Panic At Canonsburg Marked By Frenzy And Scenes Of Horror Almost Unspeakable. Medics Make Probe.
BY T. H. B. PATTERSON
CANONSBURG Pa., Aug:28. - Physicians and theatrical people are joining with Coroner Heffran in an attempt to make a study of "mob madness" from the Morgan Opera House disaster.
Data is being carefully prepared by alienists interested in the subject, who declare that this panic had the least cause of any on record, and was marked by a prevailing frenzy scarcely believable.
That people in the panic bit each other with their teeth, tore flesh and garments with their hands and seemed for the time being to be transformed into fiends are among the gruesome surpdians of the critical investigation now being at instigation of members of the Western Pennsylvania Medical Societies and the Exhibitors League.
Chief of Police Swan has testified to men climbing over his head and the heads of other rescuers, stamping their feet into the up-turned faces of those who were trying to unknot the great knot of struggling humanity upon the stairway.
One statement secured in the investigation tells of a man who, after being dragged from the crowd in which he had been injured and taken to the adjoining office where the floor was strewn with the dead, and dying, suddenly burst from the grip of his rescuers and ran wildly over the bodies of those about him to plunge back into the fear maddened mob.
Allen Roessell of 237 Whitehall avenue is suffering from a badly bitten arm as the result of the mayhem committed by a maddened foreigner in the crowd. Roessell with George Kay, one of the boys killed was caught in the crowd and thrown on top of one man with another crushing on top of him. The man underneath cried to him to "get up" and when the boy did not buried his teeth in his right arm.
I. W. Roessell, father of the injured boy, was passing the theater and rushed in to rescue those he could reach, after saving several he found his own son bruised and bleeding and dragged him half naked into the street.
Lita Patton, of South Central avenue, who was just entering the theater when the panic started was caught in the doorway, although she was half in the street she could not extricate her limbs from the human pile, she was finally dragged free by rescuers but the clothing from the lower portion of her body was stripped away.
Young Roessell said that he, Kay, Sid Rittiger and his sweetheart, Lillian Fisher, formed a group of four at the ticket window when the trouble started. Of the four Roessell alone is alive.
Dr. A. F. Burney, whose office was on the same floor as the theater, will be one of the principal witnesses before the coroner. Securing a ladder he dragged people through a window until he was himself exhausted.
Local theatrical men propose to profit from the lesson of the panic by offering a permanent reward for any person creating a disturbance or crying out in their theaters.
Reward of now more than $700 have been offered for the arrest of the cause of Saturdays' disaster. In the interior ###