A Crippled Prisoner’s Wild Dash at the Flyer Dock
A United States prisoner slips his handcuffs and leads a deputy marshal on a frantic footrace through the railyards.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There was a fine footrace in the Half Moon yards this morning when Walter Lawrence, a prisoner at McNeil Island, attempted to escape from Deputy United States Marshal Joe Statter. Lawrence had finished his term, but detectives from Covington, Kentucky, were waiting at the marshal's office to extradite him on charges of hold-up and attempted murder. As Lawrence disembarked from the boat at the Flyer dock, he made a sudden leap for liberty. Statter fired shots into the air, but the fugitive ran even faster until a railway worker tackled him. Lawrence, who managed to slip his cuffs due to a crippled hand, later joked: 'I had the kid winded the first two jumps and would have gotten away if it hadn't been for that blame fool up along the track.'
“I had the kid winded the first two jumps and would have gotten away if it hadn't been for that blame fool up along the track.”
The Flyer dock was once a bustling transit hub near the Tacoma waterfront, serving as a gateway for travelers and, as in this case, the movement of prisoners. Today, the area is part of the redeveloped Thea Foss Waterway, reflecting Tacoma's shift from a gritty industrial railyard to a public promenade.
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