Vincent Mroz, 86, and Elroy Sites, 77, were witnesses to attack on Truman
WASHINGTON - Secret Service Special Agent Vincent Mroz and apprentice electrician Elroy Sites met Nov. 1, 1950, just moments after two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to storm Blair House in Washington and assassinate President Truman.
Mr. Mroz had just fired a well-considered shot at one of the attempted assassins from a second-floor window while his colleagues were in hot pursuit. He then ran through a basement and out, ready to continue the fight, only to find a fatally injured colleague nearby. Mr. Sites, the electrician, was knotting up a jacket as a makeshift pillow for the dying man.
The violence made headlines around the world and foreshadowed a 1954 attack by Puerto Rican nationalists on the US Capitol. Except for a 2005 book on the attack, the Blair House assassination attempt is nearly forgotten.
Mr. Mroz, the last surviving officer involved in the 1950 shoot-out, died July 22 at his home in Adrian, Mich., of lung cancer. He was 86.
Mr. Sites, one of the last significant witnesses of that day, died July 26 of coronary artery disease at his home in Westminster, Md. He was 77.
In 1950, hundreds immediately gathered at the scene, including swarms of photographers, nearby office workers, tourists, and streetcar passengers. But few were close to the action, and all of them are now dead: The only remaining Secret Service agent from that case, Floyd Boring, died in February.
Mr. Mroz had been in the Secret Service for just over two years at the time, working the presidential protective detail. The White House was being renovated, so Truman was living at Blair House. The president was napping at 2:20 p.m. when the two would-be assassins approached from opposite directions, with a hazy but firm intent to kill him.
The sequence of events is laid out in "American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman" by Stephen Hunter (a former
When he came out the side door to the adjoining Lee House, he found, to his shock, that "There was nobody to shoot. Everybody was down," Hunter and Bainbridge wrote. What he did see was a civilian pulling a seriously injured White House policeman, Leslie Coffelt, out of a guardhouse.
The civilian was a 19-year-old Elroy Sites, who had been fixing an outdoor sign at a furniture company about 480 feet away. At the sound of gunshots, he ran toward Blair House, arriving before the shooting had ended, and spotted the White House police officer slumped in the phone booth-size guardhouse.
"I heard Coffelt moaning, and I went over and he looked up at me and raised his pistol," Mr. Sites told Bainbridge. "I just took my foot and pushed the pistol over. . . . I had just lifted him up, and I was trying not to hurt him. . . .
"This guy came up and told him to roll up his coat," he said. "I made a pillow, somebody came out the door. . . . I helped put him on the stretcher, and I gave the police captain his gun. They put him in the ambulance. Then I went around and worked on the sign."
He testified in the murder trial of Oscar Collazo (whose partner, Griselio Torresola, had died at the scene), and then went on about his life. Collazo was sentenced to death, but Truman commuted his sentence. Collazo died in 1994.
Elroy Reynolds Sites, a native of Altoona, Pa., moved to Washington as a boy but spent enough time hunting that he became an expert marksman. He graduated from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C., where he was on the swim team and the shooting team. He also served in the Army. He was a member of the National Rifle Association.
He worked for himself most of his life as a master electrician, and then went into the construction, heating and air-conditioning trades. He also worked as a deputy sheriff in Montgomery County for seven years. His wife, Mary Louise Sites, died in 1989.
He leaves eight children, Kathleen Horan of Gaithersburg, Md., Anne Vane of Frederick, Md., Ronald Sites of Silver Spring, Md., Lauren Chaffin of Annapolis, Md., David Sites of Fulton, Md., Christine Ryman of Kearneysville, W.Va., Carolyn Arensmeyer of Germantown, Md., and Mark Sites of Tucker, Ga.; a sister; 25 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
His family said Mr. Sites, who liked to talk about his years as a deputy sheriff, rarely talked about the Truman assassination incident until the Hunter-Bainbridge book was published.
Mr. Mroz was more than 6 feet tall, physically imposing but a graceful dancer with large hands and a level gaze. He looked like a Secret Service agent, someone in the higher ranks noted, and he had a college degree, not a given for agents in those days.
He spent 26 years in the Secret Service, and he had been a Marine in World War II, so he knew how to handle guns and a crime scene. After Coffelt was loaded into an ambulance, Mr. Mroz noticed a little man curled up in a fetal position in the hedges. It was the body of Torresola, who had shot three men that afternoon and whom Truman might have seen when he rose from his nap and looked out the window.
When Mr. Mroz removed the Luger pistol from Torresola's body and searched his pockets, he found two magazines of unused ammunition.
Vincent Peter Mroz was born in Stanley, Wis., and grew up in East Chicago, Ind. He attended Michigan State University on a football scholarship but interrupted his college life to enlist in the Marine Corps during World War II. Before he went to war in the Pacific, he was sent to the University of Michigan by the corps, and he became one of the few football players to get an athletic letter from both schools. After the war ended, Mr. Mroz graduated from Michigan State and went directly into the Secret Service.
He worked in Chicago before coming to Washington in 1950. Assigned to the permanent protection detail for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, Mr. Mroz later rose through the ranks. He ended his career with the Secret Service in 1974 as deputy assistant director of the uniformed division.
The Treasury Department gave Mr. Mroz a certificate of meritorious civilian service for his actions during the Truman assassination attempt.
He leaves his wife of 63 years, Shirley Gamm Mroz of Adrian, Mich.; two children, Barbara Mroz of Adrian and Gregory Mroz of Washington; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
