Seventy-three-year old Dan E. Fabun lies dead on the front seat of his car near Cardiff Avenue in San Bernadino, California. Fabun had separated from his sixty-six-year old wife Lula Fabun, but was at the house they once shared discussing its sale. But he had no intention of selling the house. Instead, he pulled a .32 caliber automatic pistol from his pocket and fired a volley of shots. One missed. One hit Lula in the torso, and another entered her right cheek and exited her left ear.
Lula’s unlucky brother-in-law was there too, and he was felled by a fourth bullet in the stomach. While lying wounded in the street, he saw Dan Fabun put the gun to his own head and pull the trigger, with a click resulting. Fabun then leaped into his car and drove off. Not more than a mile away he veered off the road, through a wire fence, and into a field, where police later found him in the condition you see above. He
had drunk a deadly poison, and succumbed almost immediately. He carried two notes—one explaining his funeral arrangements, and the other explaining his reasoning for what he did. “I’m too old to live alone,” he wrote. And apparently, too unwilling to die alone. Today, 1951.
