• Derek Brouwer ©️ Seven Days
• Burlington police at the scene of the triple shooting on North Prospect Street

So much for a relaxing holiday weekend.

For Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, three college students visiting Burlington, it ended with senseless, life-altering violence on Saturday night, when the 20-year-old men were shot while walking on North Prospect Street.

I knew something terrible had happened when I saw an email from Seven Days reporter Derek Brouwer at 9:20 p.m. with the subject line: "post up on triple shooting in U district." The "U" indicated it was near the University of Vermont.

Derek had been 10 hours into writing a cover story for next week's paper when he saw the Burlington Police Department advisory. He texted deputy news editor Sasha Goldstein, who was out to dinner with family in Connecticut, and offered to cover it. Derek went to the crime scene to glean what he could for an online story. Sasha edited the post and published it on our website at 9:44 p.m. Readers who subscribe to our Know It All email newsletter got a bare-bones account of the triple shooting in their inboxes first thing Sunday morning.

Derek woke up to reports on social media about the victims. As soon as he discovered that all three were of Palestinian descent — two are U.S. citizens; one is a legal resident — he knew the incident had an important new dimension and would attract international attention. A post from their former West Bank school identified the three young men, all students at East Coast colleges, and suggested the vicious attack might be a hate crime. Still, Derek waited to get confirmation from their families, as well as information from Burlington police.

"With a story of this nature, we did not want to report off social media," said news editor Matthew Roy, who was in the Berkshires visiting his in-laws when the news broke. "We didn't want to put something out that we would have to pull back later." For example, NBC published an early story that had some mistakes. "It said all three were wearing kaffiyehs, a patterned scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian identity. Only two were," Matthew explained. "It also said they were being harassed at the time of the shooting, and that turned out not to be true."

On Sunday morning, Matthew texted the entire news team to ask who else was available to help Derek. Shocked and moved by the brazen brutality of the crime, reporters Courtney Lamdin and Colin Flanders raised their hands. Colin knocked on doors in the neighborhood. Courtney and Derek made calls from the Seven Days office, alternating writing and reporting. On his way back to Vermont from Massachusetts, Matthew stopped to edit their work, our second online story, from a metal picnic table in front of a Stewart's outside Hoosick Falls, N.Y.

• Courtney Lamdin ©️ Seven Days
• A rally outside Burlington City Hall on Sunday

Courtney, Colin and Derek all went to the pro-Palestine solidarity rally in front of Burlington City Hall that evening, then moved to a coffee shop, where they worked on additions to the story until they were politely told to leave at 7 p.m. By the time they got home, news outlets around the country had reported even more information about the victims, so they kept updating, citing other outlets' reporting, until just before 9 p.m. Sasha got back to Vermont before Matthew, so he took a last look at their hard work late on Sunday.

On Monday morning, Sasha reported a third online story: The alleged shooter, Jason J. Eaton, had been arrested. Colin went to the arraignment and shared the affidavit with Sasha, who added the charges — three counts of attempted second-degree murder — and other details to his piece. Courtney and Colin attended the subsequent press conference at Burlington City Hall while Derek was back in the office, working the phones, trying to find out more about Eaton.

That's the kind of shoe-leather reporting it takes to deliver responsible, fact-checked breaking news. Unlike in the social media posts people love to share, every claim has to be substantiated. While they rarely credit local media outlets like Seven Days, regional and national outfits such as the Boston Globe and the New York Times rely on our coverage to get theirs. So my in-laws can text from Barcelona: "On CNN: shooting in Burlington!"

Vermonters in Chittenden County are fortunate to have multiple media outlets doing good work. That's not the case in many places around the state, and the country, where newspapers have closed or become "ghost" papers that publish rehashed national news devoid of local reporting.

According to the most recent report from the Local News Initiative, a project of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, "Since 2005, the country has lost more than one-fourth of its newspapers and is on track to lose a third by 2025."

As long as there are reporters willing to cut short their holiday plans to get the story, we'll do everything we can to bring it to you. Read our coverage of this evolving story in print on page 15. And note the byline on it is not one but four names.