moved late Sunday to the New York City Medical Examiner's office at 520 First Avenue. The
autopsy confirmed that shotgun pellet wounds in the heart had killed Malcolm X. Chief Medical
Examiner Dr. Milton Helpern said that death followed the first sawed-off shotgun blast which
caused thirteen wounds in the heart and chest, and he said that .38 and .45 caliber bullet wounds
in the thighs and legs evidenced that Malcolm X had been shot at after he had fallen. Monday
morning the official identification was made at the Medical Examiner's office by Sister Betty, who
was accompanied by Percy Sutton, Malcolm X's Boston half-sister Mrs. Ella Collins, and Joseph
E. Hall, General Manager of the large Unity Funeral Home in Harlem. Leaving the Medical
Examiner's office at about noon to go and complete funeral arrangements, Sister Betty told
reporters, "No one believed what he said. They never took him seriously, even after the bombing
of our home they said he did it himself!"
At the Unity Funeral Home on the east side of Eighth Avenue between 126th and 127th Streets,
Sister Betty chose a six-foot-nine-inch bronze casket lined with egg-shell velvet. At her request,
the funeral would be delayed until the following Saturday, five days away. The funeral home's
manager Hall announced to the press that the body would be dressed in a business suit, and it
would be put on view under a glass shield from Tuesday through Friday, then the Saturday
services would be at a Harlem church.
Soon posted on the funeral home's directory was "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz." In Brooklyn,
orthodox Moslem Sheik Al-Hajh Daoud Ahmed Faisal of the Islamic Mission of America said that
the delayed funeral services violated a Moslem practice that the sun should not set twice on a
believer's body, that the Koran prescribed burial inside twenty-four hours if possible, and Moslems
believed that when a body grows cold the soul leaves it and when the body is put into the earth it
comes alive again.In Chicago, where policemen were watching all bus depots, railways,
terminals, O'Hare Airport and highway entrances, Elijah Muhammad, under heavy guard in his
three-story mansion, said, "Malcolm died according to his preaching. He seems to have taken
weapons as his god. Therefore, we couldn't tolerate a man like that. He preached war. We preach
peace. We are permitted to fight if we are attacked-that's the Scripture, the Koran, and the Bible,
too. But we will never be the aggressor. I don't have the right to be frightened, because I was
chosen by Allah. If Allah gives me up to the hands of the wicked, I am satisfied. My life is in the
hands of Allah." The grounds outside the mansion were patrolled by both Chicago police and Fruit
of Islam bodyguards. More of both patrolled before the University of Islam high school, and the
offices of the newspaper Muhammad Speaks.
Malcolm X's lawyer, Assemblyman Percy Sutton, said that the police now had the names of those
whom Malcolm X had said planned to kill him. All over Harlem, reporters were interviewing
people, and microphones were being put before the mouths of the man-in-the-street. At police
precinct station houses, people being questioned were leaving by side entrances. Said Assistant
Chief Inspector Joseph Coyle, in charge of Manhattan North detectives, ".... a well-planned
conspiracy. We're doing a screening process of the four hundred people who were in the hall at
the time." Fifty detectives were on the case, he said, and he had been in touch with police in other
cities.
Harlem was mostly asleep when around the Black Muslim Mosque Number 7, on the top floor of
a four-story building at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, an explosive sound at 2:15 A.M. ripped
the night. Firemen were instantly summoned by the four policemen who had been guarding the
sidewalk entrance to the mosque. Within a few minutes flames burst through the building's roof
and leaped thirty feet into the air. For the next seven hours firemen would pour water into the
building. On an adjacent roof they found an empty five-gallongasoline can, a brown, gasolinestained
shopping bag, and oily rags. Southbound IRT subway service was re-routed for a while,
also three bus lines. At the spectacular five-alarm fire's height, a wall of the building collapsed; it
smashed two fire engines at the curb and injured five firemen, one seriously, and also a
pedestrian who had been across the street buying a newspaper. By daybreak, when the fire was
declared "under control," the Black Muslim mosque and the Gethsemane Church of God in Christ
on the floor beneath it were gutted, and seven street-level stores, including the Black Muslim
restaurant, were "total losses." Fire Department sources said that replacing the ruined equipment
darsice
(darsice)
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