But the incident didn’t just work as great TV. After inspecting a calendar hanging on the wall—“and it’s just a typical sort of calendar with [pause] pictures”—and examining a prayer rug, some shredded papers, “a check here from Chase to Syed Farook for $7. 98,” and a bag of mixed nuts, Sanders started rummaging through a pile of toys. “Come over here, you can see the baby’s toys. We have … uh, really, quite a number of toys,” he said as he grabbed a stuffed white bear. “There’s a teddy bear here. There’s a box here. It looks like it might have been even an unwrapped gift. Dream Eyes. Bright Dream Eyes. Bright Eyes Dreamy.” I will wager that this same detail—a box of toys in the kid’s room—will end up in some print story Friday evening or this week.

And that is how you get those details: by poking around.

Poking around and looking at stuff and drawing observations on what you find is what reporting is. I found it weird to watch Kerry Sanders hunt and peck through that apartment for 15 minutes not because it seemed so odd, but because it seemed so familiar. He was doing exactly what I would have been doing if I had been there: walking around, touching stuff, filing away details that might enliven my eventual story, trying to puzzle out what I was seeing as I was seeing it.