On a warm summer evening in Salt Lake City, on August 20, 1980, the lives of two young men were tragically cut short in an act of racial hatred. Ted Fields, a 20-year-old Black male, and his friend, 18-year-old David Martin, were leaving Liberty Park with two white female friends after an evening run. As they made their way from the park at approximately 10:15 p.m., a series of gunshots suddenly pierced the night.
Martin was struck first, and as Fields rushed to his friend's aid, he too was fatally shot. One of their female companions was also injured by shrapnel.
The assailant, hidden from view, was Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist and serial killer who was in the midst of a years-long killing spree across the country, targeting Black individuals and Jewish people in an attempt to incite a race war. Franklin's motive for the ambush was his deeply held racist beliefs and his opposition to what he termed "race mixing." The attack on Fields and Martin was just one of numerous violent crimes Franklin committed between 1977 and 1980.
Franklin was eventually apprehended in Florida on October 28, 1980. He would later confess to the murders of Ted Fields and David Martin. For these killings, Franklin faced both federal charges for violating the victims' civil rights and state first-degree murder charges. He was convicted of both murders and received two life sentences. Franklin was also convicted of or linked to numerous other murders and violent attacks. His reign of terror came to an end on November 20, 2013, when he was executed by lethal injection in Missouri for a different murder.
