popular thinking

HER NAME WAS CLAIRE O'LEARY: A day later, the rest of the Boston media follows up on the mysterious case of Claire O'Leary, the 20-year-old from Westport, Conn., who climbed along the steel girders and rafters supporting the right-field grandstand roof of Fenway Park on Sunday night. Mark Triffitt, one of several fans in attendance that night with cameras, supplied photos of O'Leary to local media.

What's more interesting to me, though, is how some media reports continue to put forward false, misleading or contradictory information about the incident, and how some eyewitness accounts also have gotten fuzzy on the facts.

One report had city firefighters extending a ladder truck from outside Fenway -- what would that have done, exactly? Another report had city officials claiming they were using bullhorns to persuade O'Leary to climb down safely -- the concert was so loud, I had to yell into my cell phone about 10 times before the Herald city desk could even figure out that I was telling them a girl was dangling from the roof. If cops, Fenway security or anyone else was talking to O'Leary, she wasn't listening. She barely even looked in our direction.

She wasn't dancing on the Budweiser sign or on the girders. She wasn't sitting there for "a long time." She was too busy making her way from section to section. As I reported late Sunday night, she was sitting on a beam extending down from the farthest end of the roof for about two songs, then made an attempt to reach the upper corner of the roof directly beneath retired No. 1 when she lost her footing, held on for several seconds, then fell, at 10:11 p.m. Sunday.

There was pretty much nothing that could've been done to stop her once she got out there.

Mark Pazniokas, reporter for The Hartford Courant (disclosure: I interned there in 1992), attended the concert with his wife and provided a first-person account in today's paper, available here. He had the Stones done with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and into "Brown Sugar" when she fell. My notes recorded the time of her fall and specifics before I wrote down the next song. Other than that, our stories match.

None of the stories, curiously enough, have mentioned drugs and/or alcohol.

Related roundup:
-- WHDH-TV (Ch. 7) (includes video)
-- CBS4 Boston (includes video, slideshow)
-- Boston Globe
-- Boston Herald
-- Hartford Courant