Asesinato de Martin Luther King

Asesinato de Martin Luther King
On Thursday, April 4, 1968, King was staying in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The motel was owned by businessman Walter Bailey and named after his wife. ReverendRalph David Abernathy, a colleague and friend, later told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and he had stayed in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel so often that it was knownas the "King-Abernathy Suite".
King had gone out onto the balcony and was standing near his room when he was struck at 6:01 p.m., by a single .30-06 bullet fired from a Remington Model 760. The bullet entered through King's right cheek, breaking his jaw and several vertebrae as it traveled down his spinal cord, severing his jugular vein and major arteries in the process, before lodging in hisshoulder. The force of the shot ripped off King's necktie. King fell violently backward onto the balcony, unconscious.
Shortly after the shot was fired, witnesses saw a man (believed to be Ray) fleeing from a rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Ray had been renting a room there. Police found a package dumped close to the site, which included a rifle and binoculars, both markedwith Ray's fingerprints. Ray had purchased the rifle under an alias six days earlier. A worldwide manhunt was triggered, which culminated in the arrest of Ray at London Heathrow Airport two months later.
At the time, Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the deck, bleeding profusely from the wound in his cheek. Andrew Young, a colleague from theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), thought King was dead, but found he still had a pulse.
King was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where doctors opened his chest and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. According to Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that his heart was in the condition of a 60-year-old man,which Branch attributed to the stress of King's 13 years in the Civil Rights Movement.
Capture and guilty plea
The FBI investigation found fingerprints on various objects left in the bathroom from where the gunfire had come. Evidence included a Remington Gamemaster rifle from which at least one shot had been fired. The fingerprints were traced to an escaped white convict named James Earl Ray. Twomonths after King's death, Ray was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom for Angola, Rhodesia or South Africa on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder.
He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969 (although he recanted this confession three days later). Onthe advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and potential sentencing under the death penalty. Ray was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.[45]
Ray fired Foreman as his attorney and claimed that a man he met in Montreal with the alias "Raul" was involved, as was his brother Johnny Ray, but that he was not. He said through his new attorney JackKershaw that although he did not "personally shoot King", he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it", hinting at a conspiracy.
Escape
Ray and seven other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, on June 10, 1977. They were recaptured on June 13, three days later, and returned to prison.[47] A year was added to Ray's sentence, making it 100 years.Shortly after, Ray testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot King.
Ray worked for the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure a full trial. In 1997, Martin Luther King's son Dexter King met with Ray; he publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a retrial.
Dr. William Pepper remained James Earl Ray's attorney...