Ten different witnesses said that they smelled gunpowder at street level at the time of the shooting. Ralph W. Yarborough, a veteran with over fifty years of experience with guns, was riding in the car behind the Secret Service follow up vehicle. Confused as to why he smelled gunpowder a few seconds after the three shots, he told the reporter “I could never see how I could smell the powder from a rifle in that high building. You don’t smell gunpowder unless you’re upwind of it, and it blows in your face.” Another witness, Dallas patrolman Earl Brown, was standing on a railway bridge overlooking the motorcade. He heard the shots and soon after, when the motorcade sped underneath him, he smelled gunpowder. The motorcade was in between Brown…show more content… At least eleven witnesses, including Yarborough and the mayor, who was four cars back, claim that someone in the car behind Kennedy’s pulled out a rifle. Seven of those witnesses were Secret Service agents. The mayor, Earle Cabell, also said that “there was a longer pause between the first and second shots than there was between the second and third shots.” Someone firing multiple shots in succession routinely fires at a constant rate. This testimony also disproves that Oswald fired the third and fatal shot, as he would not have been able to reload that quickly. Winston Lawson, a Secret Service agent, said he saw an agent pull out a rifle after the first shot, and his first thought was that the agent had killed the president, being that the rifle in the Secret Service agent’s hand was the first weapon he saw. This agent, George Hickey, pulled out an AR-15 assault rifle, a weapon that fired frangible bullets. This information all adds up, pointing the blame towards Hickey. Yet, why would Hickey, a Secret Service agent, shoot the…show more content… In accordance with the Texas law, if “a crime had taken place in Texas… there the autopsy must be held.” Be that as it may, no autopsy was held in Texas. Instead, the Secret Service forced the doctors to let them take Kennedy to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The Secret Service broke the law to move Kennedy from Texas; why would they be in such a hurry? When Kennedy’s body arrived at the hospital, two clinical pathologists, Doctor James Humes and Doctor J. Thornton Boswell, began the autopsy. Being clinical pathologists, Humes and Boswell were ill-prepared to perform an autopsy on anyone, let alone the president. A medical examiner should have performed the autopsy; however, none were present. Humes said that “the team had zero information from Parkland when the post-mortem began,” and that he felt rushed to quickly finish the autopsy by Admiral George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician. In fact, when interviewed years after the autopsy, Humes explained, “it was like trying to do delicate neurosurgery in a three-ring circus.” There were around thirty people in the room, compared to the normal five or six. Full of Secret Service agents, FBI reporters, photographers, and other doctors crowding together, the room was chaotic. Jerrol Custer, an X-Ray technician, said “the room was full of loud debate and… the doctors were being harassed.” The photographers took
