I’ve been involved in a discussion over at Jay G’s site about famous mass murders that didn’t involve guns. As part of that, I went over to Wikipedia to refresh my memory about a couple of famous incidents and discovered the following interesting bits of information.
The Happy Land social club fire:
Found guilty on August 19, 1991, of 87 counts of arson and 87 counts of murder, [Julio] González was sentenced to 174 twenty-five year sentences, to be served consecutively (a total of 4,350 years) . It was the most substantial prison term ever imposed in the state of New York. He will be eligible for parole in March 2015.
Of the three employees accused of the fire, only one, Héctor Escudero Aponte, is still in prison. Armando Jimenez and José Francisco Rivera Lopez were released from federal prison in 2001 and 2002 respectively.
(And if you want to read about something both horrible and forgotten, look up the Bath School disaster.)
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. But I digress.) So, of course, I have to note the NYT‘s navel gazing story yesterday on 
, a book which I strongly recommend. (When I say “genuine freaking weirdo”, I mean it. Parsons did seminal early work on rocketry; he was also a leading follower of Aleister Crowley and an active practitioner of thelmic magic. He also lost one of his lovers to none other than L. Ron Hubbard, and died under rather bizarre circumstances.)