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SEGEE Robert Dale

1930

...

167+6

1938

1950

NE +JP

Verdict/Urteil:

In Hartford, Connecticut, a fire breaks out under the big top of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus, killing 167 people and injuring 682. Two-thirds of those who perish are children. The cause of the fire was not known, but it spread at incredible speed, racing up the canvas of the circus tent. Scarcely before the 8000 spectators inside the big top could react, patches of burning canvas began falling on them from above, and a stampede for the exits began. Many were trapped under fallen canvas, but most were able to rip through it and escape. However, after the tent's ropes burned and its poles gave way, the whole burning big top came crashing down, consuming those who remained inside. Within ten minutes it was over, and some one hundred children and their sixty adult escorts were dead or dying. An investigation discovered that the tent had undergone a treatment with flammable paraffin thinned with three parts of gasoline to make it waterproof. Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus eventually agreed to pay five million dollars in compensation, and several of the organizers were convicted on manslaughter charges. In 1950, in a late development in the case, Robert D. Segee of Circleville, Ohio, confessed to starting the Hartford circus fire. Segee claimed that he had been an arsonist since the age of six, and that an apparition of an Indian on a flaming horse often visited him and urged him to set fires. On 02 November 1950, Segee was sentenced to two consecutive terms of twenty-two years in prison, the maximum penalty in Ohio at the time.

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