(4 of 17)
Steamfitter Howard L. Brennan, standing across from the School Book Depository building, had noticed a man at the sixth-floor corner window; while waiting for the motorcade to arrive, Brennan had watched him leave the window "a couple of times." After Brennan heard a shot, he looked up again: "And this man that I saw previous was aiming for his last shot. Well, as it appeared to me, he was standing up and resting against the left window sill, taking positive aim, and fired his last shot. As I calculate, a couple of seconds. He drew the gun back from the window as though he was drawing it back to assure hisself that he hit his mark, and then he disappeared." Brennan stopped a police officer, gave a description of the man: slender, about 5 ft. 10 in., in his early 30s. The description was flashed to all Dallas patrol cars. Brennan later picked Lee Harvey Oswald out of a police lineup.
"His Condition Was Hopeless." Five minutes after the shooting, the presidential limousine screeched into the driveway of the Parkland Memorial Hospital. Vice President Johnson's car and two cars loaded with Secret Service men arrived almost simultaneously. Agent Clinton Hill removed his suit jacket and covered the President's head and chest to prevent photographs.
The braking of the car jolted Governor Connally back to consciousness. Despite his grave wounds, he bravely tried to stand up and get out so that the doctors could reach the President. But he collapsed again. Mrs. Kennedy held the President in her lap, and for a moment she refused to release him. Then three Secret Service men lifted him onto a stretcher and pushed it into Trauma Room One.
Twelve doctors had rushed into the emergency room. Surgeon Charles J. Carrico was the first to examine Kennedy. Says the Warren report: "He noted that the President was blue-white or ashen in color; had slow, spasmodic, agonal respiration without any coordination; made no voluntary movements; had his eyes open with the pupils dilated without any reaction to light; evidenced no palpable pulse; and had a few chest sounds that were thought to be heartbeats. On the basis of these findings, Dr. Carrico concluded that President Kennedy was still alive." But, added the report, "his condition was hopeless, and the extraordinary efforts of the doctors to save him could not help but to have been unavailing." One bullet had hit near the base of the back of the President's neck slightly to the right of the spine, traveled slightly downward, ripped the windpipe, and shot out the front of his neck at almost the same speed at which it hit; it nicked a corner of the knot on his necktie. That wound, says the Warren Commission, lethal." But the second bullet that hit bored into the right rear of his skull, "causing a massive and fatal wound" approximately five inches wide on the right side of his head. So extensive was the damage that the Parkland doctors were unsure whether the bullets had landed from back or front. They did not discover the wounds in the back of his neck