The Sheriff Shoots

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 a new trial, because only white men were on the jury and because of newspaper-inflamed prejudice in the community, e.g., mobs shot up Negro houses in the county just before the trial. "One of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice," Justice Robert Jackson called it.

On a Lonely Road. Last week Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall drove over to Raiford State Prison to pick up the boys and bring them back to Tavares for a hearing before the new trial. It was dark when Sheriff McCall and his deputy, James Yates, left the prison with the boys handcuffed together in the front seat. They drove to Weirsdale, where Deputy Yates picked up his own car and went on ahead--to 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.

But 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 me. He reached and grabbed me and snatched me, and Sammy, too. He snatched both of us and then threw both of us on the ground."

Who Lied? "Then I didn't say anything, I didn't say nothing. So later he snatched us, he shot me again in the shoulder, and still I didn't say anything at all, all that time. And I knew I was not dead . . .

"In about ten minutes the deputy sheriff was there ... And the deputy he shined the light in my face and he said to the sheriff, 'That son of a bitch is not dead,' and then he said, 'Let's kill him.' The deputy sheriff then pointed the pistol on me and pulled the trigger, snapped the trigger, and the gun did not shoot. He took it around to the car lights and looked in it and shined the light on it. He turned it on me again and pulled it and that time it fired. It went through me here [indicating his neck] and then I began to bleed out of my mouth and nose . . . I did not say anything and did not let them know I was not dead. And some people came . . ."

U.S. 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.

In Paris, Russia's Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky quickly incorporated Sammy Shepherd and Walter Irvin into his speech to the U.N. Assembly. "This is human rights in the U.S.A.," he cried triumphantly. The U.S., whose constitutional processes had protected the civil rights of Walter Irvin through tedious and careful procedures unknown to Vishinsky's masters, would want a good and careful answer for Vishinsky's taunt.

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