A Hoosier’s War

On October 15, 1907, Clay County residents felt the ground shake under their feet and heard two enormous explosions, one at 9:08 a.m. and the second at 9:40 a.m. The DuPont Powder Mill, seven miles from Brazil as the crow flies and the main employer of the town of Fontanet in neighboring Vigo County, had blown up. The blasts destroyed not just the mill; they leveled most of Fontanet-- and killed dozens of people.

The next day’s Brazil Daily Times reported that “fully fifteen hundred people are homeless, and no less than one thousand more or less injured. Over five hundred homes, businesses, houses, churches, etc., are wrecked and every person is covered with either their own blood or that of the injured they have been caring for.” Clay County residents personally experienced the power of the blasts when windows in their homes and businesses broke, walls cracked, and buildings shifted off their foundations

People from 200 miles away heard the percussion of 40,000 kegs of powder. Newspapers from all over the country covered the disaster. What had been a bustling town of 1000 people became a shell akin to the villages in France and Belgium that would be destroyed in a war that was almost ten years away.

The people of Fontanet rebuilt the town but rejected DuPont’s offer to rebuild the powder mill, preferring the danger of working in nearby coal mines over the risk of another catastrophe. The ruins of the powder mill and the expanse of property around them reverted to a dense jungle-like forest. Parents from throughout the area would take their children there to hunt tadpoles, mushrooms, and salamanders and to look with reverence and a bit of fear at the enormous overgrown but still solid cement foundations of what had been.

When the powder mill exploded in 1907, Clifford Bouillez was 12 years old living on his family’s farm a couple of miles from Fontanet. He was one of 14 children;11 survived to adulthood. His father, Ozee, immigrated to the US in 1863 from Belgium, and his mother, born Christina Kimmerle, was a first-generation American whose parents were German-born. The blast shook the Bouillez’s land and no doubt rocked the farm’s structures. Damage occurred inside homes, as well, and Christina might have been upset that the blast had caused items passed down to her from the old country to fall from counters and shelves.

Clifford seemed to be more inclined to farm work than his brothers, who were coal miners. It could well be that Clifford found his family a bit hard to take. A hot streak of bad temper ran in the Bouillez bloodline. It was rumored that one of Clifford’s sisters was so hard to live with that her husband killed himself by drinking carbolic acid as his only way to escape her.

By 1917, Clifford was a short, handsome man known to most as “Kink” because of the tight curls in his black hair. When he registered for the draft on June 5^th of that year, he was living in Carbon in Clay County but was still working the family farm, helping to support Ozee, who had a daughter and her family living with him.

Perhaps boredom with farm life triggered Kink’s decision to join the US Army in 1918 while World War II raged in Europe. He was 26 years old and single, stuck in a rut, his mother dead for three years, his father an old man, and his brothers and sisters married with families of their own. Maybe he saw the army as a way to see the world that his father had left when he came to the US.

Chapter 2, The Honor of the Van Sandts

James William Van Sandt had followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a doctor serving the people of Carbon. James had good reason to be proud of both his father, Dr. William Harrison Van Sandt, and his grandfather, John Van Sandt.

John was born in Fleming County, Kentucky, about twenty miles south of the Ohio River. He owned slaves but grew to abhor the institution of slavery, so he took his slaves into Ohio and freed them. Van Sandt stayed in Ohio and purchased a farm in Hamilton County, which he named Mount Pierpont after Massachusetts abolitionist John Pierpont. He took his abolitionism a step farther and became active in the Underground Railroad.

As The Brazil Times has noted before, one of the slaves he helped was Eliza Harris, whose escape from her master was recounted in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe used Van Sandt as the model for John Van Trompe, a character in the novel, and Mount Pierpont became known as the “Eliza House.”

John Van Sandt was caught by local authorities while aiding eight runaway slaves on April 23, 1842. Even though Ohio was a “free state,” it was still against the law to assist a slave who was running away from an owner.

John was tried and convicted, sentenced to imprisonment, fined $500, and ordered to pay $1200 in damages to the slaves’ owner. The case was taken to the Supreme Court, which sustained the judgment in 1847. Van Sandt was dead by then; his family lost Mount Pierpont to pay his debts.

John had over 20 children by two wives; 11 lived to adulthood. In 1849, Mrs. Nancy Bowen Van Sandt, John’s second wife, brought her four children to Putnam County, Indiana. Son William Harrison Van Sandt studied medicine with a local physician and then attended Rush Medical College in Chicago. When the Civil War started, he dropped out of medical school and joined the Union army. He was with Sherman on his march to the sea.

