injured. The most seriously injured were all Italian prisoners-of-war; they were transported to hospitals for treatment. One Italian spent 16 months recovering from his injuries. The military policemen restored order without taking anyone into custody. Later, they claimed it had been too dark to identify any of the participants in the riot. The next morning, Lomax, accompanied by a Black MP, discovered the body of prisoner Guglielmo Olivotto, hanging from a noose on the obstacle course. Investigation By sunset on the day Olivotto's body was discovered, Colonel Harry Branson, Fort Lawton's commanding officer, had ordered all evidence destroyed. No fingerprints were secured, no footprints saved, no weapons properly catalogued. When Branson tried to ship the black soldiers to San Francisco that same day, he was countermanded after a subordinate reported his actions to the Pentagon. The riot and lynching was front page news in Seattle, and became a major story across the United States. The United States Army sent a young prosecutor, Leon Jaworski of Houston, to conduct a two-month investigation. During weeks of interrogations, Jaworski's investigators offered immunity to several soldiers who would agree to testify. Most refused, including Samuel Snow and Roy Montgomery. Five black soldiers agreed, however, to testify for the prosecution in exchange for immunity. Six decades later, all five were said to have had unrelated grudges against many of the men they accused. Most Italian prisoners-of-war were unable to identify a single black soldier, citing the darkness and confusion. Two, however, offered confident identifications of dozens of the Americans, and Jaworski used those two as his main witnesses. Decades later, a review of the case found that both had been previously identified as unreliable security risks by officers of the Military Intelligence Corps. As reports of the riot and lynching reached the Pentagon, General Elliot Cooke was sent to Seattle, charged with determining who, if anyone, had failed to prevent the riot and lynching. Cooke conducted an investigation before Jaworski had arrived. Cooke was not responsible for helping Jaworski with the criminal investigation, but Jaworski was given access to all of Cooke's interrogations and conclusions. In a classified report to Virgil L. Peterson, the Inspector General, Cooke concluded that the Fort Lawton commander had botched the initial criminal investigation, recommended Branson's demotion and/or reassignment, and ordered that Private Lomax be court-martialed for abandoning his post during the riot and lynching. Defense After weeks of investigation,