Ernest Evans, a male deputy with the Eureka County Sheriff’s Office, was killed in the line of duty on October 17, 1907, after responding to a disturbance at the railroad depot in Palisade, a community in Eureka County, Nevada. Called to intervene when men were forcing a woman toward a departing train, he ordered them to stop; one of the men drew a pistol and shot him, mortally wounding him at the station. He had served with the sheriff’s office for two years.
Contemporary accounts identify the gunman as H. L. Brooks, a waiter from Winnemucca, who had quarreled with a woman named Nettie Carleton before heading to the depot with a companion, Curtis Marrows. When Evans confronted them, Brooks knocked the officer’s arm aside and fired four shots, one striking the deputy in the heart. Brooks fled, threatened Carleton, then walked along the tracks and killed himself a short distance from town. Marrows boarded a passenger train but was apprehended at Battle Mountain and returned to Palisade.
Authorities therefore made no arrest of the shooter because he died by suicide shortly after the killing; the companion, Marrows, was detained as a witness or participant following his capture and return. The incident has been memorialized by local law enforcement and fallen-officer registries, which record Evans’s end of watch as October 17, 1907.
