James Breslin was sitting at the assignment desk at Channel Five when the police scanner traffic went from staticky background chatter to an urgent, raised voice storm, pouring out of the squawk boxes. This told the desk assistant, Jimmy Breslin’s son, it was time to put the cigarette out, take his feet off the desk and start dialing his bosses. Fast. The words “John Lennon” were starting to come over the air.
John Miller, the station’s 21-year-old star police reporter, had just wrapped up a date that was going nowhere and swung the Channel Five car, a blue 1977 Buick LeSabre, by a motorcycle accident. You never knew who it could be. Might be a picture. Then he swung home, and when he got into his apartment on Madison Avenue all his phones were ringing.
Jimmy Breslin was home in Forest Hills, Queens, when James Breslin, having reached the news director, the anchor, and reached out to Miller realized, “I should call Dad.”
“The scanners are going psycho. Squawking. Squawking. SHOOTING ONE WEST 72nd STREET. And you could hear the blaring sirens,” James Breslin recalled. He called his father.
“I said, holy shit, there’s something going on. And I’m hearing John Lennon’s name.”
“Get Froggy,” Breslin said. Froggy lived around the corner from the Breslins. Another person impressed into service as a driver for Breslin and his considerable ego.
A few minutes later, Breslin was running out the front door half dressed as David Kasparian, a.k.a. Froggy, pulled up.
James Breslin was grabbing his coat and racing west, across Central Park from the Channel Five newsroom.
John Miller was back in his Buick and was racing across the park from his apartment just a few blocks from the television station.
The Emergency Room at Roosevelt Hospital, the entrance to the Dakota, the 20th Precinct. Breslin and Miller hit them all and what came out of it, from Miller, was the most thorough and accurate of television reports.
“One of the last things John Lennon must have seen was an overweight fan who had been pestering him for days,” Miller reported in a measured cadence. “The last time he had been clutching a pen. But this time, he was holding a gun.”
What came out of it from Breslin was deadline poetry.
The shots that killed Lennon had been fired at a few minutes before 11 P.M. Just a few hours later and in time for the Final Edition of the New York Daily News, his column was reported and written and handed to a reporter he would later betray but who this night typed it in to the rudimentary computer system where it was read by the editors. When Page Three of the paper was laid out it had the column with this quote pulled out:
And a shaking woman, another victim’s wife, crumpled into the back seat as Palma started for Roosevelt Hospital. She said nothing to the two cops and they said nothing to her. Homicide is not a talking matter.
And they put this headline over the work: “Cops Hear the Song Die on Streets of New York.”
The column puts you at the Dakota apartment building where Lennon lay face down in his blood, and then it puts you inside two police cars that have arrived. One carries the victim across its back seat as it races to the hospital. The other was carrying the victim’s spouse, who was soon to be a widow.
That summer in Breezy Point, when he was 18 and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life.
Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.
And now, last night, a 34-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at 82nd St. and Columbus Ave. and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, 1 West 72 St.”
Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.
As the structure of the column unfolds, you recall “A Death in Emergency Room One” so many lives ago. But here there are only minutes until deadline. Here he files. Someone types it into the computer for him. And it will be in the paper.
A car was there ahead of them . . .
“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.
“In the back,” one of the cops said.
Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard . . . A guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. He rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood. . . .
Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street. Somebody told them to put the body in another patrol car.
Jim Moran’s patrol car was waiting. Moran is from the South Bronx, from Williams Ave., and he was brought up on Tony Bennett records in the jukeboxes. When he became a cop in 1964, he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. Girls screamed and pushed and Moran laughed. Once, it was all fun.
As Moran started driving away he heard people shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”
. . . Moran was driving with Bill Gamble. As they went through the streets to Roosevelt Hospital, Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in the back nodded and groaned.
Back on 72 St., somebody told Palma, “Take the woman.” And a shaking woman, another victim’s wife, crumpled into the backseat as Palma started for Roosevelt Hospital.
Jim Moran, with John Lennon in the backseat, was on the radio as he drove to the hospital. “Have paramedics meet us at the emergency entrance,” he called. When he pulled up to the hospital, they were waiting for him with a cart. As Lennon was being wheeled through the doors into the emergency room, the doctors were on him.
“John Lennon,” somebody said.
That night, at that apartment building, you watched as fans quickly began to gather, and reporters who had raced from all over the city to get there were among them and were talking to police, with cameras, television cameras, microphones and pads. This crush of reporters was happening at the hospital as well. Breslin stayed with his simple part of the story.
Now Tony Palma pulled up to the emergency entrance. He let the woman out and she ran to the doors.
Somebody called to Palma, “That’s Yoko Ono.”
“Yeah?” Palma said.
“They just took John Lennon in,” the guy said.
Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes. Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.