John Warnock Hinckley Jr. is one of three attempted presidential assassins currently living who are not in prison. He shot Reagan six times at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., after the president addressed an AFL–CIO conference. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and remained under institutional psychiatric care until September 10, 2016.
About John Hinckley Jr. in brief
John Warnock Hinckley Jr. is one of three attempted presidential assassins currently living who are not in prison. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and remained under institutional psychiatric care until September 10, 2016. Public outcry over the verdict led to the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which altered the rules for consideration of mental illness of defendants in Federal Criminal Court proceedings in the United States. He shot Reagan six times at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., after the president addressed an AFL–CIO conference. He also wounded police officer Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and he critically wounded Press Secretary James Brady, who was permanently disabled in the shooting. Hinckly was reportedly seeking fame in order to impress actress Jodie Foster, on whom he had an obsessive fixation. He wrote to Foster just before his attempt on Reagan’s life: “The reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you. On March 30, 1981, at 2: 27 p.m. EST, I shot Reagan with a. 22 calibre revolver. Within minutes, a labor official who stood nearby and saw him firing hit him in the head and pulled him to the ground. Though he did not hit Reagan directly, the president was seriously wounded when a bullet ricocheted off the side of the presidential limousine. The president was taken to the hospital and treated for serious but non-life-threatening injuries.
He later died in a hospice in Los Angeles, California, on March 31, 1983. He is survived by his wife, two children, and a stepson. He has a son, John Warnock Jr., who was born on May 29, 1955, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and moved with his wealthy family to Dallas, Texas, at the age of four. His late father was John Warnocks Sr., chairman and president of the Vanderbilt Energy Corporation. His mother is Jo Ann Hincksley. Hinckleys grew up in University Park, Texas,. and attended Highland Park High School in Dallas County. In 1975 he went to Los Angeles in the hope of becoming a songwriter. In September 1976, he returned to his parents’ home in Evergreen, Colorado, where the new company headquarters was located. He was an off-and-on student at Texas Tech University from 1974 to 1980 but eventually dropped out. He became obsessed with the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which disturbed protagonist Travis Bickle plots to assassinate a presidential candidate. The Bickle character was partly based on the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who attempted to assassinate George Wallace. He eventually settled on a scheme to impress her by assassinating the president, thinking that by achieving a place in history, he would appeal to her as an equal. He returned home. Despite psychiatric treatment for depression, his mental health did not improve. He began to target the newly elected president Ronald Reagan in 1981. For this purpose, he collected material on John F. Kennedy.
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This page is based on the article John Hinckley Jr. published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
