Ron Edmonds, an Associated Press photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for a dramatic series of photographs of the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan and the shooting down of the gunman outside a Washington hotel in 1981, died Friday in Falls Church, Virginia. . he was 77.
His wife, Grace Feliciano Edmonds, said he died in a hospital from pneumonia related to a bacterial infection.
It was only Mr. Edmonds’ second day in the White House when he was assigned to cover a speech by President Reagan to an AFL-CIO group at the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981. After rushing to leave the hotel earlier As the president did, Edmonds stood on the other side of the presidential limousine, waiting for Reagan to do little more than wave to onlookers before returning to the White House.
“I had it in the viewfinder,” Edmonds said in an interview with the Gannett News Service in 1982. “It waved once to the right and turned to the left as I lowered the shutter. That’s when the shots rang out.” He added: “I saw his reaction when he flinched.”
Although there were other photographers at the scene, Edmonds was the only one to capture the assault on Reagan by the gunman, John W. Hinckley Jr., in a sequence of photographs that began before the shooting and continued after a single bullet from Mr. Hinckley’s .22 caliber revolver entered Reagan under his left armpit, struck his seventh rib, and penetrated his left lung.
Another photo showed Secret Service agents Ray Shaddick and Jerry Parr frantically pushing Reagan toward the limousine, which then sped toward George Washington University Hospital.
The assassination attempt began around 2:30 p.m., when Hinckley, 25, a blonde man wearing a raincoat, fired six shots from a position he had taken among television camera crews and reporters standing outside. leaving a hotel.
He also shot James S. Brady, the White House press secretary, who was lying face down, blood pouring from his head; Secret Service agent Timothy J. McCarthy, who was shot in the abdomen as he tried to protect the president; and Officer Thomas K. Delahanty of the Metropolitan Police Department, who was struck in the neck.
One of Edmonds’ photographs vividly conveyed the chaos at the scene: the three wounded men on the sidewalk, officers with guns drawn, two television cameramen recording Hinckley’s arrest.
Returning to the AP’s Washington bureau, Edmonds worried that he had not been able to obtain a photograph of Hinckley’s face.
“I knew he had pictures of them wrestling with him, but initially they had put the jacket over his head, which is one of the ways to incapacitate someone,” he said in an interview with PBS Hawaii in 2012.
But his bosses assured him that he had done his job. He was rewarded with a raise of $50 a week.
“Sometimes you make your own luck and I was in the right place at the right time and ready when this happened,” he told Time magazine in 2011.
When he received the 1982 Pulitzer for news photography, Edmonds told the AP: “I wish it had been for a photograph that had not been of violence, of people being hurt.”
Ronald Allen Edmonds was born on June 16, 1946 in Richmond, California, and grew up in Sacramento. His father, Ernest, was a truck driver whose itinerant job caused the family to move so frequently that Ron rarely spent more than a year at a single school. His mother, Dorothy (Theis) Edmonds, kept house.
After graduating from high school, Mr. Edmonds worked for Pacific Telephone and attended Sacramento City College from 1965 to 1969. While there, he took a photography course taught by a newspaper photographer, who encouraged him to take photographs of anti-war demonstrations in Sacramento. United Press International paid him $25 for one of his photographs.
“I saw it in the paper the next day and knew what I wanted to do,” Edmonds told the White House News Photographers Association when it presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.
After freelancing in California for several years, he moved to Hawaii in 1971 to work for The Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Four years later, he met Feliciano, his future wife, a reporter who covered state and federal courts there for the newspaper. Edmonds joined UPI, in Sacramento, in 1978 and stayed two years before the AP recruited him to work in its Washington bureau.
Doug Mills, a Washington photographer for The New York Times who worked with Edmonds at The AP for 15 years, praised him in an email as a man with “an incredible work ethic” who “loved covering the biggest news events.” important in Washington.” ”, and for being “the first AP photographer to take digital images during the film camera era.”
At George Bush’s inauguration in 1989, Edmonds used a telephone line to transmit a digital image to newspapers around the world 40 seconds after President Bush took the oath of office.
Edmonds’ extensive portfolio included photographs of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat shaking hands, while President Bill Clinton embraced them, after the signing of a peace agreement in 1993; a bare-chested Reagan climbing a tree and sawing off a branch on his California ranch; and the eruptions of the Kilauea volcanoes, in Hawaii, and Mount St. Helens, in Washington state.
In addition to his wife, with whom he lived in Annandale, Virginia, Mr. Edmonds is survived by his daughter, Ashley Edmonds; his sister, LaVonne Edmonds Coen; and his brother Donald.
While working in Hawaii in 1973, Mr. Edmonds was assigned to take photographs of an Elvis Presley concert that was broadcast around the world by satellite from Honolulu. But Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wanted to ban all press coverage.
After The Star-Bulletin threatened to seek a court order to stop the program, Colonel Parker relented, but still took steps to control Mr. Edmonds’ access.
After he and a burly security guard escorted Mr. Edmonds to his seat, Colonel Parker gave him his instructions.
“The lawyers said I have to let you take pictures,” Edmonds recalled saying, “but I don’t have to let you move.”