Mal Couch grew up in Dallas, where his father worked for Braniff Airlines and his mother was a housewife. Even as a Woodrow Wilson High School student, he got a job working as a part-time cameraman for WFAA-TV (Channel 8), for which he was still shooting film in 1963.

As part of the motorcade, he found himself riding in the "media" car, next to Bob Jackson, a photographerfor The Dallas Times Herald; Tom Dillard, a photographer for The Dallas Morning News; and a Channel 4 cameraman whose name he can't recall.

Jackson had taken his last picture and handed his film to Jim Featherston, a reporter waiting to receive it at the corner of Main and Houston. When the heavyset reporter fumbled it and began to chase after it, the men in the car found themselves laughing.

And then came the first shot.

Couch remembers someone shouting: "Look at the window — there's the rifle!" By the time the third shot rang out, Couch had spotted about eight inches of the rifle protruding from the sixth-floor window, and being pulled back in. He says he never saw a face, though some witnesses did.

Moments later, Couch and his fellow passengers scrambled out of the car to descend on the madness of Dealey Plaza.

"'God, don't let them do this!' I screamed. 'They can't kill the president!' And I'm running like crazy. In the plaza, it's mass confusion, total mayhem." So much so that the events began to feel overwhelm his instincts as a photographer.

"I didn't film the window," he said. "It was happening too fast. I did raise my camera to take black and white footage of a policeman pulling his pistol and people falling, which everyone has seen for years. But then I stopped filming. Why? Mercy, goodness, gracious, I don't know. When I ran back, I didn't film anything. I guess I was just too dazed to figure out what was going on. So nothing was filmed until I got to Parkland Hospital, where I saw Jackie getting into a hearse. So I filmed the hearse and people crying all over the place."

For him, the Kennedy assassination continues to be "a devastating marker." It was, he contends, the opening of a 1960s Pandora's box, leading to Vietnam and two more assassinations, which claimed the lives of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the president's brother Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968.

"That little piece of metal sticking out the window started it all," said Couch, who teaches at Tyndale Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and who believes in the prophecies from the Book of Revelations.

"I count that as the change in America, from that point forward," he says. "But for me, it cuts even deeper. The Bible speaks of the end of days. So I see it as the beginning piece of the train of the last days.

"And I was there when it happened."

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© 2003, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services