Word: sheriffs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...prosperous, sun-baked Las Cruces (pop. 13,500), an agricultural town 30 miles from the Texas border, Cricket had little trouble finding a variety of primrose paths. The town and surrounding Dona Ana County was dotted with bars and gambling joints. The law was administered by big, smiling Democratic Sheriff A. L. ("Happy") Apodaca, a former prizefighter with a great fondness for women...
When the town began to resound with rumors that somebody was trying to cover up the crime, the sheriff secretly jailed a fellow who had been drinking with Cricket on the night of her disappearance. The man was one of his own friends, beefy, crop-haired Jerry Nuzum, a professional football player for the Pittsburgh Steelers. For three days no word of the arrest leaked...
Western Ways. Enraged at the splash this made in the El Paso Herald-Post, Sheriff Apodaca first slapped the football player into solitary. Then he cleared him of all charges and turned him loose. The roof promptly fell in on the sheriff. A Negro construction worker named Wesley Byrd complained that he had also been held incommunicado in jail for twelve days, that state policemen had tried to make him admit the crime by squeezing his testicles with a bicycle lock. Nuzum's landlady, who backed the athlete's alibi, had been warned by the sheriff that...
Calm, determined Sheriff McCall put in a hurry call to Governor Fuller Warren that brought 78 National Guardsmen to the scene. Off and on for three days, small mobs, sprinkled now with strangers from other counties, cruised menacingly in cars, or shuffled through the small-town streets, but did no damage. Then, all of a sudden, they were roused again. A hundred shouting whites with rifles and pistols roared into tiny Mascotte in trucks, forced Guardsmen and police to withdraw and took over the community for the night...
...Stuckey's Still, a bedraggled Negro home site three miles from Groveland, the band poured shots into one house (someone thought it belonged to the father of one of the rape suspects) and started after more. Sheriff's men and highway police stopped them with tear-gas grenades. A few miles away, whites tossing kerosene-filled bottles burned three Negro homes to the ground...