John finished his medical studies at the Indiana Medical School in Indianapolis. He began his practice in Brunerstown, Putnam County, and then moved to Carbon, where he practiced medicine for about 50 years.

William married Putnam County native Orlena Ellis, and they had three children, one of them dying very young. William must have been pleased when his only son, James, a tall, handsome, and well-mannered young man, decided to become a physician. James attended DePauw University and then Indiana University’s Medical School in Indianapolis.

While in Indianapolis, James Van Sandt met Grace Covington, and some unusual things happened. Before Grace and William Cowan divorced, they were living in Chicago. The 1910 Federal Census showed that Grace had had a baby that was still living, but the child was not living with William and Grace. Little Edison Cowan appears in the 1920 Federal Census as a “boarder” in Indianapolis with the Smith family. Perhaps during that time foster children were counted as boarders, but why wasn’t Edison living with his mother or father?

Grace had regained her maiden name after the divorce, so it is not clear if James Van Sandt knew that she had been married or that she had a son. No matter—the handsome couple fell in love, and on November 18, 1911, they married in Hamilton County, Indiana.

Nothing appeared in the local newspapers about their engagement or wedding, even though the groom was the Van Sandt’s only son at a time when even a trip from Carbon to visit friends in Brazil merited at least three lines of newsprint. The oddest thing was the couple’s application for a wedding license. James stated that he was older than he was and gave incorrect names for his parents.

Grace and James had a baby girl, Mary Jane, in Indianapolis in 1913. After James graduated third in his class from medical school in 1914, he, Grace, and baby Jane moved to Carbon, where James joined his father’s medical practice. In 1915, their second and last child, a daughter named Elizabeth Ann and called “Betty” was born. No sign of Edison.Chapter 3, Here Comes Trouble

Grover Cleveland Jackson, born June 19, 1887, in the middle of President Grover Cleveland’s first term, was the kind of man who defined “right” as anything he could get away with and “wrong” as anything anyone did to try to stop him. He wanted to be a big fish in the pond—a man who was admired for his disregard for safety and his willingness to skate outside the law to make a buck.

It could be that Grover admired the Robber Barons of his day who made money by hook or by crook when everyone else was flat broke. He developed a reputation as someone involved in “blind tigers”—places where liquor was sold illegally (even before Prohibition)—and as a reckless driver who scoffed at speed limits.

Grover’s father and mother, George Washington “Wash” and Margaret “Maggie” (Armstrong) Jackson, were original residents of Carbon, having arrived in Indiana before the town was founded. Like William Van Sandt, Wash fought for the Union during the Civil War. But the Jacksons never reached the economic strata of the Van Sandts.

If Margaret and Wash ever had regular encounters with the Van Sandts, it was because they needed medical assistance. Death—and presumably illness beforehand—seemed to haunt the Jackson family. From 1897 to 1910, seven of their ten children died; their ages at death ranged from 19 to 30. At least one and probably more died of tuberculosis, which was raging in Indiana during that time.

Meanwhile, Grover was gaining notoriety around town, judging by the reporting of The Brazil Time’s predecessor, The Brazil Daily Times. In late November 1908, the newspaper reported that Grover had walked into John Cummings’s livery stable, and John’s large dog jumped up and went for Grover’s throat. Grover threw up his arm in time to protect his throat; he made it to Dr. Pell for treatment of his badly bitten arm.

Grover claimed surprise at the attack because he had taken the dog hunting before. This seems a little suspicious. The dog did not have rabies, and dogs do not normally attack people who have treated them well. The good news is that both man and dog survived.

Grover married Ethel Goshen, the daughter of William and Farbia (Mullis) Goshen, in December 1909. Ethel was second-to-the-last child in a family of 13 children. Her parents came to Carbon in the early 1870s. William had been born in Virginia and moved to Kentucky, where he and Farbia met and married. They came to Indiana around 1865, after he left service in the Union Army.

Grover and Ethel’s only child, Wilbur, was born on January 18, 1910, in Fontanet. Four months later, the 1910 Federal Census listed Ethel as divorced, and she and Wilbur were living with her parents in Carbon. On August 3, 1911, Grover married “Roza E Goshen.” “Roza” listed her birth year as 1892—the same as Ethel’s—and her parents as William and Farbia Goshen—the same as Ethel’s. The only name close to “Roza” in the Goshen family was Rosanna Goshen, who was born in 1869 and died from epilepsy in 1909. Apparently, Ethel didn’t want the public to know that she was making the same mistake twice.

