New Haven, CT Train Wreck, Sept 1913 - Engineer Arrested

ARREST ENGINEER OF FATAL TRAIN

Flagman of Wrecked Express Also Held by Coroner as Criminally Responsible.

ACTS ON SECRET EVIDENCE

Accused Engineer Says He Will Clear Himself and Is Not a Scapegoat.

ROOF OF ONE CAR ROTTEN.

Witness Tells of Sinking Through It ---- Federal Inquiry to be Full and Public.

Special to The New York Times.

NEW HAVEN, Sept. 4.---After an all-day star chamber inquest into the wreck of the Bar Harbor Express and the White Mountain flier on the New Haven Railroad at North Haven, which cost twenty-one lives and injured scores of returning Summer visitors on Tuesday morning. Coroner Eli Mix of New Haven County at 10 o'clock to-night ordered the arrest of Augustus B. Miller, engineer of the White Mountain Express, and Charles Henry Murray, flagman of the wrecked Bar Harbor train, on charges of being criminally responsible for the death of Royal A. Hotchkiss, son of a New Haven broker and one of the victims of the wreck. Miller and Murray were held in $5,000 bail.

When the inquest had lasted all mooring and afternoon, with no jury or public official other than the Coroner attending, and with two policemen stationed at the door of the courtroom in the County Court House to keep reporters away from all the witnesses. Miller, the engineer, was taken to the Court House this evening and subjected to a long examination. Thereafter, H. W. Belnap, Chief Inspector of the Inter-State Commerce Commission, was permitted by the Coroner to serve Miller with a subpoena to appear at he commission's public investigation into the wreck to be held here to-morrow.

Immediately afterward Miller was taken by the Coroner to the police station and placed under arrest on a Coroner's warrant, which remanded him to jail for twenty-four hours after the Coroner should return his verdict. After that time, the arrest would cease automatically.

Mix Says He Has Evidence.

Asked whether he had sufficient evidence to warrant the prosecution of Miller, Coroner Mix replied:

"I have evidence sufficient to hold him for twenty-four hours after I find my verdict."

He refused to disclose the evidence or to tell anything that had come out at the inquest, but, turning to Miller, he said:

"Tell these gentlemen whether I have treated you fairly and kindly."

Miller, who looked gaunt and haggard, his square jaw hollowed in the two days since the wreck, his face clammy and eyes red and tremulous, replied:

"I think you used good judgment. I am all demoralized over what the newspapers have been saying. If you fellows would tell the truth it would compliment the Coroner, the railroad, and myself. I'd like to catch hold of the man who wrote that story in the newspapers calling me a scapegoat. I'm not a scapegoat.

"I haven't read the papers myself," continued Miller, nervously, "but they have told me a lot of things that have been said in them. I have nothing to fear. Certainly, I expect to clear myself."

Miller telephoned to F. B. Gates, Secretary and Treasurer of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Railway Engineers and Firemen, who arrived presently and gave his home as bail. Coroner Mix turned to Miller again and said:

"Tell the gentlemen of the brotherhood whether or not I have treated you fairly."

"You have." said Miller.

Then turning excitedly on the Police Sergeant at the desk, Miller shouted:

"Now, Sergeant, I want to know why I wasn't allowed to have any flowers sent up to my cell when my family brought them in to-day. They wouldn't let the flowers come in."

Miller Declines to Tell Facts.

The Sergeant explained that the flowers should have been admitted. Miller seemed satisfied with the apology. Then, turning nervously to Gates, as the newspaper men began to ask for a statement about the wreck and his part in it, he waved them aside, and at Gate's suggestion refused to speak about the wreck. He was hurried away to his home in an automobile. Gates accompanying him.

Coroner Mix returned to the County Court House, where, despite the lateness of the hour the private inquest still was continued. Murray, the flagman, had testified, and Coroner Mix announced that he would hold him on the same charge and in the same bill as Miller. Murray, up to a late hour had not obtained bail.

Inspector Howard of the interstate Commerce Commission, after the arrest of the two railway men, said over the telephone from the Hotel Taft:

"The action of the Coroner was taken on his own initiative. We had no knowledge that such a step was to be taken. I am talking with Chief Inspector Belnap here in bed at my side, and you can say with his approval that what the Coroner or the State's Attorney may do will have no effect whatever on our inquiry.

"We will start at 10 o'clock to-morrow as planned. We will have all the witnesses we want, and we will go ahead with our programme. We have no concern with what those fellows do or do not do."

