The Sorrensons were a Danish family who immigrated to the United States sometime between 1905 and 1906. They arrived with their eldest child, Anders (seen on the donkey), and settled on a farmstead in Missouri. Three more children — Simone, Frikke, and Mathilde (center, right, and in the wagon, respectively) — soon followed. This photo, taken in 1916, captures all four of the children a few weeks before the tragedy.

The three eldest kids were apparently playing fort in the hay barn and must have fallen asleep. Their father, Niclas, drove a wooden haysweep into the pile and dismembered all three, in locations accurately suggested by the flaw in the photo.

Mathilde, the youngest, was inside the house with her mother at the time and not hurt. According to the son of a neighbor later interviewed by the author, the donkey later died in equally hideous fashion by getting its head caught in a barbwire fence and nearly decapitating itself in a frenzy to get free. This final detail could not be corroborated.