Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

a signed statement at this time but added that he “might possibly furnish a statement at a later time.”
    Deputy James Yates, who told the FBI agents that “he knew nothing of the shooting,” since it was all over by the time he’d gotten back to the sheriff’s car, also declined to make a statement. He said that for now he “would rather think over the matter” and would consider “furnishing a statement to the Bureau at a later date.”
    To McCall’s dismay, agents Swinney and Aderhold continued poking around the hospital; they talked to physicians, nurses, and the administrative staff. In succeeding days they visited the scene of the shooting, took samples of McCall’s hair, examined the sheriff’s automobile, and attended Samuel Shepherd’s autopsy. They were able to verify some important facts and to establish a chain of events that did not seem to be in dispute.
    The agents learned, too, that within an hour of the shooting numerous automobiles had converged at the scene, many of them carrying friends of the sheriff. Among the first to arrive was Spencer Rynearson from the Gulf service station, who, despite the fact that the bodies of two black men were lying next to the car, had been instructed by McCall to change the tire. He had thrown the flat in the back of the sheriff’s Oldsmobile; in one of the grooves he’d noticed the nail that had punctured the tire. Yates had interrupted a city council meeting with news of the shooting, and McCall’s Umatilla friends, the town’s mayor, and members of both the city council and local Kiwanis Club had soon shown up at the roadside, along with police. State Attorney Jesse Hunter had arrived about the same time as Marie Bolles, the editor of Eustis Lake Region News , who’d promptly begun photographing the disheveled McCall at the scene: He’s standing alongside his car, his rumpled, torn shirt hanging over his belt, a cut on his temple plainly visible; two bodies are splayed awkwardly in the grassy ditch behind him, the head of one resting on the thigh of the other; blood everywhere.
    “Marie, it’s just one of those things. I hate it that it happened,” McCall had said to his neighbor as she, with Hunter beside her, had moved in closer to photograph the two dead prisoners. That was when Hunter “saw one of them move.” Reuben Hatcher, the jailer at Tavares, had confirmed that one of the Negroes was indeed still breathing, and on Yates’s car radio he’d contacted Waterman Memorial Hospital. There would be a delay; a Jim Crow car was being dispatched from the Dabney Funeral Home in Leesburg because the hospital ambulance could not be used to transport blacks. In the meantime, Walter Irvin, groaning and writhing in pain, lay unattended. Concern centered on Sheriff McCall’s injuries.
    Stetson Kennedy, a Jacksonville native and frequent contributor to many liberal and black newspapers, observed Jesse Hunter eyeing McCall suspiciously at the scene of the shooting that night. The sheriff was hovering around his Oldsmobile, where his trademark ten-gallon Stetson sat crumpled on the hood; his hair mussed up, his broken glasses perched on his nose, a trickle of blood on his temple yet to be wiped away, he appeared to be in a daze. His hangdog look of exhaustion and remorse won him no sympathy from the state attorney, whom the sheriff could barely look in the eye. Hunter shifted his gaze from McCall back to Walter Irvin, now curled on the ground with his knees bent and his open mouth gasping for breath. Turning again, leaning in toward McCall, the prosecutor believed himself to be out of anyone’s earshot when, displeased, he spat, “You have pissed in my whiskey.”
    McCall was vocal in expressing concern for the black man while the small crowd of maybe thirty people waited for the ambulances to arrive. “One of them has a pulse—a good pulse,” McCall said. “I hope he makes it.” At the same time, McCall’s boyhood friend, the judge and county coroner W. Troy Hall, was charged with conducting the inquest. In the glare of the headlights from the dozen and more cars that had gathered on the clay road, Hall had hastily assembled a jury of six “friends of Sheriff Willis V. McCall,” including Marie Bolles.
    Once the ambulances had arrived, both McCall and Irvin had been taken to Waterman Memorial, just six miles away in Eustis. Irvin, who had been given an injection of Demerol, had arrived in “extreme shock,” unconscious and unable to