“Oh, yes, the guards called to him to stop. They fired a few shots in the air, then to kill. They got him just as he went over the fence. They said if he’d had two good arms he’d have made it, he was moving that fast. Seventeen bullet holes in him. They didn’t have to shoot him that much…What was one Negro, more or less, among two hundred of ’em? He wasn’t Tom to them, he was an escaping prisoner.”
– Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 24. Atticus announces the news that Tom Robinson is dead, shot seventeen times reportedly as he made a run for the fence of the prison yard. The overkill nature of the seventeen bullet holes suggests the racist nature of the guards.