Love (maybe) and death in Oceanside

As I’ve said in the past, I love digging up historical tidbits about Oceanside and Island Park. In fact, I love history — it was my minor in college.

While digging through dusty stacks at libraries may make me feel like a lamer version of Indiana Jones (he was an archeologist and I’m sure he did research), I just don’t have the time for in-depth research anymore. It’s an unfortunate victim of the weekly news cycle.

But it doesn’t preclude me from finding old newspaper articles full of wonderful information. It may make me more like Robert Langdon (the guy from “The DaVinci Code”) than Indiana Jones, but I can live with that.

This week’s historical piece comes from a New York Times article from April 16, 1899.

The story is unfortunately short — only three paragraphs. It was the headline that caught my eye when I was doing a search for Oceanside: “First Nassau County Killing.”

The story starts like any account of a homicide. Samuel Ousterman, 55, a bayman from Oceanside, shot and killed Thomas Nickerson and Daniel Pearsall in Oceanside on the night of April 15, 1899.

Don’t misconstrue the headline: it was the first killing to happen in Nassau County which, before then, was actually part of Queens. On Jan. 1, 1898, all of the western towns in Queens County became part of the City of New York, excluding the eastern towns — Hempstead, North Hempstead and Oyster Bay. They stayed part of Queens County but were not part of New York City.

Residents, however, didn’t take kindly to it. There was a fight about it in Albany (some things never change), but on April 27 of that year, Gov. Frank S. Black signed a law that created Nassau County, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1899.

I don’t have the historical records to prove it, but I would assume that, in the more than 200-year history of the area preceding 1899, someone killed someone else. It’s just the way things are. What the article says is that “the killing of Nickerson is the first homicide to be committed in the new County of Nassau,” which at that time was barely three months old.

The details in the story are sketchy. Nickerson and Pearsall went to Ousterman’s house in Oceanside on the night of April 15. About an hour after they arrived, “a quarrel started.”

The next sentence makes me assume that everyone involved was probably at least somewhat drunk. Because, according to the article, after the fight started, “Nickerson and Pearsall went outside and threw a lot of empty beer bottles through the windows [of Ousterman’s house].”

Ousterman told them to stop, but they wouldn’t. Then he apparently got a double-barreled shotgun from his son-in-law, Edward Baldwin, and shot Nickerson and Pearsall.

“Nickerson was shot in the head and through the lungs and dropped dead beside a fence,” the article reads. “Pearsall was wounded in the right hand and left leg, but he managed to run to Rockville Centre.” Even without a gunshot wound, that’s quite a jog.

Ousterman was later arrested by Policeman Skelly, of Rockville Centre. He pleaded self-defense. Unfortunately, this three-paragraph article was all the information I could find. I don’t know if Ousterman was ever convicted.

The most telling detail, in my opinion, is the last sentence of the first paragraph. “Emma Smith, thirty years old, is housekeeper for Ousterman, and Nickerson, it is said, had been attentive to her.”

It’s not stated in the article, but I imagine that Nickerson’s attentiveness to Ousterman’s housekeeper could have been the start of their argument. At least, that’s they way I romanticize it in my head — coy glances between Nickerson and Smith while she cleans, Ousterman slowly realizing the truth. Perhaps Ousterman was really in love with her all along!

Or three guys got drunk, got into a fight and things spiraled out of control. I guess we’ll never really know.