Morbid Fact Du Jour For June 10, 2011

Today’s Slurred Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

New York City coroner Patrick Riordan got himself in trouble for coming to work drunk in 1914.  As one angry witness put it, he stumbled into a death scene with “a glassy eye and smirky face” to sneer at bodies.  That indictment followed an accident on the Ninth Avenue Elevated, the crowded commuter line run the private Interborough Rapid Transit Company.  The collision had occurred in the last days of December, 1914.  Newspapers described it like a scene from a circle of hell – brakes failed on a local, metal and flame exploded as it went slamming into the back of an express waiting at the Eight Avenue and 116th Street station.  The impact had pushed the wooden cars upward into a blazing pyramid.  Flying sparks then set the platform on fire.  Passengers, dazed and bloody, fled to the street, stumbling down the rickety stairs from the seventy-five-foot-high track, crowds gathering in the fire-lit dark to catch them if they fell.  Two train workers died in the crash.  Dozens more workers and passengers went to the hospital seeking treatment for burns, lacerations, and shock.

The papers also offered a memorable image of the coroner that night.  Eight hours after the accident, as the hands of the clock were just slipping past two a.m., Riordan finally ambled into the police station where the bodies lay.  An assistant was holding him upright, officers, reported, and he was a big enough man that his weight pulled both of them sideways.  Riordan looked down at the dead men.  When told their names – Joseph Collins, 52, Gottlieb Minnick, 27 – he snapped, slurring the words but saying clearly enough: “It’s a shame that two such names should pull us out on a night like this.”  All this according to the notes of journalists covering the accident, who helped trigger a formal investigation of Riordans’ work.  (He was replaced as coroner in 1918.)

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook