Pre-Game Party

The brothers of Delta Tau Delta, at Ohio State University in Columbus, were celebrating. It was homecoming week, and the eve of the Illinois game. Across the brick front of the fraternity house a sign proclaimed: "We're Gonna Wash Illinois Right Out of Our Hair." Inside, the party ran on until long after midnight. Freshman James Heer, 20, an exmarine, was there with a girl from Cleveland.

Boyish Jim Heer, pledged to the fraternity but not yet an initiate, had been drinking heavily. He had also been paying a lot of attention to other girls. He quarreled with his own girl. When he came back from escorting her to the home of his aunt some of the upperclassmen told Heer what they thought of him. He went up to the room of Brother Richard Moore and got a .45 automatic, a souvenir of Moore's service in the Army.

Heer backed a couple of brothers into a study room. He brandished the gun at another group on the first floor, warning them hysterically, "I'll shoot," then ran outside. Jack T. McKeown, senior, and managing editor of the university's daily paper, confronted him, tried to stop him. Heer warned him away but McKeown closed in on him. Heer fired one shot, ran, jumped in a taxi. Six miles away, he telephoned the police to come and get him.

"When I get drunk I get trigger-happy," Freshman Heer told the police. In his rumpled tuxedo, he finished the homecoming party at the police station, where he was held for murder. McKeown, a bullet in his abdomen, died in the university's hospital.

-A crowd of 81,000 saw Ohio State win, 30-17.

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