John Gutierrez-Mier

DALLAS -- A week ago, John Gutierrez-Mier checked out of Medical City Hospital in Dallas after heart surgery.

He moved into a hotel near the hospital where medical students, some of them Muslim, live.

Mr. Mier greeted them in Arabic, which he had picked up while writing news reports about Islam after 9-11: "As-salaam alaikum." It was a moment, his friends said Saturday, that illustrated two important parts of his life. He spent a career in the newspaper business trying to bridge gaps between cultures and races. And he lived with health problems that had followed him since childhood and ultimately cut his life short.

Mr. Mier, a Star-Telegram reporter since 2002, died Friday. He was 43.

"John worked hard to connect with the communities he covered," Managing Editor Rex Seline said. "He liked to tell stories about real people and real lives. He had had health problems, and we had hoped he was getting better. This turn of events is shocking and sad."

Mr. Mier, who was born on Nov. 28, 1963, grew up in El Paso. An aunt, Virginia Gutierrez, spotted Mr. Mier's writing ability when he wrote an obituary for an uncle when he was a teenager.

"It was just a beautiful narrative story," she recalled. "We figured, 'Wow, this guy can write.'"

After earning a journalism degree at the University of Texas at El Paso, Mr. Mier got a reporting job with the San AntonioExpress-News.

Even as a rookie, he brought people together in the newsroom, said Nora Lopez, an Express-News reporter. He gave people playful nicknames -- Lopez's was La Beauty -- and tried to get people to socialize. "He was notorious for bringing people out of their normal lunch cliques," Lopez said.

Mr. Mier moved to Philadelphia in the early 1990s and commuted to the News-Journal in Wilmington, Del. He became active in gay and Hispanic politics in Philadelphia and was also a union leader at the newspaper, said Sam McLaughlin, a longtime friend. "The true John came out in Philadelphia," McLaughlin said. "No matter where else he went, he just kept to that true John."

But while in Wilmington, he had to have surgery to repair a heart valve in 1992 and spent months recovering.

He spent time as a public-relations writer for the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta and then returned to daily journalism at the El Paso Herald-Post, which closed in 1997. He returned to the Express-News,and began to specialize in covering minority communities, which he thought got little coverage in traditional newspapers.

After 9-11, he began covering San Antonio's Muslim community. He read the Quran, visited mosques, and watched and re-watched a PBS series on the religion, said Macarena Hernandez, a reporter at TheDallas Morning News who worked with him in San Antonio.

"John was very passionate about communities of color, people whom newspapers traditionally ignored," Hernandez said. "He and I had very intense conversations about the coverage of Muslims, blacks, Latinos, the poor, gays and lesbians."

When he arrived at the Star-Telegram, he was assigned to cover minority affairs, homelessness and poverty issues.

"Some of the best work he did was when he was writing about our diverse neighborhoods," said Metro Editor Lee Williams, who supervised Mr. Mier. "Not every reporter has the ability to walk into these neighborhoods and disarm people, which let him get to the heart of what was going on."

Mr. Mier was on a team of reporters that won a second-place award for investigative reporting from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors' Association in 2002 for a report card on local hospitals. In 2004, he and reporter Karen Brooks won second place in the Houston Press Club's Lone Star Awards for stories about the deaths of a group of undocumented workers.

In 2005, he and reporter Jeff Claassen took an in-depth look at colonia-style developments on the outskirts of the Metroplex, where pockets of substandard homes existed despite the area's growth and affluence.

Since late 2006, Mr. Mier had had more heart procedures and surgeries and had become seriously depressed. The last surgery was Aug. 7, and he was on the waiting list for a heart transplant, Hernandez said.

When Hernandez arrived to visit Mr. Mier on Friday night, he did not answer his door. After a maintenance man was summoned, she said, they found Mr. Mier unresponsive. The medical students whom Mr. Mier had befriended came to try to revive him, Hernandez said.

"Even his death was such a beautiful moment of all these different people coming together and trying to save him," Hernandez said.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete Saturday.