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Last August, Romero returned to the site of the assassination with Zwiener. Romero traveled to Germany to meet Zwiener, her husband and their children, and the Zwieners came to California. But there’s Juan, who didn’t take cover, trying to help a man in need.
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He said she comforted him by saying that in some of the photos, taken just moments after the shooting, the shoes of bystanders can be seen at a safe distance from Kennedy. One day, while visiting his mother in Tulare, his guilt surfaced again while he spoke to Zwiener by phone. “I don’t think she intended to fix me initially,” says Romero, “but as we came to know each other, she knew something was broken in me.” In time, they began talking about his struggle. Zwiener is not a trained therapist, but she works with special-needs children in Germany, and Romero felt that he could talk to her in ways he had never been able to with other friends or his own family.
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They became pen pals, then began talking by phone. “She really wanted to see how I was doing, and to find out if she could do anything to make it easier on my conscience,” Romero said. He hoped Zwiener wasn’t yet another “somebody who wants to feel sorry for me.” He didn’t want pats on the back he didn’t feel he deserved, or comments that stoked his own second-guessing of his actions that night. Many have reached out to Romero over the years, and he appreciated their concern but wondered as to their motives. Not long after that, Zwiener sent Romero a message. She wrote to me saying she was touched by his humanity, and didn’t believe he needed to ask Kennedy’s forgiveness, as he had that day in Arlington. Two years ago, Zwiener came upon my column about Romero’s visit to Arlington. Times national editor and Bobby Kennedy press secretary Ed Guthman. with her husband, visited the gravesite, and met people who had known him, including former L.A. She became insatiably interested in his life.Īs an adult, she read books about Kennedy, traveled to the U.S. It was a different Juan Romero, however, who reached out to me earlier this month to say he was much improved “spiritually and emotionally,” and it was all because of an unlikely friendship with a woman from Germany who saw my column about the Arlington visit, tracked Romero down and helped him finally step out of the past.Ĭlaudia Zwiener, 45, was a teenager when she first read about the Bobby Kennedy assassination. On far too many nights he lay awake wondering if Kennedy would still be alive if he hadn’t paused to shake a busboy’s hand. I told him there was no rational reason to feel guilty.īut the shooting had wounded his psyche. He spoke to me each time about his regrets, his sense of duty to the Kennedy legacy, and a lingering feeling of guilt. I knew this when I first met him on the 30th anniversary of the assassination, and his pain was just as raw 12 years later in 2010, when I went with him to RFK’s gravesite in Arlington, Va., where Romero knelt, paid his respects and wept once more. In the photos, disbelief and despair gathered in Juan Romero’s dark eyes, and he would carry the weight of that moment through the decades.
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“I wanted to protect his head from the cold concrete,” says Romero, who went to school the next day with Kennedy’s blood crusted under his fingernails, refusing to wash it away.