Coy, a Kentucky bank-robber and a cell house orderly on Alcatraz managed to take the gun cage in the main cell house and seize the two firearms held there. However, due to a breach of regulations by a prison officer, the key to the yard door, from which the inmates planned to gain access to the prison launch, was not in its place and inadvertently doomed the escape attempt. The prisoners refused to surrender and Coy, Cretzer, Hubbard, and two prison guards died in the fighting, which ended two days later, on May 4, 1946.
Carnes survived the "battle", and because of his youth and because he refused to kill the guards when ordered to do so by his colleagues, he was spared the death penalty; instead, he received a life sentence. Shockley and Thompson were sentenced to death and subsequently executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin in 1948.[3]