Mr. Stern. Then you took them into the sheriff's office?
Mr. Sorrels. Yes, sir.
Mr. Stern. What was going on in the sheriff's office?
Mr. Sorrels. At that time one of the deputy sheriffs was in the interrogation room taking a statement from some witness there. And I did not want to just stay there and wait too long, so I asked him would he also write up the statements on it—Mr. Brennan and the colored boy. And I then started out in the hall of the sheriff's office there with the idea of going back to see if I could locate other witnesses, when Chief Deputy Sheriff Mr. Allan Sweatt told me there was another witness across the hallway, near Mr. Sweatt's office—he is the polygraph operator there, and his office is not in the same area as the sheriff's office but across the hall—that there was an FBI agent taking a statement over there from a person.
So I accompanied him over there and hadn't been in there but just a few minutes until Mr. Sweatt came and called me out and says "Forrest, there are some people here I think you ought to talk to."
Mr. Stern. Whose statement was being taken by the FBI?
Mr. Sorrels. I don't recall. And, at that time——
Mr. Stern. Do you recall what their statement was—what their testimony was?
Mr. Sorrels. No, I don't, because I wasn't in there but just a very short time. And this FBI agent was questioning about what they had seen and so forth. I don't recall—it was being taken down at the time.
So I went out, and they had Mr. and Mrs. Arnold there. And Mr. Arnold, a young man, and his wife, very young, said that they were standing on the side of the street on Houston Street, there by the courthouse building, and that they—this is prior to the time of the arrival of the President there, some 20 to 25 minutes beforehand, he said.