Sirhan Sirhan fired a .22-caliber revolver in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen, striking Kennedy and four other people.[1]
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On the morning of June 6, 1968, at 8:44 a.m., Robert Francis Kennedy was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 42 years old. The nation had spent the night in vigil, watching the wire reports, hoping against the news that was already all but written. Hours earlier, in the kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel, a 24-year-old Palestinian-American named Sirhan Sirhan had raised a .22-caliber revolver and fired. Four others were wounded. Kennedy never regained consciousness. The thirty-six hours between that hallway and the hospital declaration compressed something enormous — the presidential campaign, the years of grief after Dallas, an entire season of national violence — into one more unbearable loss.
The night before had seemed like the beginning of something. Kennedy had spent June 4 watching the California Democratic primary returns. When the numbers came in and the crowds swelled in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, he stepped to the microphone and thanked his supporters — the farmworkers, the students, the civil-rights organizers who had made the California win possible. He spoke of closing the divisions that had split the country over Vietnam and poverty and race. Then the speech ended, the lights held, and Kennedy moved toward the kitchen to make his exit through the back of the hotel — an area that lacked the security presence of the main ballroom.
At 12:15 a.m. on June 5, Sirhan opened fire. Hotel staff and former NFL player Rosey Grier tackled Sirhan and pinned his gun arm, but the damage was done. Kennedy lay on the concrete floor of the pantry, his head cradled by a busboy. The crowd in the ballroom, seconds earlier jubilant, did not yet know what had happened.
