Lennon nods, his chest soaked with blood.

They pull off the curb and speed the mile between the Dakota and Roosevelt Hospital.

Officer Tony Palma follows close behind. His back-seat passenger is a stunned and silent Yoko.

In the lead car, Moran radios ahead that police are bringing in a gunshot victim.

*  *  *

Third-year general surgery resident Dr. David Halleran is making his rounds when his emergency pager goes off. He runs to trauma room 115.

“I waited for the next few minutes, expecting to see an ambulance pulling in,” he recalls in 2019. “Instead, I see a cop car.”

Nurse Deartra Sato is part of the team that puts the victim “on a stretcher, pulled him into our minor OR, which was room 115. Then we cut the clothes off and opened his chest.”

Halleran tells his team, “Four entry wounds over his left chest, three exit wounds. Either you do nothing or you crack his chest and find something that might be salvageable.”

With no blood pressure and no pulse, every moment is critical.

“The patient didn’t come in dead; he came in mortally wounded,” he explains. “And I had nothing to lose. I was hoping that we could find something that we could repair, fix, or patch until we got him up to the operating room. For me, there was very little downside.”

He makes an incision in the left side of the victim’s chest and works to separate the ribs to expose the heart. With one hand flat underneath and the other hand over the vital organ, the surgeon squeezes the heart gently and rhythmically at one hundred beats per minute, trying desperately to increase blood flow to the coronary arteries.

It’s not working.

A nurse leans over the operating table and is startled to recognize the victim, calling him by name.

“No, it’s not,” Halleran says while continuing to hold the victim’s heart in his hands. “It can’t be.”

Nurse Sato checks his wallet and finds an ID that verifies his identity.

Chapter 64

Chapter 64

Tomorrow I’ll miss you.

—“All My Loving”

TV producer Alan Weiss is lying on a gurney in the hallway of the Roosevelt Hospital ER. He’s awaiting X-rays following a motorcycle accident he suffered an hour before in Central Park.

“My ears are still ringing from the impact of the road,” Weiss later recalls, “and two police officers come out and they are literally standing over my head. I got my eyes closed, and I hear one officer say to the other one, ‘Can you believe it? John Lennon.’”

Weiss’s mind begins to race. Did he say John Lennon, my favorite Beatle?

“At first, I didn’t believe it,” Weiss explains in a 2019 interview. “I banged my head. My ears were ringing. I wasn’t sure I heard it correctly.”