Until Wednesday afternoon January 5, 1944, there had been no deaths, intentional or accidental, caused by the firing of a crossbow in the recorded history of Los Angeles County.
On that day, while the German army of Field Marshal Fritz von Manstein was retreating into the Pripet marshes in Poland and the U.S. Marines were driving the Japanese back at Cape Gloucester in New Britain in the Pacific, Mildred Binder Minck made history.
The day after Mildred’s historic demise, I sat across from her grieving widower, Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., in a room in the Los Angeles County Jail.
The Los Angeles County Hall of Justice on Temple Street between Broadway and Spring takes up a city block. It’s fourteen stories of limestone and granite, an Italian Renaissance style building with rusticated stonework, heavy cornices, and a two-story colonnade at the top.
The L.A. County Jail occupies the five top stories. Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., was occupying only one chair on the fourth floor of the jail. He faced me through a wall of thick wire mesh.
“Toby, I didn’t do it,” he said.
Shelly Minck is not a thing of beauty to behold when he’s at his best, happily drilling into or removing the tooth of a trapped patient. Seated on the other side of the wire, he was not at his best.
“I mean, I don’t think I did it,” he added.
Shelly wore a pair of dark slacks and a long-sleeved wrinkled gray shirt. His thick glasses rested, as they usually did, at the end of his ample nose. Beads of sweat danced on his bald head and his large stomach heaved with frequent sighs.
“They won’t let me have a cigar,” he complained. “Is that fair?”
