The miners of the Allegheny Coal and Coke Company were on strike. Some say Sellins was killed while she was on picket duty; others say she was shot while she was inciting a riot. Foster says that "a dozen drunken deputy sheriffs on strike duty, led by a mine official, suddenly rushed the pickets, shooting as they came. Joseph Strzelecki [sic] fell, mortally wounded. Mrs. Sellins, standing close by, rushed first to get some children out of danger. Then she came back to plead with the deputies, who were still clubbing the prostrate Strzelecki, not to kill him." An account in the September 20, 1919, New Majority describes the scene:
"The mine official snatched a club and felled the woman to the ground. This was not on company ground, but just outside the fence of a friend of Mrs. Sellins.
"She rose and tried to drag herself toward the gate. [The official] shouted: "Kill that -------------! Three shots were fired, each taking effect.
"She fell to the ground, and [the official] cried: "Give her another!"
"One of the deputies, standing over the motionless and silent body, held his gun down and, without averting his face, fired into the body that did not move.
"An auto truck . . . hurried to the scene and the body of the old miner thrown in; then Mrs. Sellins was dragged by the heels to the back of the car. Before she was placed in the truck, a deputy took a cudgel and crushed in her skull before the eyes of the throng of men, women and children, who stood in powerless silence before the armed men. [One of the deputies] picked up the woman's hat, placed it on his head, danced a step, and said to the crowd: 'I'm Mrs. Sellins now.'"
One witness to the shooting was Stanley F. Rafalko, a seven- year-old boy who was out on an errand for his mother. Sixty years later, he described what he saw as a child. He noticed "three or four uniformed deputies parked in a maroon touring car talking to some local steelworkers." He went into a store, and when he came out, "the coal mine police were chasing the fellows with billy clubs."
