On September 5, 1917, Austin Green, an African American man, shot and seriously wounded a teenager named Jessie Roth on a busy street in Henderson, North Carolina. Authorities never did ascertain a motive for the attack and surmised that Green must have either been under the influence of alcohol or drugs or was suffering from a mental illness of some kind. Upon hearing rumors that local whites planned to organize a lynch mob, authorities acted quickly to transport Green out of Henderson to the state prison in Raleigh to await trial. On October 2, he was convicted of assault and sentenced to twenty years hard labor at the state prison. Jessie Roth later died from her wounds in a Richmond (Virginia) hospital. Green's sentence was thrown out in 1919 due to his mental illness.