Tom Jarriel, a globetrotting, Emmy-winning reporter who was best known for his work on the ABC newsmagazine “20/20” but also served as the network’s chief White House correspondent and weekend news anchor, died on Thursday at a nursing facility in Annapolis, Md. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his son Steve, who said he had a debilitating stroke last year.
Mr. Jarriel started at “20/20” in 1979 — a year after it went on the air — and was there for 23 years. His subjects included the child victims of the civil war in Mozambique (including a 9-year-old boy forced by rebels to burn down his own house), the return of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and famine in Ethiopia.
“We did not do happy stories together,” Janice Tomlin, his longtime producer, said in an interview. “You had to be in serious trouble for Tom and I to do a story on you.”
He considered the defining story of his career to be a series of reports over a decade on the thousands of forgotten, abused and malnourished orphans in Romania. He and Ms. Tomlin found them naked and warehoused in orphanages — some of them dying, others with flies all over them, and others in primitive institutions for what Mr. Jarriel said were unsalvageable children.
“In more than 50 institutions hidden in remote areas of Romania, innocent children are locked away like condemned prisoners,” Mr. Jarriel said in one of two reports broadcast in 1990. “These are not the orphanages seen before on American television. These are state-run asylums shrouded in secrecy. This is where children with physical or mental defects are banished by a government which has branded them worthless.”
Ms. Tomlin recalled: “We found children in cages, with their heads shaved, four to a crib, some in straitjackets. It was like Auschwitz. The children were dying from malnutrition and fixable things.”
She said that their reports spurred many American families to adopt Romanian children, but that many more were left behind. She herself adopted two Romanian girls.
Mr. Jarriel won four of his of his 19 News and Documentary Emmy Awards for the Romanian series, as well as an award from the Easter Seals Society (now Easterseals) and a citation from Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
Thomas Edwin Jarriel was born on Dec. 29, 1934, in LaGrange, Ga., and grew up there and in Shreveport, La., the youngest of six children of William and Ruth Jarriel. His father was a supervisor at a meat manufacturing plant and his mother managed the home.
He went to the University of Houston on a tennis scholarship and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1956. After two years as a chaplain’s assistant in the Army at Fort Monmouth, N.J., he joined the Houston television station KPRC, where he worked as a cameraman, on-air reporter and anchor.
After seven years, Mr. Jarriel was hired by ABC News, where he covered the space program and the civil rights movement. ABC said that he was the only network correspondent in Memphis on the night of the fatal shooting of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel. After conducting interviews at the scene, Mr. Jarriel went to a local studio and reported that before the shooting, “members of Dr. King’s staff were there discussing a mass rally that was planned for tonight” when they heard a sound “like a firecracker” coming from an apartment house across the street from the motel.
“Officers came forward to secure the area,” he added.
ABC shifted Mr. Jarriel to Washington in 1969 where he was the chief White House correspondent during the presidencies of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. He covered everything from Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 to the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation.
In a 1977 speech to a women’s group in Akron, Ohio, Mr. Jarriel recalled that Nixon was “always difficult, always uneasy with the press,” adding, “Our best relationships with him were on the trips abroad when he was more relaxed.” Ford, he said, was “a welcome relief.”
After leaving the White House, Mr. Jarriel worked as senior regional correspondent for ABC’s “World News Tonight.” In 1979, he was named an anchor of the network’s weekend newscast, which he stayed with until 1990, and also joined “20/20.”
“Tom was the ultimate hard-core international correspondent,” said Victor Neufeld, a former longtime senior producer and executive producer of “20/20.” “He loved those journalistic adventures — he went undercover, slept in jungles, lived with guerrilla armies, very intense and potentially dangerous. He’d disappear with his producer for a week or two and come back with stories that he did without drama, enhancement or anything artificial.”
The subjects of Mr. Jarriel’s domestic reports for “20/20” included female members of the United States military who said they were sexually assaulted and abused while serving their country; wretched conditions at nursing homes in Texas, where Mr. Jarriel said he found “patients tied to the chairs, patients bound to their beds, patients uncared for and unwanted”; and cases of mentally ill people being jailed for crimes instead of being treated in hospitals.
He and Ms. Tomlin also collaborated on an Emmy-winning 1983 report about the death in Alabama of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights volunteer from Detroit who was killed on March 25, 1965, on a highway between Selma and Montgomery after the Freedom March between the two cities. She was driving a Black activist when she was shot by a high-powered rifle from a car packed with four men — three Ku Klux Klansmen and Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., an informer for the F.B.I. who had infiltrated the Klan.
Mrs. Liuzzo’s family unsuccessfully sued the F.B.I., arguing that the government had been negligent in recruiting, training and supervising Mr. Rowe, and that this negligence had resulted in Mrs. Liuzzo’s death.
Two of the Klansmen said Mr. Rowe fired the fatal shot. Mr. Rowe’s testimony against all three Klansmen helped lead to their convictions on conspiracy charges. Mr. Rowe was not charged.
In addition to his son Steve, Mr. Jarriel is survived by his wife, Joan (Borgeson) Jarriel; two other sons, Michael and Jeffrey; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
In Mr. Jarriel’s final report from Romania in 2001, a year before his retirement, he and Ms. Tomlin found a baby business in which adoption agencies received about $25,000 for the most desirable children, while others were sold for $700 on the black market. Tens of thousands of orphans lived in run-down state housing.
“Ten years later,” he said, “it’s disappointing to see how little has changed for the children of Romania.”
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