Category: courts

A Young Woman’s Dying Words


June 12, 1907
Los Angeles

At 19, Florence Grover was old enough to be in love and living with a man, and at 19, she was old enough to become a mother. Her boyfriend, L.C. Lutzen of the National Messenger Service, with whom she lived at 120 N. Broadway, testified that he had made preparations to raise their child as his own.

Instead Florence sought out Dr. C. Van Peter Watson. On May 28, she took a streetcar to his home at 2652 W. Pico. When she left 30 minutes or an hour later, she was so weak that she couldn

Mullen in Bad Plight


May 18, 1907
Los Angeles

William Mullen, a black strikebreaker for the Pioneer Truck Company, was delivering a shipment of lumber when he realized that he had lost some of his load and retraced his route to look for it.

At the Southern Pacific railroad crossing at Alameda and 2nd streets, Mullen noticed some lumber leaning against a shack belonging to a railroad flagman named Caulfield, who was presumably white. Mullen asked Caulfield if there was more of his lumber inside the shack and Caulfield said no.

Mullen challenged Caulfield, knocked him to the ground and began kicking him when Patrick Connelly, a union teamster for the Water Department and also presumably white, intervened, although it