It’s been almost 100 years since Deputy Sheriff Lawrence McParlin, the first Charles County Sheriff’s officer known to have been killed in the line of duty, was shot while serving a warrant in Washington, D.C. On Wednesday, May 21, the Charles County Sheriff’s Office honored McParlin, naming a bridge crossing Mason’s Springs on Route 225 after the fallen officer.
The compelling story intrigued Lt. Eddie Godwin of the Charles County Sheriff’s Office, who spent eight months planning the bridge dedication.
“I had attended a bridge dedication for a fallen officer in West Virginia,” Godwin said, adding he got the idea from that event.
The story of McParlin’s death is fascinating stuff, even more than nine decades later. Although officers in the department knew about the case, not a whole lot was known about the officer. His burial place was unknown and they had no photographs of him. Godwin changed all of that with determination and some good old fashioned investigative work. He spent time at the National Archives, found newspaper clippings about the murder in papers as far away as New York. He recruited an archivist who “helped me dig.”
According to a Charles County Sheriff’s Office press release, in 2012, Kathryn Lynn, an Arizona resident and a cousin of McParlin’s wife, S. Ethel Bradley, contacted the sheriff’s office to provide the agency with information about McParlin’s burial site. As a historian for one of Bradley’s ancestral families, Lynn had been researching the location where her late cousin’s husband had been laid to rest. After learning McParlin was buried at the Hartland Central Cemetery in Hartland, N.Y., she remembered a post on an Internet message board she had read several months earlier from a member of the CCSO who was also searching for the officer’s final resting place. Unable to recall specifically who wrote the post, she contacted the CCSO by e-mail to offer the information.
Godwin, assigned to the Executive Services Division and unofficially as one the CCSO’s resident historians, received her e-mail and was instantly intrigued.
“It immediately sparked my personal interest and I became consumed to learn more about this man and his service to this organization,” Godwin said.
As the facts came out, there were so many interesting facets to the story. McParlin had only been a deputy for a few months before travelling to Washington, D.C. to serve a summons on Herbert Copeland relating to an embezzlement charge. Unbeknownst to the officer, Copeland was also wanted for murder in South Carolina.
McParlin and a representative of the Austin Construction Company traveled to Washington, D.C., to serve a witness summons on Copeland related to the investigation of another man accused of embezzlement at the Naval Powder Factory in Indian Head. Prior to the summons service, McParlin found Officer John Conrad, a 13-year-veteran of the Metropolitan Police Department assigned to the Fourth Precinct, walking his beat and asked for assistance. Together they confronted Copeland who, without warning, shot and killed both officers.
During the subsequent search for Copeland, MDP Lt. David Dunigan tracked him to address on Carrollsburg Place in Southwest D.C. and found him hiding under a bed. Dunigan—a 43-year veteran of the MPD and a widower with five adult children—was shot during an exchange of gunfire and succumbed to his injuries at the scene. Copeland sustained multiple gunshot wounds during the encounter but survived. Other officers at the scene to
