Some of those who jumped hit the glass sidewalk vault lights and crashed through to the basement where water poured in on top of them. Others jumped to their deaths on the concrete more than a hundred feet below. Thousands of onlookers behind police lines watched in horror, unable to believe what they witnessed.
United Press reporter William Shepherd wrote, "I learned a new sound: a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk. Thud -- dead; thud -- dead; thud -- dead; thud -- dead. Sixty-two thud -- deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant."
Shepherd also described one man who helped three women to the ninth-floor sill where, "calmly, deliberately," he dropped each of them to the concrete below. "They were all as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity."
The last body fell at about 5:00 p.m. The endless horror had lasted twenty minutes.
(To be continued)
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