On the night of 8 December 1980, Dr Frank Veteran was preparing for bed in his girlfriend’s apartment on Manhattan’s West Side when his beeper went off. He was 30 years old, a chief surgical resident at Roosevelt Hospital, and used to late-night emergencies. What he did not know was that the patient being rushed across 10th Avenue was John Lennon.Earlier that evening, Lennon had been shot four times outside the Dakota, the Upper West Side apartment building he shared with his wife, Yoko Ono. At around 10:50pm, Mark David Chapman fired from behind using a .357 Magnum revolver. Lennon collapsed at the entrance. Police officers arriving at the scene placed him in the back of a patrol car and drove him directly to Roosevelt Hospital.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono/ Image: Instagram
Chapman, who had asked Lennon for an autograph earlier that day, remained at the scene and was arrested without resistance. Decades later, during a parole hearing reported by MailOnline, he said he committed the murder “to be famous”, calling the crime “completely selfish”. He is currently serving a sentence of 20 years to life, with parole denied 14 times.
Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon in New York on December 8, 1980/ X
At the time, Veteran was one of three chief residents at Roosevelt, in his fifth and final year of surgical training at the age of 30, on call for emergencies every third night. His work typically involved what he described as the routine injuries of city life, gunshot wounds, stabbings, car accidents. Music, and the lives of his childhood heroes, had long slipped into the background.“I was into the Beatles, and I followed them,” Veteran later recalled when speaking in 2005 for a Guitar World Presents special issue. “But by the time I was the chief resident in surgery, I wasn’t listening to them anymore. I was too busy. I didn’t even realize John Lennon was living in New York.”Inside Roosevelt’s emergency department, staff had already begun resuscitation attempts when Veteran received the call.“They said, ‘We have a gunshot wound to the chest,’” he recalled. When told that another resident had already opened the patient’s chest, Veteran initially assumed his presence was unnecessary. “Opening the chest is a last resort,” he explained. “It means the heart has stopped.”Then came the follow-up call.“But they said to me, ‘No, we need you now!’”Puzzled, Veteran dressed quickly, took the elevator down to the lobby and ran across 10th Avenue to the hospital. As he walked upstairs and down the hall toward the emergency room, he encountered two nurses.“One of them looked at me and said, ‘John Lennon.’ I looked at them and thought, What does John Lennon have to do with it? It made no sense to me.”The reality did not register until he stepped inside.“I walked in, and there was John Lennon, on the table, with all these people around him.”The doctors were already at work. “His chest was open,” Veteran said. “They were doing everything to save him.”Lennon’s injuries were catastrophic. Two bullets had passed through his left arm and entered his chest; two more entered directly behind the arm. The rounds tore through his lungs and major blood vessels. Three exited the front of his torso. One remained lodged inside. The most severe damage, Veteran said, was to the subclavian artery, a major vessel branching from the aorta.“He was bleeding heavily.”For roughly 20 minutes, the surgical team attempted to restart Lennon’s heart. Veteran later explained why the outcome was inevitable.“Once your heart stops, you have five minutes to resuscitate it before lack of oxygen causes brain injury,” he said. “Getting from the Dakota to the hospital, getting stripped, getting the chest open — that takes longer than five minutes.”Lennon’s heart never resumed beating.“And had we gotten it going,” Veteran added, “he would have been brain dead. It would have been a disaster anyway.”The last sign of life came earlier, not in the operating room, but in the police car.Veteran later recalled speaking with an officer who had been at the scene. “He said the last evidence of any life was a groan when they put him in the backseat of the police cruiser.”At 11:15pm, John Lennon was pronounced dead. The medical examiner later confirmed he died from shock and massive blood loss, stating that survival beyond a few minutes would have been impossible.Veteran was still in the operating area when he heard a scream from a nearby room.“That was Yoko Ono,” he said. “The head of the emergency room had given her the news. It was a horrendous scream.”What Stayed With HimDespite years of experience treating violent trauma, the case did not fade.“Standing there, suddenly, everything just hit me,” Veteran said. “For some reason, I thought of John Kennedy and Jesus Christ. It was just a weird thing that flashed in my head.”For months afterward, he struggled.“I’d feel normal, and then I’d wake up in the middle of the night in this deep depression,” he said. “It took six months for that to go away.”
Though Veteran would later leave surgery and pursue a different life, the events of that night never fully receded. He had been present for one of the most shocking moments in modern cultural history, not as a fan, not as a witness, but as the surgeon who stood at the table, trying, and failing, to save John Lennon’s life.
