Sarah Jane Moore, one of two would-be assassins who took aim at President Gerald Ford in the span of three weeks in the summer of 1975, died on Wednesday in a nursing home in Tennessee at the age of 95 — just two days after the 50th anniversary of her fateful act.

Moore infamously pulled out a gun and fired two shots outside Union Square's St. Francis Hotel as President Ford was exiting the hotel on September 22, 1975. Her first shot missed, and her second shot might have been closer were it not for the intervening hand of Oliver Sipple, a former Marine and closeted gay man who was briefly deemed a hero — and forcibly outed by Harvey Milk, who saw Sipple's privacy as less important than the political optics of a national hero who happened to be gay.

Moore remains one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of American political assassinations. Neither as cuckoo as Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme — who took the first attempted shot at Ford that September in Sacramento — nor as vainglorious as the likes of John Hinckley Jr. or Lee Harvey Oswald, Moore was a loner figure in search of a cause who had both tried to join radical organizations in San Francisco and became an FBI informant to potentially betray them.

She worked briefly in 1974 with a food program, People in Need, funded by Randolph Hearst in order to appease the Symbionese Liberation Army who had his daughter Patty captive at the time, and espoused Marxist ideals. And she was married and divorced at least five times.

Biographer Geri Spieler, who has written the only book about Moore and her motivations, never really gets to the core of what spurred Moore to to try to kill Ford, but one thing was clear — she was bound and determined to get it done. As the New York Times notes in their obituary today, Moore had actually brought a weapon to an event Ford was appearing at at Stanford University on September 21, 1975, the day before the assassination attempt. The Secret Service spotted her with her gun and pulled her aside for questioning — but she cast such an unthreatening figure and passed herself off as a middle-aged housewife, so they let her go, but seized her gun.

Moore then went to a gun dealer in Danville, where she was living, and purchased the gun she used to shoot at Ford the next day. She was 45 years old at the time, and had dropped her son off at school that morning.

Moore ended up serving 32 years for the assassination attempt, getting paroled in 2007.

She gave a rare interview in 2009 to the Today Show's Matt Lauer, and shined some of the only light on her crime that she ever did — she was more reticent in the years leading up to her parole.

"It was a time people don’t remember," Moore told Lauer. "We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this [assassination] might trigger that new revolution in this country."

On the 20th anniversary of the assassination attempt in 2015, CNN spoke to Moore, and she passed off her motivations as a version of "everybody was doing it," or at least "everyone was talking about doing it."

"I don't know about the rest of the country, but in San Francisco, people were saying this all the time," she said. "Number one: We elect our presidents, we don't appoint them. And Gerald Ford was appointed, and he was appointed by a crook, if you'll pardon the expression. So it wasn't a unique feeling."

She went on to say that she saw her role as taking one for the team when it came to the coming revolution, destroying her own life so that radical leaders who wanted the same thing could go on to do their work.

"I thought somebody like me — I was a nobody — it would be better coming from somebody like me and not destroying these people who I felt were leaders, and if they did this it would destroy their leadership," she said.

Last year, a local Nashville TV affiliate got an on-camera interview with Moore from the nursing home where she spent her final years, asking about the attempt on Donald Trump's life which had just occurred. Moore seemed to have remained politically engaged, and was watching Trump speaking in Butler, PA on CNN live when the assassination attempt occurred.

"It's been a long time," Moore said, when asked if the Trump shooting brought up any PTSD for her. "I have more control of my emotions and more control of things than I used to."

She also described being fearless in the moment, on the day of her attempt on Ford's life. "When you psych yourself up for something like that... it's sort of like being in a play," Moore said. "You rehearse and rehearse, and when the time comes you just do it."

Related: Mining The Sad Tale Of San Francisco's First Reluctant Out Gay Hero, Oliver Sipple

Photo via Utah Governor's Office

The many, many troubling things that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk said in the public spotlight during his brief career are being trotted out online in the immediate aftermath of his horrific assassination, including comments he made about the 2022 hammer attack on Paul Pelosi.

We are going to be hearing a lot from Trump and the Republicans in the coming days about how violent the American Left is, no matter what we end up learning about the person who shot Charlie Kirk. And while Kirk is being praised on the right for his unapologetic views and mode of unabashed free expression, we can't discount how he himself dismissed an act of politically motivated violence just a couple of years ago, and downplayed the role that conservative rhetoric played in it.

The double standard being invoked here, which strikes everyone on the left as gross and unfair, is going to continue to feel gross and unfair, while the media and Democratic politicians remain careful not to promote or accept political violence of any kind.

