William Edward Hathaway, 51, male, was a Faulkner County deputy serving a warrant near Mayflower on August 5, 1931, when an attempt to arrest a man accused of stealing fruit erupted into a gun battle. Hathaway and three other officers approached a home about two miles southwest of Mayflower; gunfire broke out from members of the suspect’s family, and Hathaway was struck and fatally wounded. He died shortly thereafter, his end of watch recorded that same day.
Contemporary remembrances and records echo the same core scene: multiple family members opened fire on the officers as they tried to execute the warrant, wounding more than one deputy before the skirmish ended. Local memorial accounts maintained by the sheriff’s office and law-enforcement archives preserve the date, place, and circumstance of the shooting, identifying it as a line-of-duty death caused by gunfire during service of the theft warrant.
Period newspaper coverage and later historical compilations point to members of the Harrell family as the shooters. A Conway newspaper retrospective attributes the fatal shot specifically to Leroy Harrell, and an archival civil-rights research entry on the same incident identifies the wanted man as Major Harrell, a tenant farmer accused of stealing peaches; that archive also references Arkansas Gazette follow-ups noting that the “slayers of Faulkner officer” received prison terms. While official memorials do not list individual offenders by name, these contemporaneous and archival sources indicate that Harrell family members were arrested and ultimately imprisoned in connection with Hathaway’s killing.
