LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. -- My job today, with photographer Billy Hong, was to help our viewers know the woman who was murdered last night in her home. I knew this when I woke up this morning; she had three children, two girls and a boy, she was a deputy sheriff, and her 17-year-old son was charged with shooting her and her daughters to death. As a deputy sheriff, we know she was a woman in a uniform, an authority figure. We knew there was more to her, and the challenge was to find out what that was, what she was, and tell you.

The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office has a public Information Officer, Stacey Bourbonnais, who graciously talked to each of the reporters and photographers who showed up at the jail. It was clear that the woman who died, Joy Deleston, was a friend. We could see the grief and shock and weariness in her eyes. Very often at times like this, friends and family don’t want to talk to reporters and, in fact, are angry that we come around. Stacey Bourbonnais, though, knew that this was the best way to help the public see her colleague and friend as a real person, not just as a “a murder victim,” not just as a uniform with a body in it. She spoke eloquently and personally until I, too, felt a little bit of the loss she suffered.

Inside the Sheriff’s Office, where Joy Deleston had a job many of us would find awfully hard to do—she registered and tracked the whereabouts of registered sex offenders—grief ran deep. But Stacey Bourbonnais gathered four more friends who came out to the assembled cameras and microphones and each answered questions. It must have been a hard thing to do.

But through their eyes and hearts and words…and then through my story as I strung their comments together and broadcast it on WSB-TV…we all got a chance to see a real person, whose death is a real loss to good people around us. Several said her smile was beautiful, that she was such a happy person all the time she made others happy just by being around. They wouldn’t talk about her son, the one charged with murder, because they didn’t want to do anything to cause problems for the police investigation. But they did say this: ALL her children were the joy of her life. And they repeated it; ALL her children.

I am grateful to those four friends and colleagues who looked through their grief and helped us know Joy Deleston a little bit.