Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

On the night of June 4–5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy addressed supporters in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California and South Dakota Democratic presidential primaries. Leaving the podium, campaign staff redirected him through a kitchen and pantry corridor toward a press area. As Kennedy shook hands with kitchen worker Juan Romero, 24-year-old Sirhan Sirhan stepped from beside an ice machine and fired an eight-shot .22 caliber revolver at close range. Kennedy was struck three times, including a fatal shot fired about one inch from behind his right ear. Five bystanders — William Weisel, Paul Schrade, Elizabeth Evans, Ira Goldstein, and Irwin Stroll — were also wounded. Kennedy was taken first to Central Receiving Hospital and then to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he underwent nearly four hours of neurosurgery. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, 1968, at age 42.

Kennedy's body was returned east for a funeral Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, with a eulogy delivered by his brother, Senator Ted Kennedy. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery near his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in the first nighttime burial ever conducted there. The assassination led Congress to expand U.S. Secret Service protection to major presidential and vice-presidential candidates, a safeguard that had not existed at the time Kennedy was killed.

Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian who had immigrated to the United States in 1956 and held strong anti-Zionist views, was arrested at the scene. Investigators found a diary in which he had written that "RFK must die," and a newspaper article on Kennedy's support for Israel was found in his pocket at booking. Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder in April 1969 and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole in 1972 following the California Supreme Court's ruling in California v. Anderson, which invalidated pending death sentences imposed before that year. Sirhan has since been denied parole numerous times — 17 times as of 2023 — though a 2021 state parole panel recommendation was blocked by California Governor Gavin Newsom in January 2022.

Sirhan's attorneys have filed multiple habeas corpus petitions, including a 2012 brief alleging a second gunman fired the fatal shots; these were denied by federal courts, including a 2015 ruling by Judge Beverly Reid O'Connell. Paul Schrade, one of the wounded bystanders, has publicly asserted that a second shooter, not Sirhan, fired the fatal shot and has alleged that the Los Angeles Police Department withheld or destroyed ballistic evidence. Other researchers, including filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan, have raised separate theories about CIA personnel present that night, though key elements of that claim were later disputed. A 1975 official re-examination concluded there was little or no evidence supporting a second-gunman theory, while later audio analyses of a recording of the shooting have produced conflicting conclusions about the number of shots fired.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declassifying remaining files related to the assassination, including autopsy photographs, prompting objections from Kennedy's daughter, Kerry Kennedy, over their release.