In SRO Land

Sleeping Joe Schutton was roused from his rest by an ungodly clash and clatter, and when he lit his lamp found a pair of thrashing man's legs dangling from the ceiling as the man above made obvious attempts to escape back onto the roof through which he'd broken. Irked Joe would have none of that, and clung to the kicking feet, screaming loudly for aid.

Patrolmen Sweeney and Kierscey were quick on the scene, and taking an accounting of the situation, raced to the roof where they extracted O.W. Coppington, 35, and asked what the hell he thought he was doing.

"I'm the victim here," swore Coppington, who told a convoluted tale of being halted at Winston near Main by a pair of highwaymen, who he'd eluded by racing up the first stairwell he spied, then out onto one roof, then another, then another--searching for an open skylight he could escape through. But when he leapt from a tall roof to a lower one, the shingles, lath and plaster broke away, waking Joe Schutton and leading to Coppington's arrest. Skeptical, Sweeney and Kierscey took their prize back to City Jail for further conversation, while Joe Schutton shook the ceiling chips out of his sheets and tried to get back to sleep.

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Two weeks ago, the tearful relatives of Raymundo Reyes, 74, gathered at Calvary Cemetery for his burial. Not a week later, Reyes turned up, very much alive.

Who then had died, this man who looked so much like Reyes that the whole family was fooled? No one had a clue until today, when Adam Kryst, an elderly pensioner, was reported missing from a rooming house at 224 Boyd Street.

Police Sgt. Tom Anderson of the missing persons bureau obtained the three keys found on the dead man's person and went to Boyd Street, where he opened the front door, the door of Adam Kryst's room, and a chest inside it. A fingerprint technician matched prints found in the room to those taken from the corpse.

And so the mystery was solved, but one awkward problem remained: Kryst's family, coming from Florida, must reach some agreement with the Reyes family regarding the somewhat decayed man occupying their relative's grave. Let's hope at least he was a Catholic!

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Walking in the alley behind the Sisters of Mercy building, where unfortunates were fed and housed, Fred Forsberg made a grim discovery: a partially mummified section of a human skull, with incongruously handsome, twirled moustaches above the former lips. The top of the skull had been neatly sawn off, suggesting the corpse had paid a visit to an anatomical laboratory.

Forsberg attempted to interest the police in his discovery, but to them it looked too old to be worth investigating. They did, however, deign to attach a note which read "ex-police reporter" and parked the relic in the station's reporter's room. And it was this prank which resulted in a few inches of column space in the Times the following day, and keeps alive the memory of this nameless posthumous denizen of SRO Land. Here's to ya, fella, whoever you were.

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