Samuel Richard Shockley, Jr. (January 12, 1909 – December 3, 1948) was an inmate at Alcatraz prison, who was executed for his participation in the Alcatraz uprising or Battle of Alcatraz in 1946. Background Sam Shockley was born in Cerro Gordo, Caney Township, Little River County, Arkansas. His father, Richard Shockley, was a sharecropper who married three times and had eight children. As a newborn baby, Sam survived an accident when his 9-year-old sister, Myrtle, was looking after the other children while their parents worked on the land; with baby Sam on her arm, she came too close to the fireplace and her dress caught fire. She ran out of the house and collapsed, throwing the baby clear, and both lay outside for six hours. Both were burned, and Sam had fallen hard. Sam's mother, Annyer Eugenia, Richard's second wife, died when Sam was 7 years old. Sam started running away from home after his stepmother, Sally Barton, died of malaria in 1920. When he was 12, his father took him out of school to work in the fields; his formal education ended at the third grade. By the age of 13 he exhibited signs of serious instability. In 1927 he left the family for good and became a transient. Soon after that he was arrested for stealing chickens, automobile tires and accessories in Garvin County, Oklahoma, and on July 3, 1928 was sentenced to one year in the Oklahoma State Reformatory at Granite. While in prison Sam Shockley was beaten by a fellow inmate, suffering brain damage and numerous scars on his head and neck. He was released in July 1929. In the early 1930s he was arrested several times for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, escaped from the jail in Birmingham, Alabama, and was beaten by a police officer, receiving further head trauma. In June 1936, Shockley married Betty Moore (born 1923 in Shoshone, Idaho), but the marriage only lasted a year and a half. They divorced in June 1939. In March 1938, Shockley was arrested with Edward Johnson for robbing a man of his car, robbing the bank of Paoli, Oklahoma, and kidnapping two employees, Mr. and Mrs. D. F. Pendley; Shockley attempted to escape during the arrest. They were both convicted of kidnapping. Although the Pendleys had not died, the prosecution still requested death sentences. However, the jury spared both of them from execution and they were