September 2, 1931 started off as any other day in Fort Smith.
It was a Wednesday. Temperatures ranged from the high 60’s in the morning to the muggy low 90’s in the afternoon. In the west, some dark clouds threatened to turn the day into one of thunderstorms.
On the national scene, President Hebert Hoover was battling growing fiscal concerns in the United States, a young singer by the name of Bing Crosby debuted a new show on the CBS Radio Network and the New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 7-6 on the strength of a two-RBI double by an aging Babe Ruth.
And Fort Smith police captain William Andrew Bourland and patrolman Ralph Howard reported for duty on the night shift, just as they had done many nights in their law enforcement careers.
Shortly after 8 p.m., word reached Fort Smith that a robbery had occurred at a service station in Spiro and officers were on the lookout for a vehicle with three robbers along the old Spiro Road. Howard spotted the three suspects and the vehicle along with the suspects on the outskirts of town just after 11:30 p.m and a pursuit occurred until it reached South Y street and Jenny Lind, where he robbers turned east toward the Towson Road.
Captain Bourland, the shift supervisor for the night, started making his way from the downtown when he heard the radio activity about the chase. Officers knew the men they were chasing were armed, but what they didn’t know was the boss of the three man crew was one Orb Crow, an Oklahoma desperado that had just been released from the state prison in McAlester after serving a term for assault and armed robbery.
Bourland’s arrival near the intersection of South Y and Towson Road coincided with the arrival of the suspect vehicle. As Crow attempted a right turn on Towson to head east, Bourland and Howard were able to force the bandits off the road in the area where the small lake now stands in front of the former Brownwood Manor nursing home.
As Bourland and Howard exited their patrol cars, gunfire broke out. Before Bourland could return fire he was hit in twice in the chest and once in the head. Howard and other officers unloaded a volley of gunfire from their service revolver. All three of the robbers were hit by return fire and Crow died in the car.
During the chaos, Howard was wounded in both hands, the neck and upper right chest.
Both officers were bundled into the back seat of patrol cars, and with sirens screaming, transported to local hospitals. Bourland never regained consciousness and died as he was being carried into the emergency entrance at St. Edwards Hospital on Rogers Avenue.
Severely wounded but clinging to life, Howard was taken to Sparks Hospital, since the policy was to try and not take two trauma victims to the same facility in an emergency so the staffs could be focused on their separate patients.
Howard died at Sparks on Sept. 4, two days after the shoot out. Funeral records from Putman Funeral Home listed his cause of death as septic pneumonia, following the gunshot wounds to the neck and chest.
Neither of the officers that gave their lives in the line of duty were from Fort Smith, or even Arkansas, for that matter.
Bourland had been born February. 28, 1880, in Belle Green, Alabama and he and his wife, Mabel, lived at 611 N. E St. in Fort Smith and had four children, John D., Clyde, William H. and Katie.
Captain Bourland and his family were all members of First Methodist. He was laid to rest on Sept. 4, 1931, in the National Cemetery in Fort Smith. William Bourland was 51 years old.
Howard was born in Texas on April 26, 1878. He and his wife, Melville, lived at 811 Birnie Avenue in Fort Smith and had two children, Frank Jr. and Mrs. R.N. McLeod. Howard was a member of the Dodson Avenue Assembly of God.
Following what the Southwest American called “a gallant fight for life,” the twenty year veteran of the FSPD was laid to rest on Sept. 5 in Oak Cemetery in Fort Smith. Howard was 53 years old at the time of his death.
Ironically, the names of Orb’s two accomplices in the robbery and shoot out have been lost to history but local lore says that both men died were sentenced to life sentences between “The Walls” of the Arkansas State Penitentiary located just southwest of Little Rock. One died in prison and the other saw his sentence commuted and was eventually paroled.
Bourland and Howard are just two of eleven officers that have been lost in the line of duty in Fort Smith, but their deaths mark the only time that multiple officers died from the same incident.
