Word: irvin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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People in Florida's Lake County were still sore about those two colored boys, Sam Shepherd and his buddy Walter Irvin. Two years ago, a 17-year-old white housewife swore that they and two other Negroes had kidnaped her and raped her in the back seat of their Mercury. A Lake County jury at Tavares had convicted them, and they were sentenced to the electric chair. But lawyers hired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. This spring the Supreme Court had reversed the Lake County court and ordered...
...look for lynchers' roadblocks, McCall explained later. Then, said McCall, a tire went flat. He got out to fix it. When McCall opened the car door to let Shepherd out, said McCall, the prisoner suddenly smashed at his head with the sheriff's flashlight and yelled to Irvin to get his gun. The sheriff pulled out his revolver, and shot each prisoner three times. Then he radioed Yates to come back, and called a doctor. When the doctor got there, Sammy Shepherd was dead...
...Walter Irvin was not dead. In the hospital, his neck and chest bandaged, a rubber tube in one nostril, Walter Irvin told a different story: "The sheriff and the deputy began talking on the radio a little bit. [The sheriff] told him to go ahead and check and so the deputy sheriff went on a short ways in front of us and says, 'O.K.' . . . The sheriff began to shimmy his wheel and said, 'Something is wrong with my left front tire...
...Irvin said the sheriff reached under the seat for his flashlight, got out and kicked the front wheel. "Then he said, 'You sons of bitches get out and get this tire fixed' ... So Shepherd, he takes his foot and put it out of the car and was getting out, I can't say just how quick it was, but he shot him. It was quick enough, and he turned, the sheriff did, and he has a pistol and he shot him right quick . . . That left [Sammy] against the face of the car and then he shot...
...Attorney General Howard Mc-Grath sent FBI men to make an on-the-spot investigation to find out whether McCall's version or Irvin's was true. At week's end, a coroner's jury upheld Sheriff McCall, finding that he had fired in self-defense, and a state investigator displayed powder burns on McCall's coat sleeve which showed, he said, that McCall's arm was doubled up, indicating that there had been a struggle. But the FBI continued its own investigation...