While expressing one's opinions, no matter how repulsive, should not be something that gets someone killed, neither should being married to someone in the political spotlight, because of their spouse's opinions and positions.

That was the case with Mark Hortman, the husband of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman. Both were killed in June in an act of political violence allegedly committed by someone on the right, who also targeted another Democratic lawmaker and his wife.

As ABC News and others have noted, President Donald Trump pointedly ignored those very recent acts of politically motivated violence in his remarks Wednesday night about Kirk's killing. Trump only mentioned the attempt on his own life last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania (the motives for which remain unclear), the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, and "attacks on ICE agents," saying "radical Left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives."

And as KRON4 notes today, Charlie Kirk was notably insensitive and grotesque in his comments about the violent attack that could have killed Paul Pelosi in his own home three years ago.

In the aftermath of that event, on his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show, Kirk asked, "Why is the Republican Party, why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry-makers breaking into somebody’s home, or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home?"

Kirk was promulgating a debunked internet rumor that Pelosi was harmed during a gay tryst gone wrong, and referring to the fact that the perpetrator, David DePape, was associated with a loose nudist collective in the Bay Area through his relationship to longtime nudist activist Gypsy Taub.

Whether DePape suffers from mental illness has been a topic of discussion by Taub and by his attorneys during his state and federal trials. But it did not prevent him from being sentenced to life in prison in state court, and to 30 years in federal prison in the federal trial. But before he had even gone to trial, DePape gave a jailhouse interview in which he put out a statement calling himself a patriot, saying his message to America was "You're welcome," and saying his only regret was "I'm so sorry I didn't get more of them... I should have come better prepared."

DePape had a "hit list" of multiple individuals, including the actor Tom Hanks and Governor Gavin Newsom, and he had intended to find Nancy Pelosi in her bed and to break her kneecaps if she didn't admit to "lying" about some sort of liberal conspiracy.

Kirk continued his comments, which came just days after the 2022 attack, saying of DePape, "And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out… Bail him out and then go ask him some questions."

Kirk went on to complain that other criminals committing similar offenses in Chicago and San Francisco get let out on bail immediately, but not "when you come after the Pelosis."

You may want to disagree with him, but New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asserts today that Kirk was "practicing politics in the right way" by going to college campuses and engaging people in debate. The quality of those debates, and the talent Kirk had for shouting down disagreement with misinformation and incendiary fiction that he called "facts" notwithstanding.

Still, Klein makes an important point:

Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.

Related: Right-Wing Firebrand Charlie Kirk Fatally Shot During Utah College Speaking Event

Top image: Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025 in Orem, Utah, shortly before he was fatally shot. (Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images)

Charlie Kirk, one of the rising stars in conservative circles who made an appearance just a few months ago at San Francisco State and appeared on Governor Gavin Newsom's podcast, was shot and killed Wednesday while on stage in Utah.

The shooting happened at 12:10 pm local time, during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, 40 miles south of Salt Lake City, and a gunman reportedly took aim from a building about 200 yards away. Kirk, 31, was speaking on stage before an audience of students, who all scattered in fear after Kirk was struck in the neck by a bullet — which was captured on video by witnesses.

One eyewitness, Raydon Dechene, spoke to CBS News and said that when the shot rang out, Kirk had, ironically, been speaking with an audience member about the transgender shooting suspect in the Minneapolis school shooting last month. She said there was a single pop, and Kirk suddenly had blood gushing from his neck — she guessed his carotid artery had been struck.

As the New York Times reports, as of 2 pm Pacific Time, no arrests have been made, and a search is on for the gunman. A gray-haired man who was seen detained by security guards at the scene in early images was later released, but that did not stop many from sharing the image and even attempting to identify him on social media.

Like Kirk did when he made an appearance at SF State in May, he appeared with tents branded with "American Comeback," where he encourages students to debate him and "Prove Me Wrong" on any number of political topics. (At the SF State appearance, a punk band set up across the street and tried to drown Kirk out with their music.)

As the Associated Press reports, Kirk's appearance at Utah Valley University had been opposed by a number of students on campus, with a petition to cancel the event signed by over 1,000 people.

Kirk has been particularly vocal on a number of culture-war touchpoints, as he was on Newsom's podcast in March, where he was the governor's first podcast guest. The two discussed the "unfairness" of trans athletes in school sports, something that Newsom said he agreed with Kirk about.

Immediately after the shooting, Newsom tweeted, "The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form."

President Trump, who has reportedly ordered that flags be lowered to half-mast for Kirk, posted on Truth Social, "The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us."

