Roger Wilson Lyon, a 9-year-old male from Buffalo, New York, died on August 7, 1924, in a night that left an entire household silent. While the city slept, the violence came from inside the family itself, turning what should have been an ordinary summer night into something irreversible.
Accounts describing the deaths say Roger was shot in the head as he slept, after his mother, Agnes Rogers Lyon, had also been shot.
His little brother, Henry Hopkins Lyon Jr., was killed the same way, and the gunman then turned the weapon on himself. The sequence reads like a grim, methodical passage through the bedrooms, each shot delivered to someone who never had a chance to wake, plead, or run.
The suspected shooter was Roger’s father, Henry Hopkins Lyon, who was described as a Cornell graduate and the chief of the drafting department for General Electric in Buffalo. The same sources that outline his career describe how he shot his sleeping wife and children with a. 33 caliber revolver, then lay down in his own bed and killed himself. With the suspected killer dead at the scene, there was no manhunt to stretch into the morning and no courtroom reckoning to follow—only the aftermath and the knowledge that the case’s central question of “who” had been answered in the most final way possible.
