Juan Romero: How a Teenager's Thirty Seconds With RFK Haunted Him For Fifty Years
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It happened just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Robert F. Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and he'd decided to take a shortcut through the kitchen to avoid the crowds. A 17-year-old Mexican-American busboy named Juan Romero was waiting there, hoping for another handshake. He'd already met Kennedy the day before when he delivered room service, and that brief encounter had changed something in him. Kennedy made him feel seen. Made him feel like more than just a busboy.
Romero pushed through the crowd. Kennedy reached out. For a moment, they were connected by a two-handed grip. Then everything fell apart.
The Handshake That Changed Everything
Romero had arrived in the United States as a 10-year-old, a Mexican immigrant who'd grown up seeing photographs of John F. Kennedy hanging in Mexican homes. When Robert Kennedy announced his presidential campaign, Romero became convinced he was looking at the future. He was working at the Ambassador after school when he heard that the senator would be staying at the hotel. It felt like fate.
The night before the primary, Romero delivered room service. Kennedy was there, and he greeted the teenager with genuine warmth. "I remember staring at him with my mouth open, and I see him shaking the hand of a waiter and then reaching out to me," Romero recalled years later. "He had piercing blue eyes, and he looked right at you. You knew he was looking at you and not through you." Kennedy gave him a two-handed shake. Romero walked out feeling transformed.
"I remember walking out of that room feeling 10 feet tall, feeling like an American. I didn't feel like I was Mexican, and I didn't feel like I was a busboy, and I didn't feel like I was 17 years old. I felt like I was right there with him."
Less than 24 hours later, Romero was in the kitchen again, this time on the night of Kennedy's greatest triumph. Word had spread that the senator would walk through to reach his car. Romero positioned himself, eager for another moment. Kennedy arrived with his entourage, moving through the crowd, shaking hands.
"I remember extending my hand as far as I could, and then I remember him shaking my hand," Romero said. "And as he let go, somebody shot him."
The Moment Everything Stopped
The photographs that followed are among the most haunting images of the 1960s. A mortally wounded senator lying on a cold kitchen floor. A teenage busboy kneeling beside him, cradling his head. The terror and confusion frozen on the boy's face. The camera caught what Romero experienced in those first chaotic seconds that would become iconic portraits of 1960s upheaval, not unlike the assassinations that would follow just months later.
Romero knelt down to Kennedy. He could see Kennedy's lips moving. "I put my ear next to his lips and I heard him say, 'Is everybody OK?' I said, 'Yes, everybody's OK,' " Romero remembered. Kennedy then turned to someone else and said, "Everything's going to be OK." These would be nearly the last coherent words Kennedy would speak. He died the following day.
Romero had a rosary in his shirt pocket. In that moment, with Kennedy bleeding on the cold concrete, he took it out and placed it in Kennedy's hand. "I could feel a steady stream of blood coming through my fingers," Romero said. "I remember I had a rosary in my shirt pocket and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me. I wrapped it around his right hand and then they wheeled him away."
The Weight of Fifty Years
The iconic photograph spread across newspapers and into the collective memory. Juan Romero became famous for thirty seconds. Visitors came to the hotel asking for the boy in the picture. Photographers wanted recreations.
For decades, Romero carried a crushing guilt. He quit his job at the hotel and left Los Angeles, eventually resettling in Wyoming in self-imposed isolation. He lived with a torment that wouldn't fade: what if Kennedy hadn't stopped to shake his hand? What if that thirty seconds hadn't happened? Would the bullets have come anyway? Would Kennedy be alive?
The guilt consumed him. "After the thing was over, people started to say I was a celebrity and then I started to think, celebrity for what? Why a celebrity? Is it because a person is dying and you try to help them? Is it because a person was shot and you were there?" he said in an interview years later. He struggled with depression and trauma. He fled. He tried to outrun a memory that had become permanently tattooed on his hands, literally marked by Kennedy's blood.
Eventually, Romero left Wyoming and resettled in San Jose, California, where he worked in construction and raised a family. But the past never fully released him. He dreaded June. On the bus to school the day after the shooting, a woman sitting in front of him was reading the newspaper. She recognized the photograph and showed it to him. "I remember looking at my hands and there was," he said, the memory still difficult to articulate decades later. He rode that bus home in shock, staring at his own blood-stained hands in newsprint.
Finding Peace
For nearly five decades, Romero lived in the shadow of that night. But something shifted in his later years, partly due to the love and support of Kennedy fans who reached out to tell him that he embodied the very values Kennedy had fought for. These were people who recognized that a 17-year-old busboy, acting on instinct and compassion, was exactly the kind of person RFK had dedicated his life to helping. Romero came to understand that his presence there, his humanity in the face of horror, was not something to feel guilty about. It was something that reflected the man Kennedy truly was.
A friendship with a German woman named Claudia Zwiener helped Romero heal spiritually and emotionally. He began speaking publicly again, granting rare interviews to NPR, StoryCorps, and the Netflix documentary 'Bobby Kennedy for President.' Slowly, he began to let the guilt go. He visited Kennedy's grave, and though tears still came, the shame began to lift.
In 2015, he told the Associated Press something he hadn't been able to say for fifty years: "I still have the fire burning inside of me." It wasn't the fire of guilt anymore. It was the fire that Kennedy had lit in him that first night, the feeling of being truly seen, of being part of something larger than himself.
Juan Romero died in October 2018 at age 68, from a heart attack. But his story lived on. It's a story about trauma and recovery, about the impossible weight we sometimes place on ourselves for things beyond our control. It's about a teenager who did everything right and still spent fifty years wondering if it was enough. And it's about finally, after all that time, understanding that it was.
Sources
1. Los Angeles Times, "Juan Romero, the busboy who held Robert F. Kennedy moments after he was fatally shot" (2018)
2. NPR, "The Busboy Who Cradled A Dying RFK Recalls Those Final Moments" (2018)
3. StoryCorps Interview with Juan Romero
4. CNN, "Juan Romero, busboy who aided wounded RFK in '68, dies" (2018)
5. The Daily Beast, "The Busboy Who Held RFK as He Died" (2024)
6. San Antonio Express-News, "Long-ago busboy talks about night he helped dying RFK" (2018)
7. Chicago Sun-Times, "50 Years of Guilt, Pain for Teen Who Held Dying RFK" (2018)
8. Irish Central, "Juan Romero, the busboy who cradled dying RFK speaks" (2019)
9. CBS News, "Teen immigrant who cradled fatally wounded Robert F. Kennedy dies in California" (2018)
