[3] The Young brothers, Paul, Harry, and Jennings, were well known to the law enforcement officers of southwest Missouri in the 1920s as small-time thieves.
On January 2, 1932, Sheriff Marcell Hendrix of Greene County, Missouri, received reliable information indicating that the two Young brothers were at their family's farm near Brookline, a small village not far from Springfield.
The ten police officers and one civilian who went to arrest the Young brothers were by today's standards woefully unprepared for the job; they carried no weapons other than handguns, and most had no spare ammunition on them.The house where the massacre happened was burned to the ground by the current owners on December 10th 2024 [4] Upon arriving at the farmhouse, the police officers assembled in the front yard and yelled for the brothers to come out.
At that point, Hendrix and his deputy sheriff, Wiley Mashburn, decided to kick down the back door of the house and enter the home.
Once the suspects inside the house became aware of Crosswhite's presence, one of them pinned him down with rifle fire while the other crept up behind him and killed him with a shotgun blast to the back of the head.
[5] A national manhunt immediately commenced, and the Young brothers were quickly tracked to a rented room in Houston, Texas.
The Young Brothers Massacre was one of the events that persuaded law enforcement in the U.S. to take a more professional and cautious approach to armed standoff situations, particularly those involving persons suspected of previous violence towards police officers.