When white mobs tried to storm the courthouse, the Kentucky National Guard and the state police opened fire on them, shooting over 50 people.

The Brooklyn Eagle remarked that the incident was "the first time south of Mason and Dixon's Line that any mob of this sort had actually met the volley fire of soldiers."

Brigadier General Francis C. Marshall declared martial law, secured the area with tanks, machine guns, and snipers, forced the mob to leave, enacted citywide censorship, and had military patrols guard various parts of the county, including the black districts.

In 1917, he choked, raped and beat a black woman at Governor and Canal Streets in Evansville, Indiana, leaving her for dead.

He was eventually enlisted to serve in the army at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, where he raped and strangled a woman of "uncertain color" in February 1919.

[1] On February 4, 1920, her school satchel and cap were found near a fence bordering a large cornfield in southern Fayette County by a farmer named Speed Collins.

[2] Collins and local store owner Claude B. Elkin, along with a Thomas Foley, left for the spot where the satchel and cap were found.

[2] The men then called the sheriff's office and the deputies soon arrived, led by Captain Volney G. Mullikin and his bloodhounds, who followed the large man's tracks leading into the town of Keene, in Jessamine County.

[2] Continuing to follow the trails into Nicholasville, police questioned a farmer, Will Hughes, who had seen a black man walking along the pike, covered in mud to his knees.

For every time a shot was fired I could see a man fall and they were killing men that did not have anything to protect themselves with and did not wish to hurt anyone but wanted to get that negro who murdered little Geneva Hardman."

Amid looting and fears of further violence, Edwin Morrow requested Federal help, and 1,200 Army soldiers led by Brigadier General Francis C. Marshall were brought to Lexington on special trains.

In a show of force, Marshall did not have Lockett transported discreetly, but instead had the prisoner, guarded by 400 federal soldiers, openly marched in the streets to the train station to return him to the state penitentiary.

He ordered local telephone and telegraph companies to shut down all communication within 100 miles from Lexington and banned any messages from leaving the city.

However, on February 26, 1920, they concluded that handing down indictments with subsequent trials would "only tend to aggravate an already tense situation, engender more passion and bitter feelings in the County and State, and keep alive such as now exists.

He refused to make a statement when he was taken back to his cell, but prison officials claimed that he had prayed loudly and had sung hymns during the night.