The StoneZONE - Roger Stone - Dr. Paul K. Maurer, MD | 09-25-25
Aired: 2025-09-26
Duration: 22:26


=== JFK Front Shot Theory (14:57) ===

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[00:01:01]  The Stone Zone.
[00:01:02]  Entertaining and informative.
[00:01:04]  On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
[00:01:08]  Welcome back into the Stone Zone.
[00:01:11]  Joining me now is Dr. Paul K. Maurer.
[00:01:15]  Paul Maurer is a graduate of the University of Rochester.
[00:01:18]  He got his medical degree at the University of Rochester.
[00:01:22]  He did his neurosurgeon residency at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
[00:01:29]  He was an attending neurosurgeon for the United States Army at the San Francisco, California Letterman Medical Center.
[00:01:37]  He was attending neurosurgeon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from 1988 to 1992.
[00:01:44]  The chief of neurosurgery at the 86th Evacuation Hospital during the Saudi in the Gulf War in Saudi Arabia.
[00:01:53]  He's also assistant professor of neurology at the University of Rochester from 1992 to 1998.
[00:01:59]  Professor of Neurology at the University of Rochester from 1998 to the present time.
[00:02:04]  He's also the attending neurosurgeon at the UHS Medical Wilson Medical Center and has been a board-certified member of the American Board of Neurosurgery since 1988.
[00:02:16]  I go through all of those academic and military credentials to say that he is one of the country's, if not the country's leading expert on gunshot wounds.
[00:02:27]  And he, like many, many Americans, still is studying and looking at the horrific and brutal political assassination of my good friend, Charlie Kirk.
[00:02:39]  Dr. Maurer, welcome back into the Stone Zone.
[00:02:43]  It's an honor to be here, sir.
[00:02:45]  As you know, I have written a New York Times best-selling book on the Kennedy assassination.
[00:02:52]  I've just finished a book on the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan that'll be out by Christmas.
[00:03:00]  Both of them serious questions about the ballistics and the circumstances surrounding those shootings.
[00:03:08]  In the case of JFK, the government conducted investigation by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who took an entire seven days to declare that there was a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a disgruntled, who fired three shots hitting John F. Kennedy from the rear.
[00:03:32]  Nothing else to see here.
[00:03:34]  Handing it off to the Warring Commission.
[00:03:36]  Actually, it was 50 years yesterday.
[00:03:41]  Essentially, asking them and getting them to rubber stamp that conclusion.
[00:03:45]  We now know, of course, that that's not true due to a number of studies, but also a stunning new documentary on Paramount, what the Parkland Doctors Saw had a number of the attending physicians say that they saw in JFK wounds consistent with his being shot from the front and the back.
[00:04:08]  And the doctors at Parkland also noted a massive grapefruit size blowout wound in the back of JFK's head, which would indicate that he'd been shot from the front.
[00:04:20]  They also noted that the wound in his throat, where a tracheotomy had been later performed, was most likely an entry wound rather than as the Warring Commission tries to tell us, an exit wound.
[00:04:34]  So if we buy the FBI's assessment so far, that Charlie Kirk was shot from the front with a 30-aught six charge, should there not have been an exit wound and a blood splatter in such a wound?
[00:04:52]  A couple things.
[00:04:54]  I like to try to take all these surgical dilemmas, trauma dilemmas, bullet wounds, and everything else.
[00:05:00]  You know, as I mentioned, you know, balls are balls, strikes are strikes.
[00:05:04]  And so I try to call them as they are and assess them as scientifically as I can based on, you know, over 14,000 brain and spinal cord operations that's been through a lot of blood over the years.
[00:05:16]  So let's, if it's okay with you, I would start it right with what we have to deal with, recognizing, you know, we don't have all the cards on the table, which is always the problem, because voids of knowledge will always be filled with speculation, which frankly is imposed upon us, not to sound too harsh on that statement, but when you have a void, people will fill the void.
