For more than a century, no one alive in Everett, Washington, had even heard his name. Now the city's police department has rebuilt the story of Charles Edward Ray, a fallen officer whose memory had slipped entirely out of its records, and has worked to give him the recognition he never received.
The discovery began with a simple question. Everett Police Investigations Lieutenant Greg Sutherland was reviewing the department's history of fallen officers when he came across a newspaper clipping mentioning a man named Ed Ray. The problem was that no one in the department knew who he was, and that uncertainty turned into a months-long project.
The work drew on a team of investigators. Detective Susan Logothetti helped build a family tree, while Officer Alyssa Gratzer dug through old archives, census records and newspaper articles. Working alongside a library historian, they pieced together his life and confirmed his swear-in date of October 15, 1906.
They learned that Charles Edward Ray was born in Missouri in 1858 and, as a child, hid in the cellar of his family's home during the Civil War battle of Wilson's Creek. He later moved west, worked as a barber in Everett, married his wife Lola, and joined the Everett Police Department in his late 40s.
According to accounts reconstructed from newspaper articles, Ray responded to a drunken disturbance near a saloon on Hewitt Avenue and tried to arrest a 23-year-old mill worker named William Mark. Witnesses described the man striking the officer in the temple, knocking him to the ground, and then kicking him. A mail carrier helped hold the suspect until more officers arrived, but Ray died minutes later.
Authorities sought to charge the man with murder, but forensics in 1906 were limited. The coroner ruled that Ray's death was caused by exhaustion while making an arrest, the murder charge did not stick, and the officer gradually disappeared from history, his record later confused with that of another man with a similar name. Months after his death, his wife Lola died of typhoid pneumonia, leaving their young daughter Felita orphaned, and her descendants are now spread across the country.
The investigators also searched for his grave, combing muddy hillsides, old maps and overgrown ground until they located Ray's headstone, and new headstones are now being prepared along with a planned ceremony. During National Police Week in May, Lieutenant Sutherland and members of the Everett Police Department traveled to Washington, D.C., where Officer Ray's name was added to the National Law Enforcement Memorial.