The marriage broke up again in the first half of 1913. In June of that year, Grover and his parents, Wash and Maggie, attacked Ethel where she and Wilbur were staying, hitting her and knocking her down in an effort to take Wilbur away from her. She had bruises to show for her ordeal.

The next day, Ethel, escorted by Farbia, filed assault and battery charges against Grover and Wash. Ethel also filed for divorce. On June 19th, Grover pled guilty, and the judge fined him $16.60. The charges against Wash were dropped.

On September 15, 1913, the court granted Grover and Ethel a divorce and awarded custody of Wilbur to Grover. Grover attacked Farbia later that year and was charged again with assault and battery. The Brazil Daily Times commented that “the trouble is the result of family friction that has existed for some time.”

Chapter 4, Grace and Grover

By 1917, James and Grace Van Sandt’s daughters, Jane and Betty, were four and two years old. As most parents know, two- and four-year-olds are wild, wily, and fast little beasts with no judgment about safety, no sense of personal space, and no attention span.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they were Grace’s little girls because James was gone day and night, often seven days a week. People’s medical problems had no schedule, and James was trying to prove himself to his boss—his father, who at 77 years old was undoubtedly eager to have James handle the bulk of their patients.

Marrying a handsome young doctor and moving to an up-and-coming town had been a dream come true for Grace until the reality of life set in. Maybe she thought of the adventurous life she and William Cowan could have had together. She’d given up one child then, only to be saddled with two now.

Could Grace help the fact that she had lived in Indianapolis and Chicago and visited other big cities and now missed the fashion, the nightlife, and the general buzz of activity generated by so many people living so close together? The fact that her mother, Josie, became ill and then died in July 1917 couldn’t help but make Grace feel even more alone.

It’s not clear how Grace and Grover met. Perhaps he had made a visit to James’s home office as a patient. Grover ran a jitney bus between Carbon and Brazil, and Grace might have contacted him for transportation. In any case, they hit it off. Grace was the sophisticated, worldly woman who fulfilled Grover’s image of himself as a man-about-town; Grover, a good-looking man with gray eyes, brown hair, and a slender build, satisfied Grace’s yearning for a more exciting life.

Grover’s ego could not have overlooked that the wife of one of the town’s most respected gentlemen, a man that the women of Carbon universally found to be intelligent, courteous, and attractive, seemed to prefer his company over her husband’s. Grace’s pride must have taken satisfaction that she had found a way out of the claustrophobic environment that James had kept her in.

Grace had thought she and Grover had been discreet. When they would go out riding at night, they would head away from Carbon. They went to Brazil to buy liquor. They attended a dance in Coal Bluff, leaving the sleeping girls alone. They had gone to Terre Haute to spend the night together.

James had seen Grover talking with Grace at the Van Sandt home several times during the day. Grace thought perhaps they could get away with a few hours together at her home when James was out on calls at night, but that strategy proved flawed. One night when James told her he’d be out all night with an ailing patient, the patient turned out not to be that bad off, and James had come home to find Grover there. Fortunately, Grover and Grace were just talking.

The townspeople liked their doctor and didn’t seem to care much for his wife, who, unlike her mother-in-law, appeared uninterested in blending into the town’s social activities. The people of Carbon who were especially concerned for the doctor’s wellbeing would quietly let him know that his wife had been spotted hither and yon with Grover Jackson. For his own reputation, James needed

Chapter 5, James Takes Action

James decided to go speak to Grover and appeal to him man-to-man to stop associating with his wife. He took a gun along with him, just in case. He asked Grover to come with him to his home so that they could form a united front to tell Grace that the fling was over and that she needed to return to being his faithful wife. The result of this appeal did not have the effect James desired.

Grover told James that he had no intention of ending the affair. The essence of Grover’s response, which was full of epithets and implied threats, was: “You’re just mad because she likes me more than she likes you. She’s stuck in the house day and night and says if she needs money for clothes and things, she has to get it from her dad because you’re too tightfisted. Maybe if you treated her better, you’d have a better chance of getting her back. Now, go away, and don’t come back, or I’ll have to teach you a lesson.”

