FOUR KILLED.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 230, 28 September 1929, Page 3 (Supplement)

FOUR KILLED.

DICE GAME HOLD-UP. RUNNING FIGHT WITH GUNMEN. Patrolman John A. Henly, jun., of the Elizabeth Street station, New York, was strolling west of First Street between First and Second Avenues one evening when he was attracted by the muffled sounds of a pistol fusillade. Breaking into a run, he saw three men emerge from an areaway a few feet ahead of him at 68, First Street. All three dashed down the street, one of them dropping a pistol into his coat pocket as he ran. Henly shouted, "Put 'em up!" The man with the gun turned and fired twice. He missed both times. Henly fired a shot in the air, then raced after the gunman. By the time he had reached the corner of First Avenue the gunman's friends had disappeared, Henly's pistol was enrpty, and Louis Blumberg, of 5714, Seventy-fourth Street, Maspeth, L.1., one of hundreds of spectators, lay on the sidewalk with a flesh wound in the hip, while his wife and children screamed. With his ammunition exhausted, Henly continued the chase. In the meantime Patrolman Abe Solomon entered the areaway from which the gunmen had emerged, ran to a back courtyard, found over a dollar in silver scattered about, a dice cube, an empty pistol and the inert form of Morris Roth, 30 years old, of 2578, Pitkin Avenue, Brooklyn. He had so many bullets in his brain that the police were unable to count them. As he was rounding up witnesses who told of a dice game interrupted by four hold-up men, Henly dragged in a man who later described himself as John Paresi, 24 years old, of 58, Catherine Street. Henly had found him in a doorway near the corner of Houston Street and First Avenue. The policeman said he was the man who had fled pocketing a gun and who had fired at him when he gave chase. Paresi would supply little information, but from what he said and the answers of others questioned the police conclude that a dice game, in which 25 persons were engaged, had been held-up; that Roth had been killed when he objected to the interruption, and that Paresi's companions had escaped with the money.