[00:05:42]  So from a standpoint of terminal ballistics, which as you mentioned, I lecture a lot about to military and law enforcement literally all over the world, which I don't know the word expert applies, but certainly I spend a lot of time dealing with that, as well as my surgical experience.
[00:06:00]  There are some very interesting aspects of this case.
[00:06:04]  And so to walk through them, just a moment, it's very important as I waded through over these last two weeks or whatever it is now of speculation, some of which is very sound, some of which would strike me as maybe, in my opinion, a little less sound.
[00:06:23]  Let's see what we have.
[00:06:25]  If there's four camera angles to visualize this, and obviously our video data is our best, it's the best data we have at this point, recognizing as effective as it is and high quality some of the shots are, it still leaves some room.
[00:06:41]  But first, let's start with the very first couple frames of that.
[00:06:44]  And I walked through this frame by frame by frame as much as possible multiple times.
[00:06:51]  And as he has the microphone in his hand, he answers that final question, leans back, and you hear the snap, the signature of, it's almost certainly a rifle sound.
[00:07:02]  You always have to be careful about saying that, but it's certainly an unsuppressed, non-silenced weapon because it's a different sound characteristic.
[00:07:10]  It sounds a rifle crack of an unsuppressed weapon.
[00:07:15]  And almost immediately, now I would keep in mind, and this is going to be important when we walk through the neck wound for the ballistics.
[00:07:21]  We're just going to walk through this neck wound a bit at a time.
[00:07:26]  The round that I practice most with for precision rifle closes 700 yards in 1.03 seconds.
[00:07:35]  So the sound from the snap of that rifle to impact at a distance of variably reported between 146 and 200 yards.
[00:07:43]  Now, yes, we can't assume that's where he was shot from.
[00:07:47]  So I'm not saying that's not etched in stone.
[00:07:50]  I'm just saying the theory right now, he was shot from a slightly upper depth down angle, from a decline angle, maybe 15, 20 degrees or so, someplace 200 or less.
[00:08:03]  That bullet's going to close that distance in a fraction of a second.
[00:08:08]  The fact that it's potentially a 30-odd 6, again, we don't want, because if we're really going to do an analysis of this in a clean fashion, we can't even etch that in stone.
[00:08:18]  But let's, for the sake of discussion, say it was a Mauser Model 98, somewhat short in barrel, apparently, maybe 20, 22 inches or so from what they're divulging so far.
[00:08:27]  Bolt action weapon with a scope, of course.
[00:08:30]  That's, you know, that's a doable shot, as I think most people agree.
[00:08:34]  It's, you know, you couldn't just pick that up having no experience, but some moderated experience, that's a doable shot.
[00:08:41]  I would start by saying, because I lecture so much to the military and to law enforcement people, I've spent a lot of time over the last two weeks, me calling people, them calling me.
[00:08:51]  The first thing I'd say is, I'm sure obviously you know better than anybody, he wasn't aiming for his carotid artery in the neck.
[00:08:57]  That was either a headshot that went low or a chest shot that went high.
[00:09:01]  I have never heard in training or ever that anyone aimed for the neck.
[00:09:06]  That doesn't make it a bad shot.
[00:09:07]  It was highly effective.
[00:09:09]  I'm just saying that, you know, that was either a low headshot or a high chest shot.
[00:09:13]  But it ended up in about the worst place you could possibly get hit in your neck.
[00:09:19]  You see him lean back after he brings the mic away from his comment, and you hear the signature of the rifle sound, you see an immediate little splash of blood, maybe centimeter and a half, two centimeters maximum, less than an inch.
[00:09:33]  You see a little absolutely circular splash of blood followed.
[00:09:38]  Now, I haven't seen anybody mention this, which is interesting to me.
[00:09:41]  But if you go back and look at the video frame by frame, the most common video, pretty macabre, I agree, but the one mostly from in front, you see something very interesting, which has not been mentioned by anybody that's seen.
[00:09:55]  Walking through what happens when a bullet hits you, and this is essential to analyzing exit, entry, should it have left his neck, should it have stayed in his neck?
