Schoolboy Smoking Cigaret Might Have Touched Off Fire |
CHICAGO, Dec 2 - (UPI) - A schoolboy who sneaked a forbidden cigaret may be the unwitting arsonist who touched off the fire which killed 87 children and three nuns at Our Lady of the Angels parochial school. |
This was the theory Tuesday of Police and Fire Department squads investigating Chicago's worst fire in 55 years, a holocaust which swept the West Side parochial school Monday and shocked the nation and the world. |
The horror and pathos of the fire mounted as Chicago became a city in mourning. There were these developments. |
Five of the 100 children injured, 82 of them still hospitalized, were not expected to live. |
|
The possibility arose that the death count might really be 91. Only three pitifully charred bodies remained unidentified at the at the county morgue, awaiting X-rays and an attempt to give them names. But four of the school's children were missing. Police hoped the extra missing child had wandered from the school in a state of shock and was being cared for by someone living in the neighborhood. |
The Chicago Archdiocese announced that Archbishop Albert George Meyer will preside at mass funeral services for the 87 dead children in a National Guard armory Friday. The church will bury the 53 girls and 34 boys, aged 9 to 15, together in the Holy Innocents section of the Queen of Heaven Cemetery if their parents wish. |
Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered all flags drawn to half mast on city buildings until the funerals. Appeals went out for donations of money and blood, although so many blood donors volunteered some had to be turned away. A citywide day of mourning was to be declared. |
Scenes of heartbreak and grief continued in scores of homes, empty by or more children, at the morgue, where parents collapsed in hysteria upon identifying their children, and at the Our Lady of the Angels rectory, where the nuns' bodies were brought Tuesday night. |
|
A large crowd, many of them nuns who could not restrain their sobs, watched the three black coffins, decorated with small silver crosses, taken into the rectory. An auxiliary bishop conducted services outside the building, where last rites for the nuns will be held Thursday. |
Police had all but ruled out the possibility that the fire was deliberately touched off by a deranged arsonist who somehow crept into the school. |
But their suspicions mounted that some teenage boy had ducked beneath the stairwell, taken a few puffs on a cigaret, and tossed it into a cardboard container stuffed with discarded examination papers before returning to his classes. |
The fire swept up the stairwell of the 2-story school and spread through the second floor. Suffocating black smoke boiled up from the well-waxed corridor floors. Then, it was theorized, a nun smelled smoke, ordered windows opened in a classroom, and provided the murderous draft for the flames. Within minutes, children were leaping from second floor windows or dying of heat or asphyxiation at their desks. |
|
Police Sgt. Drew Brown, head of the arson squad, along with a special police squat of 35 men, began intensive questioning of boys who had been assigned by their teachers to carry wastepaper from classrooms to the trash bins near a stairwell. |