Joseph Breedlove, 62, male, was a constable in Dumas, Arkansas, when his life ended on September 21, 1940. He had spent decades keeping order in a small Delta community defined by farm roads and close-knit neighborhoods, working the kind of post where everyone knew his name and where a knock at the door often came from someone he’d helped before.
On that September day, he was killed by gunfire in the line of duty, a fact preserved in memorial rolls that record the bare contours of the tragedy even as time has worn away many of the particulars.
The tributes that survive emphasize his service and tenure. Memorial listings note that he had served roughly twenty-seven years in law enforcement, a span that would have carried him through Prohibition’s end and the hard years of the Depression into a new decade. In Dumas, his death stands out on historical rolls of local violence, a lone entry from 1940 that still appears alongside far more recent losses. These remembrances fix his end of watch as Saturday, September 21, 1940, and list gunfire as the cause.
Public records and memorial pages available today do not identify a suspect by name, and they do not document any arrest or court outcome connected to the killing. The surviving summaries state the cause and date but offer no official account of who pulled the trigger or what followed in the courts, leaving that part of the story unresolved in accessible online sources.
