Warrant Officer Thomas was not alone in his impulse to flee after the murder of Auburey Pollard in the game that he, Thomas, had so blithely joined. The hallway was virtually clear of uniformed men in a very short time. Convenient firing was heard not far away; all but a handful ran to do their duty.
“And then some more shooting started down the block there,” Greene told Eggleton. “All of them rushed out of the Manor house there and ran down the block. Two policemen were left there.”
“And then I heard some more shooting from outside,” Michael, who was still lying on the floor in A-4 at the time of which he was speaking, testified. “And then some of the officers and all of them went outside because I heard—let’s see, the soldier told me, he say, ‘That’s another one of your friends out there shooting at us.’ ”
“I remember,” Sortor testified, “that I heard officers say they were shooting down the street, and some of them ran out—ran out of there, and that’s when the officer—when they left, this officer went into this room and got Michael and them up, and they told us we could leave.”
Despite the sudden fear he said he had felt, Warrant Officer Thomas did not, after all, leave. He was soon to be found in room A-4 again, with Patrolman August, the naked girl, and the half-naked girl. “These two,” Karen (the one who had lost all her clothes but her panties) told Early, “were very nice.”
“They then took K and J into a room (A-4),” Early’s notes said. “ ‘What was the trouble?’ They said they didn’t know and they didn’t ask them any more. These two were very nice. Thought Juli should go to the hospital. . . . The cop asked them if they had any robes. J & K said, ‘No.’ Told them to get out and get a robe.”
According to the Thomas synopsis, “Warrant Officer Thomas was then asked to escort the girls to the Algiers Motel next door; as he was leaving he was joined by private watchman Dismukes and Pfc. Henson.”
“I believe,” Thomas testified, “it was Officer Senak that asked me to escort the women back to the motel room, their own motel room. . . . Myself, Henson, and Mr. Dismukes escorted these women back. . . . Henson, myself, and Mr. Dismukes went to the girls’ room, and when they opened the door there was a colored fellow laying on the bed, and Mr. Dismukes approached him and shook the bed and woke him up. He was sleeping. And I held him at, you know, in custody more or less until Mr. Dismukes went in and checked the girl’s cut on her head because she was bleeding so severely that, to see if she needed medical attention right away. I asked Mr. Dismukes to do this. And he went over and he said, ‘Well, it look like it will take a couple of stitches.’ ” (Juli had seven stitches; she also testified she suffered a slight concussion and developed a black eye.) “So I warned the girls, I told them to stay in the room until after five-thirty, until after the curfew lifted . . . and then came out because they are liable to get in trouble if they come out of the motel. I was satisfied that the girls did not need medical attention right away because she had almost stopped bleeding.”
“And this police,” Greene told Eggleton, “he told us . . . ‘Get out of here, because I don’t want to see you get killed like the rest of them.’ So we started out the back way. The two girls, they went out the front. . . . I told them I wasn’t going out there on the street. So he said, ‘You better get the hell out of here if you want to live.’ And I went through A-2, where the guy was lying in a pool of blood. I went over to the office and stayed there until the next morning.”
“They told us to get out fast,” Charles Moore said to a reporter from the Free Press. “Said, ‘We’re going to come back and kill all you niggers.’ ”
“Paille,” Sortor told me, “went in the room and told Michael and this guy”—Roderick—“to come out of there, they can go. Asked us, did we like policemen? We say, ‘Yeah!’ The guy says, where we live at? I told him I lived in Joy Road, gave a wrong address. Said we could go. They just told us to keep on going, don’t come back. This one guy asked could he go back and get his pants or shoes, one. That’s all I remember. I was trying to get on out.”
Roderick, who had been left lying on the floor in A-4, said to me, “A policeman told me to get off the floor and get out in the hallway. He said to leave out; he said, ‘Start walking in the direction you’re going with your hands above your head, and if you look back, we’ll kill you, because we’ll be following you all the way home.’ Fred Temple asked could he go back to the room and get his shoes and shirt. I passed him. Larry was just ahead of me. They told Fred it would be all right to go and get his stuff. I was too scared to go for my shoes, I just kept on walking in my socks. Out through the back rooms. Almost stepped on a body. That really scared me, because I hadn’t seen it before, see, and they shot in the floor by me in the room there, so I didn’t think they were really killing people.”
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Both Roderick Davis and Larry Reed said under oath in court that they had seen Fred Temple in the hallway at the very end. This was Roderick’s testimony:
Q. When did you last see Temple?
A. In the line as we were going out the room—out the building.
Q. Beg pardon?
A. I saw him in the hallway as we were going out the building.
Q. Do you know where he was going?
A. I believe he was supposed to have been going out like the rest of us were.
Q. Did he go out like the rest of you did?
A. No.
Q. Did you hear him talk to anybody about permission to go to his room?
A. Yes.
Q. Well, what did he say, what did you hear him say?
A. Could he go back and get his belongings or clothes or shoes, one.
Q. Did anybody go back there with him?
A. I don’t know. We were walking out.
Prosecutor Weiswasser questioned Larry Reed on the same point:
Q. When was the last time you saw Fred Temple?
A. The last time I saw him was when we were at the hotel, just before I left, when the police let us go.
Q. Do you know where he was going?
A. The last I saw him I heard him ask about some shoes, and I never did see him after that again.
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“We went outside,” Sortor testified. “Some more officers, they stopped us over there. . . . And then they asked us where we was coming from. We said, ‘The motel.’ And they said, ‘Who let you all go?’ And we said, ‘Them police officers over there.’ ”