Shortly after midnight on the morning of October 27, 1903, Tom Brown entered the Queen City Restaurant just off the public square on College Street, took a seat in the black section of the restaurant and ordered a plate of oysters. Sometime later, near one o'clock, William Weir, the establishment's "one-legged dishwasher," who was seated on a stool not far away, had a coughing spell. When he stopped coughing, Brown, who was reportedly drunk, asked Weir what the hell was the matter with him, and Weir told him to mind his own business. As the argument escalated, Weir told Brown to stop his cussing, called him a nigger, and told him to get out of the restaurant. Instead of obeying Weir's order, Brown made a threatening move toward the dishwasher. Weir picked up one of his crutches and raised it between him and Brown to ward off the threatened attack. When Brown got close enough, Weir poked him with the crutch. Brown immediately drew his pistol, shot Weir in the stomach, and fled the scene.
After the police were notified of the shooting, they located Brown in a room along Kirby's Arcade, a walkway that led from the southwest corner of the square to South Alley (now McDaniel Street), but Brown made his escape out a back door before they could apprehend him. He was taken into custody on the afternoon of the 27th after a woman notified two black Springfield policemen of his whereabouts in a house near the corner of Phelps and Washington.
Since Weir was not expected to live, the Springfield Leader called the shooting a "murderous assault," and the newspaper labeled the forty-two-year-old Brown "a vicious and dangerous negro." Often called "Cherokee Bill" because he "had some Indian blood in his veins," Brown belonged to "the worst type of bad negroes" and had seemingly "inherited the depraved instincts of both races." He allegedly was wanted for a murder committed in Indian Teritory. Weir, on the other hand, was an inoffensive and helpless old white man whose only vice was his ravenous thirst for beer. Weir lived at the restaurant and took his meals there as a perk of his job. He spent almost his entire $3 a week in wages on beer, said the Leader.
After the fifty-seven-year-old Weir died on the afternoon of the 28th, Brown was charged with murder, and there was much talk of mob action on the streets of Springfield. In response, authorities promptly whisked Brown away from Springfield to a jail in a neighboring county for safekeeping. He was brought back to Greene County for arraignment in late November. Brown pleaded not guilty.
After a continuance, Brown went to trial in Springfield in early April 1904. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang on May 20. A defense appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court automatically stayed the execution. In the spring of 1905, the high court overruled the lower court's verdict and remanded the case to Greene County for retrial. The justices ruled that testimony alleging that Brown had pulled his pistol on another man earlier on the same night that Weir was shot should not have been allowed, since it had no direct relation to the Weir case. They also said that at least one or two of the jurors probably should have been excluded because they were known to be prejudiced against the defendant.
When Brown's case came up for retrial in July 1905, the prosecution waived the first-degree murder charge in exchange for the defendant's guilty plea to second-degree murder. Brown was sentenced to 99 years in the state prison. He was transferred to the Jefferson City facility in October of 1905, and he was discharged in late July 1916 under commutation by the governor.
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