Crempas (Concl'd)

John Crempa grinned with enormous pride last week while employes of a Public Service Corp. of New Jersey subsidiary testified in court at Elizabeth concerning the ingenious devices with which he had short-circuited or cut their high tension wires more than 20 times (TIME, Oct. 14, et ante). "He interrupted service to hospitals where operations were going on," cried an attorney. "He disrupted the signal service of a railroad, and he threw theatres and department stores and homes crowded with people into darkness."

John Crempa was no longer the underdog last week. For eight years the gaunt Polish tailor had fought the law and P. S. C. singlehanded because, hating the huge utilities company, he had demanded that P. S. C. pay $150,000 for the privilege of stringing its wires over one corner of his tiny truck farm at Scotch Plains. Refusing a State condemnation commission's award of $800, he had served six months in jail for malicious mischief, defied an injunction ordering him to cease tampering with the wires, resisted repeated attempts to serve him with a warrant for contempt of court. But on the last of those attempts, last autumn, a party of deputy sheriffs had killed his wife Sophie. Now four of the deputies were on trial for manslaughter.

In court John Crempa tried to put P. S. C. on trial with the deputies. He and his witnesses testified that the deputies had been encamped around his farm for some weeks before the killing, that, when a neighbor ordered them off his land, they had replied that they would leave if P. S. C. told them to. As for the shooting, John Crempa stuck to the story he had told at the time. He said the deputies had fired a tear-gas bomb through his parlor window, shot down his wife when she rushed out with hands raised. Then, he admitted, he had gone back to get his old Army revolver, but it had jammed when he tried to fire it. His daughter Kamelia had fired some shots later, but she was only trying to kill herself as she knelt by her dying mother.

The deputies insisted that the Crempas had come out shooting, that they had fired only in self-defense. After three hours' deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict for the deputies. John Crempa had already left the courtroom, saying, "I am going away from this murderous State. I would rather live in a jungle."

Before he leaves New Jersey, however, John Crempa may have to face charges of malicious mischief for tampering with P. S. C.'s wires or of assault & battery for trying to fight off the deputies.

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