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BORIS YARO: "Sirhan lunged at Kennedy, he was stabbing at Kennedy and pulling the trigger, Kennedy was backing up, he turned and he twisted and he put his hands up over his face,"; MINASTAN: "I saw an arm extended with a revolver and he had reached around Uecker." All of these eyewitnesses were within eight feet of Kennedy, and all described at trial his position as being west of north, walking in an easterly direction, but turning to face the busboys and kitchen help and shaking their hands. All of these witnesses put Sirhan's firing position to the right and slightly in front of Senator Kennedy. These statements by the several eyewitnesses were consistent with the autopsy report of Thomas Noguchi and the trajectory study of DeWayne Wolfer in that Noguchi concluded that Kennedy's arm had been raised about 90° when gunshot #2 was inflicted. At that time Kennedy's arm was moving between the second and third shot fired by Sirhan. Noguchi stated in his autopsy report that the "pattern of the wounds were the same, right to left, upward direction, and this pattern is consistent with the wounds inflicted by shooting in rapid succession." Noguchi placed the Sirhan weapon one or two inches from the skin behind the right ear when the first shot was fired. It must be remembered that Kennedy, according to the several eyewitnesses, was turning his head and upper part of his body to shake hands, with the kitchen help, Juan Perez and Jesus Romero. Additionally, Noguchi and Wolfer both estimated that Kennedy's arm had been upraised, thus lifting the padding up of his shoulder coat and accounting for the line of a bullet fire through the shoulder coat which did not graze the skin of the Senator, but continued on into Paul Schrade's head. All of these eyewitnesses seem to make William Harper's contention of two firing positions not only irrelevant, Dut impossibie. This is particularly true when it is remembered that Harper himself admitted that he did not use a comparison microscope to conduct a formal examination, and admitted that his 1970 study was a "limited examination." It must be remembered that not-all trial witnesses were asked about muzzie distance because they were not all ina position to observe all the details. Each particular witness at trial was asked to describe what he or she had observed,’ and when taken in unison, the several trial witnesses all established that the Senator had turned to face the busboys at the time Sirhan started firing. However, it was not until William Harper's December 28, 1970, affidavit that anyone had every questioned Wolfer's identification of the ballistics evidence. Harper, a consulting criminalist for 35 years, had photographed the Kennedy (47) and Weisel (54) bullets with the assistance of an engineer for a company that developed the Hycon Balliscan camera. The camera produces photographs of the entire circumferences of bullets by rotating them in phases in front of the lens. The photos can then be placed side by side for comparison. In this 1970 affidavit, Harper declared that his examination had failed to disclose any individual characteristics establishing that the Kennedy and Weisel bullets had been fired from the same gun. - 13 -. A A A SA TT we “a eR el YR SELLS, TE GSR ESOT = cee