Woman who tried to assassinate a US president dies at 95

A woman who tried to shoot at a sitting U.S. president has died at age 95, according to the Associated Press.

Sara Jane Moore served more than 30 years in prison after unsuccessfully attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975.

Moore died Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, according to the Associated Press, citing Demetria Kalodimos, a longtime acquaintance.

Kalodimos interviewed Moore in 2024 following the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in July for the Nashville Banner.

Moore said at the time she thought she might be killed on the day she tried to assassinate Ford.

“The police came right up straight at me, they didn’t shoot me or anything, and grabbed my hand,” Moore said in the interview. “And I was just stunned … and of course I was stunned that I missed.”

Moore said she had no fear that day.

“When you psyche yourself up to do something like that … it’s sort of like being in a play. You rehearse and rehearse and then when the time comes you just do it,” she said.

When Moore shot at Ford in San Francisco, she was a middle-aged woman serving as an FBI informant and working with leftist groups, according to the Associated Press. Moore was sentenced to life at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, when she was paroled at the end of 2007, the Associated Press reported.

On Sept. 22, Moore shot at Ford as he waved to a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square. Oliver Sipple, a 33-year-old former Marine, knocked her weapon out of her hand as she fired, causing the shot to go astray and hit a building, according to the Associated Press.

Moore disputed in the interview that Sipple disrupted her shot.

She said she had an escape plan, and that she would have felt successful if she had killed Ford.

“People don’t pay any attention to women,” she said. “I would have gone out and gotten in a street car and gone up the hill and gone into the hotel up there and sat down and had a Coke or something. And no one would have ever even thought about it.”

In other interviews, Moore said she shot at Ford because she thought she would be killed once people learned she was an FBI informant. The agency ended its relationship with her about four months before the shooting.

“I was going to go down anyway,” she said in the 1982 interview with the San Jose Mercury News. “And if I was going to go down, I was going to do it my way. If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement.”