“I can’t stand this no longer!”
1929 prison riot
Nearly a century ago a riot broke out in the prison at Canon City, Colorado. The rioting prisoners took several hostages. Sadly, the melee took thirteen lives - eight guards and five prisoners - and thousands of rounds of ammunition were fired over the better part of two days. It finally ended when Father Patrick O’Neill, OSB, the prison chaplain, hollered, “I can’t stand this no longer!” Let me go in!”
And he did go in; not once but twice, under a barrage of rifle and machine gun fire.
The Associated Press reported, “Out of the chaos and confusion there rose a figure above all others in heroism. The Rev. Patrick O'Neill, who cried ‘I can’t stand this no longer, let me go in,’ displayed rare bravery in going into the prison yard under a protecting barrage from Colorado national guardsmen outside, and placed two charges of dynamite with which the besiegers hoped to blast the building to open the way for a massed attack.”
But the first charge of dynamite failed to explode, as told byTime magazine: “The burly prison priest started across the open yard with a lumberman's coat over his clericals, bearing not peace and absolution but death — a 50 Ib. box of dynamite. Rifles and machine guns on the prison wall and in the warden's darkened house kept up a blistering barrage into the cellhouse windows as the priest went to the building's very entrance and laid the charge to blast an entrance. The ignition battery did not work.”
Father O’Neill went in a second time, now placing a twenty-five pound charge of dynamite, again making his trip under a blanket of machine gun fire. This time the dynamite charge exploded.
In 1932 the Benedictine priest was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Bravery and his heroics were the subject of the 1957 television movie “Riot” starring Pat O’Brien, that played on ABC’s Crossroads series. The highly fictionalized 25 minute film can be found here.
Father O’Neill, born in Manchester, Ohio, was then a monk of the now-defunct Benedictine Abbey of the Holy Cross in Colorado. After the incident he returned to his home abbey, the Abbey of St. Bernard in Cullman, Alabama where he taught at the college for several decades. He died there in 1971 at age 84.
