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• 1 2020-02-25T18:06:03+00:00 August Miller killed 65 plain 2024-01-17T20:31:51+00:00 Around midnight, August Miller, a fifty-six-year-old white handyman, suffered a head injury in the midst of a crowd at 126th Street and Lenox Avenue. A cab driver took him to the Joint Disease Hospital, according to the police complaint report. It was 12:30 AM when Dr. Millbank attended Miller, so likely around midnight when he collapsed in the crowd. Millbank diagnosed him as suffering a possible skull fracture "received in some unknown manner during disorder," according to hospital records, and admitted him for treatment. However, after Miller died on March 22, the medical examiner conducted an autopsy which he reported showed that the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, “a natural cause, nothing suspicious.”
  
  Miller appeared in three of the seven newspaper lists of the injured published on March 20, those in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and New York American, among those the New York Herald Tribune reported still in hospital on March 21, and among those listed as injured in the Atlanta World on March 27. His death was widely reported on March 23, in some cases with information on how he had been killed. The most direct explanations came in stories published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Times Union, and in the Associated Press story, which reported Miller had been "beaten by rioters." The Home News offered the additional detail that Miller was "struck by several bricks, knocked down and kicked around by the mob." The New York Times and New York Sun did not attribute Miller's death to anyone, only going as far as saying Miller was "in the midst of rioters" when injured, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle even more obliquely said his death came "during the height of the disorders." The New York Post implied he had been assaulted in a different way. Noting where he had been injured, the story added that, "He was one of the half a dozen white men seriously hurt during the disturbance." Lists of those killed in the Daily News and stories in the New York Herald Tribune and in the Black newspapers the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News, as well as the lists of those killed published in the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide and Pittsburgh Courier simply listed Miller's injury, a fractured skull.
  
  Miller himself never described what happened to him. It was the taxi driver who brought him to the hospital who provided the information on where he had collapsed to the nurse to whom he delivered Miller, according to the detective who investigated the case. Soon after Miller arrived in the hospital, he briefly regained consciousness. Patrolman Anthony Kaminsky, who had been called when the injured man was admitted, was able to question him. After asking his name, address and age, the officer told a hearing of the MCCH that he asked "how he received his injuries?" As Miller started to answer, he lost consciousness again. He died on March 22 without again regaining consciousness.
  
  Detective John O'Brien was assigned to investigate Miller's injury at 2:00 AM; at the time he was in the midst of investigating the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs. He visited the location where Miller had been injured, questioning business owners, residents, and taxi drivers without finding witnesses to what had happened or locating the taxi driver who had brought him to the hospital. As a result, O'Brien was unable to establish the circumstances of Miller's injury. The detective also visited Miller's home, 1674 McCombs Road in the Bronx, and spoke with the superintendents of the building who employed him as a handyman. They had seen him there about midnight. There was also no information on why he traveled to Harlem, but he must have collapsed almost as soon as he arrived, likely by subway. His employers did report Miller had been “acting peculiar for some months previous.” His family were in Germany, so his employers identified the body. Confusingly, when O'Brien testified at a public hearing of the MCCH on April 20, he mentioned speaking to Miller's sister, who had seen him around 10:00 PM, a meeting not recorded in police records. When the medical examiner reported that he had not died as a result of a fractured skull or suspiciously, O'Brien closed his investigation on March 24.
  
  
  
  The version of the case reported to Arthur Garfield Hays by Hyman Glickstein, the lawyer from his law firm working to gather evidence for the MCCH subcommittee on crime, gave the police a greater role that clearly raised their suspicions about the circumstances of Miller's injury: "According to police report [Miller] died of natural causes and was merely picked up by the police in a dead or dying condition." Once testimony in the public hearing put a taxi driver in the place of police in delivering the injured man to the hospital, little basis remained for holding them responsible for Miller's injuries. However, ILD lawyers who questioned Detective O'Brien when he testified about his investigation at a hearing of the MCCH remained unconvinced that Miller died of natural causes. Rather, they suggested he had been struck by police, and his injury had not been accurately reported to prevent officers from being charged. Eventually, Hays cut off their questioning of O'Brien, saying it had no basis unless somebody could "provide evidence how Miller came by his injuries."
  
