My conversation with Sean Ono Lennon

Tom Brook was the first on the scene when the BBC reported John Lennon’s death, later interviewing his widow, Yoko Ono, and their young son. Today, he reconnects with Sean Ono Lennon about his parents’ legacy — and giving peace a chance.

On December 8, 1980, I was getting ready for bed in my small apartment in Greenwich Village when a colleague called me with disturbing news of reports of a shooting outside the Dakota apartment building, and that John Lennon may have been the target. I didn’t waste any time. I gathered my tape recorder, microphone, notepad, and portable radio and ran to Eighth Avenue to hail a cab uptown. On the way, I asked the taxi driver to go faster while we listened to radio reports confirming that Lennon had indeed been shot. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital. It doesn’t look good. At 23:15 that night, Lennon’s death was announced.

It has been 45 years since the former Beatle was murdered by a fan aged 40 while walking home with his wife Yoko Ono. It was a night I will never forget, both professionally and personally. I was in my mid-twenties, newly arrived in New York, and a huge Lennon fan. I really felt the loss, but it was pure coincidence that I ended up being the voice on BBC News that broke the news of Lennon’s murder to an early morning UK audience, with the first live radio reports from outside the Dakotas.

I was still very new to journalism and inexperienced. Normally, the task of reporting on a momentous death would have fallen to Paul Reynolds, a staff correspondent in New York at the time, but he was out of town on another story.

When she first arrived on the scene, Ono was still in the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, but Lennon’s five-year-old son, Sean, was in their fifth-floor apartment, where hundreds of tearful fans were gathering in the street below. In the aftermath, I often wondered how difficult this must have been for both mother and son. Two years later, in the Dakotas, I met them to record a television interview for the BBC in their living room. Ono told me that, for her, John Lennon was very much with us: “He’s still alive, he’s still with us, and his spirit will live on. You can’t kill someone that easily.”