Pat Furgurson died the other day.

He was a friend, but more than that. He was the sort of journalist who is increasingly rare, someone who came to the profession late in life, yet managed to have a profound impact on his colleagues, his community and journalism itself.

Pat covered a tragedy that swept up him, the newspaper we worked for, Annapolis, and for a moment, the nation.

On a warm June day in 2018, Pat was out of the newsroom when a man with a shotgun blasted his way in and murdered five of our friends. Pat was an inspiration that day, helping the surviving staff win a Pulitzer Prize with tenacity and courage.

Ernest Baker Furgurson III, 70, was the son and grandson of newspapermen. His father covered Washington and Moscow for The Baltimore Sun.

Pat, who used the byline E.B. Furgurson III as a tribute to his illustrious name, was working in the kitchen at a restaurant in Annapolis when he told a customer about his father.

“We struck up a conversation, and he told me his dad was a journalist with The Sun and that he wanted to write as well,” said Tom Marquardt, a longtime top editor at The Capital. “I told him to stop by my office and he did.”

What got Pat the job wasn’t his pedigree, and he had no experience. It was his charm. He was very good at listening to stories and telling them.

That charm quickly won over readers, who started enjoying his stories in 1999. Pat became one of the faces of the paper, recently renamed Capital Gazette by its current owners.

The problem for Pat was he just never wrote very many stories. Early on, gravel-voiced executive editor Ed Casey wanted Pat fired because he had the lowest story production in the newsroom. It stayed near the bottom for most of his career, including my six years as top editor starting in 2015.

But it takes many types of people to make a newsroom, and Pat played a role you can’t fill with a good resume and a fat file of clips.

He was friend and mentor, a steady presence with a long repertoire of life experiences that put the troubles of young reporters in perspective. He was a confidant to those who passed through and those who stayed.

He put up with the indignities that come with being a journalist — low pay and long hours, editors with no time for folksy tales, bad coffee and sources angry that you quoted them accurately — to live the life of one.

I don’t think Pat ever expected to be a star. He was content to do the job.

“He was a friend to the cranky and the naive, the insecure and arrogant, the inspired and the dejected — all of us,” said Erin Cox, a Washington Post political reporter who worked at The Capital. “He was pressing on for the sake of pressing on long before the murders inspired the slogan.”

As the editor, it was sometimes hard for me to appreciate this. “Where’s Pat?” felt like a daily refrain.

Then he’d show up right where you needed him. Paul Gillespie, the venerable Capital photojournalist, collapsed in the heat of a football practice on a breathless August afternoon. Paramedics told him he didn’t have to go to the hospital, but he couldn’t drive for at least a day.

I didn’t even need to ask Pat, the only other person in the office when Gillespie called. He drove me across the Bay Bridge in his aging pickup truck, a calm presence behind the wheel. We found an embarrassed and grateful Gillespie sitting by his car, then got him home.

Pat pulled that truck into the garage across from our newsroom on June 28, 2018.

A man who’d stalked us to satisfy a seven-year-old vendetta exploded into the office with a shotgun and killed Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, Wendi Winters, John McNamara and Rebecca Smith.

I was in Ocean City that day. Rob was sitting at my desk when he died. Gillespie and saleswoman Janel Cooley managed to escape, but four others were trapped under desks and behind filing cabinets until the gunman, his rampage spent, surrendered to police.

As the rest of us learned about the carnage, some made the impossible decision. They covered the tragedy unfolding in their community.

Reporter Chase Cook and photojournalist Josh McKerrow joined Pat, working from the bed of that truck away from the crowds and police and journalists arriving in a pack. Tim Prudente, who’d moved from The Capital to our sister paper The Sun and now is at The Banner, turned up, too.

They collected facts. They talked to the police. They covered the news conferences.

Pat, press badge around his neck and notebook in hand, asked about survivors and the names of the dead.

“I had moments where I had no idea what to do next — I was distraught,” McKerrow said. “I’d look over at Pat, and he was calmly reporting, working on his laptop, making calls, talking to cops. He was doing the next thing that needed doing. So I followed his lead and did the next right thing.”

Thalia Juarez captured images of Pat and the others working through their grief. A web editor and photojournalist for The Capital who now works in New York, she still takes inspiration from his calm dedication.

“Pat wasn’t only a journalist; he was part of the community — a local through and through, as the sticker on his truck proudly declared,” she said.

As word spread through Capital alumni last week that Pat was in intensive care, there were offers of help for his wife, Becky, and their son, Jesse. You didn’t have to be around Pat long to know they were his sun and moon, no matter how much journalism was the ground on which he walked.

The stress of that day, of the memorials and funerals that followed, eventually took its toll on Pat’s health. He took a buyout in 2020.

In his final days, Pat couldn’t remember what he’d written. He knew he’d been a journalist, but illness had stolen his memory of what he’d covered in his improbable career. He died Nov. 25.

I’ll remember for him and for us all. He wrote stories that touched many lives, about aging farmers, struggling watermen and holiday pies.

For a moment, though, working by his truck in a garage across from his destroyed newsroom, Pat symbolized the best of us and helped write the story that represented the best of American journalism.

For that moment on June 28, 2018, he will forever be a hero to me.

Friends have set up a GoFundMe to help Pat’s family with expenses.