ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. -- Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in Tennessee.
What many don't know is that King was almost assassinated in St. Johns County, said former Jacksonville detective Sgt. Lee Cody in 1964.
"I can tell you exactly what happened as far as I was concerned that particular evening," Cody said.
He was a homicide detective at the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in the 1960's and was sent to St. Augustine to assist law enforcement when tensions were high during the Civil Rights Movement in the city.
"We were dispatched to standby, and they really and truly expected trouble in St. Johns or they wouldn't have sent homicide detectives there," Cody remembered.
Historians say supporters of the civil rights movement offered a small beach house in Crescent Beach to King as a place to stay during his trip to St. Augustine in 1964.
"All of a sudden, something came over the police radio of the St. Augustine Police Department," Cody said. "There was big trouble at that house where Martin Luther King was. And they all knew where Martin Luther King was staying. That was common knowledge to law enforcement at that time."
He said, when he and other officers arrived, they learned the Ku Klux Klan had fired into the house and started a fire.
"They went all the way around the building shooting concrete blocks full of holes with buckshot or whatever firearms they had with them," Cody said.
But King was not in the house during the attack. Why wasn't he there? There's no way to corroborate the next part of this story.
Sgt. Cody said years later, a relative of the KKK leaders told him why King wasn't in the house during the attack.
"A member of the clan was an FBI informant and was able to get to that house," he said. "They said, 'We're on the way. You better get out of there and get him out.' And that's what they did. Just prior to the arrival of the clan destroying everything, the FBI was able to get Dr. King out of there."
Cody did not continue the investigation into the shooting and fire because it was out of his jurisdiction. He said no one was arrested for it.
Based on his experience as a detective in the area, "Most of the men in law enforcement in St. Johns County at the time, were all members of the clan."
Four years later, King was assassinated in Tennessee. Cody said the informant saved King's life in Florida.
"He wouldn't have died in St. Johns County on St. Augustine Beach. They would've killed him," he said.