Following months of assaults on young white women in late 1900, in which witnesses had identified a "large white man" and a "slight black man" as having been seen in the vicinity of the attacks, Fred Alexander, a 22-year-old black veteran of the Spanish–American War, was arrested on circumstantial evidence for the attacks. The police had moved him to the penitentiary during questioning, but a lynch mob was forming in Leavenworth. The sheriff needed to bring him to Leavenworth for arraignment at the county court. He refused the governor's offer of state militia, and was unable to protect the prisoner. On January 15, 1901, Alexander was taken from jail by a mob of 5,000 people and to the site of the murder of Pearl Forbes, where he was brutally lynched: burned alive. He protested his innocence to the end. An inquest concluded he had been killed by "persons unknown".