[00:10:04]  These are all answerable questions.
[00:10:07]  When you get hit with a bullet, so you pull that trigger on the 30-otix, that bullet impacts the front of the neck in what's called the sternocleidomastoid.
[00:10:17]  Not trying to confuse anybody with a lot of words.
[00:10:19]  It's the muscle that runs down the front of your neck.
[00:10:22]  When you look in the mirror, you'll see a muscle that goes from your top of your breastbone and heads behind the ear.
[00:10:28]  That's the sternocleidomastoid muscle.
[00:10:31]  We spend a lot of time there in neurosurgery because when we fix broken necks or we fuse your neck, we literally make an incision exactly where he got shot.
[00:10:40]  And you put your finger in after you dissect the platysma muscle, and in five minutes, your finger's on the front of the spine, which is in the center of your neck.
[00:10:48]  So that's well-traveled territory surgically.
[00:10:51]  That bullet, like a surgical incision, hit right at the left sternocleidomastoid, inferior one-third.
[00:10:57]  The carotid artery is five centimeters, two inches.
[00:11:01]  Depends on the size of your neck.
[00:11:02]  He's got a pretty big, beefy neck.
[00:11:04]  But that bullet went straight through, and as soon as you see that splash, just a circular drop of blood where the wound is, the next couple frames you see blood gushing out.
[00:11:15]  And to anybody who's a neurosurgeon or a vascular surgeon, as soon as my wife told me he got shot and I looked at that, well, there's his left carotid artery.
[00:11:23]  I mean, that was the entire left carotid artery pumping out that wound.
[00:11:27]  Now, what happens when a bullet hits you?
[00:11:30]  If I take, this is an important concept for people to understand for where we're going to go with this, because there's a lot of myth out there, even by people that hunt a lot and all that, I get that.
[00:11:40]  But it is a scientific discipline after all.
[00:11:43]  If I take a screwdriver with a half-inch flathead, and the screwdriver shaft is 12 inches long, and I plunge that in your neck exactly where he got shot, you're going to get a hole as deep as I plunge the screwdriver, half an inch wide.
[00:11:59]  That's called a permanent wound tract.
[00:12:02]  In other words, what's in that plunge of the screwdriver is half inch wide, layer of tissue is 12 inches.
[00:12:10]  If I bury the handle in your neck, that tissue is gone.
[00:12:14]  It's history.
[00:12:14]  It's toast.
[00:12:16]  Forget it.
[00:12:17]  How much damage occurs depends on what it is.
[00:12:20]  As fate would have it, when Kennedy got shot in the neck, I do think from in front, about the fourth tracheal ring, a miracle of anatomy for him.
[00:12:29]  It didn't really, it didn't hit his vertebral.
[00:12:31]  It didn't hit his carotid.
[00:12:33]  You know, it's a little unusual to get shot in the neck and not catch some really big stuff, but he didn't.
[00:12:38]  Unfortunately for Charlie Kirk, the opposite is the case.
[00:12:42]  This thing within two inches was through his carotid artery, or if he got shot from another angle within 10 inches, 11 inches maximally for a neck, even a big neck, that carotid was gone.
[00:12:54]  Now, there's a difference between a screwdriver, though, or an arrow, or a knife, and a bullet.
[00:13:00]  Because for those of you out in the audience that are not shooting, you know, aren't down the rabbit hole of shooting, kinetic energy depends on the mass of the bullet.
[00:13:10]  In this case, probably 150 grains, up to 180 grains, most likely.
[00:13:15]  The kinetic energy, the amount of energy in that bullet, when that bullet smacks the front of your neck, not only does it make a hole all the way through your neck, the size of the bullet, in this case, about a third of an inch, you're going to get tissue a third of an inch diameter, gone.
[00:13:31]  The bullet destroyed it like a freight ring going through.
[00:13:34]  But there's more.
[00:13:35]  And you can see this very clearly on the video.
[00:13:38]  When the bullet hits tissue, it dumps its energy.
