The Lansing Elephant Incident is not especially famous, but it is one of the more bizarre episodes of mass violence in Michigan history. To this day, it remains inexplicable.
The trouble began on a cool September night in 1963. The circus was in town and had pitched its tents at the Logan Square shopping center. The crowd was rowdy. When the 12-year-old Indian elephant, Little Rajjee, came into the ring, onlookers antagonized it fiercely. The elephant was of course familiar with abuse, having performed for a decade in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses. But something was different, more savage about this night.
As her trainer, Bill Pratt, led her through the final paces of her act, Little Rajjee broke free and ran off into the crowded shopping center.
What followed was a sort of anti-Babar. In that charming children’s story, a little elephant flees from violence in the jungle to a big provincial city, where he discovers the delights of civilization. He rides a department store elevator, buys spats, and has his photograph taken. It’s an amusing tale because in reality this would never happen.
When Little Rajjee squeezed her way through the double doors of the Lansing Arlan’s discount store, she was confused and terrified. The place was full of strange people finishing their evening shopping, and the harsh fluorescence beaming down from the ceiling was disorienting. For half an hour, she bumbled through the store, knocking over merchandise. The store manager looked on in dismay and moaned that the cleanup alone would cost thousands of dollars.
The whole time police and carnies followed close behind. None of them had ever dealt with a problem of this sort before. Pratt figured that if he could just catch the elephant’s attention, he could soothe her and lead her back to the ring. This he might have succeeded in doing, were it not for a burglar alarm (set off by a shoplifter taking advantage of the chaos) that put Little Rajjee into another panic. She bolted out through the store’s back entrance and into a residential neighborhood.
And so the wild rumpus began. The elephant charged down the back streets, trampling flowerbeds and smashing porches. Hundreds of people chased after her in cars, on bicycles, on foot. Soon, Little Rajjee attracted the worst sort of attention: teenage boys. They were watching a junior varsity football game at Everett High School, but the sight of an Indian elephant fleeing an unruly mob proved a much more attractive prospect. In unison, 500 teenagers rose from the stands and joined the hunt. The police pleaded with them to leave the elephant alone, but their cries only emboldened her persecutors. The teenagers pelted Little Rajjee with trash and football equipment as they were instructed to capture her.
By this point, there were about 4,000 people in pursuit of Little Rajjee. Asa Schiedel, a 67-year-old man who lived in the neighborhood, heard the commotion and came outside to see what it was all about. As he stepped down to the street, the elephant burst out from between two houses and trampled him. The blow fractured his pelvis. A neighbor ran out of his own house and shouted at the enraged beast, scaring her away, and Schiedel was carted off to the hospital.
Little Rajjee’s brush with Schiedel sealed her fate. Violence begets violence, and the crowd was becoming fervid. There was only one way to restore order. Once Little Rajjee had separated far enough from her pursuers, a police officer sitting in a squad car leveled his rifle at her. Eight shots reduced her to a mud-stained heap in the middle of the road. She was still wearing her sequins and embroidered dancing harness.
The onlookers rushed around the dead elephant, even as police attempted to hold them back. Someone shouted, “Murderers! Murderers!” A man stepped out from the mass of people and fired 36 more rounds into the elephant’s body, just for good measure. Pratt leaned against a nearby car and buried his head in his hands, weeping.
“Damn these people,” he shouted. “They wouldn’t leave her alone.”
Looking back on the affair in 2011, one of the high-school ringleaders, John Fouts, by then an old man, told the Lansing State Journal that he had no explanation for his actions on that night. He and his friends had started the hunt for the same reasons a dog chases a car: It was nothing more than a mindless impulse.
“Only after the elephant was killed did I realize what we had done,” Fouts said. “Five-hundred kids chasing anything through city streets will always lead to nothing good.”
Nic Rowan is managing editor of The Lamp magazine, a Catholic literary journal.
