What if the sixth floor had not been empty?

[Lance Payette]

Thanks, Charles.

Here, mostly from an FBI booklet, are numerous photos of the TSBD on a single page: https://www.tpaak.com/texas-school-book-depository.

It's interesting what a box-filled mess the TSBD was. It really was more of a warehouse than an office building.

It also occurs to me that what we call the sniper's nest really wasn't much of a construction project. Oswald may have walked along the entire bank of windows before deciding that was the spot.

[Charles Collins]

Thanks, Charles.

Here, mostly from an FBI booklet, are numerous photos of the TSBD on a single page: https://www.tpaak.com/texas-school-book-depository.

It's interesting what a box-filled mess the TSBD was. It really was more of a warehouse than an office building.

It also occurs to me that what we call the sniper's nest really wasn't much of a construction project. Oswald may have walked along the entire bank of windows before deciding that was the spot.

Thanks for the link. Yes, I think that there apparently was plenty of stacks of boxes of books for LHO to slither behind and hide from BRW.

My understanding is that most of the stacks of boxes surrounding the sniper’s nest were placed there by the flooring crew. They had been temporarily put there to clear the floor where they were working on the west end of the sixth floor. I think that LHO’s portion was probably mostly just the boxes at the sniper’s window itself. Quick and not too difficult. It is interesting that the two smaller boxes of rolling readers came from the center of the sixth floor. No one (except LHO) had any apparent reason to move those boxes to the sniper’s nest area.

I think that LHO probably had only a day or two to devise a plan. We have had many years to look at everything. And I am still impressed with how well his planning worked. Just take one aspect for example. The location of LHO’s clipboard when it was found is shown in one of the photos on the page you provided a link to. That location is most likely very close to where LHO stashed the rifle when he arrived at the TSBD on the morning of 11/22/63. So, I think that if a group of workers had gathered on the sixth floor to watch the motorcade, LHO might have had a contingency plan that might have allowed him to quietly grab the rifle and go up the nearby stairs to the seventh floor (which was reportedly rarely used for much). Those stairs going up are adjacent to the clipboard location and shown on the right side of that photo. I think it might have been feasible for LHO to grab the rifle and go up the stairs to the seventh floor without anyone else on the sixth floor even noticing (especially if they were looking out at Dealey Plaza for the motorcade and talking amongst each other). My guess is that LHO was in the process of retrieving his rifle on the west end of the sixth floor and was more or less confined to that end of the floor due to BRW coming back up to the sixth floor (until BRW left that floor of course).