James was furious. He had tried to be a gentleman about all this, but with Grover’s insults and comments about his treatment of Grace, he could stand no more. On February 18, 1918, he filed for divorce through his attorneys, alleging cruel and inhuman treatment and naming Grover as complicit.

The Brazil Daily Times covered the details of the divorce suit on its front page, including “Grover Jackson Named” in big letters. The newspaper shared the suit’s list of the times Grace and Grover had been spotted together. The Van Sandts’ dirty laundry was out for public inspection, and it became the talk of Clay County.

The next day, the Daily Times published Grace’s denial of her husband’s charges as “wholly false without foundation and would not have been made had not her husband been in ill humor.” She requested that her friends put no reliance in the charges until she had the opportunity to convince the public of her innocence. On March 1, 1918, James filed another suit in Clay County Circuit Court, this one requesting that Grace be ejected from their home in Carbon.

Meanwhile, Grover had another problem on his mind. The United States had entered the war that was raging in Europe in April 1917, and Grover was on the Clay County Draft Board’s list of men to go overseas. In October 1917, he had appealed the Board’s decision to call him up.

Grover had even sought the Board’s permission to have his lawyer make his appeal to the Board. This was probably a delaying tactic because the Board had already made a blanket prohibition of professional legal representation. Not that Grover had any justifiable claim for deferment, but it probably didn’t help that Dr. William Van Sandt, James’s father, was on the board.

By the time James filed for divorce, the Draft Board had rejected Grover’s appeal, and Grover knew he was weeks away from getting on a boat to France. He probably viewed the publication of claims that he had broken up the Van Sandt’s marriage as another sign that the world had united against him.

When asked about the article by an acquaintance, Grover remarked, “I suppose Van Sandt had put that piece in the paper about me. I’m going to have to kill Van Sandt yet.”

Friends and admirers of Dr. Van Sandt once again were attuned to Grover’s behavior and reported back to James. James took Grover’s words and reputation seriously and carried his handgun with him all the time. One day when James was in Brazil, he saw Grover and realized he had left his revolver at home. He bought another one right then and there.

Chapter 6, Day of Reckoning

The day that Dr. Van Sandt bought the second gun in Brazil was March 15, 1918. He and Grover were eating at the same diner when they saw each other. They did not exchange words, according to their waitress, Mrs. James Carpenter, but she noted that Grover, who sat at the counter, ate his food while looking up at the mirror in front of him, seemingly so he could keep an eye on James, who was sitting at a table toward the back of the restaurant.

As if fate had taken control of their lives, the two men saw each other later that same day, this time in Carbon. James was in the local poolhall at around 4:00 p.m. when Oscar Loveall, one of his patients, asked if James could provide him with a refill of a sore throat medication.

The doctor agreed to do so immediately, and he and Loveall walked out of the poolhall together. As the two men began walking down the street, Grover Jackson was walking toward them. Accounts varied among the many bystanders witnessing the men’s interaction, but all agreed on the outcome: within a few minutes of their encounter, Dr. Van Sandt fired two gunshots that hit Grover Jackson.

Dr. Van Sandt continued to hold his gun with both hands and was unwilling to surrender it to anyone in the gathering crowd. Meanwhile, Dr. Pell examined Grover’s wounds and judged them to be serious. Grover was taken to Doctor Rawley Hospital in Brazil.

The sheriff arrested James and then released him on his own recognizance, pending the outcome of Grover’s condition. At first, Grover’s condition was deemed critical and probably terminal. Then, Grover rallied, and his doctor had hope that he would recover.

Grover wrote a statement to the prosecutor to document his perspective of the events that had transpired with James. Then, peritonitis set in—the gun shot had punctured Grover’s intestine, allowing bacteria to enter and infect the peritoneum (the lining of the abdomen). Grover died at 6:00 p.m. on March 20, 1918.

While Grover Jackson was clinging to life, James Van Sandt was free to go about his business. When Grover died, James was jailed. A few days later, the grand jury indicted him for murder. James pleaded not guilty for reasons of self-defense.

The trial would be held in Brazil at Clay County Circuit Court. Finding a jury acceptable to the prosecution and the defense required the calling of a second pool of veniremen (there were no venire women). The special venire panel was exhausted, and the sheriff had to hunt down and subpoena new ones. At least 25 of the 75 potential jurors were excused by Judge J. M. Rawley because they were farmers, and it was corn planting time.

Spectators packed the large courtroom throughout the trial. Most of the spectators were women, many of whom brought a lunch to eat in the courtroom so they wouldn’t lose their seats during the noon break. The press reported that many of Van Sandt’s patients had petitioned authorities to allow him to attend to a sick child or prospective mother.

