A highway death near Atsion and a conviction

A collision on a curve

The New Jersey Mirror of October 30, 1935 reported that a jury sitting before Judge Frank A. Hendrickson had convicted Felix Donatelli, 33, of Pittsburgh, of involuntary homicide by automobile. According to the account, the fatal collision had occurred on July 31, 1935, on a paved highway near Atsion that the paper called "Route 39."

The victim was Evelyn M. Shoemaker, 24, a schoolteacher from Finesville, New Jersey, who was driving from Atlantic City with four passengers. Testimony reported in the Mirror said Donatelli, driving in the opposite direction at an estimated 55 to 60 miles an hour and on the wrong side of the road, first clipped the rear wheel of a car driven by Proper Colauserdo of Hammonton — who swerved onto the gravel shoulder to avoid him — and then struck the Shoemaker car directly. Shoemaker was killed instantly; Dr. Anthony Espisoto of Hammonton, to whose office she was taken, testified that death was instantaneous from a badly fractured skull. The report names her uncle, Benjamin Fritz, who was sitting beside her, and three young passengers — Elizabeth Laubach, 18, Caroline Laubach, 15, and Amelia Shoemaker, 12, all of Finesville — as escaping serious injury. Only Fritz is identified as a relative; the record does not say how the others were connected to her.

Conflicting accounts of speed and fault

At trial, Colauserdo and Fritz testified to Donatelli's high speed and position on the wrong side of the road. A state trooper who investigated, Benjamin Dean of the Hammonton barracks, testified that skid and impact marks on the highway showed where the crash occurred, roughly 225 feet from where Donatelli's car finally came to rest against a guard rail.

Donatelli's defense was mechanical failure: he testified that his steering gear had gone out of order as he came around the curve, at what he described as a moderate 30 miles an hour, on his way to the White Horse Pike. He said the failure was also why his car kept moving after the impact, until it struck the guard rail. The jury convicted him on Monday, October 28, 1935, on an indictment charging involuntary homicide by automobile — so it did not accept the steering-failure defence, or at least did not accept it as excusing the collision. The Mirror's report records that the imposing of sentence was postponed, and this research found no record of what sentence, if any, was eventually imposed: the conviction stands in the record, its disposition does not.

A road built for a different kind of traffic

By 1935 the sand roads that had once carried ox teams, charcoal wagons, and horse-drawn stages through this stretch of the Pines near Atsion had been replaced, in places, by concrete state highways capable of carrying automobiles at speeds their predecessors were never built for. The Mirror's account of a car passing at 55 to 60 miles an hour on a curve near Atsion, and the fatal result, is a small but concrete illustration of that change — and of how quickly the automobile, not the train, had become the dominant hazard on Pine Barrens roads by the mid-1930s.