INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Munir Sirhan, 70, outside of his brother Sirhan's room at the family home in California
On a serene, leafy street in north Pasadena, Calif., a 70-year-old man has lived a quiet life in
a well-preserved Craftsman house since his family bought it in 1963
Sometimes he smokes Parliament cigarettes with his tea on the front porch, gazing at the San Gabriel Mountains that rise to the north into a
sky that's almost always blue.One spring day 50 years ago, one of his older brothers left this house and eventually drove his pink-and-white
'56 DeSoto to the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles to shoot Sen
At the time, Kennedy was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination
To his supporters, he represented a chance to heal the torn and reeling country
On June 6, 1968, he died of a gunshot wound to the head
Sirhan Sirhan, this man's brother, was sentenced to the gas chamber for the assassination - a sentence that was commuted to life in prison
in 1972.In the intervening years, Munir Sirhan has cared for another brother, Adel, who lived here before dying of cancer in 2001, and
looked after his mother, who passed away in 2005, blind and deaf after years of illness
His father and three other siblings have died, too
Munir, three years younger than Sirhan, was the baby of the family
Now he and Sirhan are the only ones left.He keeps the furniture in the house pretty much as it has been since 1968
There's a grandfather clock that's stopped at 10:01 in the morning, the moment Adel died
A sign on a shelf says, "The Lord Provides." Another sign in the kitchen says, "Waiting for the other SHOE to drop!" Small, framed photos of
brothers Adel, Saad Allah, Sharif and Sirhan, sister Aida, father Bishara and mother Mary line a high shelf in the dining room, almost too
The Sirhans were Christians; crosses lean between the pictures.There are three shelves of books about the Kennedys that Munir bought but has
On the floor, vacuum trails are visible in the cream-colored carpet
When I visit on a Wednesday morning, he looks around the living room, which could not be tidier, and says, "Sorry for the mess." Munir's
own individuality - his own time - has come down to this: "It's all dedicated to Sirhan."The shades are drawn and the lamps are twilight low
Munir is blind in one eye and always wears dark glasses
It's quiet and still in this place
And then the sound of a robin chirping comes from the kitchen, where there's a clock with birds on the face instead of numbers
"Every hour is different," he says
"One hour it's a mockingbird, and another hour it's a blue jay and so on
It keeps me company.There is no wife, there is no career, never has been
Sirhan's crime has had a 50-year ripple effect on Munir
He leads a simple existence, keeping mostly to himself while he waits for his brother - who has been denied parole 15 times
"I just want to hear his footsteps on the porch," Munir says
"I just want to hug him and tell him, 'Welcome home.' "---In 1948, the Sirhans, who were Christian Palestinians, fled their home in the
The family slipped away during a letup in the fighting of what became known as the Arab-Israeli War of 1948
The Sirhans were granted Jordanian citizenship, but they would come to see America as their future
"There was a program started by Eisenhower and the United Nations to help refugees," says Munir
In 1956 they left with only what they could pack in suitcases
"Sirhan didn't want to come," Munir says
Finally during the morning hours we found him and packed him up real quick."A ship crowded with seasick refugees brought the family to New
Their sponsor lived in Pasadena, so the Sirhans took the train to this land of sunshine and roses
"It was a new haven, compared to Jordan," says Munir.But it wasn't perfect: "It was difficult fitting in
I think Sirhan must have had this same problem
To this day, people walk up to me and speak Spanish
Some think I'm black or mulatto
I used to get into fights when I was a child because I would say to an individual, 'I'm not Mexican,' and they would think I was putting
them down for being Mexican."Bishara, the family patriarch, returned to Jordan after about a year, unable to adapt to life in the States
He reportedly beat his sons, though Munir says that was not his experience
Bishara eventually lost touch with his family and stayed in his home village of Taibe until his death in 1987.Munir's two eldest brothers
adopted the paternal role - not always an easy situation for the younger siblings - but "we were a close family," he says
"Very tightly knit." They worked, they pooled their resources, they bought a home
They also bought an Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder
It hasn't worked for years but still sits in what was Sirhan's bedroom, a sunny space at the rear of the house, along with an old cardboard
box filled with tapes - recordings of a happy family singing Egyptian folk songs, making music together."Adel would play the oud," a
lute-type stringed instrument, "and Mother would take two spoons and hit the bottom of a bottle and approximate a drum sound," Munir says
"Even if you didn't know the language or the rhythm of the Middle Eastern music, Adel could make you jump and holler and get off your seat."
