Jim Dolan knew he wanted to be a reporter in New York before he finished grammar school. He came to Eyewitness News in 1986.
Since then, Jim has reported on virtually every major story around the world; The LA Riots, The Oklahoma City Bombing, civil wars and famine in Africa, the death of Princess Diana, The Persian Gulf War, The War in Afghanistan, and the Intifada in the Middle East.
Though he has reported from more than thirty countries on five continents, Jim has always had a great love for New York because there's nothing like reporting nightly on neighborhood stories close to home, and close to the heart.
After a grueling spring overwhelmed with death and heartache and the ominous fear of catching and falling victim to the coronavirus, the Summer of 2020 brought with it to New York a chance to exhale.
There were signs -- dim in the death and dying and amid so much grief -- but signs of better days to come. The weapons against COVID-19 were getting stronger.
Suddenly, the brutal death of George Floyd while in the custody of police officers in Minneapolis filled the streets of a nation with rage and sorrow. New York was no different. Protesters put the fear of the virus aside and took to the streets by the thousands. Abandoning the safety and comfort of social distance, to demand social change.
The virus, ghastly in its death toll and unyielding in its horror, was claiming hundreds of more lives each day, but hospital admissions in April started to decline.
It overwhelmed the health care industry, put millions out of work, drowned social services in an ocean of need, and threatened the food supply Americans had long since taken for granted. At the apex of the crisis and for the weeks that followed, no part of life, or even what followed life, was spared.
The novel coronavirus was just starting to show its teeth in New York and New Jersey as Winter turned to Spring. People were dying already, but we were only starting to feel the wave of death, anguish, and need that was heading our way.