# Waterbury Evening Democrat, 17 October 1890, page 1: The chief of police of New Orleans shot down

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/clippings/clip-waterbury-evening-democrat-1890-10-17-p1/

The Waterbury Evening Democrat front page of 17 October 1890 carries a New Orleans dispatch reporting that Police Chief David C. Hennessy was shot near his home.

Front page of the Waterbury Evening Democrat, Connecticut, 17 October 1890. The story, headed "Assassins Caught: The Chief of Police of New Orleans Shot Down," is datelined New Orleans, 17 October. It reports that David C. Hennessy, superintendent of police, was shot by men concealed in doorways on Girod Street as he went home from the Central station shortly before midnight, that he fired back, and that he died at 9 a.m. It reports that four men had been arrested. The headline was confirmed on the page image.

The headline and subheads attribute the crime to Italians before any trial, and a subhead prints a slur as the chief's reported last words. That language is not quoted here, and this archive does not adopt the page's account of a plot or of who was responsible. The arrested men are not named in this record.

The page is filed as a record of the first coverage of the killing that the New Orleans events of 1891 followed. The prejudice in the language is part of what the page records; it is not a finding about anyone.

## Sources

- Library of Congress, Chronicling America: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn94053256/1890-10-17/ed-1/?sp=1
- Library of Congress OCR text of this page: https://tile.loc.gov/text-services/word-coordinates-service?segment=/service/ndnp/ct/batch_ct_gum_ver01/data/sn94053256/00271763086/1890101701/0381.xml&format=alto_xml&full_text=1