A Fugitive’s Final Escape in a Seattle Lodging House
Facing a retrial for a violent attempted murder, a young man ends his life in a room above a downtown saloon.
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.
Tra Hummel, a young man who had been convicted of the attempted murder of John Michaelson two years prior, committed suicide by taking morphine in a lodging house above the Opera saloon on Front Street in Seattle. Hummel had been granted a new trial, which was set for the following Tuesday, but he chose to end his life instead. Two years earlier, Hummel had lured Michaelson to a remote location under the guise of showing him real estate lots, where he shot him in the back of the head. Although Michaelson survived the attack, the trial and subsequent conviction attracted significant attention due to Hummel's family connections to respectable Seattle citizens. Coroner Dr. Smart found Hummel’s body and a half-emptied bottle of morphine, bringing an abrupt end to a case that had haunted the local courts.
“Tra Hummel took his life in preference to again standing trial on the charge of attempting to murder John Michaelson, with robbery as a motive.”
The lurid fascination with the 'respectable' family behind a violent criminal is a trope that persists in true crime reporting. This story serves as a grim artifact of 19th-century Seattle's rougher edges and the swift, often lethal, intersection of legal pressure and social shame.
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