Dead in Hollywood is a true-crime web series of strange and tragic Hollywood deaths.
Juan Romero cradling the head of a dying Robert F. Kennedy and a photo of the abandoned and now demolished kitchen hallway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet. Juan Romero died this past Monday at the age of 68 from a heart attack. He was the last person to shake Kennedy’s hand before Kennedy was struck down.
The LA Times is reporting tonight that Juan Romero has died of a heart attack at the age of 68. Romero was the busboy seen cradling the head of a mortally wounded Robert F. Kennedy in the iconic photograph taken shortly after Kennedy had been shot in the head by an assassin's bullet. Romero was forever haunted by what happened just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when he was on duty as a busboy at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Blvd. near Koreatown in Los Angeles. Romero was just 17 at the time. Romero was in the habit of leaving flowers at that monument each year to mark RFK’s death. He said he often felt we as a nation were moving further politically from what he saw as a Kennedy legacy of tolerance and compassion.
