Raleigh, Aug. 31—His second break for liberty in 10 days ended tonight for J. B. Vickers, state convict, in the hospital at the state’s prison, where he lay battling for his life with a gaping bullet wound in his chest.
The wound was inflicted by a prison, guard, according to the story told by a state official who investigated the shooting, when Vickers sought to seize the guard’s pistol as the guard was attempting to handcuff him after cornering him in the yard of R. T. Coburn, 308 South Boyland Avenue.
Vickers escaped from custody last week in Charlotte where he was sent for a medical examination relative to war risk claims which he was pressing against the government. He was recaptured Saturday in Spartanburg, S.C., and had been brought to Raleigh by train and was being carried back to the state’s prison by automobile, when his second ill-fated escape took place.
While the prison version of the shooting was that the guard fired to prevent Vickers seizing his gun, Mrs. Coburn, in whose yard the shooting took place and who was a witness of the shooting, and other civilian witnesses, stated that the guard seemingly fired at close range as Vickers was in the act of surrender.
“Good Lord! You’ve got me and I give up,” Mrs. Coburn quoted Vickers as saying just before he was shot.”
From page 2 of the Concord Daily Tribune, Sept. 1, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-09-01/ed-1/seq-2/
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