Captain uses national TV to apologize for firefighter taking cell phone video of dead woman. Why did it take eight months for Spalding County, Georgia to tell Dayna Kempson's family they're sorry?

Previous coverage of this story

One thing the lawyers for the company that owned the TV station where I used to work drummed into our heads was what to do if you made a mistake in a story. The answer was pretty basic and pretty smart, clearly correct the record and apologize immediately. It won't always make all problems vanish but it sets you in the right direction for cutting your losses and getting the problem behind you. And more important, it's the right thing to do.

But too often organizations don't see that as an important first step when it is very clear someone has screwed up. Some lawyers or bosses will tell you to just shut up.

Spalding County, Georgia Captain Lee Slaughter told ABC's 20/20 that's exactly what happened when he learned one of his firefighters, Terrence Reid, had taken and distributed cell phone video of a dead woman who was in an automobile collision last July 17. The victim was Dayna Kempson and, as I am sure most of you know, that video eventually found its way to Kempson's father. Jeff Kempson went public with the story in October.

Reid was fired and Slaughter was one of seven firefighters disciplined because of Reid's actions. But according to Jeff Kempson, the apology from Captain Slaughter (in the video above) is the only official one the Kempsons have received. Congratulations to Captain Slaughter for doing what is right even when those above him couldn't find the decency to do the same much earlier in this process. 

You have to ask yourself what were Slaughter's bosses and the Spalding County lawyers thinking. There was no doubt from the start that this was an enormous screw-up on the part of Firefighter Reid and the department. Knowing that, it seems to me that the one of the initial and most important steps in trying to make this right should have been to first privately and then publicly apologize to Dayna Kempson's family. Not doing so is a great insult on top of the injury the department already inflicted.

Here's more from the ABC News story:

Slaughter, as acting scene commander, was chastised in the investigators' report for not properly supervising the scene and for being unaware Reid was taking the video.

Slaughter agreed to speak to "20/20" to apologize to the Kempsons on behalf of the fire department. During the investigation, he said, he was prohibited from contacting the couple.

"We never got an opportunity to tell the family," he said, "that we're very sorry that this happened and we did not, or do not condone what his young man did."

The Kempsons said that's the first official apology they've received. They're still waiting for one from Terrence Reid.

If you view the clips that follow Captain Slaughter's apology you will see 20/20 focused on an aspect of the story that is similar to what I brought up the other day about a problem in Pasadena, Texas. In that case the fire chief discovered, despite handling the issue three years ago when a firefighter took nude pictures of his wife inside the fire station and posted them on the Internet, the offending pictures are sill on the web haunting the department.

Similarly, the video of Dayna Kempson is still on the Internet and probably always will be. The other clips are interviews with experts about the legalities of the Internet and tips on how Kempson's grandparents can try to make sure Dayna's children don't stumble upon those images.