Two months ago, a crime and defense reporter for the daily Kurzemes Vārds was assaulted in Liepāja. He died two weeks later. Now a crime reporter for the Rīga daily Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze has been attacked in one of the most public places in the city—the Dome Square.

In both cases, revenge for their journalism is suspected. If that’s so, I hope it’s an anomaly and not the start of a disturbing trend.

Gundars Matīss, 35, may have been attacked in mid-November for the crime reporting he had done for Kurzemes Vārds. And three days ago, NRA reporter Ivars Āboliņš may have been attacked for similar reasons.

I say may because until the attackers are found, the reasons for the assaults won’t be clear. In the Matīss case, the victim died before he could talk to police.

But in Āboliņš’ case, according to a Jan. 14 story in the newspaper, little doubt is left about what provoked the attackers. Two men approached Ābolīņš outside a Dome Square cafe and blamed him for several of their comrades being in jail. They then hit him and knocked him down, kicking him several times. Āboliņš suffered bruises to his head and body, as well as a concussion, NRA reported.

Attacks such as these should be viewed as assaults not only on press freedom, but on society as a whole. The role of a journalist in a democratic society is to provide the information that allows society to function. If a journalist’s ability to report freely is threatened, society’s freedom is threatened as well.

Interviewed by his newspaper, Āboliņš conceded he’s not confident about his safety. "For now I can’t feel certain that attacks like this won’t be repeated and that some other retaliation won’t follow," Āboliņš said.

If journalists don’t feel safe doing their jobs, they may avoid reporting certain stories. Everyone suffers in that case.

But I can’t agree with NRA Editor Aldis Bērziņš, who in the same newspaper story attempted to elevate the legal status of journalists.

"Penalties for bodily attacks against journalists should be equated with attacks on ministers, members of Parliament, prosecutors and other state officials, because (attacks such as these) threaten not just specific victims, but all of society," Bērziņš said.

Journalism is an honorable profession. It’s a profession that, at its best, is a true service to a community. But journalists also are just people. We journalists should never forget that, just as we strive to remind ministers, MPs, prosecutors and other state officials that they are, after all, just people, too.

Recently while cleaning out a long-neglected nook in our house, I came across a box containing several misfigured chunks of lead. They were from a New Year’s gathering we attended a few years ago. I considered for a moment whether to toss them in the trash, then realized that doing so probably would mean breaking some environmental law. I stuffed the lead chunks back in the box and placed the box back where I had found it.

A Latvian New Year’s ritual involves pouring a ladle full of molten lead into a bucket of cold water. Whatever form the lead takes—and whatever you think you can discern from the shape—is supposed to reveal what fortune the future will bring.

As a child, laimes liešana was always the highlight of the Latvian New Year’s parties I attended. (Actually, because I was a child, the "pouring of one’s fortune" was really the culmination. It seemed that as soon as the lead set into shape, I was hustled off to bed, the theory apparently being that staying up until just past midnight was not healthy. Little did my parents know that, wherever we were, I ended up staying awake until past midnight anyway. How could anyone sleep with all that racket going on, with tipsy adult Latvians talking, guffawing and singing old war songs?)

Granted, the coming of the new year has an important place in Latvian culture. Compiled by P. Šmits and published in 1940, Latviešu tautas ticējumi, has nearly 800 entries for the new year in its collection of Latvian folk beliefs. The close of the old year was a time for Latvian maidens to divine their marital status in the new year, for farmers to eat lots of gray peas to ensure loads of money and for folks in general to avoid incidents that could turn into bad habits for the next 12 months.

But the pouring of lead, the dragging of a log and other Latvian end-of-the-year rituals have never really been activities that excite me. It’s not they’re not fun—and sometimes even meaningful—rituals. It’s just that the end of the calendar year sometimes seems so arbitrary.

A few years back, I read a magazine article about how people observe the passing of time differently. For one woman in the American West, according to the article, the new year began not with the turn of a page in a calendar, but with the return of the geese in spring. It was then that she knew the cycle of life was starting again.

