Tragedy on the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge
A young Tacoma boy is killed by an electric streetcar after being blinded by locomotive smoke.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Ailing Vedeberg, a 9-year-old boy, was crushed and mangled under an electric car on the Twenty-fifth street bridge this evening. The boy was watching a locomotive on the sawmill road pass under, and the smoke from the stack blinded him. He stumbled toward the electric track, falling backward after tripping over the guard rail. The motorman on the approaching electric car could not see the boy through the smoke, and the car mutilated the body, dragging it and running over it. The boy's head was twisted nearly off the shoulders, and the limbs were mangled. The boy had been sent from his parents' home on Twenty-third street and Yakima avenue to see his uncle, Ailing Vedeberg, in the New addition, and he was returning when attracted by the passing locomotive. In the crowd that gathered to see the remains in the street, three women fainted.
“The boy's head was twisted nearly off the shoulders. It was turned more than half way around on the shoulders when found.”
Streetcar and rail accidents were a frequent and grim reality of urban industrial growth in the 1890s, when pedestrian safety infrastructure barely existed. Today, the area remains a dense corridor of transit and industry, though safety standards have evolved drastically since the era of unfenced rail crossings.
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