One of those people was Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin.
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Beatles fans are expected at Cavern Walks to mark the 35 year anniversary of his death, and the BAIS will also be lighting 130 candles to honour the victims of the Paris attacks. The atmosphere was further buoyed by the arrival of record company boss David Geffen to pass on the good tidings that Lennon’s latest album Double Fantasy had turned gold. Chapman screamed out John’s name to get his attention, took a combat stance, and fired his gun five times at John. “I consider that my work won’t be finished until I’m dead and buried – and I hope that’s a long time”.
Police said they had a suspect and described him as “a screwball” with no apparent motive for shooting Lennon. When police arrived, Chapman was arrested without any incident.
The song alone is a salient enough argument for gun control; as art, it conveys the internal dissonance and confusion that Ono must have felt after her beloved’s murder, and the act of recreating the scene at the beginning of the song feels both cathartic and a destructive impulse to submerge one’s self into the moment that changed her life forever.
When Lennon died, it seemed that he took what was left of the promise of the ’60s with him. Chapman is serving a 20 years-to-life sentence at Wende Correctional Facility in western NY. He has been denied several attempts at parole, the most recent in August 2014. He is eligible again next year.
The tearful fans joined millions throughout the world in 10 minutes’ silent prayer at the request of John’s widow Yoko Ono.
What made the loss all the more painful was the fact that Lennon was experiencing both an artistic rebirth and a more highly developed sense of his potential as a human being when Chapman killed him.
In 1980, “Monday Night Football” announced the tragic incident. “John Lennon has been shot and killed in New York”. John Lennon is dead.
John Lennon was one of the original members of the British rock group The Beatles.
“You come, you meet people, you listen, and you just celebrate peace”, Bellotti said.
John Lennon has grown in statute over the years. For Season of Glass-her 1981 album and her first after Lennon was murdered-she sat them next to a half-empty glass, and poured forth a handsome, often challenging document of her grief.
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A memorial to John Lennon exists in a part of Central Park that is across from Lennon and Ono’s apartment.
