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RIP Jim Leavelle
Dallas homicide detective Jim Leavelle died yesterday, August 29. He was 99 years old. Everyone knows who Jim Leavelle is, or at least has seen a picture of him. He's the guy wearing the tan suit in the picture below.
Here are some interesting cut and paste things about Leavelle:
He was a sailor on board the USS Whitney, and was aboard the ship during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
He began a career as a homicide detective in the Dallas Police Department in April 1950 and retired in April 1975.
He supported the official conclusion that Oswald acted alone and also refuted conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination.
In 1992, while demonstrating how detective L. C. Graves, the guy in the dark suit holding onto Oswald in the picture, grabbed Ruby’s gun in an attempt to stop him from firing, Leavelle accidentally shot researcher and photographer Bob Porter in the arm, Leavelle was using the same model gun Ruby had used. Porter recovered at Parkland Hospital, the same facility where Kennedy, Oswald, and Ruby either died or were pronounced dead.
In a 2006 interview, Leavelle said that he was the first to interrogate Oswald after his arrest; he said that he joked with Oswald before the transfer, saying "Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they're as good a shot as you are," meaning that the person would hit Oswald instead of Leavelle. Oswald smiled and said, "You're being melodramatic. Nobody's going to shoot at me."
In an interview with author Joseph McBride, Leavelle said he had different views on the murder of President Kennedy and Tippit, describing the president's assassination as "no different than a south Dallas nigger killing...it was just another murder inside the city limits of Dallas. I’ve handled hundreds of them." Leavelle told McBride about Tippit, "What some people don’t realize is that when a police officer gets killed, that takes precedence over the shooting of the president, because that’s close to home."
Dr. Robert McClelland, who treated Oswald at Parkland Hospital, has said that while at Parkland, he noticed that Leavelle was waiting outside the hospital room and said that Leavelle told him that after Oswald was shot, he claimed to have "leaned over Oswald and said, 'Son, you're hurt real bad. Do you wanna say anything?' He looked at me for a second. He waited like he was thinking. Then he shook his head back and forth just as wide as he could. Then he closed his eyes."
In November 2011, Leavelle had a serious fall while visiting his daughter Karla and was flown to Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas for immediate surgery to remove his eye due to the severity of damage. As a result, he had to wear a glass eye.
