Sirhan Sirhan Biography

At about 12:15 am on June 5, 1968, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan shot presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy, who was leaving a campaign rally, was mortally wounded and died the next day.

Kennedy’s death came just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King by James Earl Ray. Sirhan Sirhan was an Arab who had emigrated to the United States in the 1950s and was reportedly disturbed by Kennedy’s pro-Israel positions.

After a 1969 trial lasting nearly four months, Sirhan was convicted and sentenced to death. That sentence was commuted to life in prison and Sirhan has been in prison in California ever since; his repeated applications for release have been denied.

Sirhan was granted parole by the state’s parole board in 2021, but Governor Gavin Newsome rejected the parole the next year, saying that Sirhan had “failed to address the deficiencies that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy” and lacked “the insight that would prevent him from making the same types of dangerous decisions he made in the past.”