Tuesday, March 18, 2008

John Ed Cothran Got No Sleep Till Death


Tough week so far for former Civil Rights lawmen, we'd say.

John Ed Cothran, a former sheriff's deputy who investigated the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till, which galvanized the civil rights movement, has died of heart failure. He was 93.

On Aug. 31, 1955, Cothran, then Leflore County chief deputy, helped pull Till's bloated and mutilated body out of the Tallahatchie River. Till, a black 14-year-old visiting from Chicago, was reported to have whistled at a white woman in the rural community of Money.

The investigation was reopened in 2004. In 2006 a Leflore County grand jury declined to indict 73-year-old Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman Till had supposedly whistled at. In a 2005 interview with the Greenwood Commonwealth, Cothran said he had lost his memories of the investigation by the time two FBI agents approached him after the bureau reopened the case.
We think that James Nabrit should take care of himself more this week than ever.

[Yahoo! News]

2 comments:

Danny said...

It looks like our prediction panned out.

http://www.sunherald.com/306/story/441731.html

carowade said...

You are exactly right. He did not get any sleep until death, because the press would not let him. Let the man rest in peace. He did all he could when he was alive. I should know. He was my Grandpa.