Spin freelancer killed in Bosnia - Francis Tomasic - Brief Article

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 1994

On his first assignment for Spin, freelancer Francis Tomasic was sent to Bosnia with his high-school friend, Spin staff writer William Vollmann, to serve as an interpreter, driver and photographer. But his assignment ended abruptly on May 1, when the car Tomasic was driving ran over a mine north of Mostar.

The explosion killed the 34-year-old Tomasic, an American of Croatian descent, and Brian Benton, an amateur photographer from Seattle. Vollmann suffered shrapnel wounds on his face and arms and was released from the hospital the next day. Tomasic and Vollmann were researching a story about how the Bosnian people are surviving in their war-torn country. (Another freelancer on assignment abroad for Spin was injured a week earlier in the car-bomb explosion that killed nine people in South Africa.) "No one has ever died while working for me, and I feel terribly sad," says Spin publisher Bob Guccione Jr. "It brings home in chilling focus the reality of what we do as journalists." The New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 14 members of the press have been killed worldwide so far in 1994. CPJ says Bosnia has become the most dangerous assignment for correspondents since Vietnam.