Fox 4 Freaked Out About a "Gruesome" Rat While Reporting on a Deadly Car Crash

Journalism is dangerous work. One never knows who -- or what -- one might encounter. In the case of Fox 4's Latoya Silmon, it was a rodent. She described her reaction on Facebook: Omg just screamed to the top if my lungs!!! A rat just crawled by us. We are...

By Eric Nicholson

July 24, 2013

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Journalism is dangerous work. One never knows who -- or what -- one might encounter. In the case of Fox 4's Latoya Silmon, it was a rodent.

She described her reaction on Facebook:

Omg just screamed to the top if my lungs!!! A rat just crawled by us. We are on the side of i30 at east chase. Yikes!!!

Silmon posted this a few minutes before reporting that three people -- two adults and an infant -- had been killed in a car wreck a few steps away. Maybe it seemed at the time like a bad crash but not fatal.

But Fox 4 very much knew that three people were dead, and that a 41-year-old man had been arrested for intoxication, when it posted a video of her reaction on Facebook, describing it as "[t]he gruesome 'rat' horror that Latoya Silmon FOX 4 had to deal during her live shot."

Never fear. Silmon made it through the ordeal with only minor emotional scarring.

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