Burns Almon, 39, a White man serving as a deputy sheriff in Morgan County, Alabama, died on September 10, 1927, after a raid on an illegal liquor still east of Decatur turned into a running gunfight.
It was late morning, just before noon, when Sheriff B. E. Davis and a small group of deputies closed in on the operation. The still sat out beyond town, the kind of hidden place meant for quick work and quicker disappearances.
As the officers arrived, the people working the still broke and ran, scattering on foot into the surrounding terrain.
In the chaos of the chase, one fleeing suspect went down—whether from a stumble, a deliberate drop into cover, or a split-second decision to fight rather than flee—and opened fire on the advancing deputies. The shots struck Almon, leaving him mortally wounded in the middle of an operation that had shifted in an instant from enforcement to survival.
The deputies returned fire, and the gunman who shot Almon was killed at the scene. Online memorial records describe the shooter only as a suspect who was “shot and killed,” without publicly identifying him, and they do not describe any later arrests tied to the raid beyond that immediate exchange of gunfire.
Afterward, Almon was laid to rest in Morgan County, with burial records placing him in Herring Cemetery in Hartselle.