  Miller was included in lists of those killed in the disorder published on March 23 and 24, and in Black weekly newspapers on March 30, without mention of the autopsy. On March 31 the Home News also included him in its count of those killed in the disorder even while noting that Miller's death "was later found to have been due to heart disease, probably aggravated by exertion and excitement." The Daily News, New York American, Daily Mirror, Times Union, the Associated Press, Afro American, and Chicago Defender reported the death of Lloyd Hobbs on March 30 as the fourth death resulting from the disorder without specifying the other three individuals killed. None of those newspapers included Edward Laurie among those killed, so they also still included Miller after the autopsy, along with James Thompson and Andrew Lyons. So too did the New York Herald Tribune, which identified Hobbs as the fifth death resulting from the riot. (The Daily Worker initially reported Hobbs as the fourth death, on April 1, but a week later referred to him as the third death, while the New York Times reported his death without reference to how many others had been killed).
• 1 2020-02-25T18:07:14+00:00 Andrew Lyons killed 58 plain 2024-01-12T00:05:49+00:00 Andrew Lyons, a thirty-seven-year-old Black man, died as a result of injuries "sustained during the thick of a melee at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue," according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News. Stories in two white newspapers reported the circumstances of Lyons' injury in similar, slightly more specific terms as the result of having been "beaten over the head with a blunt instrument," according to the Times Union. The New York Herald Tribune added that "rioters" had delivered the beating. However, the white newspapers located the assault a block to the east, at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. None of the stories provided information on when Lyons was injured. Both the white newspapers incorrectly gave Lyons' home address as 210 Lenox Avenue. Only the New York Amsterdam News published the correct address, 147 West 117th Street.
  
  
  
  There was no indication of the source of the information reported in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Herald Tribune, and Times Union. No evidence of the circumstances in which Lyons was injured was produced for the MCCH. One of Communist Party-affiliated lawyers who questioned Captain Rothengast during a MCCH hearing did claim that "Andrew Lyons died of injuries inflicted by clubs of the police." Rothengast replied, "I'd have to consult records to be exact." The MCCH had its investigators gather information on those killed during the disorder. In Lyons' case, the only material in their files were the death and autopsy records.
  
  The medical records showed that Lyons did not receive medical attention until the evening after the disorder. An ambulance was called to his home, 147 West 117th Street, at 5:10 PM on March 20, by a friend, George Harris, according to the death record issued by Harlem Hospital. When Lyons arrived at the hospital, he was was described as "stuporous," too groggy to tell doctors what had happened to him. The doctor who completed the death record, Emanuel Hauer, wrote that Lyons was "said to have been hit on the head during riot on 3-19-35." He told a MCCH hearing that it was Harris who told him that Lyons "came home [on the night of March 19] stuporous" and had gone to bed. Harris also said he did not know what had happened to Lyons. The ambulance man's report, which Hauer read to the MCCH hearing, simply recorded that Lyons had been "Struck over the head" not that he had been hit during the disorder. Nor did the autopsy report completed on March 24. It recorded that Lyons had been "injured in some unknown manner." Lyons died three days after being admitted to hospital, on March 23rd; the recorded cause of death was a "fractured skull, laceration of the brain, terminal pneumonia." His brother James, a resident of Stem, North Carolina, identified his body on March 25, according to the autopsy. Although the autopsy also noted "Detectives investigating" the death, there were no avenues for investigation in the records. Likely as a result, Lyons' death appeared to have remained unexplained.
  
  Given that their was no evidence of clashes between "rioters" and Black men on the streets during the disorder, the ILD lawyer who questioned Rothengast was likely correct that Lyons' injuries came from a police baton. The intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue saw the most sustained clashes between police and crowds on the street, so the beating probably occurred where it was reported by the New York Amsterdam News. Clashes between police and people on the street occurred there from 8:00 PM until around 10:30 PM. The Black newspaper also correctly reported Lyons' address, which the white newspapers that reported the alternative location did not.
  
  Lyons' delayed admission to hospital explained why he was not in any lists of the injured published in newspapers on March 20 and March 21. The first mentions of Lyons in the press were reports of his death in the New York Post and Daily News on March 23, in the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, New York Times, and an AP story on March 24, and in the Atlanta World on March 27. Lyons also appeared in lists of those killed published in the weekly Black newspapers, the New York Age, Pittsburgh Courier, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, as well as the New York Amsterdam News, on March 30.