Robert F. Kennedy Assassination

Case background and investigation

Senator Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in the spring of 1968. On the night of June 4 he won the California primary and spoke to supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

At about 12:15 a.m. on June 5, as he left through a kitchen pantry, Kennedy was shot. Five other people were wounded: Paul Schrade, William Weisel, Elizabeth Evans, Ira Goldstein and Irwin Stroll; all survived. Bystanders, among them the athletes Rafer Johnson and Roosevelt Grier, restrained 24-year-old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who was holding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson revolver, and he was arrested at the scene. Kennedy was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he died at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, 1968. He was 42.

Sirhan's trial opened in Los Angeles in early 1969. On April 17, 1969, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and of assaulting the five wounded victims, and he was sentenced to death later that month. In 1972 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after the California Supreme Court, in People v. Anderson, invalidated the death sentences then in force.

Questions about whether Sirhan acted alone have persisted. The Los Angeles County medical examiner, Thomas Noguchi, concluded that the fatal shot was fired from very close range behind Kennedy's right ear, a finding that has fed debate about the positions of those in the pantry, and a later analysis of an audio recording was argued by some experts to show more shots than Sirhan's eight-round revolver could have fired; other experts dispute that reading. A court-ordered re-examination of the firearms evidence in 1975 found, according to Wikipedia's summary of the panel's report, little or no evidence of a second gun. No other person has been charged.

Sirhan has been denied parole many times. On August 27, 2021, a two-member panel of the California parole board found him suitable for release, with two of Kennedy's sons supporting parole and other family members opposed. Governor Gavin Newsom reversed that decision on January 13, 2022, writing that Sirhan had not shown the accountability and insight needed for safe release. The board denied parole again on March 1, 2023. NBC San Diego reported a further denial following a hearing in August 2024, with reconsideration possible after three years.

Sirhan is held at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. In January 2025 President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the declassification of remaining federal records on the assassination, and batches of files have since been released.