Another man jumped 70 years ago

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

Robert Seman isn’t the first person to plunge over the fourth-floor railing to his death on the marble rotunda floor of the Mahoning County Courthouse.

Another man took the fatal leap about 70 years ago.

The death of Frank Rigelsky, 57, of South Avenue, a tailor, who made the same jump Aug. 5, 1947, was ruled a suicide by the coroner.

Then-county coroner David A. Belinky said Rigelsky had been despondent for some time.

Friends of Rigelsky’s said he had been separated from his wife and had worried about his inability to make alimony payments since he was struck and seriously injured by a hit-and-run car driver Dec. 29, 1946, on South Avenue at King Street.

Nell Flannery, a worker in the county’s Soldiers’ Relief Commission (now the Veterans Service Commission) office, which was then on the fourth floor of the courthouse, said she saw the man climb on the ledge and stand poised to jump.

“I screamed: ‘You aren’t going to jump, are you?’ just as he made his leap,” she told The Vindicator in a story published Aug. 5, 1947.

John Hooker, an assistant county prosecutor, was buying cigarettes at the first-floor newsstand when he heard Flannery scream.

“I looked up and saw a body hurtling through the air,” Hooker said. “It twisted once or twice, then landed with a thud in the southwest corner of the rotunda,” Hooker said.

F.B. Gould, of Sears-Roebuck Co., who was standing at the tax stamp window, said the man fell about 6 feet from where he was standing “with a sound like a ton of bricks falling.”

When Rigelsky jumped, more than 25 people were in the vicinity of the rotunda, The Vindicator reported.

A woman holding a 3-month-old baby reportedly nearly fainted, almost dropping her baby before help reached her.