“We could’ve killed him, gone home and had dinner. That’s how strong the hate was,” Sakeim Dowdell recalled, 52 years after a Lawrence police officer shot and killed his younger brother, Rick “Tiger” Dowdell.
All told, Tiger Dowdell’s murder — at the hands of a police department that had threatened to kill him shortly before his death, his grandmother told the KBI — drastically changed the fabric of Lawrence.
A KBI case file leaves one prevailing question which may ultimately be lost to history: Why did Lawrence Police Officer William Garrett shoot and kill Rick “Tiger” Dowdell on July 16, 1970?
