Christopher Seider

[1][2][3] He was 11 years old when he was shot and killed by customs officer Ebenezer Richardson[4] in Boston on February 22, 1770.

[5][6] His funeral became a major political event, with his death heightening tensions that erupted into the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770.

Richardson was a customs officer who had tried to disperse a protest in front of the shop of Loyalist Theophilus Lillie.

The crowd threw stones that broke Lillie's windows and struck his wife.

Richardson was convicted of murder that spring but received a royal pardon and a new position within the customs service on the grounds that he had acted in self-defense.

The Bloody Massacre , Paul Revere 's engraving of The Boston Massacre of March 1770. In the background on the right, the Customs House has been renamed "Butcher's Hall" and a gun can be seen firing from a window, an oblique reference to Seider's death.