Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t believe his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was shot by the man convicted of the killing nearly 50 years ago, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
According to the Post, Kennedy, 64, met for three hours with convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan just before Christmas 2017 at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility outside San Diego —after months of research, speaking with witnesses and reading the autopsy and police reports on his father’s June 5, 1968, murder.
“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Kennedy told the Post — and afterward, joined those who believe there was a second gunman, and that it wasn’t Sirhan who killed his father.
“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father’s 11 children, told the Post.
“I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”
The Post reported Kennedy now supports the call for a reinvestigation — a call led by Paul Schrade, 93, who also was shot in the head as he walked behind Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles but survived.
The Post noted Sirhan admitted at his trial in 1969 that he shot Kennedy, he claimed from the start he had no memory of doing so.
But midway through Sirhan’s trial, prosecutors provided his lawyers with an autopsy report that launched five decades of controversy: Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind, including a fatal shot behind his ear. But Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was standing in front of him.
“It’s not only that nobody saw that,” Kennedy told the Post. “The people that were closest to [Sirhan], the people that disarmed him all said he never got near my father.”
“Once Schrade showed me the autopsy report,” Kennedy said, “then I didn’t feel like it was something I could just dismiss. Which is what I wanted to do.”
Schrade believes that Sirhan shot him and the others who were wounded but that he didn’t kill Kennedy, and has been leading the crusade to reinvestigate since 1974, the Post reported.
“Why didn’t they go after the second gunman?” Schrade told the Post. “They knew about him right away. They didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.”
Kennedy called Sirhan’s trial “really a penalty hearing.”
“It wasn’t a real trial,” he told the Post. “At a full trial, they would have litigated his guilt or innocence. I think it’s unfortunate that the case never went to a full trial because that would have compelled the press and prosecutors to focus on the glaring discrepancies in the narrative that Sirhan fired the shots that killed my father.”
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