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Young Brothers Massacre....
Young Brothers Massacre....
Item # 566010
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January 03, 1932
THE NEW YORK TIMES, New York, January 3, 1932
* Young Brothers Massacre (1st report)
* Springfield Missouri
* The Ozarks
This 70+ page newspaper has one column headlines on the front page: "SIX OFFICERS KILLED BY DESPERATE BAND", "Barricaded in Missouri Farmhouse of Leader, Gang Battles With Posse in Darkness", "Governor Sends Troops", "Fugitives Escape Amid Volleys, Leaving Bodies of Sheriff and Five Aides". This tells of the Young Brothers Massacre near Springfield MO.
Other news, sports and advertisements of the day throughout. Rag edition in very nice condition.
wikipedia notes: The Young Brothers Massacre (sometimes referred to as the Brookline Shootout) was a gun battle that occurred outside of Brookline, Missouri on the afternoon of January 2, 1932. It resulted in the deaths of six law enforcement officers, making it the worst single killing of U.S. police officers in the 20th century.[1] The event is little known of outside of the Ozarks region of Missouri where it occurred, and even books dealing with the “Public Enemy Era” of the 1930’s rarely mention it. This may be due to the geographical and cultural isolation of the Ozarks at that time.
Upon arriving at the farmhouse, the police officers assembled in the front yard and yelled for the brothers to come out. They received no response, but officer Ollie Crosswhite said he had heard a person walking around inside. Sheriff Hendrix ordered tear gas to be fired into the house, with no immediate result. At that point, Hendrix and his deputy sheriff Wiley Marshburn decided to kick down the back door of the house and enter the home. When they did so, two persons, one armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and the other with a .25-20 rifle, opened fire from inside the house. (It is not completely clear who was in the house at the time of the gun battle, but all evidence points to the presence of Harry and Jennings Young.) Both Hendrix and Marshburn fell, mortally wounded. The officers outside began shooting into the windows of the house, while those inside continued to pour a deadly fire on the exposed policemen. Another three officers, Tony Oliver, Sid Meadows, and Charles Houser were quickly gunned down. The surviving policemen, out of ammunition and pinned down, were forced to abandon their dead and dying comrades and flee for their lives. Unknown to the fleeing lawmen, Officer Crosswhite was still alive and uninjured, crouching behind a storm cellar at the rear of the house. Once the men inside became aware of Crosswhite’s presence, one of them pinned him down with rifle fire while the other crept up behind him and killed him with a shotgun blast to the back of the head. While a relief party was being hastily formed in Springfield, the killers took both money and weapons from the fallen policemen and fled.
A national manhunt immediately commenced, and the Young brothers were quickly tracked to a rented room in Houston, Texas. Houston Police officers entered the home on January 5th and discovered the brothers had retreated to a bathroom. They called on the men inside to surrender, and were met with gunfire. After the officers returned fire, there was a period of silence, and then several shots were heard. A voice called out “We’re dead-come on in”. The officers found Jennings Young dead and Harry Young mortally wounded from multiple gunshot wounds. The guns taken from the murdered lawmen in Brookline were found on the bodies. The coroner’s office in Houston concluded that the brothers had shot each other in a suicide pact to avoid capture. Some persons later questioned this version of events, suspecting that the officers involved had in fact fired the fatal shots.
The Young Brothers Massacre was one of the events that persuaded law enforcement in the U.S. to take a more professional and cautious approach to armed standoff situations, particularly those involving persons suspected of previous violence towards police officers. A monument bearing the names of the six slain officers stands today in front of the police headquarters building in Springfield, Missouri.
Category: The 20th Century
No Longer Available
