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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Sara Jane Moore, who was imprisoned for more than 30 years after she made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, has died. She was 95.
Moore died Wednesday at a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, according to Demetria Kalodimos, a longtime acquaintance who said she was informed by the executor of Moore’s estate. Kalodimos is an executive producer at the Nashville Banner newspaper, which was first to report the death.
Moore seemed an unlikely candidate to gain national notoriety as a violent political radical who nearly killed a president. When she shot at Ford in San Francisco, California, she was a middle-aged woman who had begun dabbling in leftist groups and sometimes served as an FBI informant.

Sara Jane Moore looks out the window of a U.S. marshal’s car in San Francisco on Dec. 16, 1975. Moore is the woman who fired a gun at President Gerald Ford in 1975.
AP Photo/file
Sentenced to life, Moore was serving her time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, when she was unexpectedly paroled Dec. 31, 2007. Federal officials gave no details on why she was set free.
She lived largely anonymously in an undisclosed location after that, but in broadcast interviews she expressed regret for what she had done. She said she had been caught up in the radical political movements that were common in California in the mid-1970s.
“I had put blinders on, I really had, and I was listening to only … what I thought I believed,”” she told San Francisco television station KGO in April 2009. “We thought that doing that would actually trigger a new revolution.”
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