Juan Romero, The Boy Who Cradled A Fallen Hero, Dies

LOS ANGELES, CA - Juan Romero, has died. He was 68. His is not a name that most Americans will remember, but his face was indelibly imprinted on the American consciousness on June 5, 1968.

Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and in the confusing moments after the shots rang out, it was a 17-year-old busboy, who knelt down and cradled the dying icon. That moment and the haunting photographs that captured it would forever change Romero’s life.

Romero’s stunned expression, his helplessness, captured something a whole nation was feeling. But while the world moved on, Romero would forever do battle with that moment, struggling to come to terms with his role in history, fighting and often failing to absolve himself of the blame for not saving his hero.

In the decades after Kennedy’s assassination, Romero shared his grief and guilt with the Los Angeles Times. He tormented himself wondering if he could have done more to protect Kennedy and if it was his fault because the presidential nominee had stopped to shake his hand just before the shots rang out.

A native of Mexico and a high school student in Boyle Heights, Romero was mesmerized by Kennedy and his message of social justice. He had met the candidate the night before the shooting when he delivered room service. Kennedy shook his hand.

“He had piercing blue eyes, and he looked right at you. You knew he was looking at you and not through you,” he told the Times in June. “I remember walking out of that room … feeling 10 feet tall, feeling like an American.… I didn’t feel like I was Mexican, and I didn’t feel like I was a busboy, and I didn’t feel like I was 17 years old. I felt like I was right there with him.”

Romero said that when the shots rang out he thought they were fireworks and that Kennedy had merely fallen. But when he bent down to help the candidate, he felt the blood wash over his hands. He pressed his mother's rosary beads into the dying man's hands and held tight.

"Is everybody OK?" Kennedy asked. Romero said yes. "Everything will be OK," the senator replied shortly before losing consciousness.

It wasn’t until he was riding the bus home from the police station the next morning, still in his blood-soaked clothes, that he first saw the pictures.

“What made me realize it was real was that a lady was sitting in front of me reading the newspaper,” he told the Los Angeles Times. I remember the lady showing me the picture and saying, ‘This is you, isn’t it?’ That’s when I first saw the picture, and I never wanted to see it again.”

It would take Romero years to look at the pictures again and years more to reconcile himself with the tragedy. He moved to Wyoming, settled near Sacramento where he married, divorced and raised his children while working in construction. Yearly, he placed flowers at a Kennedy memorial and periodically, he met up with Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. Together they visited Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Romero wept. He told Lopez that if he could speak to Kennedy he would tell him, “’I’m grateful for his involvement in my life and that I will always respect his efforts for social justice. And to say that I will never forget the first time we met, and that I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for him.”

Romero died Monday several days after suffering a heart attack at his home in Modesto.

"Juan was a big, brawny guy, a muscular guy and seemingly in good health," Rigo Chacon, a longtime family friend and former TV newsman, told The Associated Press on Thursday, adding his death came as a shock to family and friends.

"According to his daughter Elda, he was the happiest she had seen him in a while," Chacon added, noting the divorced Romero had recently met a woman who helped bring peace into his life.

Only recently, he said during rare interviews this year, did he finally come to terms with the struggle he felt each time he saw black-and-white news photos of himself — a baby-faced busboy gently cradling Kennedy as he lay sprawled on the hotel's concrete kitchen floor. Though he would always wonder what more he should have done to save Kennedy, he would also try to carry the example Kennedy had set as he campaigned for equality and civil rights.

"I still have the fire burning inside of me," Romero said in June 50 years after Kennedy's assassination.

For the full Los Angeles Times column, click here.

Associated Press reporters JOHN ROGERS and RUSSELL CONTRERAS contributed to this report.

Photos: Boris Yaro:Los Angeles Times via AP, Jud Esty-Kendall:STORYCORPS via AP, Richard Drew:Pasadena Star News via AP