By Steve Neavling
Larry Buendorf, the Secret Service agent who stopped Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford in 1975, died Sunday at his home in Colorado Springs, The New York Times reports.
He was 87.
Buendorf was standing next to Ford outside the Senator Hotel in Sacramento when Fromme, a Charles Manson follower, pulled a .45-caliber handgun from an ankle holster. Buendorf saw the gun rise, yelled “Gun!” and knocked it from her hands before she could chamber a round. He wrestled her to the ground as agents rushed Ford to safety.
“If she’d had a round chambered, it would’ve gone through me and the president,” Buendorf recalled in 2010.
Fromme, 26 at the time, was convicted of attempted assassination and sentenced to life in prison. She was paroled in 2009.
Buendorf, a former Navy pilot, joined the Secret Service in 1970 and spent five years as an agent before the incident. He later became the chief security officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee, a position he held until his retirement in 2018.
He is survived by his wife, Linda.
