The Little Old Murder From Pasadena
A retired police sergeant and a historian discuss history and true crime in the City of Roses.
The Little Old Murder From Pasadena
Tournament of Terror
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Alyse and Victor discuss the tragic grandstand collapse at the 1926 Tournament of Roses Parade in which criminal negligence led to 11 gruesome deaths and hundreds of casualties.
And we are back with another little old murder from Pasadena. I'm the historian Elise and I'm here with my co-host.
SPEAKER_02:Victor Cass, a retired police sergeant with over 30 years' experience, all with the Pasadena California Police Department.
SPEAKER_03:Today we have a um not so typical murder for you, but that's right.
SPEAKER_02:This is a what is known as a legal murder, but a different classification. It's a um manslaughter case through negligence.
SPEAKER_03:And this all occurred at the 37th annual Tournament of Roses parade uh in 1926. So this is on January 1st, 1926.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, and it's a story that uh very few Pasadenians would know about today. Like I said, unless you're a historian or a tournament of roses buff. This is, you know, it's almost a hundred years ago when this happened. There'd probably be nobody alive today except small children who may have been there that would remember this incident.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, it was very shocking, made news all over and really put a damper on that edition of the Tournament of Roses.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Well, I don't think the Rose Parade folks wanted people to remember this happening.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, definitely not. So 1926, Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena is pretty built up. Doesn't look that different from how it would look in the 1950s or the 60s. Um, some buildings would be removed, others would would stay the same. Um where this occurred, as as people who are familiar with the term roses and the rose parade know, the parade starts just outside Old Pasadena, um, at the top end of Millionaire Row, Orange Grove in Colorado. That's where the parade starts. It turns west, I'm correction, it turns east onto Colorado Boulevard from that intersection and goes through Old Town. It's a long parade, and the parade route's about five miles in change, uh, ends uh on Sierra Madre Boulevard up past uh the Pastina High School. Um so as the parade is winding uh past Old Town and entering the Playhouse District.
SPEAKER_03:So the parade has started, as you're saying, at the corner of Orange Grove in Colorado. And when it gets to 127 West Colorado, this building is now restoration hardware. Two-story building. 51-year-old Mrs. Bowen was watching the parade from the top of this building, and she's peering out over the building to see some of the floats when she falls, and people scream, see her fall, her head hits the pavement, and she dies immediately, if not on the way to the hospital.
SPEAKER_02:Right, and keep in mind that this is almost like a bad omen of what is to come because it's not gonna be the last of the bizarre incidents that occur on the parade route this morning.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, and it's very grisly already because she narrowly misses hitting three kids. On her way down, I think her foot struck a man in the head, leaving a huge gash on his head. At some point in the parade, a police officer is injured. Traffic officer John Fox was holding a crowd back on Colorado when this big black horse broke free and basically stampled like stampled.
SPEAKER_02:Stampeded, I think you meant to say trampled and stampede at the same time.
SPEAKER_03:I did. I was thinking both words at once. They yeah, ran over him, caused him internal injuries, broke his back.
SPEAKER_02:Um broken ribs, I believe.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, broken ribs, and he was transported to the hospital. Did not die. They thought that he was going to, though, because it was uh very grisly.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, his injuries were so severe, uh, they thought Officer Fox was gonna die from this. Um, he ended up not dying and uh lived to like 1960 or something. So he, you know, he served his time with the PD and uh was able to uh make it out of there.
SPEAKER_03:Glad he recovered from that. That was a crazy injury.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So this is already two, we're already two crazy traumatic incidents into this ill-fated parade as it makes it woop makes its way into the playhouse district.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and so it gets to the intersection of Colorado and Madison Avenue.
SPEAKER_02:What's there today, Elise?
SPEAKER_03:This would be the southeast corner, which is today Earth Cafe.
