ROBERT BOAG | The Breeze

This photo of the Springfest riot appeared on the front page of The Breeze.

ROBERT BOAG | The Breeze

Police in riot gear form a line at the Springfest riot on April 10.

JEANNA DUERSCHERL The Roanoke Times

Katie Thisdell, editor of The Breeze, James Madison University's student newspaper, holds the Springfest riot edition in her newsroom.

HARRISONBURG -- Here comes Editor-in-Chief Katie Thisdell:

The Roanoke native, who stands 5-foot-2 in her sensible shoes, started her own newspaper as a second-grader (her big scoop: a story about the mushrooms growing in a neighbor's yard), prefers hard-boiled news stories over English literature, thinks slipping grades are an acceptable sacrifice to make in order to chase stories, and, like generations of editors before her, has been heard to swear.

Now, as editor of James Madison University's student-run newspaper, The Breeze, the 20-year-old junior finds herself, to her surprise, at the center of controversy. For a change, she is not just covering the story, she is part of it. A big part.

"It's not the fun I expected," Thisdell said Tuesday, sitting on a couch in her dusty office with her legs tucked beneath her.

Advocates of press freedom around the state had their hackles raised Friday when Rockingham County's prosecutor, along with at least a half-dozen police officers, showed up at The Breeze's tiny newsroom on South Main Street demanding that the paper hand over all the photos its photographers had taken during a student riot the preceding weekend. The photos could, in theory, aid in the prosecution of the rioters, dozens of whom had been arrested.

Thisdell, a media arts and design major, had been editor only since April 1. And now she had to decide whether to comply with a demand she understood to be unlawful. It was a moral quandary that many editors spend entire careers without facing, yet there was Thisdell, days on the job, not quite fluent in the intricacies of press law, but nonetheless confident that she was right and the police were wrong.

"It was baptism by fire," said her father, John Thisdell, an accountant. "She called me Friday afternoon. She was very excited."

Though not yet resigned to the fact that "her classes take second place to the newspaper," John Thisdell said her excitement over the showdown did not surprise him.

"She's very passionate about the paper, and about news in general," he said. "I don't know how many times I've told her to turn off her cellphone and her computer and go to the library. But she says, 'I can't. This is going on.' "

John Thisdell and his wife, Amy, had, without intending to, it seems, given birth to a newshound.

Katie Thisdell said she doesn't know when or how she fell in love with journalism (online, she follows the Twitter tweets of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine, among other news outlets). Her aunt, Roberta Vowell, once wrote for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and a neighbor across the street, Ricky Lovegrove, was also a newsman, she said, but she doesn't recall catching the journalism bug from them.

"I always liked asking questions," she said. "I'm not really the most outgoing person. I think journalism has made me very confident. I'm not afraid to talk to anyone now."

Thisdell said she began as a reporter at The Breeze during her first or second week as a freshman, intent on plugging herself into the JMU community. (While a student at Patrick Henry High School she wrote for The Edge, the teen page of The Roanoke Times. As a Girl Scout, she helped fourth- and fifth-graders at Hurt Park Elementary -- where her mother teaches -- put out their own newspaper.) Her sophomore year at JMU she became news editor of The Breeze. The editor-in-chief slot was the next logical step.

Then, 10 days into the top job, the riot erupted during the school's annual Springfest block party. Thisdell was at the April 10 party when students began to get out of hand. She said when she saw the police preparing their riot gear -- they would eventually use tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd of thousands -- she reacted like the editor she had become: She began alerting her news staff, mobilizing photographers and text-messaging updates to a reporter.

The headline on the paper the following Monday said "War Zone," and the photo showed student revelers whooping it up around a giant bonfire. The issue appeared as prospective students toured campus, a coincidence that Thisdell said did not give her pause about running the story of student mayhem out front. "We're not going to put a photo of [school mascot] Duke Dog on the front page," she said. "That's not our job."

The issue was a monster hit. Stacks of the newspaper typically stand 2 feet high in the newsstands in the middle of the day. That Monday, though, the stacks were reduced to a mere 2 inches. Students were snatching them up. "It was our hottest issue ever," Thisdell said with pride.

On Wednesday, April 14, though, a state police officer mentioned to a news editor that investigators might want to look at the newspaper's unpublished photos. Thisdell said that's when she realized she had better be prepared, so she began talking to faculty advisers Mike Grundmann and Brad Jenkins. She also spoke with Roger Soenksen, professor of mass communications law at JMU. The consensus: Don't give up the photos because federal law generally protects news gathering organizations from having to share working material with investigators.

On April 15, Thisdell received a call from the Rockingham prosecutor's office. The man on the other end of the line very politely asked to see the photos, Thisdell recalled. She declined. Before hanging up, he asked her where her newsroom was located.

Thisdell said she had just stepped out of the shower in her apartment about 10:30 a.m. April 16, when she listened to the voice message left by office worker Charlene Rice. The message said police were in The Breeze's newsroom with a search warrant.

"I was standing there in my towel and I said, 'Oh s---!' " recalled Thisdell. "I got ready as fast as I could. I didn't have time to dry my hair or anything."

Making phone calls to advisers along the way, Thisdell raced to the newsroom, a basement office in Anthony-Seeger Hall where yellowing newspapers lie scattered across desks, long-forgotten journalism awards hang on the walls, and empty cups litter the desks. Six or seven officers in plain clothes were in the room, Thisdell recalled, and two or three more might have been in the hallway. Prosecutor Marsha Garst was also there.

Thisdell refused to turn over the photos. With a faculty adviser by her side, she cited the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, the federal law that specifically prohibits police from taking material from news gathering operations. "I said I don't need to release these to you, and I need more time to consult with legal counsel."

But Garst was adamant, Thisdell recalled. "She said if you don't give the photos up right now, we're ready to take everything out of the newsroom." (Garst declined to discuss the matter Tuesday, but said she may issue a statement at a later date.)

Faced with the possibility that the twice-weekly newspaper, which prints 9,500 copies of each issue, would be shut down by the loss of its computers, Thisdell said she stepped outside with Jenkins, her adviser. "I don't have any choice right now, do I?" she asked. "Not really," she recalled him saying.

Thisdell stepped back into the newsroom and relented. She allowed police to copy 926 photos on to CDs. Among them were 682 photos of the Springfest celebration and ensuing riot.

Professional journalism groups reacted with dismay and anger to the photo grab. The Student Press Law Center in Northern Virginia said the unpublished photos had been "improperly seized." Newspaper editorial writers weighed in with their condemnation as well.

Under fire, Garst turned over the discs of photos to Soenksen, the professor of mass communications law at JMU. The discs, supposedly not yet scrutinized by investigators, are in a sealed envelope, their fate ultimately to be decided by discussions between Garst and the newspaper's attorneys.

Soenksen said he is proud of Thisdell, whom he had taught last fall in his mass communications law class. "I think Katie has handled herself superbly in this situation," he said. "I don't think any class prepares you for a commonwealth's attorney and 10 police officers showing up in your office with a search warrant."

Soenksen said Thisdell also has done a great job of making readers aware of the free-press implications of the situation, heading off any criticism of the newspaper as being unresponsive to the law enforcement needs of the community.

As for Thisdell, she praised her staff of 16 editors and sundry contributing writers for performing well under trying circumstances. "It shows me that what we do is important," she said. "No other media was down in the riot. We were there and were able to provide coverage. It's definitely giving me quite an experience these last two weeks."