President Abraham Lincoln
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--Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth’s brother, died on June 7, 1893. Two days later, at the very moment Edwin’s casket was being carried from the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City, all 3 floors of Ford’s Theatre collapsed killing 22 people and injuring 68 others. At the time Ford’s was being used as a storehouse for War Department records.
--Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot John Wilkes Booth, went berserk during an 1887 meeting of the Kansas State Legislature. He was arrested, declared insane, and sent to the Topeka Asylum for the Insane. He escaped the next year.
--In May, 1875, an insanity trial for Mary Todd Lincoln was held in Chicago. The jury found Mrs. Lincoln “insane and a fit person to be in a state hospital for the insane. Mary spent the next several months in an asylum in Batavia, Illinois.
--William A. Petersen, the German tailor in whose house the President died, committed suicide. His body, filled with laudanum (a mixture of alcohol and opium derivatives), was found on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution on June 18, 1871.
--Robert Lincoln, the President’s son, was in the White House when his father was shot. On July 2, 1881, Robert was with President James A. Garfield at Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station when the President was shot by assassin Charles J. Guiteau. In his own words, Robert reached the stricken Garfield within 15 seconds of the shooting. Finally, on September 6, 1901, when President William McKinley was shot by Leon F. Czolgosz at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, Robert was on a train just arriving in Buffalo.