On 8 December 1980 at 11.00pm, surgeon Frank Veteran was getting ready for bed when his beeper unexpectedly went off - unbeknownst to him, the patient was John Lennon.
Mark David Chapman was convicted of murdering the musician after he shot him 45 years ago today. The Beatles star was outside of his apartment building in New York City when the gunman aimed and fired at him four times from behind at roughly 10:50pm.
Lennon was 40 years old at the time and was rushed to the nearby Roosevelt Hospital, but was pronounced dead upon arrival.
Chapman had met the icon earlier that day, having reportedly asked for his autograph. The killer remained at the scene of the shooting, making no attempt to flee or resist arrest and in late August of this year, he said he wanted to kill Lennon ‘to be famous’.
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“This was for me and me alone, unfortunately, and it had everything to do with his popularity,” he reportedly told the parole board, as he faced them for the 14th time.
“My crime was completely selfish.”
And on the night Chapman shot Lennon, surgeon Frank Veteran was on call for emergencies at Roosevelt Hospital.
He was a resident in surgery at the time, in his fifth and final year of surgical training at the age of 30.
Having been ‘into the Beatles’ when he was younger, he was ‘too busy’ by the time he’d worked up to his job title and ‘didn’t even realise’ Lennon was living in the city.
He explained that he was at his girlfriend’s apartment nearby when he was told he was needed ‘now’.
Recalling the moment he arrived, he told Guitar World Presents: “One of them [nurses] looked at me and said, ‘John Lennon.’ I looked at them and thought, ‘What does John Lennon have to do with it?’
“It made no sense to me. It was so ridiculous that it didn’t even register.”
But he then entered the ER to see Lennon being worked on, and bleeding heavily after officers had sped him over. The surgeon recalled speaking with an officer who had been on the scene.
“He said the last evidence of any life was a groan when they put him in the backseat of the police cruiser," he explained.
Veteran continued: “Standing there, suddenly, everything just hit me. For some reason, I thought of John Kennedy and Jesus Christ. It was just a weird thing that flashed in my head.”
Medics were doing ‘everything to save’ Lennon, but the surgeon says even if the team had got his heart beating again, 'he would have been brain dead’.
"It would have been a disaster anyway,” he added. And at 11:15pm, the star was pronounced dead.
While Veteran remained in surgery with the body, he heard a scream from nearby.
“That was Yoko Ono,” he explained.
“The head of the emergency room had given her the news. It was a horrendous scream.”
It took about six months for the surgeon to recover from the depression he suffered following that fatal night 45 years ago.
Jess Battison