Death Before Dawn

It was 2 a.m. and cold; the thermometer stood at 19DEG. In the hushed buildings of Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa, nurses worked at the desks, hurried soundlessly down hushed corridors on errands of the deep night. A nurse paused at a window, glanced out into the darkness, caught her breath in horror; thin patches of snow in the yard were lighted with the red glare of flames. She raced down the corridor to spread the alarm. As she did, the hospital's St. Elizabeth mental ward, a 60-year-old frame building, was spewing smoke and flame. Trapped in its rooms and wards were 65 women and three men, all of them insane or suffering the gentle irrationality of senility.

The Rescue. Before fire trucks sirened to the scene from two miles away, the fire had shot from a first-floor room up a dumb waiter, was licking through all three floors. In rows of flame-lit windows, terrorstricken women shrieked and pounded at wire mesh and steel bars which imprisoned them in cell-like rooms; before the firemen had arrived many had fallen silent and disappeared in the flames. Mrs. Anna Neal, a 55-year-old nurse on duty in the ward, led some of her patients into the night, rushed back into the fire to rescue more.

She did not come out again. Two nurse's aides herded twelve patients to safety; they had to plead with some, to keep them from scurrying back to their rooms to pick up shoes, rosaries and other possessions. The three men patients broke out of their rooms and escaped, two by leaping from first-story windows.

Balancing gingerly on slippery, icesheathed ladders, firemen hacked with axes at the stubborn screens and bars, taking costly long minutes. Finally they clambered inside. They found one woman, two hours after the fire had started, seated calmly on her third-floor bed; her nightgown was partially coated with ice and she was surrounded by fallen debris. "Are you all right?" a fireman asked. "I think so," she said. Taking her by the hand, he led her to a ladder at an open window. "Some of them were like animals who had something new happening to them and didn't know what to do," said Patrolman Richard Fee.

The Toll. Outside, doctors, nurses and white-habited nuns of the Sisters of Mercy, many of them sobbing, administered to the bewildered injured and kept count of the rescued. Of the ward's 68 patients, 39 women patients and Nurse Neal were dead. After the injured were tended and the funeral services arranged, the investigators would come, asking a pertinent question: why had the 60-year-old hospital building not been made fireproof? Fire Chief Lester Schick said that almost a year before he had urged the installation of a sprinkler system, but nothing was done about it. At Christmas, for the first time in years, hospital authorities had decided against having a lighted Christmas tree in the corridor of the mental ward. Reason: they feared a fire.

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