Orange Sells testified at the trial of Champ Ferguson after the war that, "The night before the killing, we heard a rustling on the stairway and immediately three men came into the room. One had a lighted candle and the other two had revolvers. They looked into each of our faces and after they got around, one of them remarked, ‘There are none of them here,’ and went out. They had hardly got out—had not been gone more than half a minute—until we heard firing in the next room to us. Some six shots were fired, and immediately afterward a Negro soldier was carried, dead, out of that room. Another Negro soldier ran into our room wrapped in a sheet." Two different sources sited the death of at least two Negroes at the hospital, but neither listed their names.