Remembering and reminding

It started with a call to investigate some suspicious activity in downtown Lewiston.

Check the activity log for pretty much any municipal police agency, and you’ll find similar calls. It’s the type of thing officers handle on a regular basis.

There’s nothing unusual about it today — and there wasn’t anything unusual about it 50 years ago, the night Lewiston police officer Ralph Russell was murdered.

That’s something Barbara Russell, his widow, wants people to keep in mind. At a time when people around the world are protesting the May 25 killing of George Floyd and the broader issue of police brutality, she’d like them to remember that most police officers are just decent people trying to help their communities.

“I don’t think we give enough credit to the good police officers,” Russell said. “We go on and on about the few — and it is very few — who are bad. That’s disconcerting to all those who made being a policeman their livelihood.”

Ralph Russell wasn’t a police officer when he and Barbara first met on a blind date in 1961. He was working at a gas station at the time, after graduating from Pullman High School and serving four years in the military.

“He was an all-around good person,” recalled Russell, who still lives in Lewiston. “He was a very happy person, a jokester.”

He also had a knack with young people — something that became apparent after he joined the Lewiston Police Department in 1963.

“Ralph was every kid’s friend,” noted Marv Yates of Boise, in a letter to the editor following a 2007 Lewiston Tribune story about Russell. “He always thought back just a few years to when he was a kid himself and gave us all the breaks whenever possible.”

Barbara Russell said her husband “recognized we’re all human, and tried to go by that. We’re good by nature.”

Like Yates, she thought he had a particularly good connection with teenagers, both because he was still a young man himself (he was 23 when he joined the force) and because he’d been in a few scrapes of his own growing up.

“I think he’d done some things he could have had problems with,” Russell said. “He recognized that some teens just needed a break. He was their friend, not an antagonist.”

Ralph Russell celebrated his 31st birthday less than two weeks before he got a call to investigate some suspicious activity in downtown Lewiston. It was shortly after midnight on June 15, 1970.

Unbeknownst to him, two fugitives from Tennessee were hiding out in town. Melvin Cox and Jesse Jones were wanted for armed robbery in Chattanooga, as well as for a murder in Portland committed before they arrived in Lewiston.

The two had drinks with Forest Williams, a local man, at the Mint Tavern downtown, leaving shortly before closing time. They were in a alley near Eighth and Main when Russell drove up in a patrol car and asked to see their ID.

Russell knew Williams by sight. In subsequent court testimony, Williams said Russell asked him to step into the headlights. As he moved toward the car, he heard a series of rapid shots.

It happened that quick — three shots that knocked Russell down and a fourth, execution-style behind the ear, that killed him.

Despite a massive regional manhunt, Cox and Jones remained on the run for another two months before they were captured back in Tennessee. During that time, they were accused of killing a fruit picker in Okanogan, Wash.

After pleading guilty to Russell’s murder, Cox is currently serving a life sentence in the Idaho State Correctional Institute. Jones was sentenced to 7 1/2 years on a lesser charge; he’s now in prison in Oregon.

In a July 21, 1970, Lewiston Tribune story, Barbara Russell said local teens “came to the police station and cried the morning after Ralph was killed.”

She was 25 at the time. She and Ralph had two daughters, ages 5 and 7. They had talked about moving to Portland, where he could make more money, she said, “but we decided there were so many more risks and dangers in a town that size.”

Ralph Russell was the first Lewiston police officer to die in the line of duty in 46 years. However, he was just the first of three to die in an 18-month period. Edward Davis died of a heart attack in November, 1971, while pursuing a subject, and Ross Flavel was killed in January 1972, during an attempted robbery and bombing at a Main Street drug store.

Fifty years after Russell’s death, there is an ongoing national conversation about the use of force by police agencies. While some of the protests have been disrespectful of police in general, others have focused more specifically on training and community relations and the disproportionate use of force against minorities.

Despite the loss of her husband, Barbara Russell doesn’t think peaceful protests are out of line.

“I think there are things that need to be rectified,” she said.

She also thinks society demands too much from police officers.

“We overwhelm them with thing society hasn’t taken care of, like drugs and mental illness,” Russell said. “They don’t have the training for all that.”

Her main message, though, is that her husband was an example of community policing at its best — and his spirit is alive and well in police agencies around the country today.

“I want to emphasize how good police officers are,” she said. “And I hope to highlight someone who was just a good human being.”

Spence may be contacted at bspence@lmtribune.com or (208) 791-9168.