Eugene Hale Brading

Eugene Hale Brading was a convicted felon from Los Angeles who was taken into custody in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, under the name Jim Braden. He had changed the name on his California driver's license two months earlier. The sheriff's office released him without learning who he was, and he used the same name when the FBI interviewed him again in January 1964.¹²

November 21

Four years out of the penitentiary, Brading needed the permission of the federal probation office for travel between states. On November 21 he reported under his real name to the chief probation officer in Dallas, Roger Carroll, whose record of the visit states that he "advised that he planned to see Lamar Hunt and other oil speculators while here." He was staying in a third-floor suite at the Cabana Hotel taken by his traveling companion, Morgan H. Brown. A former Hunt Oil Company official recalled seeing Brading and others in the receptionist's office that day, waiting to see Nelson Bunker Hunt. A friend of the family said Brown "knew the Hunts very well, knew Lamar and Bunker and all of them," and had played poker with them in Dallas years before. Brown later served time in a California prison. A spokesman for Lamar Hunt said the names "didn't mean a thing to him" and that no such visitors appeared on his calendar. Brading later told a Los Angeles police official that he had not gone to the Hunt offices because of his record. Jack Ruby drove a young woman, Connie Trammell, to the same building that day for an appointment with Lamar Hunt.²³

November 22

In a statement sworn before the Dallas County Sheriff's Department that afternoon, "Jim Braden," of 621 South Barrington in Los Angeles, with an office at 215 South La Cienega in Beverly Hills, said: "I am here on business (oil business) and was walking down Elm Street trying to get a cab and there wasn't any. I heard people talking saying 'My God the President has been shot.'" He said he went to the building across from the one the police had surrounded, was told by a woman that there was a telephone on the third floor, rode up in the freight elevator, found the telephone out of order, and rode down. "The colored man who ran the elevator said you are a stranger in this building and I was not supposed to let you up and he ran outside to an officer." He showed the officer a credit card. The building was the Dal-Tex Building. A supplementary report by Deputy C.L. Lewis lists him with the Cabana Hotel, room 301, as his Dallas address. Chief Deputy Allan Sweatt took the statement.¹

While he waited at the sheriff's office his companions checked out of the Cabana, at about two in the afternoon. The desk clerk had noted at registration that they planned to stay until November 24. In 1973 Lewis and Sweatt identified Brading in an enlargement of a photograph, taken about ten minutes after the shooting, of a group standing on the sidewalk between the depository and the triple underpass, which would place him west of both buildings before he returned to the Dal-Tex Building to telephone. The Warren Commission published his statement among the sheriff's papers and did not examine him.¹²