SPEAKER_02:That's correct. Uh prior to Earth Cafe, it was a small parking lot, and I think a lot of Pasadenians listening today would remember there was a Zinki's shoe repair on that corner. Uh but in 1926, it was a bigger lot, um, adjacent to a building on the southeast corner. And all throughout Colorado Boulevard, uh, even today, they have little segments of grandstands that they erect along the parade route at various places. You know, there's a parking lot here or a little space between two buildings. Um Rose Parade, you know, organizers will set up bleachers. And you can still see these bleachers today along Colorado Boulevard, even in the Playhouse village neighborhood, as it's called today, you'll see still you'll still see these little segments all the way down, you know, like PCC, all the way down, you'll see these bleacher segments. But I guess in the 1920s, the construction of these bleacher segments maybe weren't up to par.
SPEAKER_03:Well, they had inspectors. Um, and so the lot that we're talking about on Madison and Colorado, it was a home, I think, not uh not long before they put up the grandstands. There was a home on the lot and they had to move it elsewhere. And this lot belonged to kind of a prominent Pasadena man, and he leased that lot to a Pasadena contractor named Paul Mahoney. And so Paul Mahoney is the one who constructed this big grandstand there on that lot for the Rose Parade.
SPEAKER_02:These are like wood bleachers. Um, you know, they're staggered up. You know, you can maybe fit, you know, a couple of hundred people in this segment, maybe 20 folks or so to a level, you know, to one row of wooden bleachers.
SPEAKER_03:And they also he sold standing room spaces too to people. So you could sit and stand. You can sit and stand. And so he was kind of trying to cram as many people as he could into these to make as much money as he could.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he got as many bucks as he can from this.
SPEAKER_03:And there were inspectors that came around to all of the grandstands to make sure that they were up to par. And there was one building inspector named Bucknall who did come. He saw on December 28th, he looked at the stand and he approved it.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Keep in mind this is a Bucknell's a city of Pasadena inspector, like a code enforcement guy, um, whose job it is to, you know, give the okay as to the safety of these bleachers, these temporary bleachers.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. And it's interesting that Bucknall approved it because there were many others who saw these bleachers and did not think that they looked safe at all. Uh, for example, Mahoney was trying to get about$50,000 worth of insurance for these grandstands, and so some folks from an insurance company show up to look at the stands that he had uh constructed, and they refused to insure him because they didn't think that the stands looked safe enough or sturdy enough.
SPEAKER_02:That's right, and it was even kind of like a kind of a supernatural episode where a man gonna buy tickets with his wife had a dark premonition.
SPEAKER_03:He did. So Charles Campbell was sent to go buy tickets for this lot. They wanted to be there on Madison and Colorado because they thought it would be a a good place to view the floats from. So he goes down to buy the tickets and he sees the stand when he's there, and he's like, This can't be right. This looks like so flimsy. I I it doesn't seem safe. So he goes and he goes to a a payphone or something like that and calls his wife and tells her, I'm gonna get it the tickets for another grandstand because this doesn't look right. And she just laughs at him, thinks that he's being kind of ridiculous, and makes him get the tickets anyway. So he buys the tickets, and he is there in the crowd when the stands start to sway.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So imagine, you know, a couple of hundred people, 250 or so, sitting and standing on this rickety wood grandstand, and it starts to move under your feet and buckle a little bit. Maybe they even heard some strange sounds.
SPEAKER_03:Most of the witnesses say that it felt like they swayed forward. And at one point they were looking across the street, and they thought that the grandstands on the other side were about to collapse. They didn't realize that it was them that were swaying on their platform. So they were yelling across the street trying to get their attention, and then they start to hear like a cracking sound, like the wood splintering. The grandstand starts to collapse in the middle, like it splits down the middle, and so everything comes crashing down the center.
SPEAKER_02:Kind of like a closing book, as it were. Uh shoving bodies and people all crashing each other, crashing toward the ground, you know, they're falling from different heights, wood and bodies piling on top of you. It's just total pandemonium.
