with 70-150 law enforcement officers, including Ben E. Cabell. The officers were overwhelmed, and upon reaching Brooks, who was on the second story of the courthouse, the mob tied a rope around his neck and pulled him him out a window. Brooks landed on his head on the street below, where more of the mob waited. Despite being unconscious, he was subjected to further violence by the mob, including being kicked and stomped on. A contemporary report described Brooks' face as having been "crushed into a pulp". Brooks may have been dead by this point. He was dragged by a car to Elks Arch at the intersection of Main Street and Akard Street, an arch built by the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks to celebrate the organization's national meeting. There the mob hanged him from a telephone pole or an iron spike beneath the arch. The mob's size was estimated to be 2,000-6,000 people. Aftermath After the lynching, the city's sheriff A. L. Ledbetter said that it had been "impossible to protect" Brooks. Erasmus Gilbert Senter, a member of the Texas Senate, wrote an open letter criticizing the mob's ignorance of the rule of law, but many in the community did not share his view. The lynching was widely covered in contemporary papers. An investigation undertaken by Dallas authorities never named any members of the mob. Postcards were published depicting the event. One such postcard included written commentary on the back: "This is a token of a great day we had in Dallas, March 3, a negro was hung for an assault on a three year old girl." History professor Terry Anne Scott wrote that the postcard conveyed a "grotesque, murderous scene" as a "salutation and [. . .] a friendly jolt for a reciprocal jester." Such postcards were reprinted thousands of times. William H. Atwell, then a United States District Attorney, denied requests to halt the mailing of them stating that the only law broken was "the law of common decency and love of the city in which one lives". Amon G. Carter, of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, had written a special edition covering the lynching by 12:30 that same day. Two paperboys traveled with Carter to Dallas to sell it, selling all of the one thousand copies they had brought in thirty minutes. They had sold a further four thousand copies by the day's end, and one