Tom Brooke was first on the scene when the BBC broke the news of John Lennon’s death, and later interviewed his widow Yoko Ono and her young son. Today, he is reunited with Sean Ono Lennon about his parents’ legacy, giving him a chance at peace.
On December 8, 1980, as I was getting ready for bed in my small apartment in Greenwich Village, a colleague called me with the alarming news that there had been gunshots outside the Dakota Apartments building, and that John Lennon was probably the target. There was no time to waste. I grabbed my tape recorder, microphone, notepad, and portable radio and ran to 8th Avenue to get a cab uptown. On the way, I asked the taxi driver to go faster, listening to radio reports confirming that John Lennon had indeed been shot. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital. It didn’t sound good. Lennon was pronounced dead at 11:15 p.m. that night.
It’s been 45 years since the former Beatle was murdered by a fan at the age of 40 while walking home with his wife Yoko Ono. It was a night I will never forget, both professionally and personally. I was in my mid-twenties, new to New York, and a huge Lennon fan. I felt a real sense of loss, but it was purely by chance that I ended up being the voice for BBC News, broadcasting the news of Lennon’s murder to an early morning British audience on live radio for the first time from outside Dakota University.
I was still new to journalism and had little experience. Normally, the job of reporting on such a significant death would have gone to then-New York correspondent Paul Reynolds, but he was out on another report.
When I first arrived on the scene, Mr. Ono was still in the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, but Mr. Lennon’s 5-year-old son, Sean, was in his fifth-floor apartment and hundreds of crying fans had gathered in the street below. Afterwards, I often thought about how difficult it must have been for mother and son. Two years later, I returned to the Dakota and met them in my living room to record an interview for BBC television. Ms. Ono said that as far as she was concerned, John Lennon was very important to us. “He’s still alive, he’s still with us, his spirit will continue to live on. You can’t kill someone so easily.”
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