SPEAKER_03:Exactly. So a kind of a strange incident happened just before the grandstand collapsed. There was this like marching band or some sort of band that was coming through the parade that um passity and a PD actually like had to swoop in and stop the parade and like kick them out of the parade because they were kind of party crashing it, they weren't authorized, says the police. The men themselves, the band players, said they just did that because we were non-union men. Um, but either way, all of these band players are standing right there near this intersection when the grandstand collapses. And so when it collapses, all of these men are very quick to rush in and start pulling boards off of people and dragging people out of the wreckage.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, it was fortunate that uh this band was there, these were extra hands, but there's also I thought was interesting that there were sailors and soldiers present that were able to help because the parade that year had like a memorial float, and they're a kind of paying remembrance to the first world war and the experience of that. So there were a lot of soldiers and sailors on hand, and they were also able to help. I mean, pasting a police, pasting a fire would have been overwhelmed. Um, and so yeah, so you had all these extra people helping, you know, pull bodies out, helping, you know, the the injured, uh, lifting the boards and debris, um, the screaming and all kinds of you know chaos.
SPEAKER_03:So they said that there was like a thousand people on these grandstands. Hundreds were injured at the very end of it all, and it took some months, some people ended up dying months later, but 11 people died from yes, in total, yeah. A total of 11 people died.
SPEAKER_02:That's right. Uh, a couple right there on the scene. I believe one lady uh who witnessed it had a heart attack and died.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, she she wasn't in the area, just seeing it shocked her so much that, like you said, she had a heart attack and died.
SPEAKER_02:Keep in mind at this time there are two major hospitals in Pasadena. There's what would come to be known as Huntington Memorial Hospital later, which at the time was called Pasadena Hospital. Yes, and there was a small hospital adjacent to the police department. The one at the police department would have been closer to Colorado and Madison, and that's where they're starting to get people shipped to first. And they're utilizing cars, taxis, uh they're trying to get everything that can move.
SPEAKER_03:They are so overwhelmed that they're just asking for anyone in the crowd, any doctors to come forward and help the people there. Anyone nurses, anyone who has cars are being asked to help transport some of the victims to the hospital. Uh, one fills up, they start moving to another hospital. Eventually, they're so overwhelmed that they're asking for help from ambulances from LA, from Glendale.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, uh, County USC Medical Center. That's LA County General at the time. They're making room uh at their hospital to start taking victims. They're sending doctors and nurses. Um, they sent all their ambulances but one up to Pasadena. These hospitals are so overwhelmed that people are in the hallways on the floor. Uh they had to, I believe they had to open up a mattress store.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, the Pasadena Furniture Company. I think the managers came in and opened it up so they could take out the mattresses for people to sleep.
SPEAKER_02:And take them to the hospital to fill the in the in the hallways and stuff.
SPEAKER_03:So the maternity women, pregnant women in the maternity ward were giving up their cots because they knew that there were other people more injured and they needed the space.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, today this would be called the mass casualty event today. And so this is happening to Pasadena, you know, amongst among one of our first mass mass casualty events uh in Department in you know, city and department history, uh 1926.
SPEAKER_03:And you just hear such sad stories, like one man remembered just seeing nothing when everything crashed, and then looking up and seeing some man just holding a child above his head, and you know, that person himself had been lost beneath the rubble, but the baby held above his head was okay. That man, Charles Campbell, who was so anxious about getting tickets, he didn't want to. For days before the parade, he kept remembering how those stands looked, and he was just so nervous thinking about going. He was so sure that something bad was going to happen. He ended up going with a big group of friends. One of the women was Miss Marie Brim. I don't know too much about her, but she seems like an interesting character because she was a member of the women's Christian Temperance Union and was a candidate for the vice president of the Prohibition Party. So outspoken woman, it seems like. But she was there, she was one of the women that was crushed to death in this collapse. A Mrs. Dobson was also there on the stands, and she fell when they collapsed. She remembered that everything went black, and then when she came to, she was there with a Mrs. Boric, who was also injured, and she remembered holding, cradling Mrs. Boric's head in her lap until the help arrived. Mrs. Boric ended up dying. Um, Dobson survived, but she had a punctured lung, several fractured limbs, several dislocations, and was in shock. The jury, when this all went to trial, ended up going to what's now Huntington Memorial to interview Mrs. Dobson in her wheelchair there to get her testimony.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, something that was also unique about this incident was the newspaper published the names and injuries of all the victims. Um this is clearly in the age before HIPAA, um, and you would not see something like that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, no, they even like described the sort of injuries they had, exactly where they lived, their adjectives.
