Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [281]
The two shooters, trying to escape through the main entrance, hoped to conceal themselves within the large, panicking audience, but even before they were halfway across the ballroom, Gene Roberts intercepted them. One assailant, probably Hayer, fired at him at point-blank range. The bullet tore through Roberts’s coat but did not hit him. Roberts grabbed a folding chair and hurled it into Hayer’s legs, causing him to stumble and fall, after which Hayer tried to scramble up toward the now packed exit. As he did so, Reuben X Francis took aim and fired at him from eight feet away, pulling off three shots. Hayer was struck just once, in the left thigh; in pain, he stumbled and continued running down the stairwell, where he was immediately surrounded by Malcolm’s enraged followers and viciously beaten. In the confusion, Leon X and the other conspirators managed to escape.
From his lone security outpost at the front door, William 64X George had heard the gunfire and immediately ran down the street to tell police, who within a minute were outside the Audubon. Turning back to the main entrance and front stairwell, William saw Hayer being grabbed by two MMI and OAAU brothers, Alvin Johnson and George 44X, who dragged the wounded shooter to the ground. “The crowd started to beat him,” William would later recount. At that moment, police patrolman Thomas Hoy arrived at the scene and attempted to pull Hayer into the rear of his squad car. Seconds later Sergeant Alvin Aronoff and patrolman Louis Angelos drove up in a squad car and assisted Hoy in dispersing the angry crowd. Aronoff fired his revolver into the air and the officers were finally able to secure Hayer into a squad car.
The most detailed eyewitness account by a journalist was that of freelance writer Welton Smith, whose story appeared in the New York Herald Tribune . Smith first observed a man wearing “a black overcoat in the middle of the hall” rise to his feet and “[yell] at the man next to him, ‘Get your hand out of my pockets!’ ” Gunshots then erupted from the front stage as Smith found himself violently pushed to the ballroom floor by others. All the shots took place “within fifteen seconds.” By the time Smith rose to his feet, he saw two men chase the man in the black overcoat, who turned and fired at his pursuers as he ran toward the main entrance. Smith located the smoke bomb at the back of the ballroom, smothered the fuse, and looked for water to douse it. Several minutes later, he could see that about eight people were bending over Malcolm. As several MMI security personnel attempted to keep others from crowding onto the stage, Smith saw Yuri Kochiyama, an OAAU member, bend over Malcolm and heard her shout, “He’s still alive! His heart’s still beating!”
Mercifully, Betty had witnessed only the first terrible seconds of her husband’s murder. When she first heard the boom of the shotgun blast, she instinctively turned her body toward the stage. “There was no one else in there they’d be shooting at,” she recalled later. Two more killers with handguns stepped forward, firing into Malcolm. Betty would later claim that she had seen her husband collapse onstage under this withering fire. Observers, however, saw her quickly gathering her terrified children, pushing them to the floor, shielded partially by a wooden bench and her own body. As the shooting continued, Betty screamed out, “They’re killing my husband!” While the assassins fled the scene, the Shabazz children began to cry and to speak up. “Are they going to kill everyone?” one daughter asked. Betty could see people running up to the stage, overwhelmed by the terrible damage that Malcolm had sustained. Finally rising to her feet, she began to run toward the body, sobbing and screaming; friends tried to hold her back because she was clearly hysterical. After