Later, the family would use the machine to record the audio from TV news broadcasts about Sirhan
Those tapes are in the box in the bedroom, too, all of them slowly decaying, unplayable.As an older brother, Sirhan was "very congenial and
protective," Munir recalls
"If anybody was trying to do me any harm, he confronted people." Sirhan would say: " 'Listen, this is my little brother
I don't want anybody hurting him.' "Slowly, the Sirhans became Americanized
They had dogs named Tasha and Blue, a cat named Father John and a hamster named Herbie
They were regulars at Westminster Presbyterian Church, which was in walking distance from their home
Mary worked there in the nursery school
Sirhan went to nearby Eliot Junior High School, and then to John Muir High School - the same school Jackie Robinson attended - where he
joined the ROTC and learned to shoot a .22-caliber rifle.Munir quit school after sixth grade
"My eyes were weak," he says
"I couldn't see the blackboard
I just couldn't sit through it
So I thought I could learn more outside of the school system than in it."The brothers got paper routes, tossing the Pasadena Star-News
They also worked at a local health food store making deliveries
Sirhan liked to read, holed up for hours in that back bedroom with a window that looked out on a single lemon tree
It's still there, gnarled and hanging with fruit.Munir collected records
Had thousands in the garage
He sold them at a yard sale years ago
He says he enjoyed all kinds of music, but who did he really, really like "I used to love Stan Freberg," he tells me
In the '50s and '60s, Freberg - a Pasadena native - was a popular song parodist, the "Weird Al" Yankovic of his day
"I used to adore that guy
I think that's what I would have been, some sort of comedy songwriter or something like that."But it didn't turn out that way
Nash department store in Pasadena as a stock clerk
"The personnel manager, she said, 'How do you pronounce Munir' " he recalls
" 'Don't you have a nickname' So I said, 'Well, yeah, call me Joe.' I saw it on one of the carpenter's shirts
She said, 'Oh well, we'll have three Joes.' "This mundane department store position created a connection - with Munir as the unwitting
middleman - that would lead to his brother acquiring a gun
Around January 1968, "Sirhan, because he used to belong to the ROTC, asked me to see if I could get him a gun," Munir recalls
"And I said, sure, I'll ask." A co-worker knew a friend looking to sell a pistol
That co-worker and another individual met the brothers in front of the house one evening and made a deal
"In any event, Sirhan ended up with the gun through me," says Munir
"Which didn't make me feel too good as years progressed."According to a Los Angeles police interview transcript from 1968, Munir had tried
to talk his brother out of buying the weapon
He told the police that he asked his brother to swear on their sister's memory - she had died in 1964 of leukemia at age 28 - that he would
"go to the rifle range just one time and then throw it away." He did swear - "but," as Munir told police, "he didn't carry it through.""I'd
think: If I hadn't bought him that gun, or if I hadn't connected him with" the co-worker, then "things would be different," Munir says now
"You kind of start looking inward to see if you were part of the blame for this thing happening."---In the early hours of June 6, Adel
Sirhan, who worked nights playing oud at an Arabic nightclub in Hollywood called the Fez, came home and entered Munir's room
From Munir's LAPD interview: "I was asleep, and he woke me up and he said that Senator Kennedy had been shot
I said, 'Oh, my God.' I was hazy and sleepy
I just went back to sleep."Later that morning, Munir left the house and took the bus to F.C
At about 8:30, he went into the break room
"And the TV was on loud and the room was full," he tells me
"And usually it's not that full unless it's somebody's birthday, and I'm thinking it's too early in the morning to celebrate a birthday." He
got some coffee from the vending machine
"So I took a couple of sips of my coffee, and I looked at the screen and the announcer was saying, 'If anybody knows the identity of this
individual, get a hold of the police,' and it looked like Sirhan
I said, 'Whoa.' ""I waited until the picture came on again," he continues, "and I said, 'That's my brother.' So I took my cup of coffee
with me and spilled it all over the place, but ran down to the housewares department and asked my boss if I could use his car to run home
I told him, 'Listen, I think it's my brother that shot Kennedy!' " A photo of Sirhan, left, and Munir, on a wall at the family home.His
boss gave him his car keys
"I came home and told Adel, I said, 'Hey, they say that Sirhan shot Kennedy.' I was shaking." Munir thought police had the wrong person
He had reason to think this was possible: A few years earlier, he had received a citation for hitchhiking
He says he didn't realize he was supposed to go to court, so the citation turned into a warrant
Later, according to Munir, Sirhan was stopped for driving barefoot
When the officer searched the record of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the warrant for Munir Bishara Sirhan came up
The officer arrested Sirhan
"And when this thing happened, I thought: They got the wrong guy
There's a mistake here, you know, they've got him mistaken for another guy, just as they had in the situation with the warrant
