked into traffic intentionally. Rather than processing these losses, Glawe moved to the Grand Forks Herald, was quickly fired, and briefly attended a recovery meeting before resuming drinking.

Glawe immersed himself in investigating Darren Vann, a serial killer who had murdered women in Gary and Hammond, Indiana, targeting victims no one reported missing. Using FBI data, he identified about two dozen potential additional victims. He acknowledges absorbing trauma at a tremendous pace while using journalism's emphasis on facts to avoid confronting what he witnessed. Based in Chicago, he freelanced as a "domestic war correspondent."

His coverage of civil unrest intensified. In Baltimore after the police killing of Freddie Gray, Bill was sprayed with a long-range mace weapon and took a projectile that tore his ACL, while Glawe went unscathed. Back in Chicago, his girlfriend discovered him on the kitchen floor with a needle in his arm, shooting heroin for the first time. He began experiencing unexplained episodes of anxiety. When bodycam footage revealed that 17-year-old Laquan McDonald had been shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer, Glawe discovered through city records that Mayor Rahm Emanuel's staff had offered the McDonald family $5 million to settle if they agreed not to release the video. He broke the cover-up story, celebrated at the Billy Goat Tavern, and recognized that something beyond professional ambition was wrong inside him.

In 2016, Glawe drove to Piketon, Ohio, where eight members of the Rhoden family had been killed in their sleep. In Dallas, after a mass shooting killed five police officers at a Black Lives Matter rally, he met Sarah, his future wife, who answered an editor's call to cover the story despite working in fashion technology. They investigated the shooter's background together, broke an exclusive story, and fell in love. Glawe acknowledges drinking an average of 350 days a year and routinely losing hours to blackouts. On election night, he watched Donald Trump win alongside undocumented immigrants at the border.

Glawe's mental health continued to deteriorate. After settling in Dallas with Sarah, he covered the Las Vegas massacre that killed 55 people and broke the story of the security guard who first found the shooter. He partnered with Julián Cardona, a veteran Juárez photojournalist, to cover immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they found Jose, a Honduran migrant who uses a wheelchair, whom border guards had told he was worthless. Glawe admits to using journalistic objectivity to justify emotional detachment.

During the pandemic in Savannah, Georgia, Glawe's routine became daily Manhattans from five in the afternoon until blackout. After the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, he drove to the scene but failed to turn on his recorder, recognizing that drinking was compromising his journalism. He covered two weeks of protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Julián died in the months that followed; Glawe flew to El Paso, crossed the border into Juárez, and attended the funeral. In March 2021, he covered the Atlanta spa shootings, in which eight people were killed at Asian massage parlors. At the trial of Arbery's killers, he kept a bottle of Jameson in his backpack and drank most of it crying in his car after the guilty verdict. He recognizes that "the Thing," his term for the compulsive force driving his addiction, has consumed nearly everything inside him.

The memoir's final act opens with a flashback to 2006, when a 22-year-old Glawe crashed his car into a guardrail while drunk and high, connecting the near-death experience to the earlier loss of his cousin Ted in a car accident. In February 2022, on a trip to Mexico to scout wedding venues, he woke Sarah in a drunken rage and could not remember what he said. Her silent reaction marked his bottom. Back in Savannah, he tried to quit through willpower, managing only 12 days before relapsing. In May, as news broke of the massacre of 21 children in Uvalde, Texas, the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone asked him to cover the story. Instead, he walked into rehab. His therapist diagnosed him with posttraumatic stress disorder, explaining that his anxiety felt worse in sobriety because his brain was finally processing years of suppressed experiences.

In early sobriety, Glawe investigated local election officials tied to QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy movement, and covered the case of Leonard Cure, a man wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 17 years who, after being exonerated, was pulled over for speeding and fatally shot by a deputy. Glawe reflects on the connection between Cure's trauma and the broader trauma experienced by Black Americans.

The Epilogue finds Glawe at the 2024 Republican National Convention. He drove to Springfield, Illinois, after learning that Sonya Massey, a Black woman, had been shot and killed by an officer she called for help, and discovered Massey was a distant relative of William Donnegan, who was lynched in Springfield in 1908 and died at the same hospital where Massey was later pronounced dead. Glawe had compiled a list of 300 local election officials who could disrupt election certification, but Trump's decisive victory rendered those fears moot while ushering in what Glawe considers a different form of democratic peril. He notes that police have killed more than 1,000 Americans per year for three consecutive years and that the percentage of white and Black Americans who believe race relations are bad has risen sharply since Ferguson. In his closing reflections, Glawe draws a parallel between his recovery from alcoholism and the country's need to confront its own denial. He no longer seeks oblivion through alcohol but recognizes that the compulsive mind driving his addiction remains both his greatest asset and his potential downfall. He closes by asserting that he has woken from a long slumber, sober and prepared, just in time for what he believes will be the most turbulent period yet.