In a 300-word early morning dispatch George Gregg, Ottawa correspondent of the Toronto Leader, described what happened next: “At half-past two o’clock this morning Hon. T. D. McGee was shot dead by an unknown assassin, just as he was entering the door of his lodging house. The ball passed through his head and lodged in the door which he was just opening … The body, as I write, is still prostrate on the pavement, hardly yet cold in death.”