LOS ANGELES, April 28 (UPI) -- Terrance McGarry, who covered the assassination of President John Kennedy for United Press International, has died at his home in Encino, Calif. He was 72.
McGarry died Tuesday of a rare brain disease, the Los Angeles Times reported.
McGarry, who was with police in Dallas when they discovered the spot in the Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald perched as he shot Kennedy, was on the scene two days after the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination when Oswald was shot and killed at Dallas police headquarters, the newspaper said.
His work with UPI included coverage of the war between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969. He went to work for the Times in 1983 as a reporter and a columnist, rising to assistant city editor.
At the Times, he headed an investigative report that resulted in changes in California law on regulation of police procedures and was part of the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of a North Hollywood bank robbery gone wrong and the police shootout that followed -- an event that made national headlines in 1998.
He retired from the newspaper the following year.
Steve Padilla, an assistant national editor for the Times who worked with McGarry, said his former colleague "really was one of the best teaching editors. He worked with a lot of young reporters, and a lot of them owe their careers to him."
Born May 13, 1938, in Milwaukee, McGarry received a bachelor's degree in journalism from Marquette University in 1961 and served in the U.S. Army.
He led a scholarship program conducted by the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and was president of the SPJ Los Angeles chapter in 1983.
