On April 20, 1915, Jackson relayed to Morgenthau, to the secretary of state, and to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a report prepared by the Reverend John E. Merrill, president of Central Turkey College at Aintab, on the situation in the region stretching from Aintab to Marash and Zeitun. The nine-page document described the similarities between the contemporary situation in the Marash region and that during the previous Hamidian massacre and the Adana massacre of 1909. As during the massacres of 1895–96, it noted, the Turkish government was spreading false rumors that the Armenians in the Marash region were threatening law and order. Jackson claimed that the local officials deceived the Armenians in Zeitun and in nearby Furnus into surrendering their arms in hopes of averting punishment, as during the Adana massacres of 1909, while causing the death of innocent women and children. He further asserted that the conscription of young male Armenians into the Turkish army was followed by imprisonment, deportations, and massacres. Merrill believed that the deportation of the Marash region was "a direct blow at American missionary interests, menacing the results of more than fifty years of work and many thousands of dollars of expenditure."