That was my solace at the time.Munir and Adel went to the Pasadena police station "to notify them, to see what the story was
And the officer, the desk clerk there, didn't seem too interested with our questioning, so we walked away, and when we walked away Adel
happened to gaze at a newsstand, and there it was: Sirhan's picture on the front page
So he grabbed the paper and went back to the desk sergeant and told him, 'Listen, this is my brother.' I remember the guy's look
He said, 'Oh.' And then all hell broke loose."---What Sirhan did that night at the Ambassador Hotel is well documented
The short version is this: A month before the assassination, Sirhan had scrawled repeatedly in a notebook, "R.F.K
must die." (During his trial, he said he had no memory of writing this.) On June 4, the day of the California primary, he went to the hotel
with a .22 Iver Johnson pistol fully loaded with eight bullets
He had four Tom Collins cocktails
A little after midnight in the hotel's ballroom, Kennedy finished his rousing victory speech
He left the ballroom and made his way through a kitchen pantry accompanied by supporters and unofficial bodyguards, athletes Rafer Johnson
and Rosey Grier among them
(Los Angeles police were not on the scene, nor were Secret Service details, which weren't assigned to candidates in 1968.) Sirhan stepped
toward Kennedy and began shooting
He was hit twice in the back and once in the head
Sirhan was quickly overtaken and forced onto a steam table, still pulling the trigger
Including Kennedy, he shot six people with eight bullets
Five were wounded.Sirhan stated then and still maintains that he has no memory of the actual shooting
He recalls looking for coffee, talking with a young woman in a polka-dot dress, then nothing until he found himself being choked on the
steam table.He was 115 pounds and 5-foot-2, and his goal in life up to that point had been to be a jockey; he'd worked as a stable boy at
So why would he assassinate Robert Kennedy One theory held that Sirhan hated Kennedy for his support of Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War
Munir says Sirhan never verbalized any hatred toward RFK and had no issues with Kennedy's support for Jews or Israel - though this
contradicts comments made by other members of the family, including Sirhan himself, about his feelings toward the Jewish state.Or perhaps
Sirhan - per psychologist Martin M
Schorr, who interviewed Sirhan in 1969 and was quoted in Bishara Sirhan's 1987 obituary in the Los Angeles Times - hated his allegedly
brutal father and took vengeance on Kennedy, whom he saw as a "symbolic replica" of his father
("He was a very strict father," Munir says
"But a lot of people had a tight rein on their kids.") Or did Sirhan, as has been speculated, feel he was a loser, a failure, and he simply
wanted to get famous Munir's response: "That's a bunch of crap
A lot of people looking into this case, after a while they make up their own conclusions."Then there's the second gunman theory
The coroner's report stated that the shot that killed the senator was fired from no more than three inches from the back of his head, on the
Witness accounts place Sirhan in front of him and a few feet away at the closest
Moreover, an audiotape recorded in the pantry that surfaced in 2004 reveals, according to experts, up to 13 shots fired - five more than
Sirhan's gun held.Which leads to the Manchurian angle: Sirhan, according to this theory, was acting under hypnosis, had been brainwashed and
was merely a patsy - albeit a potentially deadly one - to draw attention from the actual assassin
"He had played around with the hypnotism
I asked him about it but never got any clear answers," says Munir
"And he was into the Rosicrucians." According to the group's website, "The Rosicrucians are a community of mystics who study and practice
the metaphysical laws governing the universe." Sirhan was a card-carrying member of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis; his ID, dated
1966, was found in his wallet when he was arrested
During the trial, Sirhan was hypnotized six times by the defense and the prosecution in attempts to recover his memory of the shooting
To no avail.At the Sirhan family house, on the living room bookshelf along with Munir's unread Kennedy collection, is a spine bearing the
title "The Laws of Mental Domination." It's Sirhan's book
It's been there for all these years, along with a few of Sirhan's other, now musty paperbacks like "Think and Grow Rich," "How to Win
Friends and Influence People" and "Word Power Made Easy."Munir has lived for decades with a sense of helpless frustration and confusion
"I say this for people who loved the senator," he tells me
"They think that they have a closure, but if they look into this thing, they'll find out that there's a lot of unanswered questions."After
the shooting, Munir says, "all of us, the whole family got lost in this avalanche
I remember Mother saying - God bless her, sweet as she was - that maybe it's her fault
And then Adel thinking, 'Well, I work nights so I should have been home.' That went on for a long time
It wasn't in Sirhan to do this
It wasn't in him at all, far from him
It was far from any of us
None of us were politically inclined
If you would've told me any of my brothers did anything like this, especially Sirhan, I'd call you the biggest liar in the world."---After