[00:13:42]  And that energy dumps and stretches the tissue.
[00:13:46]  Because human tissue is almost like gelatin, which is why we use gelatin mold to study it.
[00:13:52]  Bone's bone, got it.
[00:13:54]  But most of the rest of the tissue is, to some degree, gelatin-like in consistency.
[00:13:59]  And as the bullet plows through the tissue, dependent on the amount of energy in the bullet, the tissue stretches.
[00:14:08]  So that one-third inch cavity the bullet went through, the diameter of the bullet, now you get three to four times the amount of tissue, a third of an inch.
[00:14:20]  Now you're one or two inches of tissue that gets ripped apart as the energy splashes into the tissue around it.
[00:14:27]  If you look at the frames immediately after you see the red splash on the front of his neck, go through it frame by frame.
[00:14:35]  Look at the frames right before he's shot.
[00:14:37]  His neck, his whole neck expands 20%.
[00:14:42]  The whole bottom of his face expands all the way up to his jaw.
[00:14:46]  You can see on both sides, the tissue just puffs like a blowfish almost, not to be macabre.
[00:14:54]  But at first you think, well, that's kind of a photographic aberration.

=== Bullets and Expansion (06:25) ===

[00:14:57]  It isn't.
[00:14:58]  That's the kinetic energy of that bullet dumping into the soft tissue of his neck as it goes through.
[00:15:05]  Because a 30-odd six round, people get hung up on the caliber a lot.
[00:15:09]  It's a fascination that has some true value.
[00:15:14]  But I would only say identifying entry and exit wounds is much more challenging than the usual thought that's applied to it.
[00:15:22]  There's a lot of things.
[00:15:24]  Dr. Maurer, we're going to take a quick commercial break and we'll be back with your expert analysis.
[00:15:28]  This is fascinating.
[00:15:30]  Folks, don't go away.
[00:15:31]  Don't touch that guy.
[00:15:32]  We'll be right back with Dr. Paul Maurer, one of the world's foremost experts on gunshot wounds and one of the most respected neurosurgeons in the nation.
[00:15:41]  Don't go away.
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[00:16:12]  Lead the future.
[00:16:15]  The Stone Zone.
[00:16:16]  Entertaining and informative.
[00:16:19]  On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
[00:16:22]  I am so grateful to those kind words from Vice President JD Vance.
[00:16:29]  To continue our conversation, we're talking to Dr. Paul Maurer, one of the most respected neurosurgeons in the country and an expert on bullet wounds and gunshot wounds.
[00:16:43]  And he's giving us his expert analysis of what he has seen in the various videotapes of the brutal assassination of my good friend Charlie Kirk.
[00:16:53]  Dr. Maurer, the floor is yours.
[00:16:55]  Thank you, sir.
[00:16:56]  As I was saying, the power behind a 30-odd 6 is, you know, more than a 76308.
[00:17:05]  It's below some of the long, long-range military sniper rifles.
[00:17:09]  But it's used as a hunting rifle for medium to large game, specifically, because it has a very long shell casing with a lot of propellant, and it puts the bullet out there at 2,900, 2,800, 3,000 feet per second.
[00:17:23]  You can use pretty heavy bullets.
[00:17:25]  But the performance of the bullet and tissue, where it stretches and destroys that tissue, and how far does it go before it stalls.
[00:17:34]  In other words, does it get out your neck?
[00:17:37]  Does it get to the other side of your chest?
[00:17:39]  Hunting rounds are specifically designed to go deep.
[00:17:43]  Hunters want deep penetration because they're shooting quadrupeds.
[00:17:48]  Another topic never brought up.
[00:17:50]  Hunters shoot quadrupeds.
[00:17:51]  Those are four-legged animals.
[00:17:53]  80% of gunshot wounds to animals, deer, elk, are in the side of the chest or the side of the abdomen, side of the head, because you're shooting at the biggest surface area.
[00:18:02]  Humans, only 12% of shots are in the side, just statistically, because it's not as available and it's harder to hit.