SPEAKER_02:There was a different time period for sure. So you mentioned a trial, and obviously this incident wouldn't be on our podcast if there wasn't a murder slash ill-intent negligence angle to the story.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_02:And there is a villain to this story, and there was a trial, as somebody had to be blamed for this tragic event that caused these deaths.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. So two men were taken to trial and charged for the death of Mrs. Boric specifically. Um the first being Mahoney, the man who constructed these grandstands, and Bucknall, the inspector who approved.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So these two guys are both facing two separate trials uh, you know, for manslaughter negligence. Um keeping in mind that right, you know, immediately after this grandstand collapse, both the city of Pasadena Um and the Tournament of Roses absolved themselves of all responsibility for this tragedy. Both of them are basically saying, look, we're in charge of the parade, we're in charge of the security, whatever. We're not the ones who put up these grandstands. This is a separate uh entity. We can't be held responsible for it. And they're basically kind of, you know, rubber stamping the go ahead for these two guys to be prosecuted.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, exactly. Uh, and so they call on people like Victor Prahl, the safety engineer for the insurance company. Uh, he's the one that showed up on December 28th. He said he didn't want to approve the insurance because the lumber quality was so poor. Looking at the wood that they used, it was like recycled wood almost. That lumber had still had screws in it and knots and holes. He says that the posts were not cut square and not bevel so that they only were standing on a ledge. Also, Mr. Lockier for the insurance company, he also came and inspected the grandstands on the same day, and he also denied the insurance because he said, again, the lumber quality was poor, and the nails were not driven home. So the nails that were screwed in, they were not all the way pushed all the way in.
SPEAKER_02:And I believe they they interviewed, oh, they had like a hundred witnesses, over a hundred witnesses for this case, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, they did. Oliver Brown in the investigating committee also said that the lumber was very poor. He said that the uprights were slanted forward and the ground stakes were not large enough or deeply enough embedded. They also blamed Mahoney for overselling and overcrowding the stands, selling a bunch of uh standing space.
SPEAKER_02:Keep in mind that this is a uh negligent practice that still has not gone away today. I mean, we still in the news you can find cases of overselling tickets, uh, which cause tragic events even in the modern era.
SPEAKER_03:And so Mahoney is denied the insurance by these men. And because he's denied the insurance, he doesn't give up the grandstands. He lets, you know, he keeps them up. Instead, he puts up a sign saying that basically everyone enters at their own risk. And this sign was, you know, discovered there after the collapse, and someone stole it. But then later by the time of the trial, you could see it in the picture, so they must have recovered it somehow. I don't know. So police chief Kelly.
SPEAKER_02:There's old Chief Kelly again.
SPEAKER_03:He took to the newspaper saying, Yeah, I know there is a problem with these grandstands. I thought they were flimsy, and I had tried many times to do something about it, and everyone told me to just mind my own business. Chief Kelly says he looked at the grandstand or whatever was left of it, and said it was as flimsily constructed as a child's playhouse.
SPEAKER_02:Hmm.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Probably not a good idea to uh tell the chief of police to stay in his own lane when he's trying to point out a public safety problem.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I mean clearly he was right about this. By the time of the next Rose Parade, there were much more um stringent regulations, and I think that every uh grandstand requires steel reinforced frames as a response to this. Mahoney tried to say he tried to blame the wet sinking earth that was beneath the grandstands, saying that, like, oh, because there was a home here before, and when they moved the home, there was kind of like this wet crater in the lot, and that's what caused the grandstand to collapse.
