NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- John Hinckley Jr., the man who attempted to assassinate former president Ronald Reagan in 1981, announced on Twitter Tuesday that tickets to his concert in Brooklyn this summer are already sold out.
The July 9 concert will be Hinckley’s first live show. He started pursuing a career as a musician after his 2016 release from the psychiatric institution he spent 35 years in for the assassination attempt.
The $20 tickets sold out in just four days. Market Hotel, the venue that booked Hinckley, has a capacity of 450 concert-goers.
Hinckley, 66, started recording videos of himself covering songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and other popular artists in December 2020. The fledgeling musician eventually shifted to writing his own music and has garnered over 26,000 subscribers on YouTube.
On New Year’s Eve he announced his intention to start a record label, Emporia Records. The first release will be a 14-track album of Hinckley’s music, but he intends to publish other artists as well.
Hinckley spent 35 years in a Washington, D.C. psychiatric institution after pleading insanity for the assassination attempt and was granted conditional release in 2016.
The conditions, which include not speaking to press and not traveling more than 50 miles from his mother’s Virginia home, expire in June.
The end of the conditions made the upcoming show possible, and also cleared the way for a 1010 WINS interview with Hinckley at the concert. It will be one of the first interviews ever conducted with him, due to its proximity to the end of the court-mandated conditions.
Hinckley was obsessed with Jodi Foster and the movie "Taxi Driver," which his lawyers argued in court drove him to shoot Reagan.
He opened fire on the former president, hitting him and three others. All survived, but Reagan’s press secretary James Brady was partially paralyzed.
Hinckley has since apologized for the shooting and the Department of Behavioral Health at St. Elizabeth Hospital in D.C. said he poses a “low risk for future violence,” Rolling Stone reported.
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