“Oh my God,” he thought when he read the text.

It was Saturday night, and Ben Schmitt, an assistant news editor at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, had spent all day helping lead coverage of the most horrific Jewish massacre in American history.

Around 9 p.m., some of the names of the victims began trickling out. One name stopped Schmitt cold: Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz.

Schmitt didn’t want to believe it at first. But the journalist in him knew better. A Google search revealed just one Dr. Rabinowitz in the greater Pittsburgh area. That fact, along with years of crime reporting experience, told to him to follow his instinct. So he dispatched a reporter to the doctor’s house.

No one was home.

“It made sense that Dr. Rabinowitz would’ve been at the temple,” Schmitt told me Sunday night, recounting the moment he feared he’d lost the man who’d cared for him for long stretches of his life.

In the immediate aftermath of a mass murder, a kind of chaos settles over a community. Information can be hard to obtain. And journalists can’t publish the name of a victim without official confirmation.

But the burden of proof is different for those in your inner circle. Schmitt knew in his gut that his doctor had been gunned down Saturday morning at Tree of Life synagogue, where 10 others were killed. He knew he had to tell his father.

For while Rabinowitz, 66, had cared for Schmitt as a teenager and in the decade since Schmitt returned home to Pittsburgh in 2008, his father, Jerry Schmitt, had been a patient of Rabinowitz’s for 30-plus years.

I first met Ben Schmitt in the fall of 2000 when I got hired as a news feature writer at the Free Press. Schmitt, a Michigan State graduate, was covering the criminal-justice system for Freep's Macomb County bureau. The next year, he took a job in the downtown Detroit newsroom as a police reporter.

Our desks were 10 feet apart. We’ve been friends ever since.

Few reporters chased news as doggedly as Schmitt did. Unfortunately, there was a lot to write about.

He covered a kindergarten shooting in Mt. Morris Township near Flint and cop killings in Detroit and random neighborhood gunfire on a cold and gray Tuesday night.

“Mayhem,” is how he described the beat.

From his perspective, it was. Police reporting isn’t as dangerous as actual policing, but it takes a similar toll. All that death and violence can narrow your view, blocking the light so many of us take for granted in our workaday lives.

By 2010, Schmitt was burned out. Wanted to go home. Move his wife and two daughters to the hills and rivers of Pittsburgh. Spend time with his parents. Watch the Steelers with his father.

More:Pittsburgh synagogue shooting: What we know, questions that remain

Detroit-area Jewish teens hold vigil to stand strong with Tree of Life families

When he left the Free Press to return to western Pennsylvania, he left the news business, too, and took a job in public relations. He rented a home in Edgewood, a neighborhood where, coincidentally, Dr. Rabinowitz lived, and the neighborhood adjacent to Squirrel Hill, home to Tree of Life.

Schmitt slowly settled back into where he’d been rooted. He spent weekends with family. Reconnected with old friends. Met new friends ferrying his girls to soccer, basketball and volleyball.

His dad had suggested he return to Dr. Rabinowitz’s practice. He took his advice. Though Schmitt saw his doctor more frequently while walking his dog.

Rabinowitz was often out on his bike. And when they spotted one another, the doctor always greeted the patient the same:

“Hello young, man,” he’d say.

A phrase Rabinowitz used to greet the elder Schmitt, too. The family practice physician was a throwback. He preferred a pen and pad over a computer keyboard. It wasn’t uncommon for him to phone his patients at home to check on them.

Schmitt said Rabinowitz called his father every day for a week when his father caught a bug while on business in India.

“He was a really remarkable guy in everything he did,” Schmitt’s dad told him. “Every time I would see him, he would do the exam and he would then take me into his office and we talked. There was no rush to get out of his office. It was like I was the only patient he had — and I know that’s not true.”

He made Schmitt feel the same way.

One day while out for a stroll, Schmitt found an old gas grill abandoned on a curb affixed with a sign that read: Free. Inside, its former owner had left instructions on how to light it.

Turns out it was Rabinowitz who’d left it, and when Schmitt later told his doctor he’d adopted the grill, well, you can imagine how the good doctor felt.

A few years after returning to Pittsburgh, Schmitt began to feel the pull of the news business. He’d missed the energy, the unpredictability, the dash out the door trying to run down the truth. Three and a half years ago, he made it official, and took the editing job at the Tribune-Review.

Reporters don’t pine to cover tragic news stories. But they do yearn to inform the public when they happen.

This past Saturday, a national tragedy began to unfold in the neighborhood next to Schmitt’s, and the longtime journalist went to work. Then the text flashed on his phone, and his role morphed into something more fundamental.

Seeing Rabinowitz’s name in the context of the shooting knocked the wind from him. And though he was a journalist working a national tragedy, he was still a son, too.

The intersection of work and home can muddy the view for reporters. So it was for Schmitt, who was so engrossed in doing his job that he took only enough time to text his father with the news.

“I should’ve called him,” Schmitt said. “I immediately regretted it.”

Later that night, he called his father. They spoke for an hour, about the shooting, about their relationship, about their beloved doctor.

They had wondered:

“Did he suffer? Was he scared? Did he try to do something?”

According to Rabinowitz's nephew, he did, which doesn't surprise the Schmitts. In a Facebook post, Avishai Ostrin wrote that when his uncle heard gunfire, he ran towards the wounded to help.

"That was Uncle Jerry," he wrote, "that’s just what he did.”

In times of loss, the void turns icy. Filling it with details can help it thaw. Sharing stories of the doctor with each other brought a touch of warmth. In that moment, Schmitt realized he had another story to tell, not as a journalist, but as a patient and son.

The next morning, he rang his father again, and formally interviewed him so that he could share a part of Dr. Rabinowitz’s life through the Tribune-Review. His piece was published Sunday, and almost immediately, patients from the doctor’s practice began to reach out.

When I reached Schmitt late Sunday evening he was still at the Tribune-Review's office. I could hear adrenaline and weary souls hustling in the background.

Schmitt sounded worn out, too. As he began to tell me his story, he paused, and for a few seconds, there was silence. In the 18 years I’ve known him, I'd never heard him cry.

He’d spent most of his career knee-deep in the dark recess of humanity. On some level, he was used to it.

But not this. Not now. Not in our time of anger and uneasiness, where a kind and loving doctor was gunned down because of his faith.

It’s easy to compartmentalize when the world reveals its ugliness. It’s often a matter of survival.

Ben Schmitt couldn’t do that Saturday night as the disparate parts of his life began to collide. He is human. Searching for humanity. Sifting through memories of house calls and discarded grills and walks in the neighborhood to find it.

Contact Free Press sports columnist Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.