Officer Robert Cairnes was on patrol in the old First Ward when he was summoned to a ship at the foot of Wall Street to search for a one-eyed longshoreman known as Sailor Jack, accused of threatening to murder the captain.
Officer Cairnes, a relative rookie of two years, arrested the longshoreman on South Street. What happened next on Nov. 10, 1858, became the stuff of legend — an early police killing of an unarmed man running away, with the officer locked up on suspicion of murder.
The case convulsed New York at the time, just as this month’s phone video of a white police officer fatally shooting a fleeing black driver in South Carolina has provoked widespread outrage.
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The victim in 1858, Robert Hollis, 28, an Irish-born father of four, had slugged Officer Cairnes and run. The officer, 40, also Irish-born and a father of six, gave chase, pulling his pistol and firing into the crowd until, catching up to his fugitive, he fired a fatal shot into the man’s back — at such close range that Mr. Hollis’s coat caught fire.
“A policeman has no right to shoot a man for running away from him,” editorialized The New-York Times (as the name was then punctuated), citing a rash of such cases and questioning whether officers should be armed at all.
In those antebellum days, when a former congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln had just lost his race for the United States Senate to Stephen Douglas, the New York police had yet to officially carry guns, although many did. The city, which was just Manhattan and the Bronx until 1898, had been in turmoil, with two rival police forces, the City Hall-beholden Municipals and the state-created Metropolitans in open warfare over a mayoral scandal, until the courts ruled for Albany in 1857 and the local forces disbanded or were swallowed up by the Metropolitans.
With the state takeover came a policy that officers carry guns, although some captains urged their men to ignore it, according to Thomas Reppetto and James Lardner in their 2000 book, “N.Y.P.D.: A City and Its Police.” Police shootings of unarmed civilians invariably followed, including, the authors said, an innocent German killed while walking with his wife during violent protests against enforced Sunday closings of beer halls.
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The subsequent killing of Mr. Hollis by Officer Cairnes, though both were Irish, established the victimhood of minorities in police shootings, said Mr. Reppetto, a former police commander in Chicago.
The 1858 killing remains relevant, said Leo Hershkowitz, a longtime Queens College and New York University history professor who came across the case in the archives of The Times while researching a revisionist history of the widely reviled William M. Tweed, the boss of the Tammany Hall political organization.
“Cairnes was so mad,” said Mr. Hershkowitz, 90 and now retired, who saw parallels to the fatal shooting of Walter L. Scott by Officer Michael T. Slager in North Charleston, S.C., on April 4. A witness’s video recorded Mr. Scott running away from a traffic stop and the officer firing eight shots at his back. Officer Slager has been charged with murder.
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The killing of Mr. Hollis, according to a transcript of the coroner’s inquisition, stemmed from a dispute on Nov. 9, 1858, when the longshoreman and a mate visited the St. Charles, a ship sailing between New York and Le Havre, France, and asked to work as crewmen.
Mr. Hollis was later described in The Times as a ruffian with arrests for assaults and other “atrocious violence,” including a fight that cost him an eye.
Capt. Thomas Conway told the pair he had a full crew.
They accosted the captain in the street the next day and asked again. When Captain Conway again refused, he later testified, they followed him to his ship where, The Times wrote, “deceased called me a s-n of a b-h and said he would stow himself on board the vessel and murder me on the voyage.” When Mr. Hollis hurled a brick at Captain Conway, the captain chased them off at gunpoint and sent for the police.
Tracked down nearby by Officer Cairnes and Captain Conway, and being escorted to court at the Tombs, Mr. Hollis “suddenly turned upon the officer and struck him a violent blow, knocking him down and then ran away,” the captain testified.
Officer Cairnes, in pursuit, fired two shots, the first ball rattling among the barrels where a cooper, John Thrall, worked. The second whizzed past the ear of a passer-by, William Gage, who objected, “For God’s sake, don’t fire, or you will kill someone,” according to a transcript of a coroner’s inquisition.
By this time, the cooper had seized Mr. Hollis, but, suddenly afraid, let go. Charles W. Degendorf, a cartman at Fulton Market, grabbed Mr. Hollis’s collar and held him.
Officer Cairnes, Mr. Degendorf testified, ran up, exclaiming, “You will get away from me, will you?,” and fired into Mr. Hollis’s back — “so near that the back of the man’s coat was scorched.”
Drawn by the shots, a Second Ward officer, Joseph A. Perkins, saw Mr. Hollis’s coat actually ablaze and put out the fire, demanding of Officer Cairnes, “Are you crazy?”
As Officer Perkins later testified, “I thought it very singular that he should shoot in the reckless manner he did, when there were so many about who would have assisted him.”
With the dying Mr. Hollis on a cart to the hospital, Officer Perkins said Officer Cairnes admitted “that if he had the thing to do over again, he would not do as he had done.”
Officer Perkins, meanwhile, struggled to rescue Officer Cairnes from a lynch mob bent on avenging the executed longshoreman. “Swing him over the awning,” some shouted, according to The Times. “Hang him to the lamppost.”
Officer Cairnes was extricated from the mob but was locked up pending a coroner’s inquisition. The officer, as was his right, did not testify and never seemed to claim self-defense.
The following day, a coroner’s jury ruled that Mr. Hollis died from a pistol ball in the heart, discharged “in close contact with the body.” It ruled the shooting “not justifiable” and ordered Officer Cairnes held for a grand jury. On Nov. 16, 1858, his bail was set at $10,000 (equal to about $270,000 today). He made bail the next day — the same day a grand jury declined to indict him. Without elaboration, a handwritten court record in the Municipal Archives notes: “Dismissed by grand jury.”
Nine days later, The Times reported that Officer Cairnes, back on the job, found two men struggling with a horse and wagon in Lower Manhattan at 3 a.m. Suspicious, he moved in to investigate. The cart, with a broken axle, contained an expensive load of cloth. The men fled. This time Officer Cairnes did not give chase.
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