I teach at a university, and for me the new year begins not at the end of December but at about the third week of August, when it’s time to assemble notes, rewrite syllabi and plan the rhythm of courses.

To be sure the end of 2001, especially in the United States, perhaps is to be welcomed. It hasn’t been a good year. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs, and that’s before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 transfixed and then transformed America.

But when we wake up in the "new year," will everything suddenly be different? Of course not. The military action in Afghanistan will still be going on, Argentina will still be in financial turmoil, and Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga and Einārs Repše will still be among Latvia’s most popular politicians (and I still can’t figure out this whole Repše thing). I still will have to feed the dog and the damned cat, pesky telephone solicitors will continue to call and I’ll still be woefully behind in all the work I have to do.

I suppose I don’t like closure. I like change and fluidity, not full stops.

Perhaps that’s why I didn’t toss those weird chunks of lead when I found them. Throwing them away, well, that would be that: no more chunks of lead. Hmm… Maybe I should melt them down and see what the new year may bring after all.

So far this year, nearly five dozen journalists have been killed around the world because of who they are and what they do. Now a Latvian reporter may be among them.

Gundars Matīss, a 35-year-old crime and defense reporter for the daily Kurzemes Vārds in the port city of Liepāja, was assaulted the night of Nov. 15. He died in a Rīga hospital 13 days later.

"We don’t have any information that would allow us to state that Gundars was murdered because of his work, but we can’t rule it out, either," Assistant Editor Edgars Lūsēns told me in an e-mail.

Matīss was described by colleagues as his own man, one who told the story of crime in Liepāja not by relying on police reports, but by digging into the underground to try to explain what really was going on. That he may have been murdered by someone who didn’t want a story told is a very plausible scenario.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Just take a look at the reports from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders or the Vienna-based International Press Institute, to name just a few watchdog groups. Last year, according to some record-keepers, 52 journalists died while doing their jobs. This year, thanks in part to the fighting in Afghanistan, the number has reached at least 54, according to IPI’s "Death Watch."

Liepāja police seem to doubt that Matīss may be No. 55. The police, Lūsēns said, dragged their feet in investigating the incident until five days after the attack. And the police also maintain that a more likely motive for the attack was either a personal dispute or robbery, Lūsēns said.

Some Liepāja residents question that version. The Liepaja Online bulletin board in recent days has seen numerous comments speculating that Matīss was the victim of revenge, perhaps because of his investigations of police corruption.

"Liepāja has lost a good person and a professional," wrote one user.

Reporters Without Borders, in a Dec. 3 letter to Interior Minister Mareks Segliņš, expressed its concern over the attack and urged government officials "not to exclude too quickly the possibility of an assault directly related to the journalist’s work."

If Matīss died from injuries received from an assault brought on by what he might have been investigating, if he died because of his work as a journalist, it would be disturbing news indeed. So far, Latvia has been a relatively safe place for journalists. Reporters Without Borders has noted that the first violence against media since Latvia regained independence occurred in November of last year. That’s when the offices of the Russian-language magazine Kapital Latgalii were bombed in Daugavpils. Other than that, it’s been quiet.

Like many journalists, Matīss was not a stranger to threats. Journalists get them all the time, although not all are to be taken seriously. In my career I’ve been twice threatened seriously with a lawsuit for something I wrote, once with a boycott and once with physical violence. None of it came to pass, but it has taught me that it’s part of the risk journalists take when they step onto the public stage.

Matīss, Lūsēns said, had rarely received any serious threats, at least not ones he talked about to his colleagues at Kurzemes Vārds.

"Every once in a while someone would invite him to a ‘discussion’—in a car, for example," Lūsēns said. "He saw that as part of the job and didn’t worry about it much."

And it’s precisely Matīss who was the kind of journalist who could uncover the truth in a case like his, the reporter’s colleagues wrote in a Dec. 5 open letter published in the newspaper.

"But the sad thing," they added, "is that a journalist can’t investigate his own murder."