Weiss, a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, works in the fast-paced television newsroom at WABC, located in the nearby Lincoln Square neighborhood. He begins peppering passersby with questions, trying to investigate this developing story from the confines of his gurney.

Finally, he slips a janitor some cash, saying, “Here’s my press card; here’s twenty bucks. Call this number, ask for [assignment editor] Neil [Goldstein], tell him Alan’s in the hospital and I believe John Lennon’s been shot.”

The worker never makes the call, but within minutes Weiss gets powerful confirmation when he sees “Yoko Ono in a full-length fur coat on the arm of a police officer, and she’s sobbing.”

*  *  *

In trauma room 115, Dr. David Halleran is working steadily to keep John Lennon alive. Though Halleran’s hands are steady, with every pump of the ex-Beatle’s heart, his faint vital signs diminish.

Cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Richard Marks steps in to assist. A resident of the Upper West Side, he had returned to the hospital after seeing the commotion at the Dakota. Attending physician Dr. Stephan Lynn, who had left the hospital at 10:30 that night, remembers that he was called to return just before the eleven o’clock news.

*  *  *

With the assistance of a police officer, Weiss gets through to his editor on a hospital telephone. “Neil, I think John Lennon’s been shot.”

*  *  *

As the doctors work to save John Lennon’s life, John’s voice can be heard harmonizing around them as the Beatles’ “All My Loving” plays over the hospital sound system.

Twenty minutes pass. With every medical intervention “totally ineffective,” they have no choice but to declare him dead. “I stepped away from the table at that moment,” Halleran remembers. “I felt exhausted and defeated. It was a Hail Mary pass, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had failed this great man.”

It falls to Dr. Lynn, as the director of the Roosevelt Hospital emergency room, to tell Yoko Ono what transpired in the last minutes of her husband’s life.

In the emergency thoracotomy, he tells her, “all of the major blood vessels leaving the heart were simply destroyed. There was no way that we could repair them.”

“He can’t be dead, he was just alive,” she says.

At that moment, Dr. Lynn begins to learn “more and more about how much John Lennon affected the rest of the world.”

Chapter 65

Chapter 65

I know a man ain’t supposed to cry…

—“I Heard It Through the Grapevine”

Live from South Florida, ABC is broadcasting the final minutes of a matchup between the New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins. The game is tied 13–13 in the fourth quarter when the phone rings in the production truck parked outside Miami’s Orange Bowl stadium.