DEADLY CONSEQUENCES
— PART 1 OF 10 —
IN THE BEGINNING
FROM ‘THE NOTORIOUS ASHLEY GANG’ BY HIX. C. STUART
The killing of Seminole DeSoto Tiger thrusts pioneering Ashley family on wrong side of law
BY GREGORY ENNS
A quarter mile off Old Dixie Highway, in what is now southern Martin County, 63-year-old Lugenia Ashley walked from her whitewashed home along a sandy trail of pine trees and palmetto brush. The trail brought her to a makeshift cemetery, where she could reflect on the loss of nearly half her family members.
It was early November 1924.
There was the grave of her husband, Joe, who at 62 had been killed in a shootout with lawmen just 10 months earlier. Next, was the grave of her son, Bob, who had died in a shootout with police at age 20, while trying to break his brother out of the Dade County Jail in 1915.
The freshest graves of all, dug just a few days earlier, were those of her son, John, the 36-year-old ringleader of the notorious Ashley Gang, and two of his gang members who were killed in a shooting at the Sebastian River Bridge, Nov. 1, 1924.
Missing from the cemetery were what would have been graves for two of Lugenia’s other sons, Ed, 30, and Frank, 20, who were lost at sea while they were bootlegging booze from the Bahamas in 1921.
The cemetery visit was a stark contrast to the Joe and Lugenia raising their five sons and four daughters in the Florida scrub. Before moving to the east coast at the turn of the century for Joe’s job working on the railway, the family had been living on the west coast in the community of Buckingham, northeast of Fort Myers.