City Marshal Thomas William Staggs, a 54-year-old male from Keo, Arkansas, was killed on December 5, 1931. That afternoon, while driving back to town, he offered a ride to a hitchhiker. During the ride he realized the man was armed and ordered him to hand over the weapon; instead, the hitchhiker disarmed the marshal, taking Staggs’s service pistol.
To break the standoff, Staggs deliberately wrecked his car into a roadside ditch, forcing a separation and prompting the gunman to flee on foot with both firearms.
Regrouping in Keo, Staggs armed himself with another pistol and went back out to find the suspect. He located the man walking along a town street, but when he moved to re-arrest him, the gunman drew first and fatally shot the marshal. The killing left Keo’s small force with its first recorded line-of-duty death and marked the date that would be remembered locally for decades.
Contemporary memorial records and public compilations confirm the date, place, and circumstances but do not identify the assailant by name, nor do they document whether an arrest or prosecution followed. Searches of readily available online memorials and archives provide no definitive record of a suspect’s capture, conviction, or other outcome in the case.
Staggs’s burial listing further anchors the timeline of his life and death, recording his birth in 1877 and death on December 5, 1931. Those dates place his age at fifty-four at the time of the shooting, aligning with the memorial chronology of the incident in Keo.
