CBS correspondent Steve Hartman quietly spent years documenting grief that families couldn’t leave behind

For nearly six years, CBS News editors had no idea correspondent Steve Hartman was working on a side project he funded himself — or what he planned to do with it.

Hartman’s day job is telling uplifting stories of people who do good things and usually go unrecognized. When a community was suffering through heartbreak after a school shooting, CBS often sent Hartman to profile a heroic teacher or community pulling together in grief.

But as “CBS Sunday Morning” anchor Jane Pauley noted in introducing Hartman’s latest work, “this story is something very different, very troubling.”