Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 February 1878 — A Horrible Death. [ARTICLE]

A Horrible Death.

Mr. Theodore Robinson, of Lansing, N. Y., was engaged in his father’s gristmill, and, wiiile attending to his duties, his clothing became entangled in an upright shaft running at the rate of 160 revolutions a minute. A man named Charles Humphrey, who was in another part of the mill, heard Robinson’s cries of pain, as he was whirled about by the awful power that held him in its duel grip, and rushed to him and endeavored to extricate the form that was fast losing human shape. In his attempts to release Robinson, Humphrey had his left leg broken by a blow from the boot of the whirling man, and the sickening ride was continued nearly fifteen minutes before the water was shut off and the great wheel stopped. The mangled body of the milh r was then conveyed to a house some rods distant from the scene of the accident and tenderly cared for. Notwithstanding that the poor man must have been thrashed around in that fearful manne r at least many thousand times, life did not leave the broken and limp body until the day after the accident. The force with which the shaft whirled its victim may be faintly imagined by the marks made in the work-bench by h s boots as they struck it from time to time. There are a t least i ixty indentures in the wo d that look as though they had been made with a heavy blow from fi hammer. The clothing was stripped into ribbons, which woun about the man and held him fast to the shaft sq that no farce could get him loose until after the machinery was stopped. The boots, heavy and strong, were ripped and tom to pieces in what seemed to be a minute after Robinson got in the shaft.