PLANO, Texas (AP) — A federal officer gunned down while transporting prisoners through eastern Kentucky has been honored at a small courthouse ceremony in Texas, more than a century after his death.
Senior officials with the U.S. Marshals Service and judges gathered Friday in Plano to present a flag to Russell Wireman’s great-great-great grandson, Gary Hulsey. Wireman, a marshal, was shot in the chest in 1889 during the so-called Moonshine War.
The presentation of the folded flag was part of an effort by America’s oldest federal law-enforcement agency to recognize officers whose deaths during a particularly deadly period of its history had been obscured by the passing decades.
U.S. Marshals Service historian David Turk says Wireman was one of many marshals killed during a federal government crackdown of illegal liquor distilleries around the turn of the 20th century.
