Some residents in the town simply slammed doors in journalists’ faces, a reaction any of us might have had under such circumstances. Others in the town put a price on their cooperation. Reporters from a wide array of organizations scrambled to interview anyone else they could find.

“Eventually the media pressure began to weigh even on me,” Lauren McGaughy, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, wrote in an eloquent apology to the people of Sutherland Springs. “I did a few on-the-ground interviews before rejecting the rest. It was too stressful. I expressed my growing disgust with a few other journalists, and many agreed with me.”

Journalists were not the only ones who descended on the town. Sidewalk preachers from San Antonio convened at the Valero gas station opposite the church, bellowing their prayers, if not in front of townspeople then for reporters’ iPhone cameras. Chaplains from the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team meandered through the town.

Brad Kessler, an aspirant for mayor of San Antonio, dropped in to shake hands around the yellow crime-scene tape that cordoned off the killing field. The Homicide Survivors Support Group of Corpus Christi set up a table with stuffed animals, where reporters quickly conducted interviews with the volunteers.

I grew up in a rural outpost in northern New Mexico about the size of Sutherland Springs. I know how suspicious, and sometimes awed, residents of small towns can be of privileged, big-city visitors. Still, I have a hard time imagining what it’s like for the people here to have so many cameras pointed at them and so many tape recorders thrust their way.

As some of the network television trucks began to pull out of town, I wondered how big a role I myself had played in amplifying the suffering of Sutherland Springs. After all, I, too, had approached residents who wanted nothing to do with reporters. I’d asked Ms. Solis, the factory worker, to talk to me when she could have been tending the shoulder where a bullet had sundered her flesh.