By Danielle Salisbury
MLive
JACKSON, MI — In 1935, a governor pardoned Robert Irving Latimer after he served about 45 years of a life sentence for killing his mother.
Below a photograph of a suited Latimer, the story of his release mentions Latimer’s insistence he was innocent of matricide. It talks of the jobs Latimer had waiting for him.
It says nothing of George Haight, the guard he poisoned to death en route to a successful, but brief prison escape in 1893. Latimer, who admitted to using prussic acid to render Haight “unconscious,” never was prosecuted for Haight’s death, and it seems no one remembered the 66-year-old “gate keeper” at Jackson’s old state prison.
The Michigan Department of Corrections lacks a record of Haight and his name does not appear in a listing of department on-duty deaths, which calls Warden T.B. Catlin and Deputy Warden Fred Menhennett the earliest fallen employees. Prisoners stabbed them to death in December 1921. The first officer to die is said to be Earl DeMarse in September 1973. Even stories of the escape seem to mention Haight only in passing and there is no known photograph of him.
“All these articles, he’s just a guard killed. A blurb,” Corrections Officer Jeff Reasoner said. Even the state forgot him, Reasoner said. “I think it is a travesty.”
Reasoner, one of 32 select members of the department’s statewide Honor Guard, is trying to recognize the officer, 120 years after he became the first corrections staff member to die while doing his job. He wants to see Haight’s name at last added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Full story: Corrections officer trying to add officer to national memorial 120 years after prisoner killed him