2000
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1999
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How I got the picture

Mercer:

"The morning of the robbery, I had heard broken scanner reports of police blanketing a post office for investigation.

"On arrival, there wasn't much. Greenland is a small town but the fact that the robbery attempt was at a post office, a federal offense, gave reason to hang around. I had heard that the car had been identified as belonging to someone in Rochester and that they may have headed home, so I let the post office and traveled to a toll booth about ten minutes north on the highway hoping to find state troopers nabbing them as they went home.

"After 15 minutes of nothing, I headed back to the post office. Within five minutes, without a word, local police sprinted to their cars so I jumped in mine, screeching tires and all, myself and two other journalists followed the police as they raced just two houses down from the post office to a health clinic right beside the town's police station.

"As I jumped from my car I could see police rapidly surrounding a parking lot behind the clinic, guns drawn and yelling. I tried to stay back a little because things were so intense. What I saw was four officers pointing their guns at this kid who kept saying, 'What did I do?' over and over. Very quickly, they got him to lie down and then arrested him. The entire scene took maybe 30 seconds to unfold."

Honorable mentions went to Lorna Calquhoun of The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., for a July 18 shot of firefighters working in the pre-dawn darkness to contain a blaze at the Nordic Inn in Lincoln, N.H., and to Troy R. Bennett of The Times Record of Brunswick, Maine, for his photo of the Argentine tall ship Libertad at the Maine State Pier in Portland, Maine, the night of July 25.