John Perry Hood, a 23-year-old male deputy sheriff, was killed on December 24, 1928, near Pleasant Ridge in Greene County, Alabama, on the Clinton-Pleasant Ridge Road about fifteen miles north of Eutaw. The surviving accounts paint the scene as one shaped by the hard edges of Prohibition-era law enforcement: Hood was out on duty, confronting a vehicle believed to be tied to illegal liquor activity, when the encounter turned fatal and he was shot down before he could bring the stop under
control. Later memorial records remembered him simply as a young officer lost to gunfire in the line of duty, his life cut short on Christmas Eve in a rural stretch of road that would become the final place attached to his name.
The story grows darker and murkier in the scattered historical traces that survive online. A Hood family genealogy page says he was stopped by two Black men, disarmed, robbed, and then shot, suggesting that what began as an enforcement encounter may also have become a robbery. A surviving online listing for a vintage wanted poster goes further, naming a wanted suspect as Dewey Hood, also known as Willie Perkins, in connection with the murder of Deputy Sheriff John Perry Hood. That same listing also repeats the claim that two men were involved, which leaves the impression that investigators were looking at more than one participant even if only one name appears in the surviving poster description.
What is much harder to recover from the online record is the ending. The sources readily confirm Hood’s death, his age, the date, the place, and the broad circumstances of the shooting, but they do not clearly preserve a full public trail of arrests, prosecution, trial, or conviction. The wanted-poster reference strongly indicates that at least one suspect was formally sought, yet in the accessible sources reviewed there is no equally solid online record showing that the case concluded with a conviction. As a result, the case survives more as a fragment of Alabama history than as a fully documented courtroom story: a young deputy killed on a winter roadside, a hunt for the men said to be responsible, and a paper trail that now feels thinner than the violence that created it.