Shortly following news of his death, a quote from Kirk in which he said that gun deaths around the country were "unfortunately" worth it in order to preserve the Second Amendment, has gone viral on Reddit and elsewhere.

Kirk co-fouded Turning Point USA at age 18, in 2012, in Chicago, and made a career of proselytizing for conservative causes on college campuses. During Trump's 2016 campaign, Kirk served as an aide to Donald Trump Jr., and both President Trump and his so have spoken at Turning Point conferences, as the AP reports.

Dechene, the eyewitness who spoke to CBS, said that the mood at the event was positive, and people had been chanting "USA" when Kirk came on stage. She also noted that there did not seem to be any security at all for the event.

Top image: Charlie Kirk debates with students at The Cambridge Union on May 19, 2025 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. (Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union)

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• Sen. Amy Klobuchar said authorities believe suspected gunman Vance Boelter remains in the Midwest following a politically motivated shooting that killed Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and critically injured Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. The Hortmans leave behind a son and daughter, and Hoffman's wife Yvette reportedly jumped in front of the couple’s daughter to protect her during the shooting. [MSNBC, People]
• A hit-and-run driver was apprehended by San Francisco police Saturday afternoon after allegedly striking a pedestrian near the city’s massive “No Kings” protest. While NBC News initially reported that multiple protesters may have been hit and that the act could have been intentional, SFPD has so far confirmed only one victim and described the incident as isolated. [SFGate]
• A Fremont man who vanished during what was supposed to be a two-day hike in the Himalayas has been found alive after nine days. Samuel Vengrinovich, 44, left his tent and belongings at a campsite near Dharamshala before setting out with a group of hikers he just met, unprepared for the harsh conditions. [SFGate]
• One person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting early Saturday in the East Bay’s Bay Point, with the fatal victim found in a front yard on Mendocino Drive. [Bay Area News Group]
• A small fire in the Mission District Saturday evening was sparked by a charging scooter using an aftermarket charger, with the homeowner treated for smoke inhalation after trying to move the burning device outside, according to SFFD. [KRON4]

Stay tuned for more No Kings coverage!

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

The suspect in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, was thought by his mother to be living in San Francisco earlier this year, though it's not at all clear that he ever did.

Social media has been flooded for the last 24 hours with postings that cast Luigi Mangione as both folk hero and murderer, and with plenty of images of him shirtless and smiling culled from his Instagram and Twitter accounts, which have since gone offline. As CNN reports, friends have known him for years to post images from his travels, and to maintain a mostly positive-seeming social media presence.

That seems to have stopped earlier this year, and by July, friends were posting things publicly like "I haven’t heard from you in months," and "I don’t know if you are okay."

One user also posted to Xitter in October, "Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you."

Now we learn, as the Chronicle reports, that Mangione's mother filed a missing persons report with the San Francisco Police Department just a few weeks before the shooting, on November 18. In it she stated that she had last spoke to Mangione in July, and she believed he was working in the city at car-sales startup TrueCar, which is where he was listed on his LinkedIn as being employed.

Kathleen Mangione reportedly told the SFPD she believed he was working at TrueCar at 124 Montgomery Street, which was listed as permanently closed, and it's not clear if TrueCar, which is based in Santa Monica, ever had offices there.

Mangione's mother did not suggest that her son presented any kind of threat, and she reportedly told police she didn't know where he may have frequented in town.

As SFist reported Monday shortly after Mangione's arrest, we know that he had an interest in AI and engineering, and that he had spent a summer in the Bay Area at Stanford in 2019, while he was attending undergrad at UPenn.

He graduated in 2020, and CNN reports that he had been working remotely for TrueCar while living in Honolulu for about six months in 2022. The New York Times reports that, according to TrueCar, he had not been an employee since 2023.

According to his family, Mangione had dropped out of contact sometime after having back surgery around August 2023, and that July contact with his mother is the last we know of. (His last post on his now-removed Instagram account had been photos from the Big Island in Hawaii in 2021.)

A friend who runs a co-living compound in Honolulu for remote workers, RJ Martin, has spoken to both the Times and CNN and said that Mangione was mostly "upbeat," and they had been in touch until earlier this year, but Mangione went silent sometime around March or April. Martin said that Mangione had confided in him about his back issues — a spinal misalignment that caused him a good deal of pain — and said that he said he was not able to be physically intimate with another person without pain.

Martin also said that Mangione's back problems were exacerbated after he took a surfing lesson in Hawaii in 2022, after which Mangione was "in bed for about a week."

After last seeing family in Baltimore sometime last year, it seems like no one is sure where Mangione has been living for the past six to 12 months or more, and many friends have expressed disbelief that he could have undergone any sort of mental break.

