Lafayette A. Smith, a 31-year-old White male Omaha police officer, was shot just after 12:45 a.m. on Thursday, January 14, 1909, after he rushed toward screams near Ninth Street downtown and tried to arrest a man who had just robbed a woman of her necklace. At the northeast corner of Ninth and Dodge, the suspect fired twice, mortally wounding Smith in the abdomen; even as he fell, Smith managed to return fire and strike the gunman before collapsing and dying within minutes in a nearby doorway.
With Smith down, a citywide dragnet snapped into place. Detectives trailed the fleeing gunman to the Douglas Street bridge over the Missouri River, where Detectives W. T. Devereese and his partner confronted him amid the steel girders and winter cold. A fierce exchange erupted; Devereese took a bullet to the chest but stayed on his feet long enough to help disarm the suspect, who surrendered after being hit repeatedly. He was hauled from the tollhouse under guard and booked on a charge of murder.
The man first gave his name as George Clark and claimed he had shot because he thought he was being held up, but later newspaper accounts identified him as an outlaw known as Jackson, a veteran criminal whose condition was grave from the fight on the bridge. He lingered under police watch in the hospital until the end of the following week, when his abdominal wounds reopened and pneumonia set in; he died around January 23 24, closing the case without the prospect of a trial.
Official remembrances would record that Smith was killed while attempting to arrest a robbery suspect near Ninth Street in downtown Omaha, a detail repeated in later department memorials. The suspect was the only person arrested in the case; no other conspirators were named, and with the gunman s death in custody the investigation reached its end.
