The Hall Street Shoot-Out: A True Story of the Dallas Police Department's Biggest Gun Battle

By Captain E.R. Walt

On a pleasant Monday evening in September of 1969, twenty-six year-old Johnny Lee Thomas excused himself from his familys dinner table, picked up a pump shotgun and announced that he was going huntingalone. Seconds later he stepped out of his house and shot sixteen-year-old Aljewel Wesley in the face as she sat on her own front porch listening to records with her boyfriend and grandmother.
That was but the first shot in what would shortly become the biggest gunbattle in the 130 year history of the Dallas Police Department. Johnny Thomas continued to shoot at neighbors, friends, family members and passing motorists until the police arrived, at which point he ambushed and shot the first three officers on the scene.
He then retreated to his house and held off an assault by a hundred or more determined police officers in a furious firefight that lasted more than an hour and involved hundreds if not thousands of rounds fired. Before the incident ended, ten persons would be shot, including four police officers and a TV cameraman; two would be killed, including the shooter himself.
Authored by a participant and based upon official police documents, original newspaper articles and personal interviews with forty six of the hundred or so officers present, the book details the gunbattle from the first shot to the final barrage of gunfire that ended the shooters life and brought it to a close. It includes a listing of sixty-seven Dallas officers known to have been combatants or otherwise involved in the incident and details their location and participation as far as it is known.
Also included is an analysis of the factors that contributed to the spectacular nature of the incident from departmental policies, procedures, equipment and tactics to the culture and tenor of the times. Chapters are also dedicated to the firearms used in the battle and an analysis of exactly who, among the many officers involved, was responsible for putting an end to Thomass rampagesomething that was never addressed in the original investigation.
The concluding chapters cover the aftermath of the gunbattle from the neighborhood riots and arson fires to the truncated investigation and include a brief history of the Dallas Police Departments Tactical Division and the fundamental changes in the operation of that unit that were brought about by the affair on Hall Street. The book closes with an epilogue bringing the reader up to date on the major players in the drama.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456809430

Captain E.R. Walt

Captain Walt is a 33 year veteran of the Dallas Police Department where he held commands in Vice, Narcotics, Tactical, Intelligence, Special Investigations and General Investigations. In 1969 he was a 24-year-old Patrolman when he answered a fellow officer’s call for help and found himself in the middle of a massive gunbattle. After retirement he began researching that incident and spent over five years collecting documents and interviewing witnesses and participants. With encouragement from his wife, accomplished author Carol Walt, he compiled that research and those first person accounts into this book, the definitive history of the Hall Street Shoot-Out.

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Copyright © 2010 by Captain E.R. Walt.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2010916494

ISBN: Hardcover    978-1-4568-0942-3

ISBN: Softcover      978-1-4568-0941-6

ISBN: Ebook          978-1-4568-0943-0

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CONTENTS

1.   ACTIVE SHOOTER

2.   AMBUSH

3.   SEIGE

4.   UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

5.   SUICIDE BY COP

6.   THE GUNS OF HALL STREET

7.   WHO SHOT JOHNNY THOMAS?

8.   THE AFTERMATH

9.   HELL ON HALL STREET: THE NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS

10.   LEGEND, LIES AND WAR STORIES

11.   A NEW TAC

12.   ROLL CALL

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the memory of Alvin Duane Hallum,

Lawrence R. Cadena, Sr. and all the other Dallas Police Officers

who have given their lives in the line of duty.

PREFACE

On a pleasant Monday evening in September of 1969, twenty-six year-old Johnny Lee Thomas excused himself from his family’s dinner table, picked up a pump shotgun and announced that he was going hunting—alone. Seconds later he stepped out of his house and shot sixteen-year-old Aljewel Wesley in the face as she sat on her own front porch listening to records with her boyfriend and grandmother.

Thus began what would become the biggest, wildest and most bizarre gunbattle in the history of the Dallas Police Department. The hour long ordeal would eventually involve over a hundred police officers and an exchange of a thousand or more rounds of gunfire. Ten people would be shot, including a TV news reporter and four police officers; two people would be killed, including Johnny Thomas.

