Garden City Journalist Alum Severely Injured in Cairo Riots

When Edward Palkot called Superintendent of Schools Dr. Robert Feirsen to explain that his son, Greg Palkot, Garden City High School Class of 1972 and 14-year journalist for Fox News, was severely injured during the riots in Cairo, it truly hit home how far-reaching, yet close-knit, the Garden City community is.

Greg Palkot is now home safe in London, recuperating from his injuries at the hands of pro-Mubarak rioters and, through his father, here shares his ordeal with the Garden City community.

During the Cairo riots in early February, after the building Greg Palkot and cameraman Olaf Wiig took shelter in near Tahrir Square was occupied by pro-Mubarak rioters who were throwing Molotov cocktails, gas bombs and pieces of the building down onto the anti-government protesters from the roof, a Molotov cocktail from the street smashed through a window and began spreading gas in the yet undiscovered room Palkot and Wiig were holed up in for hours.

“We decided that was it,” Palkot explained later in a Fox interview. “We weren’t going to go up in flames. We were going to make a run for it.” But when they made it out onto the street, “It was nothing short of a battle zone. Smoke filled the air, fighters scrambled back and forth across no-man’s land between the two sides, hurling rocks, gas bombs and other projectiles. Bursts of gunfire crackled through the night.”

Palkot and Wiig charged forward but were spotted as foreigners and viciously attacked. “They hit us with their open hands, their fists, sticks, bars, rocks, whatever was around, especially aiming at our heads,” Palkot said.

The two managed to take shelter in an Egyptian army personnel carrier, eventually being delivered to an ambulance that took the two, bleeding from multiple wounds, weakened and dazed, to a hospital in Cairo for treatment.

Unfortunately, the ordeal did not end there. Palkot and Wiig were driven in a small jeep across town to “the Ministry of Military Security, marched lock-step to a location, then videotaped and photographed as if in a line-up. Still blindfolded, we were thrown back into the jeep and driven to another location. Happily, it was not to some jail for political prisoners, but to a car with those working to get us free,” Greg recalled.

Palkot received 31 stitches during his life-and-death struggle in the streets of Cairo. He remembers “a hit to the left side of his head that blanked his vision out to some degree, blanked my hearing from my left ear to some degree, and that’s when I thought I was going down.” Palkot, a veteran, front-line Fox journalist who was embedded with troops during the war in Iraq, explained that adrenaline kept him going.

Edward was grateful to those in the Cairo hospital who treated his son’s injuries, including AlMoatazBellah Youssef, who e-mailed Ed the following: 

“Your e-mail left me speechless and almost brought tears to my eyes. I was only doing my job. And I hate to see injustice being done to anyone. People in Egypt are peaceful and decent. They are simple and have big hearts. These thugs were paid by the government and those loyal to it to do what they did - to scare away journalists, to scare away the protesters, to cause chaos. And all of this was done in a lousy attempt by the dying regime to hold on a bit longer. But in the end, we will see who the history will remember as thugs and who it will remember as the people who did one of the most civilized and peaceful revolution in modern history. I am so proud by my countrymen and women, and by your e-mail!”

When Edward shared the news about Greg’s near-fatal encounter, he also shared his family’s long history in Garden City: “We first moved to here in 1939 and I worked as a speech teacher for the district for two years.”

Later, Ed relocated to Connecticut for work reasons, but ultimately returned to the village to stay in 1953. The Palkots raised four children who all attended Garden City Public Schools. Greg, the youngest, “was writing all the time,” Ed recalled. “He wrote as a student reporter for Garden City News and the high school newspaper. His grounded upbringing and strength of character no doubt played a critical role in giving him the strength to push on during this horrible ordeal.”

The district extends its best wishes to Greg Palkot for a speedy recovery and commends his courage and integrity in the face of such great danger. Readers can check out Greg’s firsthand account of the ordeal here. Well-wishers can contact Greg through his father: epalkot@optonline.net.

In a recent e-mail to his father, sense of humor still intact, he quipped, “Ha, I finally made GQ."