Indeed, a brief handwritten note found in his backpack when he was arrested Monday in Altoona, Pennsylvania suggests pretty solid lucidity, and he appeared to take full responsibility for the shooting death of Thompson.

Per the Times, the note reads, "To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone... [healthcare companies] continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it," and he noted that during the time UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not.

While being escorted into an extradition hearing Tuesday, as CBS News reports, Mangione was heard having an outburst before being pinned to a wall by officers in Blair County, Pennsylvania. He reportedly shouted, "This is completely unjust and an insult to the American people!"

Previously: Man Arrested In Connection With Healthcare CEO Slaying Spent Time In Bay Area

A man whom New York police are describing as a "strong person of interest" in last week's murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been arrested in Pennsylvania and identified as 26-year-old Luigi Mangione.

Mangione was recognized while dining in a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and as the New York Times reports, so far, Mangione's only known connection to Pennsylvania is that he attended UPenn. An Instagram post (since removed) from the spring of 2019 showed him with the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at Penn.

The caption reads: "'WARNING: EMITS SHOWERS OF SPARKS. DO NOT PUT IN MOUTH. LIGHT FUSE AND GET AWAY' - the live firework in my mouth."

Mangione appears to have grown up well off in Maryland, and attended an expensive private school there, Gilman High School, where he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 2016.

He graduated Penn in 2020 with an engineering degree, and he also reportedly received a Master of Science in Engineering in computer and information science.

He lived in Hawaii in recent years, and his last Instagram post was from August 2021, from the Big Island.

He also appears to have spent the summer of 2019 at Stanford, and posted a series of photos and videos from there, saying he was "getting paid in half of these photos." A LinkedIn account suggests he was a "head counselor" and artificial intelligence teaching assistant at the school for that summer.

The Chronicle notes that Mangione appears to have reviewed the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's 1995 manifesto on GoodReads, in addition to reviewing Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

An employee at the McDonald's in Altoona recognized Mangione around 9 am today from the widely circulated photos of his face taken at a hostel in New York City last week.

Two police officers, afteer being tipped off by the employee, approached Mangione, as the Times reports, who was sitting with a laptop and a surgical mask on his face. The officers reportedly asked him to pull down his mask, and when they asked if he had been in New York City recently, Mangione reportedly started "shaking."

After giving the officers a fake ID, and being called out on it, they asked why he lied about his identity, and according to police Mangione replied, "I clearly shouldn’t have."

In his backpack, officers allegedly found a ghost gun and silencer, both made with a 3D printer.

The shooter who killed Thompson last week used a silencer.

According to the Times, via the officers, Mangione was also carrying "a handwritten manifesto that criticized health care companies for putting profits above care."

Business Insider reports that, according Mangione's online activity, he may have suffered from chronic back pain, and at one point posted an x-ray image showing four pins in what appeared to be his spine. He also reviewed several books on GoodReads related to back pain.

The publication further reported that Mangione was one of 37 grandchildren of a prominent Baltimore real estate developer, the late Nick Mangione Sr., who died in 2008.

Mangione was brought into a courtroom in Blair County, Pennsylvania Monday at 6 pm local time to be arraigned on gun charges. He is being held without bond.

This is a developing story.

Newly released but heavily redacted FBI files reveal that Irish Republican Army members or sympathizers had plans to try to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to California with Prince Philip in 1983.

A Freedom of Information Act request has led to the publishing of a trove of documents about the queen's visits to the U.S., and in particular these include previously undisclosed details about her visit to San Francisco and other parts of California in March 1993.

As the New York Times reports, the local assassination plot centered on the Dovre Club, the still extant Irish pub in the Mission District, which at the time was said to be "a gathering place for sympathizers of the Irish Republican Army." The plot was allegedly shared with a San Francisco Police Department officer who frequented the bar, via a February 1983 phone call from a man whose name appears to have been redacted from the documents.

The man told the officer that his daughter had been killed by a rubber bullet in Northern Ireland, and said that there was a plan to assassinate the queen, either by "dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia" when it passed underneath, or killing her during a planned visit to Yosemite National Park.

The FBI document notes that "it is the intention of the Secret Service to close the walkways on the Golden Gate Bridge when the yacht nears."

The queen and Prince Philip ended up flying into San Francisco instead of sailing due to inclement weather — the yacht followed behind and they later had a dinner onboard with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan while docked in San Francisco Bay. The dinner, as SFist noted following the queen's passing in September, was a celebration of the Reagans' 31st wedding anniversary.