This is the story of that gunbattle and the men who were involved in it, an incident that came to be called The Hall Street Shoot-Out.

CHAPTER ONE

ACTIVE SHOOTER

There’s something happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear

There’s a man with a gun over there

Telling me, I got to beware

Buffalo Springfield

The people who study such things can provide a remarkably accurate profile of the men—they are almost always men—whose anger at the world festers to the point that they are willing to express it in a suicidal rage by killing as many of their fellow citizens as possible before being killed themselves or, more usually, taking their own life. What the experts cannot explain is why, given the sheer numbers of such angry, disaffected loners our society has managed to produce, the streets do not run red with blood every day.

What is known about Johnny Lee Thomas sheds little light on the matter. He was born in Texarkana, Texas on January 25, 1943 to Katherine Reed and A. L. Thomas and moved to Dallas with his family in 1949 at the age of six. He does not surface on the public record there until May 9, 1960 when he was arrested at the age of seventeen for destruction of private property (over $50.00). The location of his arrest was given as 106 S. Harwood, Room 314 by Juvenile Bureau Detective M. E. Shirley #318. That he was arrested in the Juvenile Bureau offices at the age of seventeen indicates that he had lied about his age when first brought in by patrol officers. It also indicates that past experience with the juvenile justice system taught him that it was a path to be much preferred to County Jail and the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville.

He earned his trip downtown by scaling a six and one half foot chain link fence topped with four strands of barbed wire into the storage lot of the W. O. Bankston Oldsmobile dealership at 2300 Munger Street, a few blocks from his home at 2013 ½ Payne Street. There he got into a brand new, 1960 Olds and staged a private demolition derby, smashing it repeatedly into the fence and other new cars on the lot until stopped and arrested. He was charged as an adult and sentenced to three years probation which he successfully served with only one small glitch. On October 23, 1961 he was arrested on a hold for probation officer charge which was released the next day. He was listed as being 5'3 tall, 105 pounds with maroon" eyes, black hair, a dark complexion and an occupation as a caddy.

Whether the arrest and probation had its desired effect on Johnny Thomas or other factors were at work is unknown but, not only did he successfully serve out his three years probation, another six years would pass before he again came to the attention of the Dallas Police Department. By then he was twenty-six years old, had grown to 5'9" and 160 pounds and was beginning his descent into madness.

Once again, his arrest involved other people’s cars, but this time with the addition of a great deal of alcohol and possibly other substances as well. At three in the afternoon on August 2, 1969, less than two months before his rampage on Hall Street, he walked into the service area of Orand Buick at 2108 Cedar Springs, sat down in a new Buick and attempted to drive it off the lot. When confronted and stopped by two employees, he jumped from the car, ran across the street to Dodge City Motors and tried to get into another car parked in their service area.

When employees there yelled at him he ran from the scene but was arrested by Officers R. B. Parrish #2534 and D. M. Hickman #2453. When he was booked, the arrest report noted that his breath was strong; he was staggering and falling as he walked; his speech was slurred, confused and filled with profanity; his eyes were bloodshot and dilated and his clothing was disarranged. In other words, he was drunk and those specific statements were designed to show that in a court of law. He was offered and refused both breathalyzer and blood alcohol tests. Perhaps significantly, the arrest report stated that he was unemployed.

At the time of his last arrest, he listed his address as 2601 Munger Avenue, probably the home of his mother Katherine Thomas. Whether he was actually living there or not is unknown. What is known is that by early September he was living in a three room shotgun house at 1904 North Hall Street with his aunt, Mary Dixon and his half-brother, seventeen year old Oscar Lee Banks. It was there, about a month after his last arrest that he began to give veiled hints to those closest to him about what he planned to do.

Three weeks before the shootings he talked with his aunt, telling her that something was going to happen to him. On Saturday, September 20th, he told her again that something was going to happen to him and urged her to return to Texarkana. If Mary Dixon took any action regarding these warnings, other than to worry about her nephew, it was not noted in her affidavit. A week later he brought home a long barreled, 20 gauge shotgun and, as his brother would say later, a whole sack full of yellow shells. When his aunt asked why he had the gun, he said he was going hunting.

