Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald is the former U.S. Marine identified by the Warren Commission as the lone gunman who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Born October 18, 1939, in New Orleans to a widowed mother, he had a peripatetic childhood, briefly living in the Bronx, and dropped out of high school to enlist in the Marine Corps in 1956 at age seventeen.

Trained as a radar operator and stationed at Atsugi in Japan, he qualified as a sharpshooter with the M1 Garand. After his discharge in 1959 he defected to the Soviet Union, lived in Minsk, married Marina Prusakova, and returned to the United States with her and their daughter in 1962, settling in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

On November 22, 1963, working from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository where he had recently been hired, he fired three shots at the presidential motorcade as it passed through Dealey Plaza, fatally wounding Kennedy and seriously injuring Texas Governor John Connally. About forty-five minutes later he shot Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit and was arrested in the Texas Theatre.

While being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail on November 24, he was shot at point-blank range by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby in front of live television cameras and pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same facility where Kennedy had died two days earlier.

The name Lee derives from the Old English leah, meaning woodland clearing or meadow, originally a topographic surname carried west and given freely to boys and girls in the American South. He bore it as a middle-name pairing with the family name Harvey.