In 1931 in the small southeast Washington town of Asotin, a 12 year old boy named Herbert Nicholls Jr. shot and killed the town sheriff. Nicholls was starving and abused, and had run away from home and broken into the local store to steal some food. The sheriff came in to find him, and Nicholls fired the gun with the intent to scare him away. The bullet hit the sheriff in the head, killing him instantly. Nancy Bartley wrote the biography on Nicholls, titled The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff: The