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Vignettes of blood on snow: a man in a guard's blue jacket and reefer, his long, impassive face, with its heavy eyebrows, oblique eyes, long upper lip and thin mouth pushed into the ground, lying dead, his head pointed toward freedom. That was Convict Sullivan in clothes he had stripped from a captured guard. He had run through the barrage of tear gas that the troopers let loose on the screaming phalanx as it advanced across the yard toward the gate holding Warden Jennings and the other hostages as a screen in front of them. He had run toward the cars drawn up there outside the gate as decoys, their engines running. Beside him was another convict. In the yard were others. Death was waiting for them, they knew that as soon as the cloud of gas sprang out of the gate. They backed up to the wall on the opposite side of the yard, clawed at it with their nails, climbed on each other's backs trying to pyramid over. As shots followed them, they ran inside the south cell block.
At twilight the machine guns on the walls were quiet, still waiting. A thousand people and a regiment of militia were at the gates. An airplane droned overhead. Death came for the rioters across the yard, up into the cell block, past the barricades which they had piled up with mattresses, chairs, beds at corners where they could shoot down a corridor two ways and back up to a stairway. Troopers told a convict named Johnson, who was helping them, to pull a mattress off a barricade. A bullet stopped Johnson when he took his first step. A bullet stopped Captain Bruton of the guards. On the top floor there were six rebels left. Troopers brought machine guns into position.
"Will you surrender? We will shoot to kill."
Behind the last barricade one Steven Pawlak, lifer, stood up. "Go to hell," he snarled. Troopers crossed the barricade after the last wooden-sounding machine gun volley. They found all the last six rebels dead in a pile. Warden Jennings, dragged to safety when the convicts charged the gate, was dizzy from gas and a clubbing but all right. Nine guards and convicts had been killed, many others injured. After the break Governor Roosevelt said: "We have three commissions working on the problem now. I would name a fourth if it would do any good." He announced that seven captured rioters would be tried for their lives. He promised to make special penal recommendations to the legislature next month concerning: 1) A five-year building program to increase prison accommodations by 3,000; 2) Construction of a new 1,000-men model prison at Attica; 3) Increase in prisoners' daily ration allowance from 21¢ to 26¢ 4) Work for every prisoner, with pay for all work.
He appointed a new acting warden, Dr. Frank L. Christian, superintendent of the Elmira Reformatory, humanitarian.