One of the most notorious political assassin, identified himself as a former Adventist
On June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, minutes after winning the California Democratic primary. He died the next day. The shooter, a 24year-old Christian Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, fired a .22 revolver into the crowd around Kennedy and was tackled on the spot. He’s still alive, still serving a life sentence, and has been denied parole repeatedly.
What doesn’t get mentioned much: Sirhan was raised Christian and, as a young man in California, church-hopped through several denominations trying to find where he fit. Along the way he spent time as a Baptist and, briefly, as a Seventh-day Adventist. His mother said his faith mattered a lot to him — he once complained that other kids his age didn’t take religion seriously enough. By 1966, two years before the assassination, he’d left all that behind for the occult-leaning Rosicrucians (the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosae Crucis).
I’m not posting this to say Adventism “made” him do anything — it obviously didn’t, and his path ran through several faiths and then out the other side entirely. But it’s a strange, little-known footnote that one of the most infamous American assassins of the 20th century sat in Adventist pews for a stretch. Add him to the odd roster of former Adventists history has produced.