grave import

Obituary

The funeral of Paul W. Birzele will be held from the parental home, No. 602 Denmark Street, at 10 o’clock this (Thursday) morning, with interment in Aspen Grove. The Rev. Mr. Karl Scheib, pastor of the St. Lucas church, will officiate. Friends are invited to these services.
There were rumors in Cedar Rapids that Birzele had met with foul play. An inquest was held Tuesday evening which disposed of this talk and found that the cause of death was purely accidental and due in part to the dead man’s negligence. The Cedar Rapids Republican had the following:
Tuesday night a coroner’s jury, composed of JW Guy, Frank Zastera, and Joe Danziger, sat over the remains of Paul Birzele, the man who was killed on the approach to the Northwestern railway bridge last Sunday night. The inquest took place at the Turner undertaking parlors, where the body has been since the accident.
The evidence given proved that Mr. Birzele was not intoxicated on the night of his death, as the report had it. He left the East Side boathouse, run by Ed O’Connell, shortly before the train was due to cross the bridge. No one saw him from that moment until Leo LeFebure, who had left his boat at Sheftic’s boathouse on the west side of the river, as the train crossed the bridge, came upon the approach to the viaduct and discovered the body lying between the tracks.
Engineer Rimmer and Fireman Schmitz both testified that they had sounded the usual alarm signals as they were bringing their train into the city and that they were not running above the usual rate of fifteen to eighteen miles per hour. Neither saw anyone at the crossing. In fact, neither man knew of the accident until the conductor of No. 6 was advised by telegram at Mt. Vernon that their train had killed a man in Cedar Rapids.
All evidence pointed toward this solution of the accident: Birzele, as he approached the west side of the bridge, heard the passenger train coming into the city, and since he lived on the south side of the tracks and was coming over the bridge by the sidewalk on the north side, he hurried to cross in front of the oncoming train that he might not be delayed in reaching his home. The theory is that after crossing in safety in the path of the oncoming locomotive, he walked alongside the train, and perhaps by a slip of the foot was thrown against one of the cars, caught and dragged to within ten feet of the bridge, where he fell dead. The impact of the train against his head, where marks showed that he received the blow, probably caused his death through concussion of the brain.
Following is the statement as approved by the coroner’s jury:
“Paul Birzele came to his death by being struck by the side of one of the coaches in C&N W. train No. 6, after he had crossed the tracks of said company at the First Steet, west, crossing, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on July 4, 1915. From the evidence introduced we the jury, believe that the accident was due to negligence on the part of the deceased, Paul Birzele.”