Six Shots at a Nation's Heart

April 13, 1981 TIME Cover: Moment of Madness
What Happened and Why Can It Never Be Stopped?

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tan raincoat reached out to point a .22-cal. "Saturday night special" at the President. The chambers of the revolver contained six Devastator bullets, designed to explode on impact. He shot twice, paused, then fired off four more rounds—all in a scant two seconds.

At the first sound of firing, Deaver ducked. The President's grin vanished. He looked startled, bewildered. Instinctively, Agent Parr pushed Reagan's head down, shoved him hard through the open car door. Reagan's head struck the roof of the doorway. Both men landed on the transmission hump ahead of the rear seat, Parr on top of the President. "Take off!" shouted Parr to the driver. "Just take off!"

The limo lurched out of the driveway. Deaver, who had crouched beside the President's car until he saw Reagan was in it, ran for the Secret Service control vehicle. "Oh, my God, it's happening!" he thought. The shots had been so close to him that he could "feel the concussion and smell the powder." In the car, he shouted, "Let's get out of here!" He grabbed Presidential Assistant David Fischer and, referring to Reagan, asked, "My God, Dave, is he all right?"

Brady lay on the sidewalk, blood seeping from a wound in his head and trickling into an iron grating. He tried to rise. Rick Ahearn, a White House advanceman, cradled Brady's face and shouted: "A handkerchief, a handkerchief!" Dropped in the turmoil, a police pistol lay incongruously beside Brady's head. McCarthy had been trained to try to block any shots at the President with his own body; when the firing began, he turned away from the limousine toward the assailant. Hit in the abdomen by a bullet that might well have struck the President, McCarthy whirled away from the gunman and fell prone. Patrolman Delahanty, a bullet lodged in his neck, lay screaming in pain near the rope.

Along the wall, agents, police officers and a union member leaped on Hinckley. He struggled furiously for at least 20 seconds before the gun was wrestled away from him. One agent brandished his Uzi submachine gun to emphasize orders to his colleagues as well as to fend off any threat from the aghast and screaming crowd; for all he knew, it might hold other assailants. Another agent, jammed against the wall in the melee, waved his pistol toward the menacing street. "Get a police car! Get a car!" cried the men holding Hinckley. Handcuffing Hinckley and throwing a jacket over his head, the officers shoved him toward one police car, but found the rear door locked. They pushed him into a second and sped off to Washington police headquarters, some 30 blocks away.

The three wounded men still lay on the ground. After five agonizing minutes, an orange and white Washington ambulance, parked at the Connecticut Avenue entrance to the hotel, pulled around into the T Street driveway. Paramedic Bobby Montgillion jumped out, ran to Brady and grabbed his hand. "I asked if he knew what was going on," recalled Montgillion. "He squeezed my hand."

Brady lost consciousness as he was lifted onto a stretcher and placed into the ambulance with an oxygen mask clamped to his face. Two more ambulances, their sirens wailing, arrived to take Agent McCarthy and Patrolman Delahanty to separate hospitals.