The DEA Honor Roll

OFFICER SHOT BY THIEVES

MURDER OF DETECTIVE WHOSE

REVOLVER FAILED HIM

Attempt by Long Island City Police to

Break Up Series of Petty Depredations—

Arrest of Three Suspects—Bad Blood

Between Law-Breakers and Their Adversaries

New York Evening Post July 16, 1902

Detective John Sheridan of the Seventy-fifth Precinct, Long Island City, was shot and killed early this morning by two men whom he was attempting to arrest. Three men are in custody of suspicion of having been concerned in the shooting.  Sheridan saw the men he was after acting in a suspicious manner, and approached them with the intention of putting them under arrest when they opened fire on him.  One bullet entered his head over the eye, and the other pierced his heart.

Sheridan had for his partner in the early morning hunt for thieves another detective named John Shelbury, who was a block away when the shooting began. Shelbury made towards the sound of firing on a run, and stumbled over Sheridan’s body, which lay in a shadow on Henry Street, near Jackson Avenue.

Sheridan made a desperate effort to speak, but with a gasp fell back dead. The police say that Sheridan’s revolver failed to go off, and that this allowed his assailants to “get the drop on him.”  They say that he was a remarkable shot, and that if his gun had worked properly he would not have been killed.  There was no trace left of the men who did the shooting.

Michael Carr, one of the men arrested, is well known to the police and bears a bad character. He was discharged from custody only last Saturday, having been arrested for an attempted burglary on a store at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Jane Street.  There were three men concerned in that affair, and one of them shot at the owner of the store.  Carr was also arrested some months ago in connection with an attempt to rob Dan Nolan, a Jackson Avenue grocer, on the street.

A man named Wright, who saw Sheridan’s assailants running away, looked the arrested men over and said that Carr and one of them whose name is Donnelly resembled the two men who ran past his house.

Sheridan, the dead detective, was about forty years old. He leaves a widow [sic] and a son and a daughter.  He had an excellent reputation as an officer ad was popular among his comrades.

Carr, Donnelly, and the third suspect, Strang, were arraigned before Magistrate