Sirhan's arrest, communicating with him was not easy for his family
"When things somewhat cooled down, after we spoke with the FBI, after we spoke with the L.A
police and Pasadena police, Mother and I went down to see him," says Munir of their first face-to-face meeting after the shooting
"Mother asked him what happened
He said, 'I don't remember
I don't know.' "As people across the country dealt with the shock of the assassination, the residents of Munir's neighborhood had their own
"When it first happened, they had to block off the whole street," he says
The police were here for six months, 24 hours a day, guarding us, making sure nobody did us any harm, but I don't think there was any need
Everybody was trying to be as helpful as they could
Our neighbor, Olive, Sirhan used to play Parcheesi with her
She and the rest of the neighbors said, 'If there's anything I can do, please let me know.' "Olive is long gone, but Eileen Sloman, her
husband, Peter, and son, Ernie, have lived in Olive's old house for nearly 30 years
To Eileen, the man next door is just Manny
"He's a great neighbor, and when we're gone he watches the house
When he's gone we'll watch his house
He's a very soft-spoken person, and he's a very private person
But at the same time, I know that he would do anything for me and my family, and that's just the type of person he is." When she moved in,
she adds, "I think he maybe knew some way that I knew who he was
But just over the years, he kind of let me in, and trusts me."Sloman has seen the odd tour bus cruise by, and Munir once cautioned her to
move her trash cans away from his on pickup day
Sometimes souvenir hunters dig in his garbage.Munir, according to Sloman, keeps a tidy yard: "He does! And the other day he said, 'I want
your opinion on something.' So I go out, and he's redone his garage
He's going to make it into his man cave."Munir lives alone, but his existence isn't solitary
Sloman says he knows more people in the neighborhood than she does
He goes to all the block parties
The man cave is part of all that, a way out of the darkness
"It's painted circus colors," she continues
"This bright orange and purple, kind of like a circus tent
He said he just wants to make it into a place where people can come and relax."Relaxation has not been an easy thing for Munir
"I don't understand really what he's been going through," says Sloman, "but to know that his last brother has been serving the last 50 years
of his life in prison has got to be just horrible
Tearing him apart."---Munir says he's had to deal with any serious negative backlash due to his last name
Nothing physical, not even verbal
In the early days, "the whole family protected me," he says, like "where the baby elephant is between the mass of elephants."As he got
older, even out there in the working world, it wasn't an issue
He never had a profession - "I'm not that kind of guy" - but worked as a service station manager on and off
"Oh yeah, I had jobs that my name would be printed on my shirt," he says
"But no, I've never had anybody that held any animosity toward us at all
And in fact, I didn't like it, but a lot of people would say, 'You're famous,' or they would go out of their way to help because of the
notoriety, and then I tell them, 'Please, you know, I have my own individuality.' "But his own individuality - his own time - has come down
to this: "It's all dedicated to Sirhan
I wait for him to call when he can
When he can't, I'm here for the attorneys in case they need anything." And between those phone calls, between helping the attorneys Munir
"Go to the store, go to the laundry, go to the post office
Read and read and do some more reading." About what "I do a lot of house repairs
I butcher up the place, so I have a lot of manuals about repairing houses
And I read briefs about Sirhan
There's about 15 boxes of those
My eyes aren't that great, and I like to keep them reserved for the important issues regarding Sirhan's case."Since 2013, California state
prisoner B21014, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, has been locked up at the Richard J
Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego - the fifth institution he's resided in, also home to the Menendez brothers and former Manson
It's 160 miles and a world away from Pasadena.Seeing him has been up to the vagaries of the prison system, Munir says
When he and his family visited over the years, "it was hard to have time to discuss much of anything
The time we spent with him was discussing legal matters, and we'd be more concerned about his health and if he's getting treated right."They
communicate mainly by phone these days, and even those moments are unpredictable
But when Sirhan and Munir do speak, beneath the legal concerns and the health issues, he is still just talking to his big brother, the guy
who looked out for him so long ago
"Stop smoking, it's bad for you," he says his brother tells him
"It's the number one killer in the United States
I need you alive."Munir lights another Parliament
"You can't imagine how many press people the family members have spoken to and nothing has changed," he says
"We go through this every so often and, believe me, it gets monotonous
Don't take this personally, but we're private."---Gilstrap is a writer and radio producer in Los Angeles.(Except for the headline, this
story has not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
