Death in the City

Of the dozens of daily deaths in a city, few are noted much beyond the circle of family and friends. But last week in the New York City area:

> Melvin Walker, 43, an unemployed Manhattan maintenance man, started to follow his wife into a subway car during the afternoon rush hour. The doors slammed shut--gripping his right arm between them like a vise. The train began to move. Inside the car, Walker's wife screamed. Walker tugged desperately to free himself. As the train picked up speed, he walked, trotted, then sprinted to keep up. Stumbling, sliding, frantically pulling to free his arm, Walker was dragged to the end of the platform and slammed into a metal rail. As the train entered the tunnel, he was battered repeatedly against the concrete wall along the tracks. When a passenger finally pulled the emergency brake cord, Walker was dead.

> Dr. Charles J. Gallagher Jr., 31, a Columbia University assistant professor of nuclear physics, left his wife and two sons in their Manhattan apartment one night after a colleague phoned to say that a cyclotron at Columbia wasn't working right. Gallagher never arrived at the laboratory. At dawn the next morning, a man found Gallagher's body --shot once in the chest with a .25-cal. weapon--lying beneath the underbrush in a section of Central Park called the Ramble. Gallagher had not been robbed; he had no criminal record; he had no access to any classified nuclear information, police said. At week's end police could offer no hint to the killer's identity or his motive. But they reminded New Yorkers again that the Ramble, a sunny sanctuary for birds and bird watchers like Charles Gallagher during the day, had long been a junglelike hideout for muggers, holdup men and perverts after dark.

> Kenneth Ferrari, 17, and two friends, Robert Farrell, 17, and Anthony D'Aiuto, 16, stopped in for a moment at Kenneth's home in Wyandanch, L.I., one evening and were told that Kenneth's father had just had a heart attack. Panicked by his own sudden grief, Kenneth dashed out of the house--his two friends at his heels, trying to give consolation. All three sprinted blindly into the street. They were all hit by a car, and died there in the road.

> Mrs. Bertha Haas, 68, a Bronx widow, spent an evening with an elderly woman friend at the Avalon Ballroom, a kind of senior citizens' dance hall on Broadway that forbids liquor and jitterbugging, caters to older people looking for gentle companionship. Later, Mrs. Haas and her friend stopped at a cafeteria for a cup of tea and a bit of cheesecake, then took the subway to The Bronx and separated. Mrs. Haas walked home. Next morning a porter in Mrs. Haas's apartment building saw blood on the lobby floor. He followed a trail of bloody streaks for 30 ft., at last found Mrs. Haas's body beneath the stair well. She had been beaten, strangled with her own silk scarf, robbed, raped, and slashed with a razor.

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