Ron Edmonds, 77, Whose Camera Captured the Shooting of Reagan, Dies

Ron Edmonds, a photographer for The Associated Press who won a Pulitzer Prize for a dramatic series of pictures of the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan and the takedown of the gunman outside a Washington hotel in 1981, died on Fridayin Falls Church, Va. He was 77.

His wife, Grace Feliciano Edmonds, said he died in a hospital from pneumonia linked to a bacterial infection.

It was only Mr. Edmonds’s second day on the White House beat when he was assigned to cover a speech by President Reagan to an A.F.L.-C.I.O. group at the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981. After rushing to leave the hotel ahead of the president, Mr. Edmonds positioned himself on the other side of the presidential limousine, expecting that Reagan would do little more than wave to onlookers before returning to the White House.

“I had him in the viewfinder,” Mr. Edmonds said in an interview with the Gannett News Service in 1982. “He waved once to the right and turned to the left as I pushed the shutter down. That’s when the shots rang out.” He added, “I saw his reaction as he flinched.”

Although other photographers were on the scene, Mr. Edmonds was the only one to capture the assault on Reagan by the gunman, John W. Hinckley Jr., in a sequence of photos that began before the shooting and continued after a single bullet from Mr. Hinckley’s .22-caliber revolver entered Reagan under his left armpit, hit his seventh rib and penetrated his left lung.