Mrs. Rose Black, who has a grocery adjoining the Schwartz store, and Mrs. Kate Weck, a second floor tenant, heard the couple hammering in their rooms up to midnight Sunday, and yesterday at daybreak the two women were the first to detect the odor of illuminating gas from the Schwartz apartments. Policeman McCaffrey, of the Hamburg avenue station, was called in and, forcing an entrance, found Schwartz sitting dead in a chair in the kitchen, fully dressed. He had one end of a rubber tube in his mouth, the other end of which was fixed to an open gas burner. The woman lay dead on her bed in a night dress with a rubber tube in her mouth, fastened to another open gas burner. Ambulance Surgeon Sibbel, who came from the German Hospital, said the couple had been dead several hours. On a small card was a request that Edward Black be telephoned for at “421 Thirty-eighth street.” A dime lay on the card to pay for the telephone message. In the room was found 67 cents. The bodies were removed to the Brooklyn Morgue.
“Auntie Schwartz” was the way in which Mrs. Louise Schwartz soon came to be known to the children of the neighborhood when she and her husband, Victor, each of them 67 years old, opened a small candy and stationery store at 85 Arnold Street, Williamsburg, about eight months ago.
Her small customers just kept the business going in the little shop, but it was a penny business, and when the rent of the store was raised recently from $12 to $15 a month, “Auntie” Schwartz almost despaired of continuing to make a living. Her face grew sad and careworn, and one day, when one of her little customers was grieving over the loss of a pet doll which a dog had chewed up, “Auntie” Schwartz did not console her with a cheerful word and a chocolate drop or two, as she was wont to do. Instead she took her on her lap and told of the little girl she had lost three years ago. She did not explain that her “little girl” had been 31 years old, and that she had helped greatly in making a living for the old folks, who were now staggering under the burden of age, increased rent, and a precarious trade. The old people seemed always oppressed by the sadness of the loss of their only child.
Day by day recently the children noticed that “Auntie” Schwartz was less cheerful that usual. Their elders seldom visited the little store, and so none who might have helped knew that old Victor Schwartz and his wife were almost starving to death, or that the old couple were slowly making up their minds to end their troubles together.