Forty-five years ago today, Rolling Stone sent a photographer to capture the couple on December 8th, 1980. The shoot was part of a feature marking their return to music after five years spent largely out of the spotlight, focused on raising their son, Sean. It would become the last photo session of Lennon’s life.

Hours later, after returning from mixing records, John Lennon stepped out of a limousine in front of the Dakota on West 72nd Street. He and his wife Yoko Ono had only stopped home so he could say goodnight to their five-year-old son before heading back out to dinner. As they walked toward the archway, the man who had spent the entire day lingering outside, chatting with fans, making small talk with the doormen, and, at 5 PM, getting Lennon’s autograph, stepped forward, dropped into a combat stance, and fired five shots. Four struck Lennon in the back and shoulder, shredding major arteries and his left lung. He staggered into the lobby, bleeding heavily, and managed to say, “I’m shot,” before collapsing.

Police arrived within minutes and found the gunman, Mark David Chapman, calmly reading The Catcher in the Rye as he waited to be arrested. Lennon was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in the back of a squad car because his wounds were too severe to wait for an ambulance. Doctors fought to revive him, but the injuries were unsurvivable; even if he had been shot in the middle of an operating room, he couldn’t have been saved. He was pronounced dead at 11:15 PM.

The days that followed saw an outpouring of grief unlike anything the music world had ever witnessed. Yoko Ono requested no funeral, asking instead that people everywhere pause for ten minutes of silence in his memory. Millions did. More than 200,000 people gathered in Central Park alone. Three fans tragically died by suicide, prompting Ono to plead publicly for people not to harm themselves. In the decades since, Lennon’s legacy, complicated, brilliant, and deeply human, has continued to evolve, but the shock of that night has never truly faded. If interested, I write about the life of John Lennon and his death here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-volume-50-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios