Deputy Sheriff David S. Cox, a 40-year-old white man serving with the Hughes County Sheriff’s Office, spent the last day of his life working a routine complaint in the small Oklahoma town of Holdenville. Born David Samuel Cox in Indiana in March 1867, he had come to rest in this new state at a time when Oklahoma was still young and rough-edged, a place where lawmen were expected to keep order in a landscape that was only beginning to settle.
By the winter of 1908 he was an established local deputy, the kind of officer whose name would be remembered long enough to be carved into cemetery records and later memorial rolls after his death on January 31 of that year.
That Friday around noon, trouble drew Cox to a local shooting gallery owned by a man named C. E. Sneed. A citizen had complained that illegal guns were being kept on the premises, and Cox went to investigate. He first searched the gallery and found no weapons that violated the law, then stepped away to recheck the complainant’s story, trying to be certain before he took the serious step of placing the proprietor under arrest. When he returned to the shooting gallery a second time, this time determined to arrest the owner, a single shot and a frantic cry rang out from inside. Bystanders rushed into Sneed’s place and found the deputy on the floor with a gunshot wound in the chest, in the area of his left breast, mortally injured in the cramped confines of the little business he had come to police. He died from that wound on the same day, his “end of watch” forever linked to that brief and sudden burst of violence inside a Holdenville shooting gallery.
The man whose establishment Cox had come to search and whose freedom he intended to take was also the man later associated with the fatal shot. A later account in an Oklahoma newspaper, looking back on the incident while reporting on the death of E. Sneed, described him as the former operator of the shooting gallery “who killed Deputy Sheriff Cox by the accidental discharge of a pistol” in the early part of the previous year, and went on to say that Sneed himself died of consumption in San Antonio, Texas. Another memorial source ties the scene of the killing directly to “C. E. Sneed’s shooting gallery,” reinforcing the picture of Cox walking into Sneed’s place of business to carry out an arrest and never walking out again. In those few lines, the newspaper both names Sneed as the man whose gun ended the deputy’s life and frames the killing as accidental, suggesting a moment of carelessness or mischance rather than a plotted assault, even as the community continued to speak of it in terms of a lawman’s death in the line of duty.
What happened to Sneed in the legal sense is largely lost in the sparse surviving summaries. The retrospective notice that links him to Cox’s death does not mention a trial or conviction, only that his pistol’s accidental discharge killed the deputy and that Sneed himself later succumbed to illness far from Holdenville. In the formal remembrances that survive today, the focus rests on Cox rather than on the man who fired the fatal shot. Law-enforcement memorial records list him simply as a deputy sheriff killed while attempting to arrest the owner of a shooting gallery after a complaint about illegal firearms, noting that he was shot in the chest and died in the line of duty. Modern gun-violence memorials echo that stark description, recording that he was “lost to gun violence” in Holdenville on January 31, 1908, and preserving his name, rank, and age for readers who may know nothing else about the brief exchange inside the gallery that ended his life.
More than a century later, Cox’s story survives in fragments: a headstone in Glory Cemetery marking the span from 1867 to 1908, a brief entry on a list of fallen officers, and a few lines in an old local paper noting that a man once ran a shooting gallery, accidentally killed a deputy sheriff there, and later died himself of tuberculosis. Put together, those pieces trace the outline of a winter noon in Holdenville when a deputy went back to a small business on a simple complaint, determined to do his duty, and in the time it takes for a single shot to echo against indoor walls, became one more name on the long roll of officers who never made it home from an ordinary call.
