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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).