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Background As U.S. Senator for New York he had focused on issues of social reform and increasingly came to identify with the poor and disenfranchised. He reached out to members of minority groups and formed relationships with many of their leaders including Cesar Chavez, head of the National Farm Workers Union. Increasingly, he was drawn into the debate over the Vietnam War. The evening he was shot, Kennedy had won the June 4 Democratic Presidential primaries in South Dakota and California, boosting his chances for the Democratic nomination for President during the 1968 presidential election. Kennedy addressed his supporters shortly after Midnight June 5 in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Immediately afterwards, Kennedy and his entourage walked through a kitchen pantry, shaking hands with well-wishers and hotel staff. The small pantry was rather crowded, when a 24-year-old man named Sirhan Sirhan stepped in front of Kennedy and allegedly shouted "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!" before firing a 22-caliber Iver Johnson revolver toward Kennedy and his entourage. Maître d'hôtel Karl Uecker, writer George Plimpton, Olympic gold medalist decathlete Rafer Johnson and professional football player Rosey Grier helped detain Sirhan, with Grier jamming his thumb behind the trigger of the revolver to prevent further shots from being fired, as he had no way of knowing in the confusion if all the shots had been fired. The shooting was not broadcast live but the resultant scuffle was recorded on audio tape by reporter Andrew West of KRKD, a Mutual radio affiliate. *. On the stage just after the speech, West had asked Kennedy a brief question about how he would go about overcoming Vice President Hubert Humphrey's lead in delegates to the Democratic National Convention (in a garbled response, Kennedy indicated a "struggle" lay ahead for the nomination). As West followed the Kennedy party into the kitchen area, he turned his tape recorder back on after hearing shouts that Kennedy had been shot. Kennedy was shot twice in his back and once behind his right ear at very close range. A fourth shot grazed Kennedy's clothing. Kennedy lay on the floor, bleeding heavily, and asked if anyone else was hurt. Five other people were wounded. Kennedy was pronounced dead the next day. Disputes and contentions There seems to be no dispute that Sirhan did fire his revolver. What is disputed is whether Sirhan planned and acted alone, whether there was another gunman at the scene, and whether Sirhan fired bullets or blanks. As with his brother John's assassination in 1963, RFK's death has been analyzed by many who have developed various alternative scenarios for the crime, or who argue there are serious problems with the official case. It is believed by many that the same people involved in his brother's murder were involved in his. Kennedys wounds Sirhan's gun was placed by all witnesses at between 2 and 5 feet from the Senator when he fired his revolver. * All witnesses seemed to agree Sirhan was facing Kennedy when he fired. In conducting the autopsy on Kennedy, Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on Kennedy's ear and gunpowder residue in his hair. Noguchi said this indicated that Kennedy was shot from a distance of, at most, 1.5 inches (37 millimeters.) (When a firearm is discharged, the powder residue travels only a few inches because the material is very light.) Noguchi's conclusions led to speculation that Sirhan was too far from Kennedy and in the wrong position to have administered the fatal shot (also fired from a .22 caliber handgun, one which had apparently been fired into Kennedy's head at point-blank range from behind his right ear) and that a second shooter must have been present. Dr. Noguchi himself wrote years later that "Until more is precisely known…the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus, I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy."* Independent testing (shown in a program on the Discovery Channel) indicates that gunpowder residue can easily travel over 15 inches (38 cm), but that the stippling effect observed requires that the gun must have been less than 2 inches (5 cm) away. Allegations of suppression or coverup Scott Enyart asserts that he took photographs during the shooting, but these were confiscated by the LAPD and never returned in full which resulted in lengthy court battle since 1988. The trial is surrounded by a series of blunders such as the disappearance of a large part of the earlier court files. * Sandy Serrano reports that during questioning, she was intimidated by police and forced to change her story.