Dr. Van Sandt appeared to follow the proceedings closely. His daughters and his father attended the trial every day. Wash and Maggie Jackson and their son Thomas also attended regularly.

Grace Van Sandt did not attend at all. The prosecution attempted to subpoena her, but she could not be found in Carbon or at her parents’ home in Indianapolis, although it was rumored that she was in a hospital there. Her father received his own subpoena but ignored it.

Van Sandt’s defense attorneys and the prosecutor first clashed over the admissibility of the witnessed and notarized statement Grover had given to the prosecutor before he died. The jury was not allowed to hear this debate for two reasons:

First, it was solely Judge Rawley’s responsibility to determine whether Grover expected to die when he gave the statement.

Second, the testimony from those who were involved in obtaining the statement from Grover and those who were knowledgeable about Grover’s frame of mind and health status when he gave the statement could have biased the jury, especially if it contained contents of the statement itself. The Judge gave his decision after the prosecution had made its case to the jury.

Chapter 7: Did James Jump the Gun?

The prosecutors kept their case simple. They did not want to get into the history between Grover and James because without question Grover would come out looking bad because of his illicit relationship with the doctor’s wife and the numerous threats he had made to kill Van Sandt.

The prosecution wanted the jury to focus on what happened during those few minutes that culminated in James shooting Grover. They wanted to show that James had “jumped the gun” by shooting Grover, who had shown no sign of being armed. In other words, there was no point during their encounter in which James should have feared for his life.

The prosecution called four witnesses. The point of the testimony of each of these witnesses was that on the day of the shooting, it was Dr. Van Sandt who was the aggressor—that the doctor had initiated hostilities and shot Grover before the two had exchanged blows.

The prosecution called Grover’s brother, Thomas Jackson, as its first witness. When Thomas took the stand, the Van Sandt daughters moved up to where their father was seated and climbed on his lap, one on each knee, and hugged him.

Thomas claimed that he and Grover were walking down the street when they saw the doctor and another man walk out of the pool hall together. Thomas said that he and his brother had greeted the men pleasantly, and in response, the doctor told Grover not to speak to him again.

Thomas went on to testify that Grover took issue with the doctor’s demand, cursed him, declared himself to be a better man than the doctor, and challenged him to a fight in the street. Thomas said the doctor kept walking down the street away from the Jackson brothers for 87 feet without responding to Grover. Then, according to Jackson, Van Sandt turned, started toward Grover, and pulled a revolver halfway out of his hip pocket. Thomas claimed that he and his brother were turning into the blacksmith’s shop when the doctor shot Grover twice.

Oscar Loveall, the prosecution’s second witness, said that Grover Jackson had asked Van Sandt to speak with him for a minute, but the doctor declined. He and the doctor continued walking north, but when James turned back south toward Grover, Oscar continued to walk north and stopped in a meat market. That was where he was when he heard two gunshots.

Two other prosecution witnesses, Esther Wells, a clerk at the Powers store in Carbon, and George Combes, who was playing pool when Oscar and Van Sandt left the pool hall. Neither saw the doctor shoot Van Sandt; they only heard the shots. When cross-examined by the defense, Oscar, Esther, and George all expressed doubt about Thomas Jackson’s testimony that he was walking with Grover at the time of the encounter with Van Sandt.

After the prosecution’s witnesses had testified and the defense attorneys had cross-examined them, the Judge announced his decision that Grover’s statement would not be admitted into evidence.

The Judge ruled that Grover had given the statement at a time when he thought he would recover and therefore it was inadmissible because the law considers only “death bed” statements to be of sufficient gravity for the court to trust to be true. The theory behind this is that someone who is dying is unlikely to swear to a lie as his last official act before meeting his maker for judgment at heaven’s gates.

After Judge Rawley said Grover’s statement was inadmissible, the prosecution rested its case. The text of Grover’s statement appears to be lost to history, so it is difficult to judge its potential impact on the jury if the Judge had allowed it to have been entered into evidence. No doubt Thomas Jackson had known the contents of his brother’s statement and could have incorporated much of it into his own testimony.

Without Grover’s statement, the outcome of the trial relied on the doctor’s testimony, the testimony of the witnesses to the events the day of the shooting, and character witnesses for James and against Grover.

