Henney Report on hiatus

Never far from his handheld police scanner, Alan Henney has religiously covered the Cape Region’s busy summer season for decades.

This summer is a change for the johnny-on-the-spot reporter, as he takes a break from his Henney Report, for years a mainstay for anyone wanting to know why sirens are blaring in the middle of the night or police cars are racing to the scene of some unknown incident. 

He’s now a newlywed – he and Valeria Vega were married in December 2024 – and the couple is spending more time at their Takoma Park, Md. home, but will be back in the area to work on renovating two old fishermen’s cottages on Sussex Street and fixing up the home Henney shared with his late mother Dagmar on Delaware Avenue.

“It’s the best investment my mom ever made,” Henney said.

He credits his mother for falling in love with Rehoboth Beach when he was a toddler and spending the summers in the beach town.

“I grew up in Rehoboth in the summer. I’m torn between living in the Washington area and living in Rehoboth,” he said.

Born in 1967, Henney graduated from Takoma Park Academy before getting a journalism undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in information systems, both from George Washington University, where his mother was a professor.

Henney’s love for electronics started back in the Radio Shack days when the store was the go-to spot for the latest gadgets.

“When I was little, I was a Radio Shack junkie,” he said. “On the weekends, Dad and I would go out and shop and end up at Radio Shack. I’d come home with an electronic kit or something. It was the boom of CB radio back then. A lot of my fellow geeks were interested and regular customers.”

For his 11th birthday, he asked his father and namesake, Alan, for an 8-track tape player, but got a 1970s-era scanner, which he would use to listen in on police and fire frequencies. 

In Rehoboth, he would rush over to the fire station to see the fire trucks pull out.

“You start by listening,” he said. “Then you start to make the connection – I can hear things happening, I can go there, and I can take pictures of it.”

By his teens, Henney said many of his friends had started taking fire photos, and he decided to give it a try. He can’t recall his first shot, but he remembers the first homicide he shot. It was in Takoma Park. A teen had been murdered, bound and gagged and dumped in nearby Sligo Creek.

“For Takoma Park, it was very troubling,” he said. 

Henney said he quickly switched to video because Washington, D.C. news stations were paying good money for footage in the 1980s.

But he still came back to Rehoboth every summer. His first photo to run in the Cape Gazette was in 1995 after a fire at the Mallard Guest House on 2nd Street and Baltimore Avenue.

By then, his photos and stories had been picked up by publications throughout the area.

“In the 1990s, I was quite active,” Henney said.

One of his favorite stories over the years documented the towing wars between rival companies M.A.G. Towing and Coastal Towing, in which he got a photo of Coastal towing a M.A.G. truck. Another favorite was on topless sunbathing on the beach.

Back in D.C., he worked as a field producer and assignment editor for WUSA-TV before taking time off to help care for his mother. His father died in 2002, while his mother passed in 2023.

Even though he’s taking some time off from beach reporting, Henney continues to have his finger on the pulse with regular Facebook posts on D.C.-area shootings, stabbings and other mayhem.

At the beach, however, he said, it’s time to do some home repair, landscaping and painting on his properties here.

“We’re going to make them rentable,” he said. “But I’ll be back. Not all summer. But we’ll be here. We’ve been spending months just trying to get our households together.”