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MARCH 4, 1976
What the record holds: a bank robbery occurred in Fort Wayne on the morning of March 4, 1976 — the federal court opinion that preserves the day does not name the bank, and no account of the robbers themselves is in the record reached for this section. What the record preserves instead is what the robbery set in motion across town, and it is preserved because three civil lawsuits grew out of it.
Broadway Avenue: that morning, Ronald A. Woodward and David L. Mason were riding in a car driven by Joseph S. Higginbotham, southbound on Broadway Avenue on the city's west side. They knew nothing of any robbery. Fort Wayne police officers Gary Grant, Charles Dennis, Michael Jenkins and Danny Jackson, who did know — a bank had just been robbed in a different section of the city — pursued the Higginbotham car believing it held the robbers, and stopped it boxed between police cars, one ahead and one behind. Officers approached on foot; two more, James Crawford and John O'Leary, arrived. In the federal court's words, "it is not clear what next transpired, but shots were fired by the police officers." Joseph Higginbotham was killed. David Mason and Ronald Woodward were seriously wounded, and, the complaints alleged, permanently disabled.
The paper trail: the wounded men sued the officers and the city in federal court under the civil rights act, and the dead man's parents and Mason's mother sued in Allen Superior Court. The document that survives is none of those trials but the city's own declaratory action against its insurance carriers, decided July 27, 1978, over who would pay to defend the officers — a dry insurance ruling that happens to carry, in its statement of facts, the whole of what this record can honestly say about the robbery of March 4, 1976: that it happened, and that its worst harm fell on three men who had nothing to do with it.
Sources:
- Grant v. North River Insurance Co., 453 F. Supp. 1361 (N.D. Ind., Fort Wayne Division, July 27, 1978) — the March 4, 1976 bank robbery "in a different section of the city"; the pursuit and stop of the Higginbotham automobile on Broadway Avenue; the officers named; the shooting and its results; the three resulting civil actions (Woodward v. Grant, No. F 76-74; Higginbotham v. Grant, Allen Sup. Ct. No. S-77-544; Mason v. Grant, No. S-78-478).