Chapter 8: Victim on Trial

Normally in a murder trial, the “sympathy vote” is with the family of the victim and therefore, in favor of the prosecution. In this case, the accused murderer—the handsome, kind, and caring young doctor, whose marriage to a brazen city girl had been torn apart by a man who was little more than a hoodlum—gained the sympathy of the courtroom. Adding to the doctor’s appeal were those two darling little girls, abandoned by their hussy of a mother, loyally attending the trial day after day.

Attorney B. M. Robinson opened his defense of Dr. Van Sandt by stating that he would prove that Jackson was the aggressor in the fight that resulted in Jackson’s wounds and ultimate death. He stated that a witness would testify that Jackson was the first to pull a gun, but Van Sandt was the first to get shots off. He noted that the defense witnesses would testify to Grover threatening James with death twelve times.

He compared the careers of Jackson, which featured violence and clashes with the law, with Van Sandt’s pursuit of education and stellar work as one of Carbon’s physicians. He would show that Grover was drinking and driving fast and erratically on his way to Carbon the afternoon he was shot.

Because the witnesses for both sides had different recollections about where the shooting occurred, the defense called as its first witness a professional photographer who had photographed the scene shortly after the confrontation.

The next defense witness was Earl Thomas, a soldier from Atlanta who had ridden with Grover and others from Brazil to Carbon on the day of the shooting. Earl testified that Grover had three glasses of whiskey before he got behind the wheel and drove to Carbon at a high rate of speed. On the drive, Earl said, Grover nearly hit a pedestrian and ran over and killed four chickens without slowing down.

Earl testified that Grover joined him and some other men in Cumming’s pool hall on the day of the shooting. When one man asked Grover if he wanted to come to Terre Haute with him the next day to join the army, Grover told him that he would go with him to the army but before he went, he would have to “get him,” meaning Van Sandt, using vile language when referring to the physician. The defense called several other witnesses who generally corroborated Earl’s testimony. None would say that Grover was drunk.

In all, the defense called twelve character witnesses as well as other witnesses who described threats Grover had levied against the doctor. Additional witnesses described the events that transpired immediately before the shooting. None of these accounts completely jibed with one another or with the accounts told by the prosecution’s witnesses. A key factor causing some of the accounts to vary was where the witness was standing when the events occurred.

Chapter 9: Guilty or Not Guilty?

The most anticipated testimony was that of Dr. Van Sandt. Van Sandt’s attorney asked a series of questions that allowed the doctor to describe his educational achievements, the courtship of his wife, and the quiet, loving home he, Grace, and their daughters had had before Grover entered the picture. He ran through the various events that had revealed his wife’s infidelities.

He described his effort to discuss the matter with Grover. According to Van Sandt, Jackson had told him, “I’ll fight you with fists, clubs, knives, or guns! I’ll kill you!”

On the fatal day when Grover and James encountered each other in Carbon, Van Sandt testified that Jackson had accosted him as he was walking down the street. After exchanging a few words with Jackson, the doctor said he continued to walk down the street with Jackson shouting curses and insults.

Van Sandt said he turned around and returned to Jackson. He demanded that Jackson stop referring to his recently deceased mother. At that point, the doctor said, Jackson sprang at him, and the two men scuffled.

Jackson broke loose and, Van Sandt claimed, reached into his overcoat pocket as if to draw a gun. James then drew his own revolver and fired two quick shots without aiming. One shot hit Grover in the side and the other in the groin.

Upon the conclusion of the testimony and cross-examination of all witnesses, the jury probably determined that the following had transpired on the day of the shooting:

Grover Jackson was walking alone down the street when he saw Dr. Van Sandt and Oscar Loveall and greeted them in a civil but sarcastic way. Thomas Jackson was in the pool hall. Van Sandt told Grover not to speak to him, which led Grover to spew out abuse at the doctor.

Oscar and James walked away while Grover continued to shout insults. Van Sandt was less than 100 feet away from Grover when Grover said something nasty about James’s mother, and James came back to Grover and told him to “take that back.” Oscar did not turn around; he continued to walk into the meat market.

At this point, Grover and James were in front of the blacksmith’s shop, and they lunged at each other simultaneously. The fight, which consisted of grappling with rather than punching each other, moved into the blacksmith’s shop. Grover broke free, and James pulled out his gun and shot Grover twice. This was the first time a gun made an appearance in the ruckus—James had not pulled it halfway out of his pocket while they were in the street. Grover did not have a gun and did not pretend to have one.