SPEAKER_02:The old wet sinking earth defense.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, the wet sinking earth defense.
SPEAKER_02:We can put that, we can put it out up there with the Twinkie defense in a later case.
SPEAKER_03:He did eventually say that he was sorry, Mahoney. Initially, he kind of went MIA when the grandstands collapsed. Police were looking for him and they couldn't find him. Um, but eventually they did get their hands on him. He was being a little uncooperative with the police. But then by the time that the trial came along, he was saying that he was sorry, of course, that people had gotten hurt. And he was apparently so affected by seeing his grandstands collapse that he had to be admitted to a sanitarium just afterward because of his uh ruined nerves. So the jury consisted of eight women and four men, and they ended up convicting him of manslaughter, and he was sentenced to one to ten years in prison. Bucknall, the city inspector, his case was dismissed.
SPEAKER_02:Right. But I understand that he only served one year at San Quentin. What happened to his case? There was a little uh little lenience that came out at the 11th hour.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, a year later in 1927, the state Supreme Court ruled that Mahoney was entitled to a new trial, saying that the judge had been prejudicial. And then the district attorney Asa Aisha Keys, who was notoriously corrupt, by the way, dropped the charges, saying that the trial would basically be impossible to hold because all the witnesses were scattered everywhere, which I think is bullshit because all of their testimony was already recorded in the first trial, right? Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Um I I think there was also another element to this. There was some people that signed a petition granting leniency, including one of the injured parties.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:That they've kind of felt bad for our little would-be grandstand builder, yeah, and felt that the court should have some lenience. They based their argument was, you know, he did something that ended up being bad, but he wasn't he didn't have evil intent in his heart.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know.
SPEAKER_03:He did, Mahoney did have a lot of buddies, which was weird to me.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, he is a businessman, you know, who probably knew a lot of people. Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, the guy gets convicted, he does a year, state time, and then the case is dismissed. An interesting little chapter to Pasadena and Rose Parade history.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, a little bizarre true crime episode, um, if you want to call it that.
SPEAKER_03:He um ended up moving to San Bernardino and dying in 1960.
SPEAKER_02:So anyway, the bleachers are safe today. We haven't had disasters since.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, thanks to uh Mahoney's lack of foresight in 1926. Our grandstands are now safe.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so don't be afraid to go watch our uh annual and wonderful fun tournament of roses parade. Held no held every year on January 1st, unless the first falls on a Sunday, then it's not held.
SPEAKER_03:I was raised in Pasadena, and I know like this is a huge thing. We're supposed to be super proud of the Rose Parade, but like as a girl who is forced to wake up so early and it was so cold every New Year's and like being dragged to the parade, and you can see nothing anyway. Like, there's just you see the back of people's heads, basically.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, Palestinians have uh both a love and hate relationship with this parade. Uh, those who have to deal with street closures and traffic.
SPEAKER_03:Oh my god, don't get me started on the streets.
SPEAKER_02:And if you grew up here, you know you're at least got one time that you gotta camp out and sleep in that freezing, frigid sidewalk on Colada Boulevard. I know I did at least twice as a kid. Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:One year I was trying to flee the streets of Pasadena because they were so congested with all this rose parade crap. So I went and I was driving down to Glendale, and I didn't know it, but like some of the floats they had transported to Glendale, and I got stuck behind them in Glendale, too.
SPEAKER_02:That's karma.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's what I get for not liking the Rose Parade as a Pasadena.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. But anyway, we hope that you guys liked this interesting episode, and um, we'll give you guys a more modern case for next week.
SPEAKER_03:We will. Or will we?
SPEAKER_02:We will.
SPEAKER_03:We will be back next week with another Little Old Murder from Pasadena.