“Lou Overton testified:  ‘I ran a saloon on the corner of Twelfth and Rusk streets at the time Waller was killed, last summer.  About 12 o’clock that night I was in my saloon,when Will Campbell came in and asked me for my gun (pistol).  I told him I wouldn’t let my brother have my gun.  He then walked up to my door and looked out west, on Twelfth street.  I asked what was the matter.  He said, “nothing.”  I then walked to the same door and looked up in the same direction, and saw a crowd in front of Curry’s saloon.  All at once I looked back in my saloon, and saw Jim Toots going behind my counter after my pistol, and I caught him and told him he could not have my pistol.  He then went out the same door I saw Campbell in.  Toots went west to where the crowd was, in front of Curry’s, and began to curse and swear.  I went up there, and Toots was out in the street curing the officers, and making threats he would kill the brassbuttoned sons of bitches; that they couldn’t walk their beats and live.  I heard him say, in his cursing, that he didn’t have an even break with them.  As he said this two other negroes stepped up to him, and said, “We’ll see that you do have an even break.”  Then Toots and these two negroes, with Charley Ware, left there and went east on Twelfth street.  I never heard anything more until the shooting.  Officers Waller, Towns, and Bryant came up to the corner of Twelfth and Rusk streets fifteen or twenty minutes before the killing.  I saw them start down Rusk street.  I stood in my east door to watch them.  Just after I saw them pass, I saw some negroes coming up Rusk street.  I saw the flash of two pistol shots fired north, from in front of the officers–I thought within five or six feet of them.  The officers then seemed to return the fire, and shooting began from across the street at the officers.  I saw one negro seem to walk and shoot from the southeast the corner of Thirteenth and Rusk to the middle of the block east of Rusk.  There was firing all around there.’ ”

Reference Data:

The Texas Criminal Reports, Vol. 34, by Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, 1896, page 388