"That Man Has Dynamite"

Classes had been going for a week at the Edgar Allen Poe elementary school in well-to-do south Houston. But the principal, Mrs. R. E. Doty, took it as a matter of course when a slight, pleasant man in sports shirt and slacks walked into the school lobby at 10 o'clock one morning last week and announced that he wanted to register his sandy-haired, seven-year-old, Dusty, in second grade. She was only mildly surprised when Paul Harold Orgeron, 47, said sheepishly that he had just come to town and did not know his address, did not even have Dusty's report card or health certificate. He inquired persistently but politely about the location of the second-grade classrooms, then left quietly, promising to come back next day with the documents.

A few minutes later, Paul Orgeron and Dusty walked together across the big, asphalt-topped playground behind the school, where 50 second-grade children, under the watchful eyes of a teacher, were playing "spat-'em." Orgeron carried a newspaper-wrapped bundle and a suitcase. Dusty carried another suitcase. "Teacher!" called Orgeron. He walked up to Second-Grade Teacher Patricia Johnson and said: "Call all your children up here!"

The Doorbell. At first, Patricia Johnson thought that Orgeron was carrying "something horribly obscene in that suitcase." Wary, she tried to send him away. "He started babbling about the will of God, and he talked about power," Teacher Johnson said later. "I shouted 'Go back' to the children and sent a little child to get Mrs. Doty. He was talking very rapidly now. 'Well, read this, and don't get excited,' he said."

She began to read the painful scrawl: "Please do not get excite over this order I'm giving you. In this suitcase you see in my hand is fill to the top with high explosive. I mean high high . . . I do not believe I can kill and not kill what is around me, and I mean my son will go too . . . Please do not make me push this button that all I have to do . . ."

"Then," says Miss Johnson, "he showed me the bottom of the suitcase. On it was a doorbell, just a regular little button, and he said when he set the suitcase on the ground it would press the button and it would blow up. He put the suitcase down with one end on the ground and the other end on the tip of his shoe so the button wouldn't touch the ground. I told the children to get back again. I sent a second runner into the school. I thought maybe the first had been stopped in the hall for running."

Minutes later a corporal's guard of teachers came toward Orgeron: Miss Johnson backed off to lead most of her children toward the building. In the patio she saw School Custodian James Montgomery. "Mr. Montgomery," she said, "that man has dynamite out there." Orgeron shouted: "Stay away from here or I'll blow you to pieces!" At his side, still wordless, was Dusty. The rest of the schoolchildren had stopped their games and were watching.

Custodian Montgomery lunged for Orgeron. Orgeron slipped his toe out. The suitcase fell.

The Children. The shattering blast crunched through the yard with a roar. In that instant came the smell of powder and burning flesh. The explosion tore to bits the bodies of Dusty and two other children, a teacher, Custodian Montgomery and Paul Orgeron himself--six dead in all. Body fragments flew across the street to the roof of a two-story apartment house. Orgeron's left hand--all that could be identified of the man--landed in a hedge 50 ft. away. Principal Doty lay injured on the ground, and 17 children, strewn near by, screamed in pain. A little boy writhed naked, his foot nearly blown off. "That mean old man!" he sobbed. "That mean old man! Will somebody get him? Will I need a crutch for my foot? Why did he have to do it?"

Policemen asked the same question, soon discovered that Paul Harold Orgeron was an ex-convict and sometime tile layer, syphilitic, illiterate, and obsessed by dark fantasies of power and gods. He had been married, divorced, had remarried the same woman and been divorced again. He had cowed his daughter Zelda with abuse and with ugly accusations of promiscuity. He had fathered a son by his stepdaughter Betty Jean, who had run away in fear and shame. And in all the world--in some tormented way--he loved only the memory of Betty Jean and their son Dusty.

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