From Newsgroup: alt.law-enforcement

LEO honor

Jay Berardino -+
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"In under three minutes, on a Washington sidewalk in 1950, roughly twenty-seven shots were fired. When it was over, two men were dead and
four were wounded rCo and the President of the United States, who had been napping upstairs, was unharmed. He was alive because of one of the dead men. His name was Leslie Coffelt, and he was an officer of the White House
Police.
On November 1, 1950, President Harry Truman was not living in the White
House. The building was being gutted and rebuilt, and during the
renovations the president and his family were staying across the street
at Blair House. Truman walked to work. He stopped at red lights. His
security was thin by any modern standard rCo a few officers in guard
booths and on the steps, in plain sight of a busy public street.
That afternoon, two men approached Blair House from opposite directions
with loaded pistols. They were Puerto Rican nationalists, and they had
come to kill the president to draw the world's attention to their cause
for the island's independence. Upstairs, behind an open window in the
heat, Harry Truman lay down for an afternoon nap.
One gunman opened fire on the front of the house. The other, Griselio Torresola rCo the better shot of the two rCo walked straight up to the west guard booth, where Leslie Coffelt was stationed.
He shot Coffelt three times, hitting him in the chest, and moved on
toward the door, toward the stairs, toward the president.
Leslie Coffelt was, by every medical measure, already dying. Three
bullets were in him. But he did not go down and stay down. He steadied
himself against the guard booth, raised his weapon, took aim at
Torresola rCo and with a single shot to the head, killed the gunman
instantly, ending the attack on that side of the house.
It was the last thing he would do. Coffelt was carried away and died of
his wounds a few hours later. The other attacker, badly wounded, was
captured on the steps; he never reached the door.
The whole thing had lasted less than three minutes.
Harry Truman went on to finish his presidency. The man who had tried to
kill him was sentenced to death, and Truman himself later commuted that sentence to life in prison.
There is a small bronze plaque on the wall at Blair House. Most people
walking down Pennsylvania Avenue pass it without noticing. It carries
the name of Leslie Coffelt and the words that he gave his life in
defense of the President of the United States.
In the entire history of the country, he remains the only member of a president's protective detail ever to die doing it. And he did not
simply die at his post. Already carrying three bullets, in the last
clear moments he had, he used them to stop the man walking toward the president's door." See less
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