While the Troubles were raging back in Ireland, Queen Elizabeth's visit was met with multiple protests, as were some subsequent visits. In San Francisco, the Chronicle reported that there were 7,000 pro-Irish demonstrators who gathered outside the state dinner that was held at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. "Firebrand Warren Hinckle led the charge," the Chronicle said. "But the protests, like the miserably wet weather, rolled off the back of the irrepressible queen who withstood the populous bowing before her in good cheer while her acerbic husband Prince Philip kept his potshots to a minimum."

During a performance event that greeted the queen at the then-recently-opened Davies Symphony Symphony Hall, one protester seated in the orchestra section, Irish Northern Aid leader Seamus Gibney, stood up and screamed, "Stop that torture!" And he was subsequently arrested.

The new FBI revelations also include details about a protest during a 1991 visit by the queen to the U.S. that sounds it like it never fully took shape. As CBS News reports, an item appeared ahead of that visit in the Philadelphia Irish newspaper titled Irish Edition, regarding a planned protest at a Baltimore Orioles game that the queen was scheduled to attend with President George H.W. Bush. A group of protesters had reportedly bought up a large block of tickets to the game, though the article didn't contain any threats to the queen.

Per the FBI, "The article stated anti-British feelings are running high as a result of well publicized injustices inflicted on the Birmingham Six by the corrupt English judicial system and the recent rash of brutal murders of unarmed Irish nationalists in the six counties by loyalist death squads."

Coverage of the queen's visit to the Orioles game appeared in the May 16, 1991 edition of the Times, and there is no mention of any protest in the stands.

As thousands of baseball fans roared their approval, Queen Elizabeth II strode onto the field at Memorial Stadium this evening, accompanied by President and Mrs. Bush, for a few minutes of queenly greeting before a Baltimore Orioles game...

After the Queen greeted the players, she was expected to leave. But the Queen, the Prince and the President and Mrs. Bush surprised everyone by walking into the foul territory near the first base line. The Queen, wearing a wine-and-black print dress with a pin, turned and waved, and the crowd burst into cheers and applause.

The party sat in the glass-fronted box reserved for the owner of the Orioles, Eli S. Jacobs. Among others in the box were Fay Vincent, the Baseball Commissioner; Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynn; Gov. William Donald Schaefer of Maryland; John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, and Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Secretary. Behind them were Secret Service agents.

Previously: The Queen Is Dead, and SF Media Now Fondly Recalls Her Visit to the City 40 Years Ago

Top image: President Reagan laughs following a joke by Queen Elizabeth II, who commented on the lousy California weather she has experienced since her arrival to the States. The British Queen is delivering a brief address during a state dinner held at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. (Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images)

Former president Gerald Ford died almost exactly a year ago today, which makes it that much more notable that Sara Jane Moore, one of his two would-be assassins, was released from prison on parole this morning, after serving 32 years of a life imprisonment sentence.

As we discussed last year, Sara Jane Moore, a disgraced SLA member, attempted to kill Gerald Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel on Sept. 22, 1978. As she prepared to fire two shots, an alert bystander named Oliver Sipple (who had a subsequent sad story of his own) deflected her arm, and she missed Ford entirely. Moore's attempt was made a little over two weeks after Manson Family member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme's more famous assassination attempt on Ford in Sacramento.

Moore is now 77 years old, and her parole requests, made every two years since 1985, was finally granted this year. The prison doesn't know where Moore went after being released. For what it's worth, Fromme is still in prison in Texas.

The violent melodrama characterizing the recent murder of a journalist investigating "Your Black Muslim Bakery" has conjured the entire Bay Area history of political violence into our memories. Dan White, James P. Casey, David S. Terry... the list is long and impressive. The anniversary of one of our bloodier favorites is coming up this Thursday -- it's hard to believe that a mere 128 years have passed since the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle pumped a bullet into a future mayor.

It was the heart of a statewide political struggle to reform the constitution. Chronicle editor Charles De Young had just performed a 180-degree about-face from his support of populist firebrand (and bigoted jackass) Denis Kearney, and begun to attack him and his Workingman's Party in print at every opportunity.

Kearney had drafted a womanizing Baptist minister named Isaac Kalloch to run for mayor as his proxy, so De Young generously directed his vituperation towards the Reverend as well. "Skulking", "scoundrel", and "depraved sewer creature" were the sort of words that De Young might direct at someone who had merely failed to tip his hat in the street, and poor Kalloch suffered much, much worse. Though a minister, he energetically returned the favour -- but made the crucial error of insulting De Young's elderly mother.