Charles Quinn obit

Charles Quinn Dead: Ex-NBC Reporter Who Covered RFK Death Dies

 He was not on the list.

NEW YORK (AP) — A former NBC News reporter who covered the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy for the network in 1968 has died in Maryland. Charles Quinn was 82.

His daughter, Diana Quinn, says he died Sunday of heart failure at his home in Cambridge, in Maryland's Eastern Shore region.

Charles Quinn was a former newspaper reporter. He joined NBC in 1962 and covered the civil rights movement and politics. He was reporting on Kennedy's presidential campaign and was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when the senator was shot.

Quinn later served as a Pentagon correspondent for NBC and worked for 10 years at the American Petroleum Institute before retiring in 1991.

Quinn was born in Utica, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1951 and his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1954. He served in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper from 1951 to 1953.

In 1962, Quinn became a general assignment television reporter for NBC News. He covered mayor political and social stories of the 1960s, including presidential campaigns, the civil rights movement, along with news film editor Donald Swerdlow. as well as protests against the Vietnam War. Quinn was present at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, covering United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, on the night he was assassinated. He was one of the first reporters to arrive at the scene of the shooting, telling television viewers, "He's lying here on the floor. Senator Kennedy has been shot. He's been shot...There’s blood on the floor."

Quinn became the Rome bureau chief for NBC News during the early 1970s. He returned to the U.S. later during the 1970s to become NBC's correspondent at the Pentagon. In 1978, he moved to NBC's radio news bureau in Washington, D.C. as a chief correspondent and managing editor.

Quinn left NBC News in 1980. He then joined the now defunct Independent Network News, where he worked as a correspondent for a short time. Quinn was then hired by the American Petroleum Institute for its public relations department, where he remained until his retirement in 1991.

Charles Quinn died of congestive heart failure on July 7, 2013, at his home in Cambridge, Maryland, at the age of 82. He had moved to Cambridge from Alexandria, Virginia, in 2003.