At 1:22 p.m. Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone and Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman found a bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight between two rows of boxes in the northwest corner near the staircase on the sixth floor.[C3-114] No one touched the weapon or otherwise disturbed the scene until Captain Fritz and Lieutenant Day arrived and the weapon was photographed as it lay on the floor.[C3-115] After Lieutenant Day determined that there were no fingerprints on the knob of the bolt and that the wooden stock was too rough to take fingerprints, he picked the rifle up by the stock and held it that way while Captain Fritz opened the bolt and ejected a live round.[C3-116] Lieutenant Day retained possession of the weapon and took it back to the police department for examination.[C3-117] Neither Boone nor Weitzman handled the rifle.[C3-118] Discovery of Bullet at Parkland Hospital A nearly whole bullet was found on Governor Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital after the assassination. After his arrival at the hospital the Governor was brought into trauma room No. 2 on a stretcher, removed from the room on that stretcher a short time later, and taken on an elevator to the second-floor operating room.[C3-119] On the second floor he was transferred from the stretcher to an operating table which was then moved into the operating room, and a hospital attendant wheeled the empty stretcher into an elevator.[C3-120] Shortly afterward, Darrell C. Tomlinson, the hospital’s senior engineer, removed this stretcher from the elevator and placed it in the corridor on the ground floor, alongside another stretcher wholly unconnected with the care of Governor Connally.[C3-121] A few minutes later, he bumped one of the stretchers against the wall and a bullet rolled out.[C3-122] [Illustration: COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 723 Shield of cartons around sixth floor southeast corner window.] Although Tomlinson was not certain whether the bullet came from the Connally stretcher or the adjacent one, the Commission has concluded that the bullet came from the Governor’s stretcher. That conclusion is buttressed by evidence which eliminated President Kennedy’s stretcher as a source of the bullet. President Kennedy remained on the stretcher on which he was carried into the hospital while the doctors tried to save his life.[C3-123] He was never removed from the stretcher from the time he was taken into the emergency room until his body was placed in a casket in that same room.[C3-124] After the President’s body was removed from that stretcher, the linen was taken off and placed in a hamper and the stretcher was pushed into trauma room No. 2, a completely different location from the site where the nearly whole bullet was found.[C3-125] Description of Rifle