The arrest of the two men by Coroner Mix was precipitated, it is believed, by efforts made by the local branch of the Brotherhood of Railway Engineers and Firemen, in a telegram to Grand Chief Warren E. Stone of the order to-night, asking him to sanction the employment of an attorney to sue out a writ of habeas corpus for Miller. The local organization, according to one of its members, wished to have the responsibility for employing counsel in such matter shifted to some one other than employes[sic] of the New Haven Road, and therefore selected the Chief of the brotherhood rather than one of its own members to employ a lawyer.

At the same time, when the Coroner was conducting his secret inquest to-day, a careful inquiry into the circumstances of the wreck was being carried on by Inspectors of the Interstate Commission in preparation for a full and public hearing of the causes of the disaster to be held by Commissioner C. C. McChord in the Federal Court Building to-day.

According to a statement made to-day by Mrs. Anna Norton, who lived in the same house with Miller and his landlady in Montowese, suburb of this city Miller was not on his regular run on the White Mountain train, which caused the North Haven wreck, but was taking, against his own will, the place of an engineer who had reported sick. Miller, according to Mrs. Norton, had told the man at Springfield who asked him to take the White Mountain train that he was overworked, had had almost no sleep, and was unwilling to take the train. But the railroad official in charge, she said, insisted that he make the run, and the run was made.

When Coroner Mix appeared in the County Court House to-day to conduct his inquest he announced that nothing would be given out to the public concerning it; that is was a "private matter of the State of Connecticut," and that no other official than himself would take part in it.

Mix Muzzles Witnesses.

The clerk remained in the hall outside the inquest room, with two policemen whom the Coroner had stationed there. The policemen had orders from the Coroner, they said, to permit no newspaper man to talk to any of the persons subpoenaed to the inquest after the witnesses quitted the courtroom. The policemen obeyed, escorting the witnesses safely from the doors. Only a few witnesses after they left the Coroner would tell what they had testified or give their names. Most of them were employes[sic] of the New Haven Road who had ridden on the trains that figured in the North Haven wreck, or who had seen the trains at earlier stages of their disastrous trip.

One of the latter class, Allen Seaman of Whalley Avenue, New Haven, a fireman on the second section of the White Mountain Express, told the Coroner that he, Seaman; his engineer, Allie Wallace; Robertson, the fireman on the first White Mountain section, and Miller, its engineer, had taken supper together at Springfield before they started their run, and how at that meal they had discussed the foggy weather conditions. Miller, according to Seaman, said in this connection:

"We'd better be cautious this evening. It's a mighty foggy run."

The second section of the White Mountain train, Seaman added, lost time all the way down, until it was about an hour and fifteen minutes late. The first section was fifteen minutes ahead of them. All the way down, said Seaman, there was heavy fog, and often the signal disks could not be seen until the train was almost on them. Sometimes, as a result of the fog, the second section slowed down to ten or fifteen miles an hour.

At Wallingford, Seaman related, the train was flagged and the crew was told that Miller's train was wrecked ahead. Then, cautiously, the second section crept down until it could see the wrecked first. It was so foggy that the fireman could see only about seventy-five feet ahead.

William F. Clarkson of 15 Gran Street, this city, was another witness. Clarkson, who is a toolmaker, was a passenger on the train that left Cedar Hill Station on Tuesday morning at 6:40 o'clock, and which was one of the wreckage. He told of getting on the roof of one of the wrecked cars and walking along it until suddenly, as if the wood itself were rotten, the roof beneath his feet gave way and he crashed through almost to his shoulders. The fog was so dense around, he said, that the engineer could not have seen 100 feet ahead.

Despite the figures given out by the New Haven road officials to show that Miller, engineer of the White Mountain train, had not been overworked with long hours and continuous runs just before the wreck, that charge was repeated in detail yesterday by Mrs. Norton, who lived in the same house as Miller in Montowese.

"For a week previous to the wreck, except on Sunday," she said, "he had no more than three hours sleep a day. He completed his run at 1:37 A. M. on Tuesday, and thereafter begged the man in charge at Springfield not to have him run another train, but to let him go home. He was told, however, that the engineer who was to take out the White Mountain Express was sick and that he would have to take the train instead. Again he pleaded that he was very tired and his nerves were all unstrung. But his superior insisted, and at 4:43 he took out the White Mountain Express. All this Miller told to Mrs. Scott, his landlady, and me when he came home immediately after the wreck."

According to the figures given by the railroad and published yesterday, Miller after finishing his run at Stamford on Sept. 1 had a rest of eleven hours and thirty-eight minutes in Stamford. In Miller's home it was insisted that the road's statement took no account of the fact that Miller had to come back home from Stamford and return from Montowese to Stamford for the next run---a space of two hours each way---in this so-called eleven-hour rest period in Stamford.

The New York Times, New York, NY 5 Sept 1913