Tuesday night was supposed to be a time of neighborly fellowship at several places, three of them churches, in Pottstown.

Tuesday was National Night Out, the designation for the first Tuesday in August as a time for people in towns and cities throughout the nation to turn on their porch lights, barbecue on the sidewalk, and get to know neighbors as a means of taking back the streets, as they say, and strengthening neighborhoods in a show against crime.

I had volunteered to help out at the Night Out block party sponsored by the Historic Pottstown Neighborhood Association and Zion's United Church of Christ, as I am a member of Zion's and serve on the committee that was working with the neighborhood group.

Here at The Mercury, I assigned a photographer and reporter to visit at least two of the events. Earlier in the day, one of the organizers at the Bright Hope Night Out event called to request coverage, commenting that seeing people coming together would be refreshing news amid the crime and punishment headlines of the daily world.

But, things didn't work out as planned. Unfortunately, crime and punishment prevailed.

Just before 5 p.m., a call was heard on the police scanner, stating that a female juvenile was shot by a man with a shotgun at a home near Farmington Avenue and Wilson Street, and the man fled the scene on foot.

Police reporter Brandie Kessler ran from the newsroom to drive to the scene, and calls went out to photographers John Strickler and Kevin Hoffman. Strickler was home getting cleaned up after covering a smoky fire in Boyertown in which a woman was killed earlier in the day, and Hoffman was shooting photos at the American Legion state tournament at Bear Stadium.

Within minutes, all three were at the scene of the shooting, which was behind Farmington on Poplar Street.

Meanwhile, we listened to the police scanner, following the path of a K-9 tracker and monitoring the locations of police roadblocks and searches.

A short time later, we heard calls for a man found bloodied in the backseat of a car parked in an apartment complex just off Route 100 about 8 miles north of the Pottstown shooting scene.

Kessler and Hoffman traveled to Almont Apartments and confirmed that the man in the car was indeed the shooting suspect police were seeking. Investigators later confirmed his wounds were self-inflicted.

For the next several hours, we tried to piece together the story of domestic violence that escalated to an apparent attempted murder-suicide.

Neither a reporter nor a photographer nor this volunteer ever made it to Night Out. Instead, we spent those hours in the newsroom working on the story of a tragedy, while the community was trying to make a statement against crime.

Just to emphasize the challenge -- or perhaps to move people even closer together -- the skies opened up and it poured on the Night Out events.

Undaunted, organizers moved inside churches, or in the case of Bright Hope went home already satisfied having spent a few hours grilling and getting along.

The irony did not escape us that news coverage of a positive anti-violence event was thwarted because our attention was turned to reporting domestic violence in our town.

This incident involved Tyrone Dalton, a former Pottstown High School sports standout described as a good man and a devoted father and his estranged wife Latanya. In a petition filed in June for a temporary restraining order, Latanya Dalton wrote that her husband had threatened her during arguments.

The petition said they had been separated since March. Their divorce was made final Tuesday.

This incident has nothing to do with whether the streets of Pottstown are safe, nor does it represent a deterioration of society toward crime. It represents a different scourge, that of violence that results when the intense feelings in a relationship twist into rage.

Domestic violence is a crime that occurs behind closed doors, and neighborhoods coming together will not stop it.

National Night Out survived, and we returned the next day to report on the events that made it through the rain. We also returned to follow the story of a careen toward violence from a life that once held such promise as an athlete, role model, son, husband and father.

The two stories exist side by side, one to better a community and the other to mourn the damage to a torn family. Both represent life in our town -- the good, the bad, and the ambiguous.