Ralph Purnell
Ocean City resident killed on the Sinepuxent Bay bridge · 1907–1942
A resident of Ocean City, 35 years old, struck by a car about eleven o'clock on the night of Saturday 20 June 1942 while walking across the Sinepuxent Bay bridge, and dead of a broken neck twelve hours later in the Peninsula General Hospital at Salisbury. The driver was identified as Henry K. Graves Jr. of Seaford; no charge was brought, and the police said a contributing factor may have been the coastal dim-out, which required cars approaching Ocean City to show only parking lights.
In the record (1)
1942 · 1942-06-20
Ralph Purnell of Ocean City was walking across the Sinepuxent Bay bridge at eleven at night in June 1942 when a car hit him — and the police said the dim-out may have been why.
'Ralph Purnell, 35, a resident of Ocean City, was fatally injured as he walked across the Sinepuxent Bay bridge at the resort late Saturday night. Purnell was struck by an automobile about 11 o'clock and died in the Peninsula General Hospital twelve hours later from a broken neck. The police identified the driver of the car which struck Purnell as Henry K. Graves Jr., of Seaford. They said no charge will be brought against him and that a contributing factor in the fatality may have been the dim out requiring automobiles to proceed with low parking lights.' Six weeks after the Army ordered that a car approaching Ocean City show nothing but its parking lights, the order killed somebody — or at least the police thought it might have, and said so, and no charge was brought. It is the only death the campaign has yet found that the coastal dim-out is officially implicated in, and it happened on the bridge.
Source · checked 2026-08-11