Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing by Arnie Bernstein Page A

for. One father, weary from rescue work, looked over the rows of lifeless bodies and saw his son. “Well,” he said, “there’s Billy.”
    There was nothing he could do for Billy now. With resignation, the man returned to the killing field, hoping to find someone else’s child alive. 33
    A mother searching for her son lifted a sheet. It was not a boy but a girl covered by the shroud. Sunshine, breaking through the dust in the air, spread across the child’s face. Her eyes fluttered against the light.
    Josephine England was badly injured but not dead. 34
    Another voice rang out, loud and clear.
    “Dean’s not dead! He’s alive!”
    It was true. A neighbor, looking sorrowfully at the body of Dean Sweet, suddenly realized that the boy was wiggling his toes.
    No ambulances were available to transport Dean to Lansing. He was taken to the hospital in the only machine around: a hearse. 35

    Loose debris tumbled down from the ceiling in the school basement. It caught the attention of Captain John O’Brien, a Lansing police officer, and William Klock, a sheriff’s deputy from nearby Ingham County. The two men cautiously approached the coal room, where they could see part of the ceiling now fallen and scattered on the floor.
    There was something on the floor hidden under plaster; this was the chunk of debris Chief Lane had stepped over just minutes before.
    The plaster was removed, revealing dynamite connected to some kind of wire. O’Brien and Klock didn’t need to search any farther. They hightailed it out of the school. 36
    At 10:45 a painful but levelheaded decision came down: stop all rescueefforts. Dynamite was beneath the school, still wired and to God knows what. Perhaps a timing device was ticking away, ready to go off at any moment. The risk was simply too great to chance more death.
    Morse, Lefke, state troopers Ernest “Buck” Haldeman and Donald McNaughton, and F. I. Phippeny, a Michigan State College engineer, carefully reentered the basement, now a hot zone where anything could happen. 37 The wire was traced to a tin pipe. The pipe, connected by small bolts, ran a considerable length through the ceiling into other rooms within the basement. The team could see that this conduit was packed solid with dynamite.
    More dynamite was planted in the ceiling, hidden by wire mesh covered with plaster. Wire connected the explosive caches to a blasting cap. The men followed the trail as it led them from the collapsed north wing south toward the rest of the school basement beneath the main building. More wires were found, firmly stapled to wooden beams. The staples were a bit rusty, indicating that they had been in place for some time. These wires led to more blasting caps attached to more explosives, some dynamite, other heavy sacks filled with army surplus pyrotol.
    The wire trail led to a hotshot battery connected to a clock. A similar device was discovered elsewhere in the catacombs. Whoever planted these explosives clearly knew how to do it right. Had the other timers gone off and electric currents run as intended, all of Bath Consolidated School would now be rubble with every student conceivably dead or severely injured. 38
    By some miracle—be it a short in the wiring, a bad connection, or some other cause—only the north wing’s explosives had detonated. Some experts suggested that Kehoe, despite all his electrical knowledge, had made a serious error. There simply wasn’t enough power in the two remaining timing devices to set off the massive amount of explosives he’d planted under the main school building. 39
    Removal of these newfound explosives was critical. Haldeman and McNaughton, working in the dark basement lit only by flashlights, carefully disconnected the blasting caps from the labyrinthine wiring. They approached the delicate task with the touch of fine silversmiths; any slight mistake conceivably could result in more explosions. After this stage was safely completed, the blasting caps, wiring,