Fayetteville, Feb. 24—For the sixth time within the past seven years, an officer of Cumberland county was shot and killed in the performance of his duty when W.C. Callahan, special deputy, was fatally wounded by bootleggers near Victory lake shortly after noon today, dying in the Highsmith hospital in this city four hours later. Callahan’s slayer, who is not known to the officers, is being sought by a Sheriff’s posse, but is still at large, though John Smith, a young white man of Gray’s Creek township, alleged to have been one of the two men placed under arrest by Callahan shortly before the shooting, was recaptured late this afternoon. It was said at the Sheriff’s office tonight that the wounded officer’s suffering was such that he made no statement as to the identity of the man who shot him.
The meagre details available as to the actual manner of the homicide seem to show that Callahan, who lives in Pearces Mill township near the scene of the shooting, found a quantity of liquor hidden in the woods and proceeded to take charge of it. While the officer was standing guard over the confiscated whiskey two men approached and were arrested by Callahan, who then called two young men of the neighborhood named Hall and Strickland, and requested them to telephone Sheriff N.H. McGeaghy. While Strickland and Hall were gone, shots were heard, and when they reached the3 spot where they had left the officer they found Callahan had been shot and the prisoners fled. Several shots were fired, but only one took effect, piercing Callahan’s kidneys.
When arrested late today Smith denied having been implicated in the affair and claimed that he could establish an alibi. Callahan was a member of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad police and formerly served on the Fayetteville police force.
He was not a regular deputy but frequently acted as a special deputy. He is the 10th officer who has been shot in this county since 1916 and the sixth whose life has been taken. The other deputies: Frank Dees, killed by a negro; W.J. Moore and Herman Butler, slain by George Hobbs, negro; Melvin Blue, killed by Tom Clayton; and Al Pate, murdered by Marshall Williams, a blockader. The four who have been wounded and escaped death are: W.O. Patrick, seriously wounded by Clayton; Rawson Pope, shot by George Hall; J.T. Kelly, wounded by an insane man who later took his own life; and Jones, who was fired on in a recent raid on a liquor still.
From page 2 of the Raleigh News & Observer, Sunday, Feb. 25, 1923
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