Minnesota History: George DeCoursey, shot in the back after stealing nickels

Ron Lancette removed his cap and gazed down at a flat gravestone obscured by fallen leaves. Tears pooled in his eyes.

The 77-year-old from Scottsdale, Ariz., had found a grandfather he never knew.

"It's overwhelming — it's been a lot of years," Lancette said, softly. "He's always been in the back of my mind. It's something you carry around with you."

Cars whizzing by on Front Street broke the silence on this crisp, recent October morning in Section 41, Row 35 of the Calvary Cemetery on St. Paul's North End. Since 1856, some of the city's most prominent citizens have been buried here, including fur trader Louis Robert, early farmer Eugene Larpenteur and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler.

Unlike those men, Lancette's grandfather didn't have any streets named after him when he died. A St. Paul police officer fatally shot George Raymond DeCoursey in the back on June 12, 1930.

His offense? Stealing nickels from pay phones at the dawn of the Great Depression and fleeing police. He was 35 and left behind his wife, Alice, and their six kids. Lois, the eldest of three daughters, was Lancette's mother.

"If I had six kids, I would be stealing nickels, too," Lancette said. "If this had happened today, Grandma would have sued for $60 million and got it."

Instead, she received nothing from the city and remarried a plumber up the block.

Today, cop shootings and excessive force make big headlines. In 1930, the police shooting of DeCoursey received only a couple of paragraphs in Twin Cities newspapers.

"Shot while trying to escape from two patrolmen who had arrested him on a charge of robbing pay telephone boxes," the Minneapolis Tribune reported on page 11, misspelling his name. "DeCourcy was arrested at his home but broke way from the officers and fled down the street. He was found under a porch and ordered to come out."

The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that patrolman Lloyd McVay fired when DeCoursey ran again and "failed to heed the officers' command to stop."

When he died the next day at Ancker Hospital, coroner Carl Ingerson ruled his death a homicide and found "he died from gun shot wound of spine caused when he was shot while resisting arrest."

Lancette, born eight years after his grandfather's death, said his relatives seldom mentioned DeCoursey. "We weren't the kind of family that talked about that kind of stuff."

As a teenager, he recalled his Uncle Gordy telling him DeCoursey was in the arms of his wife under the porch when the officers tracked him down. The coroner's report listed his occupation as railroad switchman. This was the start of the Depression when gangsters and corrupt police punctuated St. Paul.

With help from his sons who live in Minnesota, Lancette started piecing together the family's 85-year-old hushed tragedy. Their research revealed some curious details.

First, DeCoursey's own grandfather, also named George, was a St. Paul police officer from 1872 to 1883. Son of German immigrants, George W. DeCoursey was born in 1846 in Pennsylvania. The 1880 Census shows him in St. Paul with a son named George, born in 1872, who would be the shooting victim's father.

In an 1891 recommendation letter, St. Paul Police Chief Charles Weber called the first George DeCoursey "a faithful, honest and efficient officer always willing to do his duty … one of the best detectives. Anyone who will employ him, will find an honest and competent officer."

The same could not be said for Lloyd McVay, the officer who shot the alleged thief of telephone nickels in 1930. St. Paul police historian Kate Cavett analyzed records from the city's Bureau of Police along with old newspapers. They paint a portrait of a rogue cop who would die by suicide seven years after he shot DeCoursey.

Born in 1894, making him about the same age as DeCoursey, McVay was hired as a patrolman in 1919, just after World War I. He spent a chunk of the next 18 years on police motorcycle duty.

McVay was suspended on June 30, 1937, for conduct unbecoming an officer and neglect of duty "for allegedly drawing a revolver in an E. 7th St. beer tavern while off duty," according to a 1937 edition of the Pioneer Press. It reported that McVay, 43, had been found dead in his car, near Wheelock Parkway and the Soo Line bridge.

"A garden hose had been connected to the exhaust and ran in one window of the machine," the newspaper reported. "He had been dead about six hours when his body was discovered on a Wednesday" — two days after his suspension. McVay had resigned on Tuesday rather than await the results of an investigation.

He told fellow officers, "I'll take the shortest way out." He left sealed notes for his widow and two children that were later discovered in his car.

"The puzzle pieces never really fit together," Ron Lancette said, looking back at his grandfather's death. "Why would you shoot a guy in the back for stealing nickels from phone booths? It was too bizarre and has always been something I carried in the back of my mind."

He walked out of Calvary Cemetery and, within a few days, he said "so long" to his two sons and was on the road driving home to Arizona — one journey starting; another completed.

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com