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Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio History

The Wright - Parker Shooting


On August 2, 1842 William Wright and Isaac Parker were, as near as folks remembered, intoxicated and became rowdy and it soon turned into a full blown argument. The end result was that Mr. Parker very narrowly escaped death from the discharge of a loaded musket at the hands of Mr. Wright. At a preliminary hearing, before Justice Charles W. Wetmore, Mr. Wright was bound over to court to answer to the charge of shooting with intent to kill.

Summit county's first Prosecuting Attorney, William M. Dodge, Esq., at the September term, 1842, laid the transcript before the grand jury, who returned a bill against Mr. Wright for shooting with intent to kill. Without any of the vexatious circumlocutions incident to modern criminal proceedings, the case was brought to trail a the same term before Judges Van R. Humphrey, Charles Sumner, Hugh R. Caldwell and Robert K. Dubois, and the regular jury for that term, who, after a careful investigations returned a verdict of guilty of shooting  with the intent to wound, and Judge Humphrey, with the impressive remarks about the danger of indulging in the use of intoxicating liquors, sentenced Mr. Wright to imprisonment in the penitentiary for the period of four years. After an incarceration of about one year, a numerously signed petition was presented to Governor Wilson Shannon, who finding that his conduct had been exemplary during his confinement restored Mr. Wright to liberty and citizenship on the 14th day of October, 1843. Mr. Wright returned to Cuyahoga Falls, and though he never fully reformed from his intemperate habits, was ever thereafter a law-abiding citizen, and the father of quite a large family of highly respectable sons and daughters.