Vincent Mroz, Elroy Sites; Sprang Into Action During Attempt on Truman's Life

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 the Blair House in Washington and assassinate President Harry S. 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 incident made headlines around the world and foreshadowed a 1954 attack by Puerto Rican nationalists on the U.S. Capitol. Except for a 2005 book on the incident, the Blair House assassination attempt is now almost forgotten.

Mr. Mroz, the last surviving officer involved in the 1950 shootout, 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 Washington Post film critic) and John Bainbridge Jr. Mr. Mroz, who had just rotated into the service's office, over the eastern entrance to Blair House, heard gunshots and looked out the window. He spotted two colleagues and Oscar Collazo, one of the gunmen, running and shooting. Mr. Mroz fired at Collazo, who seemed to disappear. Mr. Mroz then dashed out through a basement corridor and up a set of stairs to approach the scene from a better angle.

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."