The town was rife with talk about the incident at Bryant's store. On Friday August 26, Carolyn's husband Roy returned from Texas, where he had been hauling shrimp. That afternoon at his store, a young black customer told Roy Bryant what "the talk" was all about, and identified a visiting teenager from Chicago as the offender. To do nothing after hearing the story involving his wife, Bryant later told an interviewer, would have shown himself to be "a coward and a fool." Returning home, Roy asked Carolyn if there was something she wanted to tell him. Her denial angered Roy, and he demanded to hear his wife's version of what had happened inside the store. She told him the version of events she would later repeat in his trial.
On the evening of the 27th, Bryant and Milam, along with Carolyn Bryant and Johnny Washington (a black man who performed odd jobs for Bryant) set off in a pickup looking for their target. Spotting a black teenager walking home with some molasses and snuff, Bryant ordered Washington to throw the boy in the back of the truck, and Washington did so. When Carolyn emerged from the truck to tell Bryant, "That's not the ******! That's not the one!", Bryant ordered Washington to throw him out the truck. The teenager landed head first, losing his front teeth.
Willie Reed, who later would testify for the prosecution, saw at about 6:00 a.m. a white and green Chevrolet truck, with four white men riding in the cab and three black men standing in the back of the truck. Reed saw an eighth person, a black boy (presumably Till), seated in the bed of the truck. The truck, according to Reed, parked in front of the barn. Minutes later, he said, he heard "hollering" and what sounded like "whipping" coming from the barn. (In later interviews, Reed identified four men he saw entering the barn: Bryant and Milam, as well as two black men, including Levi "Too Tight" Collins (a truck driver for Milam).
