A family is finally getting answers to a nearly 80-year mystery behind the death of their loved one during an encounter with Alabama police.
Hattie DeBardelaben was killed by police officers on March 23, 1945, when they showed up at her home in Autaugaville, a town near Montgomery. Although some of her family members, including her youngest son, witnessed the tragic encounter, her seven children have never talked about it – a fact that left her grandchildren with lots of questions, according to AL.com.
Hattie’s granddaughter, Mary DeBardelaben, spent years searching for answers about how her grandmother died in police custody. Her search came up empty until Oct. 26, 2024, when she received federal documents with details about the case.
Mary received the documents from the National Archives and Records Administration, which released the information under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act – an act signed in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump that established an independent review board to investigate and disclose information about cold cases from the period between 1940 and 1979.
Although the documents gave Mary the answers she’d been looking for, she couldn’t help but grieve the violent circumstances surrounding her grandmother’s death.
“I cried for three days straight when I got the documents and read descriptions of what happened to her,” Mary told CNN. “I was drained, I just couldn’t function.”
According to the federal documents, four officers arrived at their home on March 23, 1945, claiming to be looking for illegal whiskey. Hattie told officers she didn’t have whiskey, but they searched her home anyway. During the search, one of the officers hit one of Hattie’s nephews.
When she asked them to stop, officers then turned their aggression to Hattie, hitting her and knocking her into a pot of boiling water, as CNN reports. Police put Hattie and her youngest son, Edward, in the back of a police car, where she died on the way to the jail house. An undertaker testified that Hattie’s head “sagged” when she was brought in, suggesting that her neck was broken.
After seeing the evidence collected in the case for themselves, Hattie’s grandchildren now understand why their parents couldn’t bring themselves to talk about what happened.
“Seeing that, I’m sure, was so traumatic for my father, and was one of the reasons that he never said a single word, nor did he or his other six sisters and brothers, ever had a conversation with us about what took place,” Dan DeBardelaben, one of Hattie’s grandsons told AL.com. “It was a combination of fear and just the trauma being traumatized from an event like that.”