The Samuel Maverick Inquest

Three of the people shot in the Boston Massacre died almost immediately: Crispus Attucks, James Caldwell, and Samuel Gray.

The soldiers’ guns also wounded several men and boys, and by the next morning one of those had died: seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick.

On 6 Mar 1770, Thomas Crafts convened his second coroner’s inquest in two days to consider Maverick’s case. While the jury that had looked into Caldwell’s death included some prominent Bostonians and the victim’s employer, this men on this second jury appear more typical: ordinary citizens from the neighborhood.

The foreman was Benjamin Harrod. The town had two men by that name, father and son. The father owned the building where Henry Knox rented space for his bookstore in 1775. After the war they moved to Haverhill and Newburyport, respectively.

Harrod and his thirteen fellow jurors determined that Maverick had died after a “Musket Bullet entered into his Belly and lodged between his Ribs.” Later Crafts produced that musket ball in court, according to the notes of John Adams.

Samuel Maverick had worked for and lived with Isaac Greenwood, an ivory turner in the North End. The teen-aged apprentice shared a bed with Greenwood’s nine-year-old son John, a notable voice in this week’s American Revolution documentary on P.B.S.

Two years after the Massacre, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson appointed Isaac Greenwood to be another coroner in Suffolk County.