[00:18:09]  So the 30-odd 6 bullet, there are very few tactical bullets.
[00:18:14]  The military actually doesn't want that much penetration.
[00:18:17]  They want 18 inches, 16 inches, but at 16 inches, you're out the back of the body, in which case that stretch cavity is gone because all the energy and the bullets flying out the back.
[00:18:27]  So the tactical bullets are designed differently because they want that stretch cavity early on.
[00:18:33]  30 odd 6 is usually designed so you get it a little bit later because they want those hunters want those 30 odd 6 rounds going 30 inches 24 inches deep while a neck's Neck's only about what, 10 to 11 inches, even in a pretty big neck, not even that in most necks.
[00:18:50]  So, statistically, statistically, you would expect this bullet to go out the other side in a neck.
[00:18:58]  It'd be unusual, not rare, but you can't put a number because you don't have there.
[00:19:04]  There are no statistics to prove it.
[00:19:06]  But I would say if you look at gelatin shots of 30 odd six, 90% of the time, that bullet would be sailing right out the back of his neck.
[00:19:14]  Now, the bullet was aimed slightly down, so we have to remember that.
[00:19:18]  Whether it was from behind, I mean, almost any of the relevant shooting positions would be flat to somewhat down.
[00:19:27]  So, since it hit the lower third of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, low third of the neck, did that bullet then dive into the upper chest?
[00:19:36]  It still would normally exit.
[00:19:38]  That's a bullet that has a penetration of 14, 16 inches minimally, and usually, but that round, I'm giving a benefit of the doubt here.
[00:19:47]  Most of those 30 odd six rounds have very deep penetration.
[00:19:50]  The heavier ones, 30 inches.
[00:19:53]  So, is it possible to not exit?
[00:19:56]  Yes, because all things are possible.
[00:19:58]  Could that bullet, one thing you can see, now we don't know, if you are sitting where Charlie Kirk was, and this shot came from, say, the 10 o'clock position on his view, about 30 degrees-ish off his left side, away from his nose to the left.
[00:20:13]  Could that bullet have cleared the carotid, tore that in half, struck his upper thoracic spine, which is what it would have hit, and then ricocheted down the chest wall?
[00:20:23]  That's possible.
[00:20:25]  You do see that.
[00:20:26]  You do see that.
[00:20:27]  It's possible.
[00:20:28]  I would only say that bullet was fired from a pretty short distance.
[00:20:31]  That thing was still cooking probably at least 2,500 feet per second when it hit him because it's pretty near shot as those bullets go.
[00:20:40]  So, is it impossible that it didn't exit?
[00:20:43]  It's not impossible.
[00:20:45]  But if it hit the, it would have had to hit either a proximal big rib, second or third rib, to ricochet down or the vertebrae.
[00:20:53]  If it hits an object like bone, they can fragment, and then the fragments don't have the oomph, the momentum to go all the way out the skin.
[00:21:00]  So, you do sometimes, Jack Ruby, in fact, the bullet that killed him was guttered under the skin because it's hard to get through skin.
[00:21:07]  Skin's like a big tent wrapping your body.
[00:21:10]  Unfortunately, Dr. Moore, I have to stop you there because we've run out of time.
[00:21:14]  I want to get you back for the full hour because this is fascinating, and we need to get to your conclusions.
[00:21:19]  But we're very honored to have you today in the Stone Zone.

=== Leadership Thread: Education, Ethics, Sustainability (01:03) ===

[00:21:22]  And thanks for our listeners.
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[00:22:03]  Listen to this podcast now on the Red Apple Podcast Network, the Leadership Thread with Dr. Peggy Polonis.
[00:22:10]  I'm Dr. Peggy Polonis.
[00:22:11]  Join me on each episode where I unravel the story that shaped leaders, tracing the thread that led them where they are today.
[00:22:17]  Because leadership isn't born in adulthood.
[00:22:20]  And thank you once again for joining us on the leadership thread: education, ethics, and sustainability.