As reported in The New York Times, Karen Schmeer, a documentary editor whose credits included several of Errol Morris's films, was killed Friday night in a hit-and-run incident in Manhattan. The driver, along with two cohorts, had been evading police after shoplifting from a drug store; the vehicle hit Ms. Schmeer as she was crossing the street at Broadway and 90th.
Schmeer was born in Portland, Oregon, and graduated from Boston University with a degree in anthropology. It was there where she met Errol Morris and worked for him as a researcher. She edited his 1996 film Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.; the Academy Award-winning The Fog of War; and Standard Operating Procedure, on which she is credited as co-editor. Other documentaries that she edited included Robb Moss' The Same River Twice, Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson's Well-Founded Fear,. Luca Small's My Father, The Genius. She won the Documentary Editing Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival for Greg Barker's Sergio. Barker, a juror at the 2010 Festival, paid tribute to Schmeer at the closing night awards ceremony, calling her "a great editor and a dear friend."
According to The New York Times, she was working on a documentary about the laet chessmaster Bobby Fischer at the time of her death.