Sirhan Sirhan |
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Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (Arabic: سرحان بشارة سرحان, born March 19, 1944) is the convicted assassin of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He is serving a life sentence at the California State Prison, Corcoran.
Sirhan was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family and immigrated as a child to the United States with his family. In his adult life, however, he made several religious conversions, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches, and dabbled in the occult. His family, which moved to the United States when Sirhan was 12, briefly lived in New York, and soon moved to California. He attended Eliot Junior High School (now known as Charles W. Eliot Middle School, Altadena, California), John Muir High School and Pasadena City College. He was employed as a stable boy in 1965 at the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, California.
On June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver at Senator Robert Kennedy and the crowd surrounding him in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy had finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom. George Plimpton, Rosey Grier, author Pete Hamill, and 1960 Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson were among several men who subdued and disarmed Sirhan after a lengthy struggle.