Burglar Shoots Young Boy in Salt Lake Home!

Joseph David Burbidge as a young man

On 2 December 1919, the Burbidge family of northern Utah opened their newspapers to discover that young Joe Burbidge, son of Joseph and Fannie, had been shot. The article reads as follows:

Salt Lake. Dec. 2 — Joseph D. Burbidge, 17 years of age, son of Inspector of Police Joseph Burbidge, was shot in the left forearm last night, at 8:30 o’clock, by a burglar, whom he surprised at work in the Burbidge home at 820 West Second South street. Refusing to obey the intruder’s command to “put up his hands,” the youth obtained a revolver in the bedroom clothes closet and while struggling with the thief was shot in the arm…¹

The youth was my grandfather. Luckily for all of us, his many descendants, he did survive. He spent his seventeenth birthday in the hospital recuperating from his flesh wound.  It seems likely that many of his Burbidge and Parry relatives would have been there to wish him well. His parents, Joseph Edward Burbidge and Fannie Louise Parry, were most likely at his bedside.

According to the news report, they had been out for the evening, attending the theater. Joseph was spending his evening with next door neighbors. He heard a dog barking and when he stepped outside saw a light on in his own house. He went next door to investigate and surprised the intruder. Was he brave or simply impulsive when he dashed for the gun?

Did his Dad, a Police Inspector, go out looking for the burglar? Was a man hunt declared? Police families can be very protective of their own. Unfortunately, I’ve never found any follow up to this story. And all of the people who might have been able to give details
are long gone.

Joe would eventually go on to become a cop like his Dad and Uncle. He served as a criminal investigator, an expert in fingerprint identification and photography for the Salt Lake City Police Department. His father became Chief of Police for SLC in 1920, and one of the longest serving Chiefs of that time. 

Footnotes

1. “Burglar Shoots A Young Boy in Salt Lake Home,” Ogden Standard, December 2, 1919, page 10, column 1; digital image, Utah Digital Newspapers (digitalnewspapers.org : 28 Aug 2013).