myself; then I saw Malcolm, and the firing had stopped, and I tried to give him artificial
respiration." Then Sister Betty came through the people, herself a nurse, and people recognizing
her moved back; she fell on her knees looking down on his bare, bullet-pocked chest, sobbing,
"They killed him!"
Patrolman Thomas Hoy, 22, was stationed outside the Audubon Ballroom entrance. "I heard the
shooting and the place exploded." He rushed inside, he saw Malcolm X lying on the stage, and
then some people chasing a man. Patrolman Hoy "grabbed the suspect."
Louis Michaux, the owner of the Nationalist Memorial Bookstore at 125th Street and Seventh
Avenue in Harlem, said, "I was arriving late at the meeting where Malcolm X had invited me, I met
a large number of people rushing out."
Sergeant Alvin Aronoff and Patrolman Louis Angelos happened to be cruising by in their radio car
when they heard shots. "When we got there," said Aronoff, "the crowds were pushing out and
screaming 'Malcolm's been shot!' and 'Get 'im, get 'im, don't let him go!'" The two policemen
grabbed by the arms aNegro who was being kicked as he tried to escape. Firing a warning shot
into the air, the policemen pushed the man into their police car, not wanting the angry crowd to
close in, and drove him quickly to the police station.
Someone had run up to the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital's Vanderbilt Clinic emergency
entrance at 167th Street and grabbed a poles-and-canvas stretcher and brought it back to the
Audubon Ballroom stage. Malcolm X was put on the stretcher and an unidentified photographer
got a macabre picture of him, with his mouth open and his teeth bared, as men rushed him up to
the hospital clinic emergency entrance. A hospital spokesman said later that it was about 3:15
P.M. when Malcolm X reached a third-floor operating room. He was "either dead, or in a deathappearing
state," said the spokesman.
A team of surgeons cut through his chest to attempt to massage the heart. The effort was
abandoned at 3:30 P.M.
Reporters who had descended upon the hospital office fired questions at the spokesman, who
kept saying brusquely, "I don't know." Then he took the elevator upstairs to the emergency
operating room. A small crowd of friends and Sister Betty had also pushed into the hospital office
when the hospital spokesman returned. Collecting himself, he made an announcement: "The
gentleman you know as Malcolm X is dead. He died from gunshot wounds. He was apparently
dead before he got here. He was shot in the chest several times, and once in the cheek."
The group filed out of the hospital office. The Negro men were visibly fighting their emotions; one
kept smashing his fist into the other cupped palm. Among the women, many were openly crying.
Moments after the news flashed throughout Harlem (and throughout the entire world), a crowd
began to gather outside the Hotel Theresa where Malcolm X'sOAAU had its headquarters. They
learned over transistor radios that the man whom the two policemen had taken from the murder
scene initially identified himself as Thomas Hagan, 22 (he was later identified as Talmadge
Hayer), in whose right trousers pocket the policemen had found a .45 caliber cartridge clip
containing four unused cartridges, and then at Jewish Memorial Hospital doctors had reported
that Hayer had been shot in the left thigh, his forehead was bruised and his body was beaten. "If
we hadn't gotten him away, they would have kicked him to death," Sergeant Aronoff had said, and
Hayer had been taken to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward. By five P.M. , the crowd in front of
the Theresa Hotel had been quietly, carefully dispersed, and the Black Muslim Mosque Number 7
and its restaurant around the corner, at 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, had been ordered closed
as a precautionary measure, on the orders of the local 28th Precinct's Captain Lloyd Sealy, New
York City's first Negro to command a precinct. When reporters telephoned the Black Muslim
restaurant, a man's voice stated, "No one is available to make any statement." When the OAAU
office in the Theresa Hotel was tried, the telephone kept ringing, unanswered. Precinct Captain
Sealy soon appeared, walking by himself along 125th Street, swinging his nightstick and
conversing with people he met.
At the 28th Precinct station house on West 123rd Street, the forty policemen who were to have
gone off duty at four P.M. had been told they must remain on duty, and two full busloads of the
highly trained New York City Police Tactical Patrol Force had arrived at the precinct. Various high
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