Serena Shim1985 – 2014

Press

For journalists writing about Serena

Anniversaries and case developments bring reporters here. This page keeps the record straight at the source.

Media inquiries

PLACEHOLDER — family-approved contact channel (email address and preferred response window) to be provided by Judith Poe.

Fact sheet

  • Serena Ali Shim, journalist. Born October 10, 1985, in Michigan; raised in Dearborn and Livonia.
  • Correspondent for Press TV from 2007, based at the Beirut bureau; reported from Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Ukraine.
  • Died October 19, 2014, aged 29, in a car–truck collision near Suruç, Turkey, while covering the siege of Kobani.
  • On October 17, 2014, she said on air that Turkish intelligence had accused her of spying and that she feared arrest.
  • No trial was ever held, no autopsy results were ever published, and no authority has issued public findings on her death.
  • Survived by her husband and two children, her mother Judith Poe, her father Ali Shim, and her siblings.
  • The Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism was established in her honor in 2019.

Press kit

PLACEHOLDER — approved portrait photographs, the family statement, and a downloadable fact sheet will be published here by the family.

Photography on this site

Stills of Serena on the home page are frame captures from Press TV broadcasts — preserved in the network’s 2023 documentary “I Am a Reporter” and in its October 2014 news coverage (© Press TV) — shown here in her memory, together with photographs kept by her family. The remaining scene-setting imagery comes from open-license archives — the places and events she reported on. Sources and licenses:

On accuracy

The often-remembered quote “I don’t know what I did” does not appear in any verifiable transcript of her final broadcast. Her verified words were: “I have nothing to hide, I’ve never done anything aside from my job.” Please quote from the verified transcript, as this site does.