DALLAS -- Residents of the city where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated more than 17 years ago were shocked to learn that President Reagan's shooting also had Dallas connections.
The man accused of shooting Reagan, John W. Hinckley Jr., went to school in Highland Park, an incorporated community in Dallas. The gun used to shoot Reagan in Washington Monday was purchased at Rocky's Pawn Shop on Elm Street in downtown Dallas -- a street that runs past the Texas School Book Depository and through Dealey Plaza.
When Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963, his limousine was on Elm Street, about a half mile from Rocky's.
The motorcade had just passed the downtown skyscrapers and was winding through Dealey Plaza towards a triple underpass when the shots exploded from an upper floor of the book depository.
Kennedy's limousine lurched forward and screeched to a halt minutes later at Parkland Memorial Hospital. In the hospital's emergency room, doctors unsuccessfully struggled to save Kennedy's life. About an hour later, the flags at Parkland were lowered as officials announced to a stunned nation that Kennedy was dead.
Lee Harvey Oswald was captured that afternoon for the shooting, and two days later himself was killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
In the affluent neighborhood where Hinckley grew up there was shock.
One elderly woman -- who lives across the elegant, tree-lined Highland Park street where Hinckley spent much of his youth -- said her original reaction was one of relief when she heard the attack had occurred in Washington.
'The first thing I thought of when I heard the news was that I was glad, so glad, it was not in Dallas,' she said.
But her relief soon turned to incredulity, then sadness, when it was revealed Hinckley had once been a neighbor.
'I'm just sick that they'll be tying this one back to Dallas too.'
Other neighbors in the affluent community, an incorporated community within the city, stood clustered in front of their posh, well-manicured homes. They talked in almost dazed tones, wondering how anyone from a staunchly conservative, Republican family could have been involved in an assassination attempt.
Julia Ann O'Connell said she turned on her television and began writing down how she felt, just as she did when Kennedy was shot.
'March 30, 1981,' she wrote. 'Time 2:40. I am watching TV for the news report of the attempted assassination of President Reagan ... My heart is pounding, hands shaking ... I can't believe that this could really happen. Feel nervous, everything jumpy, disordered, glued to television.'
A tourist leaving the Kennedy museum near the assassination site thought people on the street were playing a bad joke on him.
'We had just walked out of the museum and someone said President Reagan had been shot. We thought they were joking.'
Another man who was showing out-of-town visitors around Dealey Plaza just shook his head in disbelief.
'It just boggles your mind that in this point in time something like this can happen,' he said. 'It makes me sick, sick, sick. I thought this was behind us.'
People crowded around televisions and radios in department stores and offices across the city, most of them stunned and saddened by the day's events.
'I'm just appalled,' said one middle-aged woman. 'It makes our city look so bad.'
'I was a senior in high school when Kennedy was assassinated,' said Sally Clark who lives near the Hinckley's former Dallas home. 'It was devastating then. It's easily remembered.'
Ironically, the Texas School Book Depository, from which the Warren Commission concluded the fatal shots were fired from Oswald, received a new name Sunday. Oswald was employed in the building when Kennedy was shot. At the ceremony, however, Dallas County officials conceded the infamous building would probably never be commonly known by its new name.