Perhaps fearing for her own safety, she did not mention the gun again. Two nights later her agitated nephew came home for supper where she noted he ate just half a sandwich, but could not finish his orange juice. He got up from the table, walked into the middle room of the house, the bedroom, and came back with the shotgun. When Mary Dixon asked what he was going to do, he said, I’m going hunting—all by myself.

If Johnny Thomas was going hunting, he did not have to go far to find what he considered fair game. He walked through the living room, loading the shotgun as he went, then stepped onto the front porch and turned to his right. Shotgun houses were customarily built long and narrow and fitted two to the lot in order to double the rental revenues for each plot of ground. That made the front porch of the house next door no more than twenty feet from the barrel of his gun when he lifted it to his shoulder.

Sixteen year old Aljewel Wesley was sitting on the front porch of 1908 North Hall Street, playing records with her boyfriend and her grandmother, Ruby Mitchell. She looked up just as Johnny Thomas stepped out of the door, raised his gun and shot her in the face.

Although they had lived next door to each other for several weeks there is nothing to indicate that Aljewel Wesley and Johnny Thomas had any relationship other than that of neighbors. There could have been reasons why he selected her as his first victim; perhaps she had rebuffed his advances or there had been an argument of some kind, but there is no evidence to support that. In fact, Ruby Mitchell told police officers that she did not know the man and did not know why he would shoot at them. Apparently, Aljewel Wesley simply had the misfortune to be the first person Johnny Thomas encountered when he left his house intending to kill everyone he saw.

After shooting the girl, he pumped another round into the gun and shot Ruby Mitchell. She ducked enough that only the fringe of the tightly packed pattern of bird shot grazed the upper right side of her head. Then she grabbed her granddaughter and dragged her into the house. The boyfriend fell off the porch and disappeared into the darkness.

When the girl and her grandmother staggered through the screen door and fell to the living room floor bleeding, Wesley’s step-father, Robert Weldon Grant, began to frantically dial the phone for the police and an ambulance. Hearing the shooting, Mary Dixon ran out onto her porch and tried to take the shotgun from her crazed nephew. Jerking away, he pointed the gun at her and told her to get away from him before he killed her. She watched then as he stepped to the edge of a retaining wall that bordered the sidewalk in front of the house and stood there, hidden in the shadows.

Frank Henry Buford had spent all of his forty years in and around Hall Street and was well known to many police officers, partly from his current job where he shined shoes in a downtown office building, but mostly from his long criminal record. He was what officers would have referred to as a hook or character. They were terms usually used to identify a career criminal as in: I saw this ol’ hook hangin’ around Hall and Thomas at 2:00 a.m., so I arrested him for Investigation of B&T and it turns out he was carrying an RG-10 and was two X-Texas for robbery so I charged him with ex-con with a gun. In translation, that means the officer saw a known criminal loitering in a high-crime area late at night and arrested him on the speculative charge of Investigation of Burglary and Theft, which meant he would spend the night in jail and be released in the morning. However, further investigation determined he was carrying a cheap .22 revolver and had spent two prison sentences in the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, thus earning another felony charge for being an ex-convict in possession of a firearm.

Frank Buford was just such a character, having started his criminal career seventeen years earlier and just four blocks from 1900 Hall. It was there where he was interrupted by Dallas Police Officers H. C. Garrett and K. S. Stanfield in the 2800 block of Munger Street as he beat Willie R. Windom in the head with a broken whisky bottle while his friend George Gross was shooting him with a pistol. For undocumented reasons he escaped prison for that murder but his criminal career continued over the years to include aggravated assault, armed robbery, burglary and theft before it tapered off to alias tickets, driving without a license and driving while intoxicated.

Like Aljewel Wesley, it is possible that some relationship existed between Johnny Thomas and Frank Buford. In the tight-knit community of Hall Street it is possible that they knew each other, ate at the same restaurants, drank in the same bars, hung out on the same corner but it is unlikely that he was a specific target. There is simply no way that, after