The victim was 35-year-old José de Groot, secretary and, by all accounts, the linchpin of the faculty office of what is now the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She was involved in just about everything, and everyone liked her – she was not only great at her job but also, above all, a lovely person. She was always accommodating towards Observant journalists, too, which was not something to be taken for granted.
The tragedy was unrelated to her work. She was in the middle of a divorce; her husband struggled to accept it, but had shown no signs of violence until then. He was no stranger to those working in the building, either. It was not unusual for him to drop by, even during the time of the divorce. But that morning, something must have snapped. He took a large knife, went to Kapoenstraat, entered the small office near the back entrance and stabbed his wife “in vital organs”, as the police put it after the autopsy the next day. She died almost instantly. According to witnesses who had rushed towards the commotion, he then sat down on a chair, head bowed, and waited.
Grief
I can’t recall how, but word quickly reached us at the Observant office that something terrible had happened on Kapoenstraat – someone had been stabbed. As the university newspaper, we had to be there. I arrived to find a muted kind of chaos: red-and-white police tape, staff members in shock and grief, the dean doing everything he could to support his people and protect them from intruding eyes. And as a journalist, that’s what I was, an unwelcome intruder, even more so when I started asking people questions. Dean Wiel Kusters – also a poet, who wrote a beautiful obituary the same evening – was exactly the leader the faculty needed at that moment. He kept me at arm’s length. Years later, he told me he had been “quite angry” with me at the time, though he added that he understood Observant had to do its job.
But I did it with a heavy heart. It felt cruel to interview people still reeling with shock. I soon decided to stop asking questions and instead wrote an account based on what I could see and hear.
Sensationalism
Even so, Observant was later accused of sensationalism, unworthy of a university newspaper. It stung, as I had taken great care to avoid writing a lurid story. The accusation came, indirectly, from none other than senior lecturer José van Dijck, a former assistant professor of journalism at the University of Groningen and later president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). But with all due respect, the criticism was unfair – and, thankfully, not shared by others. To not report on what had happened, however painful, was not an option. But we covered it as soberly as possible, hoping that it would be the first and the last time.