He called the lynching “a fine lesson to the whole nation.” It was an act of savage mass hysteria, no one could deny that, but even more shocking was the response from California Gov. “The mob seemed to be insane,” one officer told The Associated Press. Some people milled about for hours, snatching grisly souvenirs. James Park, and hanged them from the nearest tree, to wild cheers. They quickly found Thurmond and Holmes, dragged the prisoners across the street to St. Police fired tear gas but it just made the mob madder, as a group of men battered down the jailhouse door with a steel pipe and trampled the sheriff.
The pair bound the stunned man’s arms and legs with bailing wire, weighted him down with concrete blocks, and tossed him into the bay…Ī mob, estimated to be about 5,000 strong, clogged the streets before the jailhouse. Holmes ordered Hart to get out of the car, and hit him over the head with a brick. Holmes drove Hart about 7 miles from San Jose, where they abandoned the Studebaker, transferred their captive to the second car, and drove to the San Mateo bridge. Thurmond was following behind in Holmes’ car.
9, as Hart steered his roadster out of the driveway to the garage, Holmes flagged him down, then pointed a gun at the driver and forced his way into the car. Thurmond and Holmes, an unemployed oil worker, friends for about a year, had hatched the kidnapping scheme about six weeks earlier. It warned that “one more peep to police” would mean death for Brooke.Īfter a night of questioning, the suspect revealed his name, Thomas Thurmond, identified his accomplice, John Holmes, and offered an account of the horrifying last scene of his victim’s life. Search parties, including dozens of his father’s employees, fanned out all over the county.īy the following day a clue had emerged Hart’s Studebaker roadster, abandoned with its lights on, was spotted on the road between San Jose and Oakland. A male voice said that Hart was safe, demanded a $40,000 (roughly $660,000 today) ransom, and warned the family to keep the police out of it. Nearly four hours after Brooke’s disappearance, the phone rang at the Hart mansion. By 6:30, he was expected at a public speaking lesson. First, he was to drive his father, Alex Hart, 64, to a Chamber of Commerce meeting, and then he was to drop his sister, Aleese, 18, off at home. he left the store that was owned by his millionaire father, and picked up his green Studebaker from a nearby garage. It was the depths of the Great Depression Hart had money, others did not. The case was the murder of Brooke Hart, the handsome, affable 22-year-old scion of a department-store empire. In fact, to hear the governor talk about it, he’d have pinned medals on the chest of each and every member of the bloodthirsty mob, if anyone had made much of an effort to find them. …in 1933 in San Jose, Calif., such an act of violence drew applause from the state’s highest officials. The perpetrators were, however, always white: Should we couch these crimes in their time? Not all victims of summary justice were black. The back reads, “This was made in the court yard in Center, Texas. Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920.