Before dawn on March 11, 1926, a Peerless touring car was tearing north out of Anacostia at 60 miles an hour. It was packed with 180 quarts of corn whiskey. Behind it, four Metropolitan Police officers were leaning out of a chase car with revolvers drawn.
At the wheel was Francis Aebersold, 19 years old, of 3929 Ellicott Street NW. Before sunrise he would be on the pavement at 13th and D Streets Northeast with a bullet in his right leg.
Aebersold was the son of Swiss immigrant John Aebersold, a gardener, and his German-born wife Mary. The family kept a modest home in the far upper northwest, near Tenleytown. Older sister Catherine and her young son Joseph rounded out the household.
The 1930 U.S. Census would catch them all still at 3929 Ellicott. But by early 1926 the teenage son had drifted well out of his father’s gardening trade and into a very different line of work.
A 60-mile-an-hour chase from Anacostia to Kingman Park
According to the Evening Star, Detective Charles A. Berry of the Eleventh Precinct was riding with Policemen Nicola and Dull and motorcycle policeman Fleischauer. They spotted a “large rum-running automobile speeding toward the city on Minnesota avenue, near the junction of Pennsylvania avenue.”
That was in the pre-dawn hours. The Star put the top speed of both cars at about 60 miles an hour. The Eleventh Precinct station, where the officers were based, sat on Nichols Avenue Southeast, at the foot of what is now the Anacostia commercial strip.
The chase held together for a mile or so through Southeast. Then, near 13th and Kentucky Avenue SE, the two men in the fleeing car opened fire on the police auto. The officers returned fire through their own windshield and kept coming.
The car tried to make the corner at 13th and D Streets NE and lost it. As the Star reported, it “skidded and swung almost entirely around to head again in the direction from which it had come.” It came to a stop. Two men jumped out and ran.
The shot at 13th and D NE
According to Berry’s own official report, one of the fugitives got off two shots at the officers before Nicola fired. Berry believed it was Nicola’s bullet that dropped Aebersold. He went down with a wound in the right leg. His passenger scaled a fence, ducked into an alley, and disappeared.
Officers pulled Aebersold off the pavement and drove him to Casualty Hospital, where a Dr. Slercia dressed the wound. He was then transferred to Gallinger Municipal Hospital, the city’s public hospital, later renamed DC General. His condition was called “satisfactory” by that afternoon. He was charged with possession and transportation of liquor.
Left behind at 13th and D was the Peerless touring car, its body dinged from the running gun battle, and 180 quarts of corn whiskey. The Washington Daily News played the seizure across page one under the headline “AUTOIST SHOT IN POLICE CHASE.”
Detective Berry, again
For Detective Berry, this was familiar ground. Five years earlier, in the summer of 1921, Berry and a partner had chased another rum-running car through Southwest DC. That battle ended with a crash on New Jersey Avenue SE and three bootleggers throwing their revolvers into the wrecked automobile and surrendering.
By 1926 Berry was still riding the Eleventh Precinct, still catching young men with liquor cargo, still willing to lean out of a moving car with a revolver in his hand. In 1930 the census would find him at 244 15th Street SE with his wife Emma and a 15-year-old daughter.
What happened to Aebersold
Francis Aebersold survived his wound and his court case. When the United States entered World War II, he was still living in DC and registered for the draft in 1942, the Prohibition chase already a decade and a half in the rearview mirror.
The March 11 chase was one small entry in a national Prohibition ledger that turned DC into a running gun battle for the better part of thirteen years. Aebersold was one of the youngest men to catch a Metropolitan Police bullet inside the wet economy and live to register for a draft card. If you like this genre of story, keep reading with three more wild DC police chases from the same era.