Dr. Stephan Lynn, the doctor who tried to save John Lennon remembers the icon's dying day
Dr. Stephan Lynn stands in the shampoo aisle of CVS, which used to be the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital, and the spot where John Lennon was declared dead.
Thirty years ago this week, a young New York doctor held the heart of a generation in his hands.
It was about 11 p.m. on Dec. 8, 1980, and Dr. Stephan Lynn had just walked into his West Side apartment after a 13-hour shift at Roosevelt Hospital's ER.
Suddenly, the phone rang.
"Please come back," a nurse blurted out to the 33-year-old director of emergency medicine. "The police are bringing in a gunshot wound with no vital signs."
Neither Lynn nor the nurse had any idea who the victim was - nor did they know that minutes earlier, a deranged stalker fired four bullets into John Lennon as the former Beatle and his wife, Yoko Ono, stepped out of a limo in front of The Dakota on W. 72nd St.
As New Yorkers are poised to mark the 30th anniversary of Lennon's death with vigils and tributes, the doctor who played a central role that night recalled the heroic - but futile - efforts to save a musical genius whose death broke the world's heart.
Sitting in Roosevelt's emergency room, where he is still on the job, the soft-spoken doctor, now 63, recounted every detail as if it were yesterday:
"I raced back to the hospital in a cab and got there just two minutes before two police officers arrived" with a fading Lennon in the back seat, Lynn recounted.
"I had no idea who the patient was. It wasn't until a nurse looked inside his wallet for identification that we realized who it was.
"In death he looked almost nothing like he looked in life. He was gray, he was gaunt, he had no signs of life. He had no pulse, no blood pressure...He was not breathing. We could have at that moment declared him dead."
25 frantic minutes
Lynn hoped against hope the bullets had not done irreversible damage, something that would let them refill Lennon's body with blood and rush him to the operating room and save him.
It was not to be. For the next 25 minutes a team of three surgeons and six nurses worked frantically.
Lynn said they cut open his chest and found massive blood loss; his heart was empty and still. The major vessels that carried blood from Lennon's heart to the rest of his body were destroyed.
Mark Chapman's bullets had been fired into Lennon's chest at close range just hours after Chapman got Lennon's autograph.
"I took his heart in my hand and massaged it to see if we could restore some cardiac function, to see if we could get it beating again, to see if perhaps with giving him some blood we could get something started," the somber-faced doctor said. "Nothing worked."
The damage was so great he could not have survived even with today's medical advances, Lynn said.
As the reality of Lennon's death set in, some ER staffers began to cry. Lynn remained stoic; his role in the night's unfolding tragedy had only just begun.
'Tell me it's not true!'
Now he had to give a distraught Ono the terrible news. She was waiting in a small, drab room at the end of the hall with record producer David Geffen.
"She didn't take it well," Lynn recalled. "She screamed for what felt like five minutes: 'You're a liar! Tell me it's not true! I can't believe it! He can't be dead!'"
Finally, Ono accepted Lynn's words. She asked him to hold off on a public announcement until she could get home and tell their 5-year-old son, Sean.
As she left to tell her son, Lynn, with just two years as ER chief under his belt, steeled himself for the moment when he would have to tell the world the dreadful news.
Shortly after 11:30 p.m., Lynn walked into the hospital lobby in his white coat and faced hundreds of shouting reporters and more than 300 cameras.
"I said what I needed to say," he remembered. "I wasn't going to take any questions. I made my statement and that was it."
An exhausted Lynn then turned to Saundra Shohen, the veteran ER administrator who was keeping the crowd at bay and made sure Lennon's belongings, the bloodied sheets, and his medical record were kept under wraps.
John Doe & John Lennon
There was a last hurdle to clear: Lynn and Shohen wheeled Lennon's sheet-wrapped body through a special passage to a loading dock where the medical examiner's van waited.
An unwelcome surprise awaited. As Lennon's stretcher was rolled onto the van, the driver whipped out a clipboard and said: "Wait. We have an order to pick up another body. The morgue is getting two bodies."
As it turned out, a "John Doe" who had died earlier that day at Roosevelt was also awaiting transport to the morgue.
It was an irony Lennon would have loved: The man who sang about working class heroes shared his last ride with a poor man who was never identified.
Shohen, now 76, choked back tears as she recalled waiting next to Lennon's body: "I put my hand on his head, and said, 'We tried, John.'"
This Thursday, Lynn and his wife will walk to Strawberry Fields to remember a man and the magic he gave his adopted city.
In the 30 years since, the emergency room where Lennon was declared dead has been relocated to 59th St. The original site - at 58th St. and Ninth Ave. - is a CVS drug store; the spot where doctors tried to save Lennon is aisle 5, where hair shampoo is sold.
"I am sad I was only able to play a role in his death," Lynn said. "I can't help but think the world would have been a better place had he lived."
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