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Show Psychopath Makes Death Leap From 1 7th Floor On Busy New York Corner After 11-Hour Vigil NEW YORK. July 27 in.Ri John Ward, 26, a .psychopath, spent 11 hours on a narrow ledge abutting the 17th floor of the Hotel Ho-tel Gotham, men jumped to instant in-stant death in the street below where 10,000 persons watched. Three hundred policemen. 100 firemen, four physicians, his sister, sis-ter, his mother, a number of his friends, and a priest had worked desperately to prevent his killing himself. He had made up his mind weeks igo that he was not fit to live. He had tried twice before to kill himself. As police rigged a ship's cargo net on the Kith floor in which they hoped to enmesh him, as peddlers moving through the crowds below crying. "Hyah Ya Arc! Get your binoculars Hyah." He said to the policeman leaning out the window pleading with him: "I have made up my mind. I wish you could convince me that life is worth living." :;: He stood on tip-toe and cata-pulated cata-pulated himself out into space like a diver. "There he comes," someone ncreamc'l from the crowd. The explosive flashes of photographers' photo-graphers' bulbs outlined the slender slen-der figure, no longer in a dive, but plunging like a dead, inanimate inani-mate weight. It struck the marquee mar-quee of the hotel, -breaking the glass and denting the steel, and bounced off into the gutter. Shrieks, screams, and moans -.;: ;: came from the crowd. Women fainted and were tramiplcd. A hundred hun-dred policemen had been holding it back, lest the madman should kill in his leap other persons in addition to himself, and they were swept aside like straws. The crowd gathered in a thick circle around the broken body with a face that looked like pulp. More women fainted. At last, police fought the crowd back, put the body in a basket and took it awuy. |
