Victim in Deadliest School Attack Ever Gets Headstone, 86 Years Later

For almost nine decades, Richard Fritz’s grave was unmarked. That changed in a ceremony almost 90 years after a disgruntled school board member blew up the Bath Consolidated School, killing 46 people, 38 of them children. (Screenshot: WILX video)

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The last of the victims the deadliest school attack in history received a headstone, almost 90 years after the bombing in Bath, MI, killed 46 people, mostly children.

A headstone marking the grave of Richard A. Fritz was unveiled in ceremonies Tuesday at Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing, thanks to the donation from an anonymous benefactor, an author who is writing about an attack that history also recalls as the third-deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil, Michigan Radio and WILX-TV report.

Young Fritz was celebrating his 8th birthday on May 18, 1927, the day school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe – described at the time as having a “mania for killing” by the New York Times and as a “stubborn man fond of drastic solutions to small problems” by Slate.com 85 years later – wired the school with dynamite and blew it up.

Kehoe was upset over increasing taxes, which he reportedly hated in general, to fund the Bath Consolidated School, which offered a superior education to the country schools that were common at the time.

According to accounts at the time, a short circuit in what investigators called otherwise expert wiring likely saved Bath’s entire downtown. Investigators found more than 500 pounds of undetonated dynamite and several sacks of gunpowder under the portion of school that was still standing.

‘Back Then, They Didn’t Talk About It, Period’

The 38 student casualties included the the Fritz boy’s sister, Marjorie, but Richard lived for nearly a year, dying on May 10, 1928, just eight days before his 9th birthday. The two are buried side-by-side at the Lansing cemetery, but it’s not clear why Richard’s grave was never marked.

“But 86 years is a long time, and now that injustice – the final injustice of not having a marked grave – has been remedied at last,” Loretta Stanaway, president of the Friends of Lansing’s Historical Cemeteries, told Michigan Radio.

One of the Fritz family’s ancestors, Dan Osborn, attended the ceremony. He said the family didn’t talk much about the bombing that claimed the lives of his aunt and uncle, but Tuesday’s ceremony “puts a closure to the whole thing.”

Closure has in many respects escaped Bath.

“ ... it had been eight decades, and nobody had talked about it. It was just this scar on the land.” – author Arnie Bernstein

In 2012, the Christian Science Monitor interviewed Chicago writer Arnie Bernstein, author of the award-winning “Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing.” Among his comments:

“Back then, they didn’t talk about it, period. They were farmers, and they had to go back to work. Your cow couldn’t take a day off for a tragedy.

“And there wasn’t a media frenzy like today. The media came in and left. Three days after it happened, Lindbergh took off and flew to Paris, and that part of it was over.

“When I came in, it had been eight decades, and nobody had talked about it. It was just this scar on the land.”

Among those Bernstein interviewed for the book was a woman who was 99 at the time, who reportedly shared graphic details. As the story goes, Bernstein was worried about upsetting the fragile woman, but she was adamant:

“”No, people have to know,” she reportedly said. “I’m not going to be around forever. I want people to know what happened.”

Koebe, who blew up his own truck and killed himself, is buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave – now the only one in the Lansing cemetery.