Exactly 50 years to the day of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his brother’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was moved to a prison in San Diego County.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed Friday that Sirhan was moved from Corcoran State Prison in central California to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County’s South Bay area.
“As a routine matter of housing allotments, Sirhan Sirhan was moved from Corcoran State Prison to the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County today,” said Luis Patino, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections.
“The date of the move is simply an unfortunate coincidence. Any number of inmates are moved from institution to institution on any given day as necessary,” Patino added.
Sirhan – now 69 years old – shot Robert F. Kennedy on Jun. 5, 1968 in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after Kennedy won the California Democratic presidential primary. Kennedy had just finished addressing supporters in the hotel’s ballroom when he was fatally shot multiple times by Sirhan.
RFK died from wounds sustained in the shooting.
Sirhan was originally sentenced to death for the assassination of RFK, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison after the California Supreme Court declared the death penalty law in effect at the time, in 1972, as unconstitutional.
In 2011, Sirhan was denied parole for the 13th time.
