Deputy Sheriff Bert Casteel, a 32-year-old male lawman serving Laurel County in southeastern Kentucky, met his death on the night of March 21, 1903, in London while carrying out what should have been a straightforward arrest. Born James Alburtis “Burt” Casteel on October 9, 1870, in Laurel County, he came from a local farming family headed by David W. and Sabra Allen Casteel, and as an adult he married Alice Andes, with whom he would have several children before his life was cut short.
By the spring of 1903 he had earned a reputation as one of the county’s bravest officers and most respected citizens, the sort of deputy called upon when a difficult arrest had to be made in the hill country outside London.
On the evening leading up to the shooting, Casteel and his brother, fellow deputy Charles Casteel, set out to serve an arrest warrant on a man named Charles Inman, who was wanted on a larceny charge. Their information led them to the rural home of George Little, where Inman was believed to be staying. Knowing that Little had a reputation as a desperate and dangerous character, the brothers approached the house cautiously. One of them moved toward the back door while the other advanced on the front, planning to block any escape and force a surrender rather than provoke a firefight. But the men inside the house saw the officers before they could close in, and the element of surprise, so crucial in such an operation, was lost.
As the deputies tried to enter the dwelling, the situation exploded into violence. At the rear of the house, the brothers’ careful plan was thrown into chaos when Little’s mother struck Charles with a heavy stove stick, turning their controlled entry into a frantic struggle in close quarters. At the front door, Casteel stepped into the doorway just as the confrontation inside erupted; George Little, armed with a. 44-caliber pistol, opened fire on him at near point-blank range. The bullet struck Casteel in the torso, inflicting what witnesses would later describe as a mortal wound, and he fell, badly hurt, in the doorway. Even as he collapsed, though, he managed to raise a shotgun and fire a single blast at Little, killing his assailant almost instantly and ending the threat from the man whose house they had come to in the first place.
Inside and around the house, the scene remained tense after Little fell. Charles Casteel recovered enough from the blow he had taken to take control of the situation, holding Little’s mother and at least one other occupant of the home at gunpoint while trying to assess how badly his brother was wounded. He urged Burt to seek help, and the injured deputy managed to walk away from the house, making it roughly two hundred yards before he collapsed along the path. There, away from his brother and the prisoners, he succumbed to his injuries. The date of the incident, and thus his end of watch, is recorded as March 21, 1903, in London, Kentucky, and contemporary accounts in local newspapers would soon describe the county’s sense of loss at the death of a widely admired officer.
In the aftermath of the shooting, investigators quickly identified the central figures involved. George Little, whose shot had fatally wounded the deputy, lay dead at the scene from the blast Casteel managed to fire in his last moments. The target of the original warrant, Charles Inman, had been in Little’s home as officers believed, and together with Little’s mother and another man in the house, he was effectively taken into custody once Charles Casteel regained control of the chaotic scene. One additional occupant managed to slip away in the confusion and flee into the countryside, but that fugitive was tracked down and arrested several days later, bringing all of the known participants in the confrontation into the hands of the law. Surviving records, however, are sparse on the specific charges, trials, or final legal outcomes for Inman, Little’s mother, or the other occupants; what emerges most clearly from the historical trail is that the only man formally suspected of firing the fatal shot, George Little, died where he stood and never faced a courtroom.
Over time, the story of Burt Casteel’s death has been preserved less through court documents than through memorials and family histories. In Laurel County, his name endures on law-enforcement honor rolls, remembered as a deputy who died in the line of duty while trying to bring in a wanted thief. In genealogical records and on his grave marker in Old Casteel Cemetery, he appears as James Alburtis “Burt” Casteel, a husband and father whose children and descendants carried on in the shadow of a violent night in 1903. The fragments of newspaper reports, memorial pages, and family recollections that survive all converge on the same picture: a rural Kentucky lawman walking toward a dark farmhouse to serve a warrant, caught in an ambush he could not avoid, yet still managing in his final act to protect his brother and community, even as the shot that ended his life was already tearing through him.
