L. C. Padgett, a male former policeman in Brunswick, Georgia, was caught in one of the city’s worst eruptions of public violence on March 6, 1915, when Monroe Phillips strode into downtown armed with a shotgun and turned a business district into a killing ground. Contemporary newspaper accounts place the beginning of the bloodshed in attorney Harry F. Dunwoody’s office, where Phillips first shot Dunwoody and then wounded Albert M. Way. The gunfire brought people in the street and in
Branch’s drug store rushing toward the commotion below the office stairs, and Padgett was among those who moved closer to see what had happened.
What happened next was quick and merciless. As Phillips came to the head of the stairs, having already reloaded, he fired into the group gathered at the foot of the steps. Padgett was struck and fell fatally wounded while attorney Eustace C. Butts was hit in the leg. Witness accounts reported that Padgett was lifted up by Butts and others and carried into the drug store, but the wound was too severe; he died within minutes. In the same burst of chaos, Phillips kept moving through the streets, firing at random and leaving more dead and wounded behind him as Brunswick reeled in panic.
The only suspect identified in the killing was Monroe Phillips, described in period reports as a real estate and timber dealer who was believed by police to have become violently unstable amid financial troubles and bitterness connected to Dunwoody. Accounts from the time say Phillips had ill feeling toward the lawyer and had recently suffered losses in business dealings. Some reports also said he was said to have a list of men he intended to kill, suggesting that the rampage began with a grievance but quickly spiraled into indiscriminate slaughter once he reached the street. Padgett appears in those reports not as a man personally targeted for a separate dispute, but as one of the first victims who stepped into Phillips’s path as the attack spread beyond Dunwoody’s office.
There were no arrests in Padgett’s case because the gunman never lived to face custody, charges, or trial. Newspaper coverage states that Phillips continued shooting until Eustace C. Butts, already wounded, armed himself and shot Phillips down, ending the rampage after more than half an hour of terror. That left no prosecution to unfold afterward, only the grim reckoning with the dead and injured. In the immediate reporting from Brunswick and other newspapers, Padgett was listed among the slain, remembered chiefly as an ex-policeman who rushed toward danger and was struck almost as soon as Phillips emerged from the stairway.