* Police reportedly destroyed or concealed considerable amounts of evidence from the crime scene, including photographs, ceiling panels, and door frames. Charges have been made that authorities withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from Sirhan's lawyer by keeping Noguchi's autopsy report sealed until after the trial had begun. Additional bullet holes or gunshots Sirhan's .22 revolver held eight cartridges. The official conclusion is that Sirhan fired all his cartridges, and all eight projectiles were recovered. Others have suggested there were more than eight shots fired. A police officer observed police criminalists dig two bullets out of a door frame in the pantry area, bringing to 10 the total number of shots that were fired during the attack. FBI documents describe holes depicted in the pantry door frame as "bullet holes", and William Bailey, the first FBI agent on the scene, has stated that he saw a bullet in one such hole. An AP photograph shows a bullet lodged in a door frame. * In addition, most of the witnesses in the pantry thought the gun looked and sounded like it was firing blanks. Rafer Johnson said it looked like a cap gun throwing off residue. Conspiracy theories Many claims of a "second shooter" point to a part-time armed security guard escorting Kennedy, a 26-year-old Lockheed aerospace worker named Thane Eugene Cesar who had been called to work at the Ambassador at the last minute by his employer, Ace Guard Services. According to witnesses, Cesar had been standing closest to Kennedy on the Senator's right and slightly to the rear when Sirhan had begun firing. Apparently, Kennedy suddenly grabbed Cesar's clip-on necktie with his right hand when hit as that tie was less than a foot away from the Senator's right hand while he was lying fatally wounded on the hotel's kitchen floor. Interviewed by Los Angeles police detectives shortly after the assassination, Cesar admitted on tape that he had removed his revolver from his holster during the shooting in the pantry but insisted he never fired it. Cesar also admitted to investigator Theodore Charach that he had owned a .22-caliber revolver similar to Sirhan's, but claimed he had sold the weapon in February 1968, a claim eventually proved to have been false, as it had been later discovered that Cesar had instead sold it three months after the assassination. The buyer of that revolver had later reported it as stolen. The revolver that Cesar turned over to the LAPD was not test-fired by the police, because it was .38 caliber and all the slugs recovered were .22 caliber. But skeptics, such as Dan Moldea, author of The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, have said that Cesar was never considered a serious suspect for good reason: No eyewitnesses saw Cesar shoot Kennedy. Moldea tracked Cesar down and gave him a polygraph test which Moldea said exonerated Cesar. Critics contend that people can be trained to pass lie detector tests. In addition, Cesar was asked if he fired his gun that night, but technically, Kennedy was shot in the morning (around 12:15 a.m.). Additional conspirators? Los Angeles police sergeant Paul Sharaga and a young Kennedy campaign worker named Sandy Serrano had both claimed a young Hispanic man and a young Caucasian woman with blonde hair (the latter wearing a "polka dot" dress) had quickly burst out of a rear service exit of the Ambassador Hotel's kitchen moments after the shooting exclaiming, "We shot him." Asked "who?", she responded, "Senator Kennedy!" Sgt. Sharaga was made aware of the suspicious duo by a middle-aged married couple who had frantically flagged him down shortly after he had pulled his squad car into one of the hotel's parking lots. Sharaga immediately issued an all points bulletin for the younger couple, one soon canceled without explanation by his superiors while Serrano had later been coerced by police into changing her story. A San Diego high school student, Lisa Urso, who had been present in the hotel kitchen pantry when Kennedy was shot, claims she had seen a blonde young man in a gray business suit place a revolver in a holster under his jacket when Sirhan began shooting and also saw a dark haired man in a black business suit fire a handgun into the ceiling and then run away from the scene. Skeptics such as Moldea have said that supporters of right-wing U.S. Sen. Max Rafferty were at the Ambassador Hotel that night. Some young conservative activists (Kennedy's bitter enemies), who had probably imbibed alcoholic beverages, were likely joyful that their liberal nemesis had been shot, according to Moldea. Sirhans motivations Mel Ayton of Frontpage Magazine argues * that Kennedy was shot not on the orders of the PLO but by Sirhan Sirhan for reasons of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and Palestinian nationalism. Sirhan, a lifelong Christian (not a Muslim as many mistakenly assume), had emigrated to the United States from Palestine with his family as a young boy. Sirhan's parents themselves expressed strong anti-Israeli sentiments and Sirhan expressed admiration for a teacher in Jordan who urged his students to be like Saladin. Brainwashing Sirhan claimed he acted unconsciously, and that he has no memory of the shooting. This has led to speculations that he was acting under the influence of "hypnotic brainwashing" which many attribute to the CIA's MK-Ultra program (similar to the plot of The Manchurian Candidate). The late author George Plimpton, one of the four men who had initially subdued Sirhan, commented that Sirhan had maintained what Plimpton judged to be an unusually calm, peaceful, or dreamlike expression on his face amid all of the terror and confusion. See also | |||||||||
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