Jerry Parr: Secret Service agent whose quick thinking was credited with saving the life of President Ronald Reagan

Among those who knew him Parr was regarded as a patient man willing to hear out the troubled

Parr, left, with President Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in 1981 moments before a gunman opened fire (Washington Post/AP)

Jerry Parr was the quick-thinking and fast-moving Secret Service agent who was credited with saving the life of President Ronald Reagan after the 1981 assassination attempt in Washington. Parr had been an electricity worker before his Secret Service years and was a clergyman in retirement. But he was best known for the fraught moments after gunfire erupted on 30 March 1981, as the president was leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel.

At the president’s side when the shots resounded, Parr did not look for the gunman, John Hinckley Jnr. Instead, he pushed the president into an awaiting limousine. As it pulled away, Parr ran his hands over Reagan’s body, searching for bullet wounds. He found none.

Then he recognised the signs: the president complained about pain in his chest, and there was blood on his lips. Parr ordered the limo to be driven to hospital instead of the White House. “If Jerry hadn’t made the change,” first lady Nancy Reagan later said, “I wouldn’t have a husband.” Doctors, noting the president’s severe loss of blood, as much as three pints, have agreed with that assessment.

Among those who knew him inside and outside the Secret Service, Parr was regarded as a patient man willing to hear out the troubled. He was called on so often to play the part of wise adviser that, after retiring from the Secret Service in 1985, he obtained a master’s degree in pastoral counselling from Loyola University in Baltimore and became co-pastor of Festival Church in Washington.

Jerry Studstill Parr, US Secret Service agent: born Montgomery, Alabama 16 September 1930; married Carolyn Miller (three daughters); died Washington 9 October 2015.

© Washington Post