'One of Our Last Direct Links' to JFK Assassination Is Gone

Marie Tippit, widow of slain officer JD Tippit, is dead at 92
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Mar 4, 2021 2:45 PM CST
'One of Our Last Direct Links' to JFK Assassination Is Gone
In this 2008 photo, Marie Tippit signs books honoring Dallas police officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty near a bronze bust of her husband J.D. Tippit in Dallas.   (Jim Mahoney/The Dallas Morning News via AP, File)

Marie Tippit, the widow of the Dallas police officer killed by Lee Harvey Oswald about 45 minutes after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has died at age 92, per the AP. Tippit died at a hospital in the East Texas city of Sulphur Springs after being diagnosed with pneumonia following a positive test for COVID-19, said her son, Curtis Tippit. He said his mother also suffered from congestive heart failure. Stephen Fagin, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of Kennedy’s assassination in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, said Tippit was "one of our last direct links to the personal pain and tragedy of the assassination.” She was "was this quiet reminder that the assassination, the pain of that memory, can still be felt right up to the present day,” he said. Tippit was a 35-year-old mother of three when her husband was killed.

At about 1:15pm that day, Officer J.D. Tippit was on patrol in a neighborhood just southwest of downtown when he spotted a man walking down the street that met the description of the shooting suspect. Moments later, Tippit got out of his patrol car and Oswald opened fire, killing Tippit. Oswald, who was arrested a short time later at the Texas Theatre, was killed two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby during a police transfer. On the day he was killed, Tippit had broken from his usual routine and ate lunch at home, where his wife fried some potatoes and made a sandwich for him. “I kissed him bye, not realizing that would be the last time I would see him, but I felt the Lord really blessed by letting him come by that one last time,” Marie Tippit told the AP in 2013. J.D. Tippit, 39, had been an officer for 11 years when he was killed.

(More Lee Harvey Oswald stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X