l Photographer who took RFK image

LOS ANGELES — As Robert F. Kennedy was leaving the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, following his victory in that year’s California Democratic presidential primary, a part-time Los Angeles Times photographer, working on his own time in hopes of catching a shot for his wall, followed.

“The idea went further than I had expected,” Boris Yaro would write more than 40 years later in a reminiscence of the night he became one of the world’s celebrated photographers.

In the pandemonium of the hotel’s pantry following Kennedy’s shooting by Sirhan B. Sirhan, as the crowd parted from the fallen candidate, Mr. Yaro snapped the enduring image of a distraught busboy trying to console a mortally wounded hero.

Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times photographer Don Bartletti said he thought two Pulitzers should have been given that year.

Mr. Yaro, who shot news photos for the Times for more than 40 years and along the way tutored the actor who played the news photographer on the TV series “Lou Grant,” died Wednesday at his home in Northridge, Calif., of natural causes. He was 81.

Although Mr. Yaro’s career became defined by the Kennedy photo, he was known to colleagues as a hard-driving but dapper news hound.

Always going to work in a blazer and tie, Mr. Yaro presented an amusing contrast to the slovenly, rumpled photographer known as Animal on “Lou Grant.” In preparing for that role, actor Daryl Anderson tutored under Mr. Yaro.

Mr. Yaro is survived by his wife, Jill; two children; and a brother.