People and incidents
Reily, William I (son suicide)
Documented incident
William I. Reily, a Medford undertaker and Charles Reily’s son, died in December 1916 after injuring himself at his workplace. Contemporary reporting said he was 45 and survived by a wife and four children.
Death at the undertaking rooms
On Thursday night, November 30, 1916, William I. Reily was meeting a customer about funeral arrangements at his Medford undertaking business. The customer reportedly noticed intense distress. Reily left the office and did not return; a search found him in his apartment, semiconscious from severe blood loss after cutting beneath his arm with a razor and severing a vein.
He was driven to Burlington County Hospital but died about an hour after arrival. The report offered no definite motive, attributing the act speculatively to a sudden mental disturbance. Reily was 45 and survived by his widow and four children. The article noted that his father, Charles Reily, had died by suicide several years earlier, though it reverses the elder Reily’s reported travel direction: the 1909 account says Charles was walking from Mount Holly toward Medford.
Source
New Jersey Mirror, “Medford,” December 6, 1916, p. 3, column beginning at 5.