The first fatal automobile accident in the Bangor area occurred a century ago this week on State Street. It was a warm spring evening after 8 p.m. on June 4, 1908. Harold Colby, a chauffeur, had dropped off his employer, Thomas R. Savage, at his home at 191 Broadway, after a drive out to Pushaw.

Colby, 19, had been in Savage’s employ for about three weeks. The wealthy wholesale grocer had told his young driver many times always to take the red, 35 hp, five-passenger Pope Hartford machine back to A.B. Purington’s garage on Exchange Street when it was not being used by the Savage family. Savage said he also had told Colby never to go more than 10 or 12 mph.

Colby was an experienced chauffeur, having driven for four years, but he had other things on his mind that night. After dropping off Savage, he drove back down Broadway to State. Instead of turning right toward downtown, he turned left toward Fruit Street where Alice Curran lived. He and Miss Curran talked on her front steps for a while, and then, at about 8:20 p.m. they went for a short ride up to Mount Hope Avenue, where he turned the auto around and brought the young woman home. She noticed that the vehicle’s acetylene headlamps were not working, unlike on other evening jaunts they had made. But it was not quite dark yet.

At about 8:30 p.m. (or a bit later or earlier, depending on whose story you believed), Colby headed back to State Street where he turned right toward downtown. At about the same time, 10-year-old Freddie O’Connor, his older brother Charlie and a friend, Lawrence Moore, were walking up State Street on the sidewalk. The Moore boy had been running an errand to the Essex Pharmacy on State Street, and the O’Connors had accompanied him. Freddie and Charlie lived on Otis Street, where their father ran a junk business.

When the boys were across the street from St. Xavier’s Convent (where the former St. John’s School building is located today), Freddie darted across the street. Colby was moving along at a good clip of about 20 mph or more with no lights, according to several witnesses. This part of the street was dark, because of the massive elm trees towering above it and because the nearest street lamps were some distance away. The speed limit was 8 mph. Auto headlamps were supposed to be lit one hour after sunset, which would have been by 8:39 p.m. that night, according to later testimony.

When Freddie O’Connor ran in front of him, Colby said, he slammed on the vehicle’s two sets of brakes, pushed in the clutch and skidded nearly to a stop, narrowly missing the boy. The youngster bounded partway up the steep embankment leading to the sidewalk in front of the convent, but then, inexplicably, he jumped back into the street right in front of the auto just as Colby accelerated.

People walking near the accident said they heard what sounded like a tire burst. The glass in the headlamp smashed. Colby said he knew he had hit a person or a dog, but he kept on driving, planning to take the auto to the garage and then return to the scene of the accident. The story was further complicated by another auto going in the opposite direction. Did its lights blind or confuse the victim or the driver momentarily?

A passer-by carried Freddie to the nearby home of Dr. Harold Crane. Awhile later, the boy was taken to Eastern Maine General Hospital in the arms of an officer in the city’s horse-drawn police ambulance. He died early the next morning.

Police immediately went in search of the auto and driver. They soon found the vehicle at Purington’s, recognizing it by the broken lamp. The driver was missing, however. Colby had walked back to State Street, encountered Miss Curran and asked her to go inquire about the accident. When he learned that a boy had been badly injured, he determined to turn himself in to police. At 10 p.m., accompanied by Savage and his parents, he arrived at the police station.

After spending a night in jail, he was arraigned in municipal court on a charge of involuntary manslaughter the next day. He pleaded not guilty and secured bail of $2,000. Later he visited the O’Connor family with his parents.

Reaction was swift in the city’s two daily newspapers. The Bangor Daily Commercial, which had been complaining for months that auto regulations were inadequate, charged in an editorial on June 8 that even the current laws weren’t being enforced. The writer implied Colby and his employer had been guilty of speeding on previous occasions. When a policeman was asked why he hadn’t enforced the speeding law, he said “he did not like to complain against the owner of the auto who is a prominent citizen.”

Colby was tried seven months later before a packed courtroom. Before taking the stand to testify, he cried silently, and so did many others in the courtroom.

“‘Brace up,’ said his lawyer, P.H. Gillin. ‘Put on a brave front. Be a man.’ At this the prisoner resolutely wiped his eyes, blew his nose and walked to the stand,” said the Bangor Daily News.

His attorney had the last word: “‘The sole cause of the boy’s injury could not have been laid to the fault of Colby, even if there had been fault. Here was a boy of 10 or 12 who deliberately ran out into the public street, through which car after car, and vehicle after vehicle, were passing. And he ran, all young and white and spotless as he was, straight into the arms of the Almighty, leaving this other boy with a burning spot upon his mind and soul – forever. It was the act of the dead boy, and not of the poor unfortunate living boy, which has brought us here today.'”

When the jury found Colby not guilty, “a great wave of applause swept over the courtroom, and no one tried to stop it,” reported the Bangor Daily News on Feb. 12, 1909.

wreilly@bangordailynews.net