Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 96, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 February 1920 — CROSS IS GIVEN SEVEN YEARS [ARTICLE]

CROSS IS GIVEN SEVEN YEARS

Pleads Guilty to Charge of Neglecting Family—Praises Court for Sending Him to Prison —Wtf| and , Child Died. Washington, Feb. 27.—Tilman Ray Cross, age twenty-nine, husband of Belle Cross and father of one-year-old Billie Cross, who froze to death In the family’s shack in the White river bottom? In Veale township, February 15, was sentenced in circuit court here by Judge J. W. Ogdon to serve from one to seven years in the Indiana reforma-

tory. He pleaded guilty on a chaise of neglecting his family and said after being sentenced that the court did right in sending him to prison. Cross was trying to keep his family in an abandoned shack in the bottoms over winter. When the members were found they were without food, barefooted and stockingless, with the temperature standing at zero, and scarcely enough clothing to hide their nakedness. The one-year-old baby was already frozen to death. A three-year-old daughter of Cross was nearly dea«i( from exposure, and while the girl was J being taken to a warm home the mother died of exposure. The mother and brother of Cross, living in a shanty nearby, are in a serious condition from influenza and pneumonia. The three-year-old daughter of Cross I* also sick from exposure and undernourishment. Youth Falls Under Train; Dies. Sullivan, Feb. 27. —The fourteen-year-old son of John Schaffer, a taxicab. man at Gilmour, died as the resist of injuries received when he felr under a Chicago, Terre Haute & Southeastern coal train at the Gilmour station. The boy jumped on the train and then fell, from the car.