Free Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination by Gus Russo, Harry Moses Page A

into? What am I doing here? Pretty soon, it kind of all came together that it was probably a pretty good thing. It happened so fast, and yet it kind of plays back in slow motion a lot of times. But I really didn’t have time to think about what was going on, what danger there might be, or anything—it was just fast.
    HAWKINS: They had a car out front that we put him in after we got him handcuffed and everything. There was quite a crowd out there too. They wanted to do their own justice. They were angry.
    BREWER: I didn’t see that because I was detained here, getting information. By the time I got outside, it’d already cleared out and was just like a ghost town. Shops were closing up.
    HAWKINS: When I saw his face, he looked like just another citizen. He had a little mark across his face or two after we arrested him. But he just looked like an ordinary citizen, someone you would see walking down the street, which he had been doing. Nothing outstanding in one way or another that I could see.
    BREWER: I got home and turned on the TV. My wife at that time worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield downtown. They had closed down, as everybody else had. I’ve got the TV on, and my wife says, “That happened pretty close to where you—” I said, “Yeah, that happened pretty close.”
    Then my mom called from Lockhart, Texas, and said, “I just saw that Oswald was arrested by your shop. I just pray you weren’t anywhere near that.”
    I said, “Mom, I got a story to tell you.” It still didn’t dawn me, really. But then the news came in more and more. They’re showing Oswald; they’re showing the rifle there at the police station, showing Captain Will Fritz. And then you hear Oswald saying he didn’t do anything—he was seeking representation, I believe. It really started sinking in that he actually was the main and only suspect for the Kennedy assassination, and it was pretty much a given that he had murdered Officer Tippit.
    I came to work the next morning, and of course there were sound trucks and all sorts of media trucks out. I thought, I’m not used to that, and it was just pretty much rapid fire, speaking with reporters, media. In fact, it got pretty annoying after a while, and it went on for quite a while, maybe a couple of months. Then I was transferred to the downtown store on Main Street, and it kind of started quieting down. We didn’t have that mass or instant media like they’ve got now. It still didn’t dawn on me just how big an operation that was, but it did dawn on me that, like Ray said, a lot of people could have got hurt.
    HAWKINS: The next day at headquarters, we were still doing reports and getting it all together, and it was really busy. There were four or five of us who had come in the theater first, and we were all writing up reports and letters to the chief on what had happened. But what had happened finally sank in that day. It didn’t seem that night like any of this stuff had happened earlier, or it wasn’t anything. Then it did sink in—the next day, really—that any number of us could have been killed. I could have been shot; any of us could have been shot.
    On Sunday I was watching TV at home. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. I knew Jack, had been to his club a few times. He wanted to be noticed and known; he really liked the police. He just wanted everybody to like him, I would say, especially the police. Several of them went to his club, kind of a police hangout, because he was friendly with police. You could go after hours and have a beer.
    I didn’t realize who it was at first. Then I heard them, or I saw when they pulled him back who it was, and I thought, Oh, no . I just couldn’tbelieve it was Jack who did it. Then a lot of people said he was connected with the Mafia here and in Chicago and all this, but I never did get that impression of him. He was just somebody who liked the police and was good to the police and wanted a little attention. He liked it. He liked us to