Tom Brook was the primary on the scene when the BBC reported on John Lennon’s loss of life, later interviewing his widow, Yoko Ono, and their younger son. Immediately, he reconnects with Sean Ono Lennon on his dad and mom’ legacy – and giving peace an opportunity.
On 8 December 1980, I used to be preparing for mattress in my tiny Greenwich Village house when a colleague phoned with the alarming information of studies of gunshots exterior The Dakota Condo constructing and that presumably John Lennon was the goal. I wasted no time. I gathered my tape recorder, microphone, notepad and a conveyable radio and ran to eighth Avenue to hail a cab uptown. En route, I willed the taxi driver to go sooner as we listened to radio studies confirming that Lennon had certainly been shot. He’d been taken to Roosevelt Hospital. It did not sound good. At 23:15 that night time, Lennon was pronounced useless.
Forty-five years have elapsed for the reason that former Beatle – then 40 years outdated – was murdered by a fan as he returned house together with his spouse, Yoko Ono. It was an evening I’ll always remember, each professionally and personally. I used to be in my mid-20s, newly arrived in New York and an enormous Lennon fan. I actually felt the loss, but it surely was by pure probability that I ended up being the voice on BBC Information that introduced phrase of Lennon’s slaying to an early morning UK viewers, with the primary reside radio studies from exterior The Dakota.
I used to be nonetheless fairly recent to journalism and inexperienced. Usually, the job of reporting a loss of life so momentous would have fallen to Paul Reynolds, the employees’s New York correspondent on the time, however he was out of city on one other story.
After I first arrived on the scene, Ono was nonetheless within the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, however Lennon’s five-year-old son Sean was of their fifth-floor house, tons of of wailing followers congregating on the street beneath. Within the aftermath, I typically questioned how troublesome that should have been for each mom and son. Two years later, again at The Dakota, I met them each to report a BBC TV interview of their front room. Ono informed me that, so far as she was involved, John Lennon was very a lot with us: “He is nonetheless alive, he is nonetheless with us, his spirit will go on. You possibly can’t kill an individual that simply.”
