CUTS THROAT WHILE ASLEEP

With a gash seven inches long and through the windpipe in his beck, four ugly cuts through the arteries of the wrist and seven punctures above the heart, Ole J. Germundson, a Sawyer farmer, is lying at the Ward county hospital at Minot on the fair road to recovery.

Germundson slept Saturday night at the Merchants hotel in Sawyer and was discovered in the morning lying in a pool of blood.

The tale he tells, which is carried out by the wounds, is one of the most ghastly ever heard by the professional men of the city. He claims he awoke from a sound sleep only in the morning to find himself attempting to carve his body up. Seven jabs were made at his heart with a rusty knife which he carried, but none of them took effect, only penetrating the skin. The man then gashed both wrists, cutting through the large arteries which run through that part of the body. Not satisfied with this he made a slash at his neck. The first cut merely cut the skin and did not penetrate as far as the man desided {sp}. The knife was then inserted below the right ear and drawn across the neck to the other ear, making a gash seven inches long, and when his head was thrown back, four inches wide.

It extended down to the windpipe in one place cutting through a portion of the cartilage surrounding the channel.

When interviewed the man claimed that he had no intention of committing suicide, but that he awoke to find that he had done the deed. He claimed that the idea was so strong upon him that he could not stop. He said that last year he had the typhoid fever and that he has not felt right since. He also stated that he felt another attack coming on. It is believed that the previoous {sp} illness had some effect on the man's reason.

Golden Valley Chronicle, 12/5/1907