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Dramatic Assassination Plots from History and Their Outcomes

Khalid Elhassan October 29, 2020 34 min

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand - Austria-Hungary — The arrest of Gavrilo Princip after his shooting of Franz Ferdinand and his wife. BBC

32. The Attempted Assassination of Harry S. Truman

Oscar Collazo. Puerto Rico Institute of Culture

While President Truman was napping in the Blair House, Griselio Torresola approached the building from the west side. His partner, Oscar Collazo snuck up behind a Capitol police officer, Donald Birdzell, who was standing on the Blair House’s steps, and tried to shoot him in the back. However, the inexperienced Collazo had failed to chamber a round. He did so and fired just as Birdzell turned around, and hit him in the knee.

Hearing the gunshots, Secret Service agent Vincent Mroz rushed out of a separate Blair House entrance, and shot Collazo in the chest as he was climbing the steps. Two other Secret Service agents joined in, and exchanged fire with Collazo in what was described as “the biggest gunfight in Secret Service history“. In the meantime, Torresola had reached a guard booth, and shot White House Police officer Leslie Coffelt four times, mortally wounding him.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.