Charles Cameron, a 49-year-old White male, was working as a detective with the New York City Police Department when a summer outing in Queens turned into the last scene of his life on July 17, 1904. He lived in Long Island City, Queens, at 582 Hunterspoint Avenue, and contemporary online memorial records list him as married and born in Ireland.
That Sunday placed him in plain clothes at a crowded picnic ground in Queens—described in online accounts as Fuhrer’s Park near 25th Street
and Jackson Avenue, and also as Seurer’s Grove in Corona—where music and drink drew a lively crowd around a live orchestra. When the orchestra paused, tempers flared. A clash broke out between people in the crowd and the musicians, and Cameron pushed into the crush and made himself known as a detective, trying to bring order to a moment that was quickly slipping away from anyone’s control.
Instead of calming the scene, his intervention drew violence. He was set upon by members of the crowd, and in the struggle he drew his revolver and fired twice, striking one of the men attacking him, according to the accounts preserved online. In the confusion—noise from the fight, the sudden gunfire, and the fact that Cameron was not in uniform—another patrolman responded and mistook Cameron for the offender. The patrolman fired, and Cameron was shot and killed there at the park.
The available online sources identify the fatal shot as a tragic misidentification by a fellow officer and do not name a civilian suspect in Cameron’s death. They also do not provide specific details about any arrest of the patrolman who shot him, nor do they describe charges, a trial, or a conviction connected to the shooting. The public memorial listings that remember Cameron focus on the circumstances of the fatal mistake and record his death date as July 17, 1904.
