Across the room, one of the administrators was telephoning the City Hospital for a woman, to inquire about her brother-in-law. He had been taken there and not to the General. The woman bit her fingernails and watched the expression of the man telephoning. Finally he hung up and said, "He's fine. Just some lacerations on his hands and face. He's fine."

"Thank God," the woman said.

"If you want to get over there, there are cabs in front."

The woman shook her head. "My husband's here," she said, pointing down to the treatment rooms.

Ralph Orlando was then wheeled out on a stretcher. A woman who had just arrived in the EW for treatment of a rash on her elbows stared at the body. "Is he dead?" she asked. "Is he dead?"

Someone said yes, he was dead.

"Why do they cover up the face that way?" she asked, staring.

In another corner of the room, a woman who had been sitting stolidly with a young child got up and took her child out of the lobby while the body was wheeled out.

The emergency ward then received word that there would be no more people coming, that it would get no more than the six it already had. By now equilibrium was returning to the ward. People were no longer running and there was a sense that things were in control. The state troopers had for the most part gone, but the relatives were still arriving.

Mrs. Orlando, a stout woman accompanied by two teen-age children, was one of the many who immediately tried to leave the lobby and get back to the treatment rooms. All relatives were being prevented from doing this, because the area around the patients was already badly crowded with hospital personnel. Mrs. Orlando was insistent, however, and the more resistance she met, the more insistent she became. The EW administrators tried to coax her out of the lobby and into a more private waiting room. She demanded to see her husband immediately. She was then told that he was dead.