Rahm Jury Hears Description of Slaying a Board Meeting

Rahm Jury Hears Description of Slaying a Board Meeting

By Dawson Duncan
News Staff Writer

Orange, Texas - Details of a bloody night of fighting at a Brownsboro school board meeting that left one man dead were given to an Orange jury Wednesday in the murder trial of Dr. Charles C. Rahm.

Dr. Rahm, 43-year-old osteopath and former school board member, is on trial on a charge of murder in connection with the fatal shooting last June 16 of Thurman Jackson in the melee.

Defense attorneys contend Dr. Rahm is not guilty for he acted in self-defense. Prosecutors waived a request for a death penalty.

Number One state witness before the all-white jury of four women and eight men was Charles Majors, a Henderson County deputy sheriff who, with two others, were at the school the night of the meeting in response to requests for police protection in anticipation of trouble.

Majors told how a crowd of about 150 attending the meeting rose out of their chairs at adjournment of the session and began crowding around board members as Dr. Rahm asked him to escort him out.

As Majors moved two men out of the way, he related one hit Board Member Ivan Long in the face and while he separated them he heard two rapid shots.

"I turned around and saw three people on the floor," he testified, they were Dr. Rahm, Thurman Jackson and his brother, Clarence W. Jackson.

He said Thurman Jackson lay face down across Dr. Rahm.

He said he saw no gun at the time but later was handed one by Wayne Smith, another school board member. It was a .25 caliber Browning pistol, which had two of its seven bullets fired. The gun, cartridge shells and spent bullets were offered in evidence.

There was blood on Dr. Rahm's head and clothes as he was taken to a hospital in Athens, where he was charged with murder, said Majors.

Dist. Atty. Jack Hardee of Athens drew from Majors the statement he saw no one hit Dr. Rahm before he heard the shots but did see Clarence Jackson hit him afterwards.

Defense Atty. Charles Tessmer of Dallas drew from Majors on cross-examinations details of the melee in the school board meeting that had been fraught with tension after a board elected last April had dismissed long-time Supt. Homer Bass.

At the time of adjournment of the meeting, Majors related, one of a group of Negroes - who have their own school nine miles from Brownsboro - surged in on the board members. One Negro was quoted as saying amidst the hollering and shouting that marked the end of the board session, "If you don't give us some consideration in September you will get what you don't want."

Tessmer developed from Majors that four members of the school board were injured in the fighting that followed the meeting and that only Dr. Rahm had been charged. Those accused of assaulting the others were charged.

Dist Judge Homer E. Stephenson sustained state objections when Tessmer asked Majors if he had not heard "threats" of the school board and he had heard "general talk that sooner or later something was going to have to happen."

Tessmer also drew from Majors testimony that previous to the melee Dr. Rahm had filed disturbing the peace charges against a nephew of Thurman Jackson and a nephew of another school board member.

At one point during the board meeting, testified Majors, Board Member Ivan  came out with Thurman Jackson and asked he be arrested, "Because they couldn't carry on an orderly meeting with his interruptions." Jackson, he said, promised not to speak out of turn if he was not arrested and allowed to return to the meeting, which he did.

Tessmer stressed in questioning that Dr. Rahm still had a second gun on his person when he was being taken from the school building and did not use it even though, said Majors, "quite a few were striking and hitting him."

The defense does not deny that Dr. Rahm fired the shots but is contending that he did so in self-defense.

Dr. A. Duphorne, osteopathic surgeon from Athens, testified for the state that after Dr. Rahm reached his hospital he handed him a gun and asked for Athens doctor to keep it for him.

The defense developed from Dr. Duphorne that he treated Dr. Rahm for head and other injuries that were "potentially dangerous."

He said Dr. Rahm told him he had been assaulted by three or four men, hit on the back of the head by what he thought was a chair and that he had shot twice when he thought a man was going to resume stomping him in the chest.

Wayne Smith of Murchison, the one member of the Brownsboro board voting in support of Supt. Bass, testified he took the gun which Dr. Rahm had fired and turned it over to Deputy Sheriff Majors.

He insisted under defense questioning that he had not seen anyone hit Dr. Rahm before the shooting.

Dallas Morning News
Thursday, December 15, 1960
Section 1, Page 9
source: GenealogyBank.com