Tom Brook was the first on the scene when the BBC reported on John Lennon’s death, later interviewing his widow, Yoko Ono, and their young son. Today, he reconnects with Sean Ono Lennon on his parents’ legacy – and giving peace a chance.
On 8 December 1980, I was getting ready for bed in my tiny Greenwich Village apartment when a colleague phoned with the alarming news of reports of gunshots outside The Dakota Apartment building and that possibly John Lennon was the target. I wasted no time. I gathered my tape recorder, microphone, notepad and a portable radio and ran to 8th Avenue to hail a cab uptown. En route, I willed the taxi driver to go faster as we listened to radio reports confirming that Lennon had indeed been shot. He’d been taken to Roosevelt Hospital. It didn’t sound good. At 23:15 that night, Lennon was pronounced dead.
Forty-five years have elapsed since the former Beatle – then 40 years old – was murdered by a fan as he returned home with his wife, Yoko Ono. It was a night I will never forget, both professionally and personally. I was in my mid-20s, newly arrived in New York and a huge Lennon fan. I really felt the loss, but it was by pure chance that I ended up being the voice on BBC News that brought word of Lennon’s slaying to an early morning UK audience, with the first live radio reports from outside The Dakota.
I was still pretty fresh to journalism and inexperienced. Normally, the job of reporting a death so momentous would have fallen to Paul Reynolds, the staff’s New York correspondent at the time, but he was out of town on another story.
When I first arrived at the scene, Ono was still in the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, but Lennon’s five-year-old son Sean was in their fifth-floor apartment, hundreds of wailing fans congregating in the street below. In the aftermath, I often wondered how difficult that must have been for both mother and son. Two years later, back at The Dakota, I met them both to record a BBC TV interview in their living room. Ono told me that, as far as she was concerned, John Lennon was very much with us: “He’s still alive, he’s still with us, his spirit will go on. You can’t kill a person that easily.”