Her work, she wrote, was to distribute "clothing and food to starving women and babies, to assist poverty stricken mothers and bring children into the world, and to minister to the sick and close the eyes of the dying."

She returned to Colliers from Fairmont, W.Va. and immediately broke her promise by challenging U.S. District Court Judge Alston G. Dayton to arrest her.

Congressman Matthew M. Neely, the UMWA waged a public relations campaign to obtain a presidential pardon for Sellins.

On August 26, she witnessed a posse of a dozen of the sheriff's deputies and Coal and Iron Police beating Joseph Starzeleski, a picketing miner, who was killed.

A grand jury in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, indicted three deputies for the killings, but a trial in 1923 ended in acquittal for the two men accused of her murder.