Thursday, March 11, 2004
 1010 WINS Mar 9, 2004: A secretive initiation ceremony in the basement of a Long Island Masonic lodge went "tragically wrong" when a member mistakenly pulled out a loaded weapon and fatally shot an inductee in the face, police said Tuesday.
William James, 47, of Medford, N.Y., was pronounced dead at the scene of Monday night's shooting inside the Southside Masonic Lodge, said Suffolk County Detective Lt. Jack Fitzpatrick.
James was participating in an induction around 8:40 p.m. at the Southside Masonic Lodge when Albert Eid, 76, of Patchogue, pulled out a gun from his pants pocket with real bullets instead of blanks and shot him, Fitzpatrick said.
[...]
Fitzpatrick told reporters at a news conference that police believe the shooting "was completely accidental."
Police believe the Masons sat James in a chair and placed cans on a small platform around his head.
Eid was standing approximately 20 feet away holding a gun, Fitzpatrick said. A third member out of James' view held a stick, and when the gun was fired the man with the stick was supposed to knock the cans off the platform to make the inductee think that real bullets were fired.
Fitzpatrick said the ceremony was designed to create "a state of anxiety" for the inductees. Police also found a guillotine, rat traps, and a wooden board that Fitzpatrick surmised was used in some type of "walking the plank" routine in the basement of the one-story building.
Eid pleaded innocent to a second-degree manslaughter.
[...]
Monday's ceremony was an initiation into the Fellow Craft, which is the second degree within the Masonic system. Police pronounced it an accident within hours. That's some crack investigation.
See also Associated Press November 24, 2003 JOHNSON CITY [Tenn.] -- Washington County authorities say one Ku Klux Klansman accidentally shot another participant at the initiation of a new member, then ran from the incident.
Chief Deputy Patrick Littleton says about 10 people were at the KKK initiation, two of them children.
They had the initiate blindfolded and standing on tiptoes with his neck in a noose as they shot paintballs at him. This, in a woods near Limestone.
Littleton says 45-year-old Gregory Allen Freeman started firing his nine millimeter pistol into the air to add realism to the event and one of the slugs hit Jeffrey Murr as it came down again. The bullet struck the top of Murr's head and came out near the base of his skull. And don't forget the Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan
Labels: masons
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