Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 June 1902 — DIE IN HOSPITAL FIRE. [ARTICLE]

DIE IN HOSPITAL FIRE.

Horror* Attend Burning of a Chicago Institution. Ten lives were lost in a fire that swept through the sanitarium of the St. Luke Society, an institution for the treatment of habitual users of drugs and liquors, Wabash avenue and Twenty-first street, Chicago, Monday afternoon, among the victims being Alderman William K. Kent of the Fourth Ward, known as “Blind Billy” Kent. Some beat out their strength against the iron-barred windows and double-locked doors that cut them off from freedom and life on the top Boor of the five-story building, and others hurled themselves to death or fatal injuries on the pavements of the street. A dozen were injured in their flight from the place or seeking to rescue those of the inmates who still lived. Most pathetic of the struggles waged for life was that of Alderman Kent, who, blind and alone, freed from the bonds that held him to his bed by the flames leaping across the room and lapping at the mattress, made his way to the bars that held him captive and beat his hands against the screening until he fell back suffocated. He was so terribly burned that identification was only possible because of some dental work which had been recently done for him. Another man, a saloonkeeper named Newell, held fast in a strait-jacket and with his hands cuffed across his breast, lay helpless in his place, unmindful of the bolt's and locks that hemmed him In because of the fever of delirium which possessed him. He was found where he had been left by his attendants, burned almost to a crisp. A woman, maddened with the frenzy of fear, locked herself in a closet on the fourth floor and met death there while rescuers thronged the hallways all about her searching for whom they might carry beyond the reach of the greedy fire. Before midnight, in the eonrse of their preliminary examination into the disaster and its causes, the police made eight arrests. These prisoners were detained for the coroner’s inquest. They are the president of the sanitarium, John P. Nagel, who was conducting a gasoline fuel experiment in the basement, the present engineer and his predecessor and the former’s fireman, and some other employes of the institution. The building was damaged $5,000, and the contents, of which but little can be saved from the wreckage, to the extent of $30,000.