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"Finally, the word came that we lost him" Eyewitness to King assassination remembers April 4 Samuel Billy Kyles was the minister of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis in 1968. On April 4 of that year he was at the Lorraine Motel and in the presence of Martin Luther King Jr. when he was assassinated. In 2006 he was interviewed as a part of the Crossroads to Freedom oral history project conducted by Rhodes College. Here is an excerpt from that interview:
Only seconds after King's assassination, witnesses point in the direction from which the shot came PHOTO: Library of Congress "Martin stood here, and I stood here. I said, 'Guys, we have a rally tonight and we got to go to dinner.' I turned and walked. I got a few steps from King. Ralph [Abernathy] was still in the room. Jesse [Jackson] was down below. Martin was leaning over the balcony talking to Jesse, and the shot rang out, 'Kapow!' I looked back and saw he had been knocked from the railing back onto the porch. I rushed to his side. There was a gaping hole in the right side of his face. There was a bigger wound under his shirt I could not see. Blood was everywhere.
"I ran into the room and picked up the phone to call the ambulance. I was beating on the walls, 'Answer the phone! Answer the phone!' When the operator heard the shot, she left the switchboard. You couldn't use the phone without the switchboard. ". . . I came back out. The police were coming at this time. I said to them, 'Call an ambulance on your police radio! Dr. King has been shot!' And they said, 'Where did the shot come from?' So there's a picture of us pointing to the building across the street. The pointing is the response to the police saying, 'Where did the shot come from?' 
Here is the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, where King was shot
"I took a spread from one of the beds. The police came and stopped people from coming up. A few people did come up. I covered him from his neck down. There was so much blood everywhere. We finally got somebody on the switchboard. I told Jesse [Jackson] to call Mrs. King, and I'd call my house.
"The ambulance came. I told them what hospital to take him to, and they did. We waited, and we waited, and we waited. Finally, the word came that we lost him. We lost him. After all these years, I have no way to express my feelings. They're just there. To be standing with your friend and in one millisecond, he's taken so violently. "I wondered, 'Why was I there?' We were friends before he was famous and all that, but why was I there at that moment in time. And then over the years, God revealed to me why I was there. I was there to be a witness, crucifixions have to have witnesses. My witness has to be true. A lying witness is dangerous. A witness who has information they won't share is of no consequence. And so my witness has to be true. 
Kyles (middle) in Chattanooga in 2006 PHOTO: The Chattanoogan "Martin Luther King didn't die in some foolish way. He didn't overdose. He wasn't shot by a jealous lover. He wasn't shot leaving the scene of a crime. He was a man with an earned PhD degree at 28, a Nobel Peace Prize . . . Oratorical skills off the charts. All the things he could have been, U.N. ambassadors, big churches all over America. He could have been a university president. All the things he could have been, and here he is with all these skills, dying on a balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, helping garbage workers."
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