Ponchatoula bandit murders Amite gas attendant
John O’Brien died without hearing or seeing his assailant. As he turned, three shots rang out. The first pierced his shoulder and ricocheted off the door frame. The second plowed through his nipple on the right side of his chest. The third shot pierced his heart. O’Brien left behind a wife and seven children.
Geronimo’s guard shot and killed in Amite City
Tangipahoa Parish native Charles Morgan died on April 13, 1902. That bright Sunday afternoon, eight men met in an abandoned house in the woods near the northern edge of the Amite city limits. Charles Morgan, an adventurer, home from the Indian Territory, met friends around a keg of beer to share tales of the Oklahoma prison where he worked, including those of his friend, a Chiricahua Apache leader called Geronimo.
Bloody Tangipahoa shootout assessed in court
Before his death on October 9, 1899, Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Avery R. Draughon told fellow deputies that Gage and Alonzo Gill accosted him at the train station in Tangipahoa, shooting him three times. Aleck and Jim Gill promised Deputy Sheriff W. J. Mullins their brothers would surrender by week’s end, but that never happened.
Stories conflict in Bloody Tangipahoa shooting
Sunday, October 8, 1899, the evening edition of the New Orleans Daily Picayune stacked multiple headlines per story, shouting “Tangipahoa wars start again,” followed by “Deputy Sheriff Draughon seriously wounded by 2 Gill boys,” “Shooting at victim’s home,” “Deputy boarding train for Kentwood when Gill pounced on him,” and “Three shots! Victim pulled gun as they searched him.”