Tragedy in Auburn: Four Children Found Dead in Fire
A railroad worker is arrested after his home is destroyed by fire, revealing the brutal murder of his four children.
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.
Tacoma, Wash.—Believed to have been brutally murdered as they lay in their beds, after the room and beds had been saturated with kerosene and the house then set on fire, four little children of S. A. Hewett of Auburn were slain about 4 o’clock Sunday morning. Their badly charred bodies were taken from the ruins. Hewett, a Northern Pacific brakeman in the railroad yards at Auburn, was placed under arrest by the King County sheriff and taken to Seattle following the gathering of a crowd of nearly 1,000 persons, among whom there was considerable talk of lynching. Examination of the children’s charred bodies by the coroner revealed that their skulls had been crushed in, and a blood-stained hammer was found near the scene.
“The children's skulls had been crushed in, while the mattresses on which they lay were saturated with blood.”
This horrific 1917 crime captures the era's tabloid approach to reporting domestic violence and mental health crises. Today, Auburn remains a vital transportation hub, but the public fascination with the details of such intimate violence reminds us of the stark differences in how tragedy and community trauma were documented a century ago.
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