Horror, Sleaze and Trash.

Mike Inik became a nuisance of the courts in erratic demands for justice after he was injured in a reported fall from a scaffold or a pipe to the back while working at Whiting, Indiana’s Standard Oil Company refinery on May 13, 1902. Seven years later, he was awarded a settlement of $1,500, but he refused to cash the check, believing the compensation owed him totaled $150,000. On June 5, 1911, he was declared of “unsound” mind by Judge Reiter and appointed a guardian to assist in these pursuant business matters, which Inik found so compelling a case, he took all the way to the highest authority in Washington D.C. before he was stopped by security.

In one of his last appearances at the Lake County Superior Court in Hammond, Inik asked the constable on duty for his phone number. When the officer questioned what he needed the number for, he responded ominously, threatening an act that would require police intervention: "Next Monday maybe you get called to Hammond. Then you must come quick." Once Monday, December 4, 1916 came, the 49-year-old appeared at the courthouse wearing a medieval suit of armor he fashioned out of sheet iron and stove pipes. Each plate was fastened together with string and newspapers were pasted on his breast. He also carried a sheet iron head mask separately with a scalp woven from mattress hair and a beard of the same material. In broken English, the following message was inscribed on the forehead in red ink: "People don't bedouche. I'b United State and I was cavalry soldier. I want true for everybody. I crose death." He donned the armor because he "smelled the big Standard Oil Company war that was coming." Inik had an arsenal to match the occasion, including four .38-caliber revolvers with 165 rounds of ammunition, an old cavalry sabre measuring more than a yard long concealed in a scabbard, a butcher knife, a hatchet, a tack hammer, a pin-studded club, a five pound chain, and a black jack.


Inik first visited prosecuting attorney Patterson in his office and presented him a list of all the worker deaths and injuries he compiled from newspaper clippings and elsewhere to push for legal action against the Standard Oil Company, as he had many times before. Short on patience, Patterson told him, "I haven't any time for you this morning. I'm too busy." He moved on to petition Judge Reiter, and he was dismissed again. He then stopped Judge Charles E. Greenwald in a corridor, who effectively "bawled him out" and suggested he go home and "take a bath." Patterson passed by in this moment and advised his fellow official, "Don't pay any attention to him." Inik then produced one of the revolvers and shot at Patterson point blank. The shot missed him and lodged in Greenwald's right upper arm. He turned and fired several times in the opposite direction, hitting bailiff Lew DeBow three times; once in the hip, and the other two grazing his scalp and wrist. George Robbins, serving as a juror nearby, rushed to overpower him, and he was shot in the face, the bullet entering to the right of his nose. Others joined in the tackle, and Inik was subdued until police arrived.

Within a week, two experts diagnosed Inik as a "monomaniac," at the time a mental illness defined as "excessive concentration on a single object or idea," and he was committed to the Indiana Hospital for Insane Criminals in Michigan City.