Warren Commission (12 of 26): Hearings Vol. XII (of 15)United States. Warren Commission
History
Warren Commission (12 of 26): Hearings Vol. XII (of 15)
United States. Warren Commission
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 -- Assassination; Oswald, Lee Harvey
Mr. HUBERT. You say you did not look into the room?
Mr. STEVENSON. I did not go into the room. The door, of course, was
open, but I was present when they left the third floor, the homicide
office, to go down for this lineup.
Mr. HUBERT. You went down to the door of the lineup room?
Mr. STEVENSON. Yes.
Mr. HUBERT. Do you recall looking in at all?
Mr. STEVENSON. Yes, I could look in through the open door.
Mr. HUBERT. Did you see a man since identified as Jack Ruby, in that
room?
Mr. STEVENSON. Oh, no, sir; I did not.
Mr. HUBERT. Did you hear him say anything?
Mr. STEVENSON. No, sir. Frankly, I was not close enough. The only ones
that I could see or did see were those lined up in the front of the
room.
Mr. HUBERT. How many people were in that room, do you suppose?
Mr. STEVENSON. I would say, and this is an estimate on my part, Mr.
Hubert--I would say from 100 to 125, including officers and news media
and everything.
Mr. HUBERT. Do you know what security plan or actual operations were
put into effect with respect to Oswald during that period?
Mr. STEVENSON. When he left upstairs, he was taken back through the
jail office. From the jail office down, there is an elevator to the
downstairs jail office, onto the "showup stage," as we call it in the
assembly room. He was taken down through the jail; was not taken out
from there.
Now to take him into the showup room, I was not where I could see how
many officers were around him. But it was necessary to bring him from
the elevator next to the homicide bureau every time we brought him down
to interview him. At that time we would have as many as three officers
with him, and from four to half a dozen officers on the route through
to the next door.
Mr. HUBERT. Do you know what check was made of the people who were
allowed into the assembly room?
Mr. STEVENSON. No one was supposed to have been in the assembly room or
on the third floor except news media properly identified.
Mr. HUBERT. How was this established?
Mr. STEVENSON. We had officers at the elevators and the stairways with
instructions that unless they were an official or connected with an
official news media, they were not to be permitted on that floor unless
they had business in one of the other bureaus, and the officer was to
escort him to that bureau.
We later eliminated as much of that as we could that night by calling
the jail office. If he wanted to visit some prisoner at the jail, the
jail personnel called the bureau and were instructed as to whether a
pass would be permitted.
Mr. HUBERT. But do you know whether or not, as these newsmen and the
rest of the other news media went into the assembly room for this
lineup, whether they were checked in any way again upon entering?
Mr. STEVENSON. No, sir; I don't, because when I went down to the
basement, they were already in the room. In other words, they had
already filed into the room.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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