Hinckley release sparks reactions
2 law enforcement officers wounded in the shooting of Reagan speak out
WASHINGTON — John Hinckley Jr. shot four people outside a Washington hotel on March 30, 1981, but two of his victims understandably got most of the attention: President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary, James Brady.
Two other men — Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and District of Columbia police officer Thomas Delahanty — each took a bullet to protect the president. Thirty-five years later, they’ve lived to see Hinckley freed.
On Thursday, both were still coming to terms with the news that Hinckley, now 61, will soon be released from a Washington psychiatric hospital to live full time with his 90-yearold mother in Williamsburg, Va. A judge ordered Wednesday that Hinckley can leave the hospital as soon as Aug. 5, with numerous restrictions.
The would-be assassin was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and he has gradually gained more freedom. For the past twoplus years, he has spent more than half his time at his mother’s house in a gated community overlooking a golf course.
Chief McCarthy, 67 — the longtime police chief in Orland Park, Ill., about 25 miles southwest of Chicago — has long followed developments in Hinckley’s case through news accounts, so he wasn’t surprised to hear about his release. He accepts it, he understands it, but that doesn’t mean that he agrees with it.
“I have a lot of not very great Christian thoughts about him,” he told The Associated Press in a phone interview Thursday. “It was a terrible act. It’s unforgivable as far as I’m concerned.”
Mr. Delahanty, 80, who has rarely spoken to reporters, said he’s not crazy about the decision to release Hinckley but is resigned to it.
“That’s their decision, I guess,” he told The AP on Thursday, sitting in his apartment in Whitehall, Pa., a Pittsburgh suburb. “I’m probably not too enthused with it, but what can you do?”
Chief McCarthy said he doesn’t think much about Hinckley, but the assassination attempt altered the trajectory of his life. He recovered from the gunshot wound to his chest, was back on duty three months later and ended up serving another five years on the presidential protective detail — an unusually long time for that high-stress assignment.
Reagan came closer to death than almost anyone knew at the time, but recovered fully. He died in 2004, and Brady died in 2014, his death later ruled a homicide resulting from the gunshot wound.
Chief McCarthy was lucky that the bullet, designed to explode on impact, didn’t damage vital organs.
“Another inch or two in the other direction and it could have been fatal,” he said.
Mr. Delahanty, who was born and raised in Pittsburgh, served in the Navy for seven years and then worked on-and-off at a steel mill. He started with Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department in September 1963 and, two months later, worked a funeral detail after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Eventually, Mr. Delahanty was trained as a canine officer. It was because of his dog that he wound up helping protect Reagan on the day he was shot.
“I was with the K-9s and my dog was sick and I went out on the [presidential] detail that day, and that’s it,” he said. “It was my day off anyhow, so I wouldn’t have even been there” had the dog not gotten sick.
What he felt was a bullet hitting the back of his left shoulder. The fragmentation bullet damaged some nerves and prompted his disability retirement that November. It caused some arthritis in the joint but, otherwise, doesn’t bother him much.
He had surgery about a week later to remove most of the bullet, but doctors have told him a fragment likely remains.