Captain Albert M. Teeters, a 52-year-old White / Caucasian male, died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 22, 1904, after a routine moment inside the Frankstown Avenue police station turned suddenly fatal. Teeters was a veteran member of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, remembered as a captain who had served the department for 29 years. On that day, he was in the basement shooting range of the station while target practice was taking place.
The shooting was not described in available
sources as an attack or an intentional killing. A police lieutenant was handling a revolver that had misfired during practice. As the lieutenant attempted to clear the malfunctioning round, Teeters moved toward the target area to look over the previous shots. In that brief and dangerous overlap, the revolver suddenly discharged. The bullet struck Teeters and fatally wounded him.
The available accounts identify the shooter only as a police lieutenant and do not provide the lieutenant’s name. The incident appears to have been treated as an inadvertent gunfire death rather than a murder. No available online source located for this synopsis reports that anyone was arrested, charged, tried, or convicted in connection with Teeters’s death. There are also no identified criminal suspects in the records reviewed; the only person directly connected to the fatal shot was the unnamed lieutenant whose revolver discharged while he was trying to deal with the misfire.
Teeters was later buried at Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh. His death stands as a line-of-duty tragedy rooted in the hazards of firearms handling inside what should have been a controlled police training environment: a captain walking forward to inspect the range, a revolver believed to have failed, and a single unexpected discharge that ended nearly three decades of police service.
