Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 September 1875 — A California Pomeroy. [ARTICLE]

A California Pomeroy.

San Francisco boasts a youth the counterpart of Jesse Pomeroy. His name is Harry Rogers and he is but ten years of age. When about eigli,t years of age the youngster was detected "in catching the neighbors’ chickens, which, having conveyed to some hiding place, he proceeded to torture to deatli by inflicting cuts on every part of their body -with pieces of glass, apparently utterly regardless of the sometimes.painful wounds which his own fingers received from his unmanageable weapon during the operation. Curiously enough, he seemed to have sense enough to prolong the torture of his victims by avoiding any wound in the neck or other vital part, so that the victims of his bloodthirstiness were occasionally able to make their way home after being released. About this time a disposition to bite and pinch children was manifested, and his mother sent him to the Brothers’ School in Oakland, and afterward to two other private schools, from all of which he was sent home in a hurry so soon as he began to display his peculiar propensities. Finally, after two years of trouble with him, the mother, who is an invalid, procured him board with a family named Bennett, near Saucelito, and here for the first time -he seems to have given full vent to his infernal appetite for blood. One day recently he inveigled a child of the family less than -three years old into the barn, and covered it partially with gunny-sacks, alter which with a piece of bone, which had been broken so as to present a chiseled edge, he proceeded to cut the child’s hips in a most horrible manner, inflicting no less than nineteen wounds, and finishing by severing its right ear from its head with the exception of a slight piece of skin. The father of the injured child was absent at the time, anil yoffing Rogers was instantly sent home to riiis mother, signalizing his arrival by setting fire to the curtains and nearly destroying the house. His mother declares that the mania has come upon him entirely within the past two years, and that when accused of his deeds lie frankly owns up, only saying he “ could not help it.” On one occasion he got hold of a blftck-and-tan puppy belonging to his step-father, which was of so diminutive a breed that when half grown it weighed one and a half pounds, and literally flayed it ali\ T e, causing a net loss of $75 to the owner.