"I Hope He Dies"

Main Street in tiny Boyd, Texas (pop. 550) is two-lane, string-straight, smooth-paved--and ideal as a drag strip for the rambunctious local hot-rodders, who went roaring through town at night, leaving empty beer cans and angry citizens in their wild wake. Finally, in October 1956, Boyd decided to stop the hot-rodders by hiring cops for the first time. By last week, plainly convinced that the cure was worse than the disease, Boyd was a town full of cop haters.

Law came to Boyd, 28 miles north of Fort Worth, in the beefy person of hard-boiled Lee Cockrell, onetime stockyard worker and volunteer fireman, who was named chief of the town's three-man police force. Cockrell stopped the hot-rodders all right. He wrote as many as 80 traffic tickets in one day, used his ever-handy blackjack on some fresh guys who talked back. Indeed, some Boydsmen claimed Cockrell had clubbed them without any sort of cause. Perhaps, so:ne townspeople began to think, the hot-rodders had not been so bad after all.

Last week three Boyd youths took direct action. Armed with a shotgun and a .22-cal. pistol, they visited Cockrell's chief sponsor. Mayor Willie Berle Horn, told him: "You get rid of Cockrell, or we will. And you'll be next." Answering a Horn call, Cockrell caught up with the boys in a grove of trees at town's edge, where farmers park their trucks to sell watermelons. There, in a wildly confused tussle, the shooting started. While frightened farmers dived under their trucks, Cockrell fell, shot three times with .22-cal. bullets.

Seriously wounded, Cockrell was taken to a hospital in a neighboring town. And within minutes of the shooting, nearly half of Boyd's townspeople began gathering in a sullen, jeering crowd outside the town hall. Cried one voice: "I hope Cockrell dies." Cried another: "We sure won't miss him. He can stay gone." With such sentiment clearly prevailing, Main Street could start preparing for the nightly roar of the hot-rodders.

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