Robert Ford, a male victim recorded as having died in Randolph, Alabama, on August 17, 1903, appears in the online record as one of the dead in a burst of violence tied to a man named Aaron Sledge. The clearest surviving newspaper account says the trouble began near Beaver Creek, close to Lamar, where road hands had been working near Sledge’s home.
After tempers flared, Sledge armed himself, came back toward the group, and opened fire, first shooting the road overseer and then firing into the crowd as men scattered. That report describes panic, pursuit, and a countryside suddenly gripped by fear. Later online memorial databases connect Robert Ford’s death to that same episode and place him among the victims killed in Randolph on August 17, alongside James Moore and Thomas Ebbett.
What happened next reads like a manhunt unfolding through woods and back roads. The newspaper version says a party of white men was formed to capture Sledge, but he was found in ambush and fired again, killing one man and badly wounding another before escaping. The difficulty is that the surviving online sources do not line up perfectly on every victim’s name: the newspaper text available online renders the dead man in that phase of the violence as Robert Moore and the wounded man as Thomas Abbott, while later memorial-style databases list Robert Ford and Thomas Ebbett among the victims of the August 17 killings. Even with that inconsistency, the suspect named across the online accounts is Aaron Sledge, and the available reporting points to Ford’s death as part of the same chain of shootings rather than an isolated killing.
As for arrests, charges, trial proceedings, or a conviction, I did not find a reliable online source documenting that Sledge was ever taken into custody for Robert Ford’s killing. The newspaper account says he escaped after the ambush, and the later online memorial records preserve the deaths but do not add a confirmed arrest history or court outcome. Because of that, the most supportable synopsis from the surviving online material is that Aaron Sledge was the identified suspect in the violence that ended Robert Ford’s life, but the record available on the open web does not clearly show that the case ended in an arrest, prosecution, or conviction.
