For Jay Hastings, a former doorman at the Dakota, the New York apartment building that the late John Lennon called home, December 8, 1980 is a day he will never forget.
“I remember everything like it was yesterday,” Hastings tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, reflecting on the role he played in that pivotal moment in music history.
Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman outside an Upper West Side apartment building at 10:50 p.m. local time. He was brought to nearby Roosevelt Hospital less than 10 minutes later and was pronounced dead on arrival.
About that night, Hastings says he remembers another bouncer named Jose first encountering the “Strawberry Fields Forever” singer, moments after Lennon was shot.
“I could hear Jose outside, ‘Oh, Mr. Lennon.’ Boom, boom, the door closes and I could hear the high heels marching up the driveway,” he says. “So I went to the counter, where there was a hidden security button to unlock the door, so you could enter the Dakota.”
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Hastings continues, “I was there with my finger on the button when he [Lennon] came running, right after he heard the shots, he said, ‘I’m hit, I’m hit,’ and he just ran past me to the back office and just collapsed.”
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The former goalkeeper says he quickly processed what happened, but notes that “you don’t count the bottom line”. Hastings says he was unable to assess the severity of the wound.
“[I] I didn’t know how badly he was hit,” he says. “I went to the back office, Yoko [Ono, Lennon’s wife] was there, right behind him, screaming, ‘Call an ambulance. Call an ambulance.’ ”
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From left: Yoko Ono, Sean and John Lennon in 1977.
Mediapunch/Shutterstock
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Hastings also notes that Jose “had already hit the panic button in the doorman’s booth, which just overrides the outgoing line with a constant message to the police, pre-recorded.”
In an attempt to double down on police contact, Hastings called 911 from the lobby of the Dakota.
When Jose told Hastings that Lennon’s assailant was still outside and unarmed, he “grabbed the baton on top of the safe” and went “down stairs, because I was going to watch the guy, because I was afraid he was going to get far.”
After approaching Chapman, Lennon’s killer, Hastings told PEOPLE he noticed him “facing the wall, doing something … He was reading a book.”
Moments later, he recalls the police arriving – and at first thinking Hastings was the culprit: “I looked a bit crazy, I already had blood on my hands, I just had my shirt on, my white shirt with no tie.”
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But Jose quickly referred the authorities to Chapman, who was arrested and eventually sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for killing Lennon.
A shocking murder is being reexamined in the John Lennon: Murder without trialthree-part Apple TV+ docuseries, which premiered Wednesday.
“There’s a lot more to the story than a lone gunman who suddenly appears, pulls the trigger and the story is over,” Nick Holt, the show’s director, tells PEOPLE. “A lot of people obviously lost their idol, but first of all he lost a lot [was] dad and husband.”
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