PBA Galleries

Gelatin silver print photograph. 14x8.5 cm (5½x3½"). Photographer's copyright in the negative, undivided postcard back, unused.

A grizzly scene of one of the last cases of capital "vigilante justice" in California. On December 2, 1920 in San Francisco, three members of the Howard Street Gang, a group of organized bootleggers operating out of a South-of-Market warehouse, lured two young girls to a home, where they were brutally assaulted. The three, Terry Fitts, George Boyd and Charles Valento, fled to the supposed safe haven of Santa Rosa. Two San Francisco detectives contacted Sonoma County Sheriff Petray and after a search, the perpetrators were found at 28 West 7th Street. In a gun battle Sheriff Petray and Detectives Jackson and Dorman were killed. A mob overpowered jail personnel and removed the three prisoners who were being held for the murder of the Sheriff and the two detectives. The mob took the three prisoners to the Rural Cemetery on Franklin Avenue where they were dragged beneath a locust tree and lynched. The leader of the vigilantes made everyone remain at the grisly scene until the three were dead. It was the next to last lynching in California.