- Crime and Prosecution - Page 18

Fifteen or twenty minutes later she heard another series of reports, more than the first time, perhaps six or seven explosions.  It was the same firecracker sound coming from the same direction.

The explosions were loud and distinct, and she was certain of the direction.  They were from the east, across an open area.  On the other side of that clearing, a couple of hundred yards distant, was the back of W. T. Zeigler Furniture.

At about 7:30, Kenneth and Linda Roach were driving south on Dillard, approaching Route 50.  As they drove past the furniture store they heard a single loud pop, like a firecracker.  It seemed to come from the direction of the store. 

Linda Roach turned to ask her husband whether they had blown a tire—the sound was that loud and immediate.

A few seconds after the first report, they heard a series of explosions, ten or more shots; to Ken Roach it sounded like a string of firecrackers going off all at once.

They kept on driving.

Between 7:30 and 8:30 that evening, twenty-four-year-old Barbara Woodard was leaving the Tri-City shopping center.  Most of the stores in the mall were still open, and she had just finished some late shopping with a friend  She was leaving the mall by the west entrance, which was on Dillard Street, beside a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, directly across the road from Zeigler Furniture.   

She looked over at the store and saw that it was completely dark. She thought that was odd.  She noticed two cars parked in the narrow front lot of the store.  One of the cars was green.  Her identification of the second car was vague.  Originally she told the police that it was dark-colored.  At the trial she retracted that.

She also saw a man: a tall, thin white man with close-cut hair.  He wore a dark blue or black jacket and was standing behind the glass doors of the store, as if he had just entered or was about to walk out.  Barbara Woodard knew the owners of the furniture store.  Though she couldn’t see him well enough to be sure, Barbara Woodard believed that the man behind the glass doors was Tommy Zeigler.

Sometime between 7:00 and 8:30—accounts differ—Samuel Harrison, two of his teenage children, and two of their friends were shopping at the TG&Y variety store in the Tri-City mall when they met a fruit picker named Felton Thomas, whom they knew from Oakland and the citrus groves.  Thomas was one of the hundreds of itinerant pickers who returned to Orange County every year for the harvest.

Thomas asked if they planned to return to Oakland.  Samuel Harrison said yes, and Thomas asked him for a ride.

Thomas sat in the backseat and said little.  But as they got into Oakland, Thomas mentioned that he had just left Charlie Mays.   Something strange had happened to them, Thomas said.  Something was wrong at Zeigler Furniture.